Although London was loads of fun, and I really enjoyed living so close to a bunch of good friends, the weather was getting a bit miserable, and repeated conversations along the lines of “I’m really lucky to be able to work from anywhere” made me think a winter away was in order.

So I was really looking forward to my trip to San Francisco to see friends, followed by a few months in Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, it seems the US immigrations officials didn’t believe that a chap going to a Carribean Island with a rucksack full of flippers, boardies and diving magazines could possibly be going for a holiday, rather than doing gainful work.

We’ve been really careful to make sure that everything we’re doing is above board from an immigration and tax viewpoint, but despite my best efforts, and after 4 hours of interrogation at San Francisco International, I was put back on a flight to the UK, not to return until my O-1 visa comes through.

On the way back, I was considering writing the idea off and hunkering down for the winter in London, but I’m all set up for some Christmas sun now, so decided instead to look for a cheap flight somewhere when I got off the plane.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea of rocking up at an airport with nothing but some innoculations and a passport, and seeing which crazy last-minute cancellation deals the airlines are offering. Word of advice: don’t. Everyone was very boring, and there were no last minute deals to be had – the best I found was £900 to Cape Town.

Instead I decided to tick off another continent, and found a nice cheap EasyJet ticket to Marrakech for tomorrow (Saturday) morning.

Although not quite as warm as Puerto Rico, it should be a more interesting, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll probably stay in a hostel for a few nights at the start of the trip, then get a little apartment, same as I did in Nicaragua, if it makes sense.

With the visa wheels still turning, I decided to make the most of my stay in England by moving down to London, where lots of old and new friends are living.

After a couple of weekend visits testing the water, I started looking for a place in the Dalston / Old St / Hackney area (because that’s where the cool kids live) on the 1st of October. I was amazed by how easy it was; 30 minutes after my Gumtree ad went up, I was already getting phone calls about places which fit the bill. That first weekend, I’d found a great place just west of Hackney and moved in that Friday. The whole thing took a week, start to finish!

I’m sharing the house with three Aussies: Tom, Anna and Nick, all from Melbourne. We have the bottom two floors of a converted Georgian house, with a kitchen and living room on top and bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs. I have a little double room with a window onto the garden; it’s still quite spartan, and I’ll probably keep it that way so that I can still travel light when the time comes.

Good gracious, London is fun. It’s strange getting used to the idea of regularly skipping really good nights and interesting events, just because there are so many options all the time: brilliant.

Last weekend was the wedding of two of my good friends, Pat and Emilie, who I’ve been staying with off and on in San Francisco for quite a while now. They’re both originally from the east coast, so they held the ceremony and reception in a town called Kent, Connecticut (about 3 hours north of New York) near where Pat went to school. And it was indescribably awesome.

All the groomsmen were staying in a great little fishing lodge right by the river a little way out of town, which smelt of sap and leather chairs. Having got the red-eye over from San Francisco and arrived first, Justin (the best man) and I nabbed the best beds, said hello as the rest of the wedding party began to trickle in, then headed off to the rehearsal.

The rehearsal probably left me more confused about weddings than before, as the priest was barking his instructions about the myriad different responsibilities of groomsmen, how they differed from ushers, protocol for leading in family, leading out the bridesmaids (all 15 of them!) and when to stand and sit, all in an echo-y church with a full-on thunderstorm raging outside. I was hoping everything would fall into place for the real thing…

After the rehearsal we headed off for an unbelievable dinner laid on by Pat’s mother. Everyone got a pouch of seafood, with a lobster, clams, mussels and the tenderest sweetcorn I’ve ever had. I managed to sneak a second lobster too: textbook manoeuvre. It was great to talk to lots of Pat’s friends and family from when he was a nipper in Manhattan, along with Emilie’s boss and a bunch of her east-coast bridesmaids who I’d never met before.

However, the real fun started after the groomsmen retired to the lodge for chit chat and drinks. What happens in the lodge stays in the lodge, but suffice it to say that a well thrown marshmallow leaves a mark, and hanging onto the bonnet of a rental car while it bombs round a field is difficult.

