Three Forks Warm Springs

 We went to Three Forks (Tudor) Warm Springs last Saturday, and it was fantastic. The trip was 110 miles Southwest from Boise. The Springs are nestled behind Three Forks Dome on the Owyhee river. The road is decent until the last two miles where it becomes a 4x4 worthy adventure. The Springs (the entire creek) are between 90° to 95° and makes for an absolutely enjoyable summer soak, with stellar pools and wonderful views.

Reading 7-9-8

    I recently finished reading the Antiquary, by Sir Walter Scott. It was an interesting book, with an insight into life and society of 18th century Scotland. I arrived at reading this book after finding the Oxford edition at Half Price Books in Redmond last summer.
     Before finishing the Antiquary, I finished The American Black Chamber by Herbert O. Yardley. Melissa bought me this book as a birthday present. I have a list of several books I want to read (such as Eric Clapton's Biography). The American Black Chamber was a really fun book to read, if you are interested in codes, cyphers, spies, or international intrigue. It was especially insightful as Yardley included actual messages and the methods for breaking the codes.

Deadwood Hot Springs

Melissa and I recently went camping at Deadwood reservoir and made a trek up to Deadwood Hot Springs. This was a rewarding journey, as a few friends and
I were unable to find it last year while hiking around in the dark. But this year, with the aid of daylight, we were able to trek about a mile further up a small trail and find the hot springs. It is an impressive setup with a hillside of hot water and tubes filling pools alongside a small cliff. The pools had drainage valves and scrubber brushes to facilitate in cleaning them. There were alot of elk around, and a few were brave enough to briefly say hello. It was a sun drenched hike of three miles one way and three miles back which could have been accomplished much easier on bicycles. Overall it was a fun excursion.

Super-Mega Photogallery revolution

I've upgraded the website with a mashup of PicasaWeb Albums and Lightbox. I'm thinking that these improvements make the photos portion of the website about 1,000 times more navigable. It was a result of the merging of this a javascript project to embed PicasaWeb Albums: JavaScript interface to PicasaWeb Albums. I took that script and modified it to work with Lightbox. With some customized mangling to mash them together, and some further tweaking of lightbox to user the arrow keys for navigation, I'm very happy with the result.

Drupal 6 upgrade

The website has recently been upgraded to Drupal 6. As well, I've switched from using gallery for my photos to using an embedded version of picasa web albums. there are still a few items to implement, such as web links, but over the upgrade went pretty well.

Seven Hot Springs

Recently we went for a hot springs discovery excursion, visiting seven springs in a day. We drove up towards Featherville and then over towards pine and then back down to Fairfield. The first hot springs we visited was 'bridge' near Anderson Ranch reservoir. And the next we looked at Paradise which is private and near abandoned. Then we went up towards Featherville and hiked up to Willow Creek hot springs. Next, we drove to Baumgartner hot springs, and then drove to Lightfoot hot springs. We were going to go to Skillern, but it was too much of a hike at that point (two miles each way), and we were hoping to hit Fairfield for dinner. So we proceeded onwards to Preis hot springs (probably the smallest developed hot springs in the world, see photo). The last one hit was Worswick, which was the grandest. The spring runoff made it to much for sandy deposits filling the pool, but it was a blast to explore. After that we headed down to Fairfield for dinner, and back to Boise. More photos here.

Breville Ikon

A few months back, I purchased a coffee grinder, as my old grinder wasn't cutting it anymore, and cleaning the blender after every brew was a little much. So I bought a Breville BCG450XL. It's a conical burr grinder. It holds ½ a pound of coffee beans. I suppose you could grinder other types of beans if you feel the need. It's really been a champion performer for making genuinely good coffee. And though burr grinders are more expensive, they sure beat using a crank operated coffee grinder.