A long-standing birthday tradition has been to celebrate those "significant" birthdays (like the noughts: 40th, 50th, and now 60th) in Bend, eating dinner at the Pine Tavern. The Pine Tavern is a good restaurant with great views of the Deschutes, flowing through the town. This year we stayed with our friends Percy and Joan (Percy also happens to be my old boss. ) The above photo shows Mt Bachelor, taken across the Deschutes not far from Joan and Percy's house in Sunriver.
A foggy morning by the river.
The footbridge crossing the Deschutes. The bridge was originally built for vehicles but now has been closed to all but foot traffic, bicycles and horses.
On to something different. This is a photo of an Amanita (species?). We were on an early Chanterelle hunt, not really expecting to find much, when we started seeing a large quantity of these. It was pretty clear that they were Amanitas. Pantherina? That's a WAG (wild-ass guess), since I haven't checked to see if that variety is a spring or fall 'schroom.
Some bounty from the garden -- the first batch of Marinara. Mmm, was it tasty. We used some of the left-over sauce to make a home-made pizza.
And lastly, an excerpt from the Radon Saga. We had suspected (rightly) that we would have elevated Radon levels in the basement. So our specifications for the house included a Radon mitigation system -- plastic under the concrete slab, and a ventilation system in the gravel base, connected to a vent pipe that goes up to the rooftop. We started making measurements before any of the joints were sealed. Initially the Radon was measuring around 50 pico-curies. The EPA recommends Radon mitigation if you have 4 pico-curies or more. Here's a factoid: 4 pico-curies equates to ONE radioactive decay event every 10 seconds, in a cubic liter of air.
I then sealed all the joints -- the one between the floor and walls, and also the expansion joints that had been cut in the floor. That got the Radon down to about 9. We had hoped that simply sealing the basement would get us below 4, since that would give us a totally passive mitigation system.
Since that didn't work out, I started working on installing a fan in the system. Fans are specially-built for this application, since they have to be totally sealed to prevent Radon from getting into the house, and run quietly 24/7 for years on end. I bought one from an online store, along with the installation hardware and a manometer to test the pressure in the pipe (it also serves as an easy way to check that the fan is working, since it is in a location that's a lot easier to get to). The whole idea behind the fan is to create a low-pressure region under the concrete slab so the Radon goes there, instead of inside the house. Since the fan was designed to work with 4" pipe, and we have 3" pipe, I had to make some adapters. The photo above shows my makeshift "miter box" I used to cut some scrap 4" pipe to stuff inside the 3"-4" adapters.
I then waited for a reasonably cool day to install the fan -- the fan goes in the attic and I didn't want to cook myself up there. I cut some plywood to fit through the attic entry and used it as planking to make sure I didn't step or fall through the ceiling. It compressed the insulation some but our online search indicated that it would not affect the R-value much, if at all.
The fan is now installed and running. I reset our Radon detector and should know in a day or so if the mitigation was successful or not. It should be -- we're pulling about 1" of vacuum on the system. But it may take a week or two for the residual Radon to decay down to less than 4 pico-curies (the half-life of Radon is about 3.8 days).
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