On the morning of the wedding, the bridesmaids were up at 6am to get their hair and makeup done. The groomsmen were up at 7am, and still managed to fit in a row on the river and breakfast in town before getting suited and booted for the church.

The wedding itself went completely without incident: everyone was where they needed to be and it all went off without a hitch. I have never seen someone as nervously excited as Emilie was outside the church, waiting to walk down the aisle.

After some photos, and narrowly avoiding another thunderstorm, we jumped onto buses and headed out to the reception, which was at a gorgeous house a few miles away. I’m running out of superlatives, but it was a great night. All the stuff you hope for: delicious food, a few drinks, dancing like extras in Miami Vice, a stunning location and a tent full of interesting people united in their happiness for Mr. and Mrs. Buckley.

It was getting to be quite touch and go for a while whether I’d manage to make it back out to the US for Pat and Emilie’s wedding (on the weekend of the 22nd August) and Burning Man after it.

Luckily, just as I was about to abandon all hope, two things happened. Firstly, Beth – our neighbour at Burning Man last year – suggested I try to get a second passport as my original was basically “stolen” by the US embassy. I was impressed that the IPS is enlightened enough to allow frequent travelers to easily get a second passport for just this purpose – a lovely change from the glacial pace of other bureaucracies.

Secondly, I got a response from the US embassy about the fate of my original passport. Because the visas we’re going for are quite unusual, I’m relatively young and don’t have a Nobel Prize, they’re checking with the USCIS that they really did mean to approve my application. My lawyer says that in every case this has happened to his clients before, it’s been a simple confirmation from the US, and the embassy grant the visa with no drama. So, it’s good news that this situation has come up before, it’s good news that it’s always ended happily before and it’s good news that they’re not doing a time-consuming full review. It’s even better news that in the meantime they’ve couriered my passport straight back to me; I didn’t even need to get a second one in the end!

So, the plan is to fly back to San Francisco on Monday, across to Connecticut for the wedding, then back to San Francisco to get ready for our desert adventure at the end of August.

Posted via web from An Englishman in San Francisco

Following on from preparation and initial mincing, the next things to decide on where how to create the chicken wire skeleton, and how the blocks would be attached to the substrate given the extra complication of a white sheet in between the two.

Chicken wire dome

Chicken wire will be great as a skeleton, as it’s relatively easy to shape, but can still be nice and sturdy if you need it to be. The mesh structure will be really useful for anchoring it into the ground, and attaching the coverings, too.

However, it only bends nicely around one axis at a time, as it barely compresses or expands as a sheet at all. That means making cylinders of chicken wire and expecting to be able to stack and bend them into a dome is not going to work. What I’ll do instead is to cut 16 equally sized isosceles triangles, chain the bases (b) together into a loop, then stitch neighboring long sides (l) together, eventually joining all the acute vertices at the top of the dome.

It’s pretty likely this won’t hold its own weight particularly well, so I may need a single vertical pole in the middle of the dome.

Attaching the blocks

The polystyrene blocks must be secure (because of the wind), quick to put on, and easy to take off. And as the polystyrene itself is awkward to work with, I’ll do as much of the hard work as possible before leaving for Nevada. The best solution seems to be to attach the blocks onto strips of white fabric, measured to fit around the igloo in courses. These strips will be useful in keeping everything together during transport, and make it super easy to attach and detach the blocks once on the playa.

I wasn’t sure about how to permanently bind polystyrene onto fabric; I wasn’t sure until I found This to That. Hot glue!

As for attaching the fabric strips to the sheet and chicken wire underneath, I’m not sure. However, I do know that it’s a much easier problem to solve than dealing with the blocks.

Next up: trying to make custom blocks of polystyrene, working out how much chicken wire I need, finding suppliers and finally the pre-build prep work!

Posted via email from An Englishman in San Francisco

Burning man is only 6 weeks away, and my highfalutin plans to build a polystyrene igloo on the playa are looking ambitious at best. So, fueled by some Arctic architecture brainstorming with my sister, this weekend I began making plans for how I can make this work.

Size

My first pass at sizing was that I’d like to be able to stand up in the centre of the dome (so 195cm inside radius), and that the walls should be around 20cm thick so that you get some real thermal insulation benefit during the hot day and cold night.

Unfortunately, this works out at being over 5 cubic metres of polystyrene. That’s a lot, considering we need to fit it in the van to ship it in and back out, along with hundreds of litres of liquid nitrogen, bikes, water, people, a geodesic dome, etc..

Scaling this back to 180cm at the zenith, with 10cm thick walls, it comes out at 2.15 cubic metres of polystyrene, which is a lot more practical, although still pushing what we can realistically take.

Design

I got really inspired by this old 1940s Canadian public information film about traditional Inuit igloo building (video doesn’t work in the UK, unfortunately…). I’d assumed igloos were built much like houses, with interlocking blocks going on top of others in courses. In fact, it turns out that the best construction method is to spiral upwards, round and round from bottom to top, so there’s effectively only one course of blocks which loops round on top of itself. This means you never have that awkward first block in a course which would have nothing to butt up against. By spiralling up, you always have a block below and a block to the side to nestle up to.

Using this method, one man can create a 6″ high shelter in less than an hour, using nothing the stuff he’s standing on.

My initial thoughts were to mimic this proven design very closely, working out some way to bind blocks of polystyrene together that would be easy to detach at the end of the week, ready for shipping back to SF and reuse in the future.

However, after some thought, I think the traditional method just won’t work for polystyrene. Firstly, the stuff is so light that it needs no encouragement to fly off at the merest hint of a breeze. Secondly, while snow blocks can be mushed up and mashed together, naturally binding together as they re-freeze, polystyrene just doesn’t behave that way; each block would have to be manually, laboriously anchored to its neighbours. And I didn’t know what that magical reversible binding was going to be… Thirdly, you can easily cut a doorway into a finished igloo, but cutting holes in the polystyrene would dramatically weaken the structure and produce loads of non-biodegradable, impossible to catch white beads flying everywhere in the wind.

So, the design I’m going for is a three stage process:

1. a chicken wire skeleton to the desired internal size, complete with doorway, anchored into the dirt with rebar
2. a white sheet over the chicken wire
3. blocks of polystyrene attached individually to the chicken wire, with some reversible binding

The idea is that the wireframe will be free standing, and give us a substrate to build on. The sheet is to fill in the gaps between blocks, keep the wind out and complete the “all white” effect. If we manage to get the blocks nestled together closely enough, very little sunlight will make it through directly to the sheet.

What next?

• How best to create an igloo shape out of chicken wire? That stuff is pretty horrible to work, especially with 3D curves
• How to get / create polystyrene blocks? I’d like to make them myself if possible…
• How to attach the blocks to the chicken wire, through the sheet
• How big should the blocks be? Is it practical for them all to be the same size?
• How much will it cost?

Posted via email from An Englishman in San Francisco

… by bureaucratic inefficiency.

As soon as I got back to the UK, I sent my passport in to the US embassy in London to try and get my visa stamp, hoping to get it back in time to shoot straight back to the west coast. Unfortunately, my optimism for quick and easy processing was once again ill-placed, and I still haven't got my passport back.

The embassy can't give me any information, good or bad, so I don't know how long it will be before I'm able to travel. Although I'm increasingly inured to leisurely paperwork processing by now, this delay has been a particularly frustrating one; I've missed Christoff's whole family visiting San Francisco, Alex's birthday BikeBQ (first non-ironic sighting of the <blink/> tag in a while , a mini-festival this weekend to the north of the city, Pat's bachelor party and a bunch of other bits and pieces.

Currently scheduled to get back to San Francisco on July 28th, although I've already had to push my flight back twice – that plan might change! ]]> http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/passport-stolen/feed/ 0 jamesbrady http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/all-my-yosemite-pictures/ http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/all-my-yosemite-pictures/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:25:28 +0000 James Brady http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/all-my-yosemite-pictures/ ]]>

Are a Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/69148053@N00/sets/72157620959491413/ ]]> http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/all-my-yosemite-pictures/feed/ 0 jamesbrady http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/yosemite-trip/ http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/yosemite-trip/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:23:13 +0000 James Brady http://jamesbrady.wordpress.com/?p=207 ]]>

Just before flying back to England, some friends and I made a trip to Yosemite for the weekend. We headed out there after work on Friday, setting off at around 7pm with the car full of enormous sandwiches, bourbon and sleeping bags.

The 200 mile drive took about 4 and a half hours, including a couple of stops, so we arrived pretty late, just wanting to set ourselves up and get some sleep ready for the big day to follow. However, before we could do that, we had to empty all food and smelly stuff from the car, or face a $5000 fine for tempting bears into camp; there was a special bear proof locker outside all the tents into which we threw the aforementioned monolithic sandwiches, chocolate and toiletries.

After a few hours sleep, we woke up at about 6:30am, to be met by this view:

Note the angle of the trees – I was craning right back just to get that cliff in the viewfinder… And that started a day of incomprehensible scales and impossible vistas.

The plan was to hike up Half Dome, a mountain nearly 9,000 ft high. Although the campsite was already roughly as high above sea level as the tallest mountain in Britain, we still had a 5,000ft climb up to the summit. To make this clearer, if Robert Wadlow, world’s tallest human, was as big as Half Dome, we would have been camping near his crotch, while Ben Nevis would be up to his belt. Meanwhile, the Eiffel Tower would be halfway up Wadlow’s shin, or at the shoulder of Gul Mohammed; world’s smallest man. Basically, although we were starting high, there was still a long way to go.

After bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, we set off. I was carrying 5 litres of water, a sandwich the size of the Indian subcontinent, a few Snickers bars, a hat, a jumper, waterproof hat and waterproof trousers, as “the weather can turn quickly at high altitudes”.

I quickly came to realise that I’d made a grave error. As we moved up out of the valley on the Misty Trail, and into the sunlight, it became obvious that it was going to be a scorching day, and that I had about 10kg of useless on my back. Undeterred, we pressed on up and to the side of Vernal Fall.

By this point, things were getting a bit warm, so the blast of misted snow melt from this waterfall was very welcome!

From Vernal Fall, it was on and up to Nevada Fall; an enormous waterfall onto slanting rock. 20 feet before the fall itself, the river looks completely innocuous and harmless – quite a transformation!

By the time we reached the top of Nevada Fall, it was around 10:30am, and we were roughly halfway to the summit. The next hour or so was gentle enough climbing up through pine forests, with the imposing bulk of Half Dome itself appearing to our left.

At about 11:30am, due to a few too many Snickers and energy bars, and burgeoning sunstroke, I thought it would be a great idea to run the rest of the ascent, so off I shot, aiming to get to the summit for lunch. This actually went better than could be expected, and although I was basically dying, I did manage to catch up with the leaders of our expedition (who had continued while we were messing about at Nevada Fall).

As we neared the final ascent – the side of the dome itself – we could see a little line of ants on the side of the huge lump of granite; ants that gradually turned into tourists from Nebraska.

Now, I’ve never had to queue for a mountain before. And although in principle I’m a big fan of The Great Outdoors being popular enough for there to be congestion here and there, the fact that you were expected to wait for an hour and a half before starting the final ascent was a bit strange to me…

Still, I sat and took an inconsequential feast from a sandwich the size of Michael Jackson’s remembrance book, and waited for everyone to catch up. By now, it was really hot. We were way above the treeline, so there was no shade, and the white granite was bouncing back the intense sun from all angles.

The final pull up to the summit was very steep bare rock – maybe a 55° slope – so a pair of metal cables have been run to the top, the idea being that you pull yourself up to the top between the cables. It was this “between the cables” bottleneck causing the queue, so we decided to go up the outside of the pair, using just the one cable and bypassing the delay.

The summit was barren and indescribably hot. Hot, hot, hot. We heard afterwards that it was 110°F.

The views from the top were amazing; the globular granite mountains seemed so extra-terrestrial to me. But it was the sheer 1,500ft drop off the front of the dome that was most striking.

After an hour or so mincing and recovering on top, we started down the mountain. The descent proceeded without incident, stopping only to refill water (making it 7 litres that day, in total), and get a couple of pics of Half Dome with Nevada Falls in the foreground.