Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Paintball

Over a month ago, we semi-randomly picked a weekend to play paintball. What a day it turned out to be! We had record setting 90+ temps and blue skies. Eighteen of us (mostly Microsofties) headed to Eastside Paintball for a day o' carnage.

Beware all who travel to Eastside Paintball. Tim and Denis were really the only people who had vehicles that looked at place on that road. As I carefully picked my way through the pot holes, mud spots, and big rocks, I could only imagine how much Greg was going to be gunning for me after driving that road in his Porsche. Oops.

Thanks to everyone who came out. I think we all had a good time and I hope that we can do it again soon! Pictures are available in the photo gallery.

benmartens May 19, 2008 Outdoors

Published Author

I've finally finished the book project. All in all, I'd say it took about 40 hours to get these six books edited and published. These new books are pretty substantial and have 450-600 pages each.

If you're ever looking to publish any type of book, I have nothing but the highest praise for lulu.com. I don't know how they can provide a service like this for such a low price. These six books cost just under $150 and when you think about how difficult one-off custom printing like this is, that seems like a steal. The whole website and process of creating the books was smooth and ridiculously simple.

Hopefully they stick around for a while so that I can continue to publish books for the coming years.

benmartens May 15, 2008 Projects

Summit Registers

Since we found that summit register on top of Cougar Mt., Rachel and I have been wondering where those books are kept. The register at the top of Mt. Rainier is kept in the National Park Archives.

Until the 1930s, the park did not maintain formal park summit registers. During the early years, many different mountain climbing clubs maintained registers at the summit. The Mountaineer’s collection of registers is located at the University of Washington. The Mount Rainier National Park Archives contains summit registers beginning in 1932.

Registers continue to be added to the collection. If you are searching for a very recent signature, please be aware that there is a time lag in getting registers to the archives for processing. Though some summit register pages are damaged and some volumes are missing, the registers are still an excellent record of Mount Rainier summit climbs and provide the reader with an opportunity to "read the thoughts of the climbers."

To initiate a summit register signature search, please be prepared to provide as much information about your climb as possible: the number of people in the climb, if you were in a guided party, how you wrote your name, etc. Providing the exact date of your summit climb or as close as possible to the date of your climb, is the most important information for ensuring that your signature has a chance of being located.

http://www.nps.gov/mora/historyculture/museum.htm

An email to the King County Parks and Recreation website revealed the destination of the Cougar Mt. registers:

The books are read and stored at the Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park maintenance office. Staff tells me they are very interesting reading. If you would like to review any of them, please call the maintenance office at 206-296-4145.

This seems like a good book opportunity to me. Imagine how many funny, inspiring, heartbreaking tales are recorded on those pages!

benmartens May 8, 2008 Outdoors

Cougar Mountain

On Sunday, Rachel and I met at the Cougar Mountain trailhead for an afternoon hike. The weather was perfect for hiking – 65 and sunny. The hike came from a book of local hikes that Tim bought last summer. It's the first one in the book (seemed like a good place to start.) While there wasn't a lot of great scenic views, it was a good workout and a nice chance to chat for a few hours. We made the 6.2 mile hike with 1700 miles feet of cumulative elevation gain in exactly three hours.

I was pretty excited to reach the peak and see what was in store. Unfortunately, I still don't know because there is absolutely no view. It's just the highest point on the hill and it's surrounded by trees so you can't see anything. There was a couple up there who had just moved to Seattle from Chicago. We shared a laugh about the anticlimactic summit and then they took off.

Rachel grabbed the notebook out of the tuperware box and proceeded to read through entries from previous hikers. Along with various comments about people who claimed to have peed on the pen, there were some interesting notes. The first was something to the effect of: "Been here for three months. Running out of food and water and the squirrels have stopped talking to me." The longest entry (three pages!) was from a 24 year old girl who was in love with her 57 year old professor. She was on a hike to figure out what it all meant and straighten things out in her head. I feel like she probably failed.

I'm hoping that there will be many more hikes this summer so I have started a hiking photo gallery. Pictures from this hike are available in the gallery.

UPDATE: Thanks to Dad for catching my units error. It's probably not that surprising if you remember that I worked for Lockheed.

benmartens May 6, 2008 Outdoors

Building the Chair

I headed to Home Depot this afternoon to pick up some wood to build a base for the lift chair. The project went relatively smoothly, and while it's not the prettiest bench in the world, it has a lot of meaning and I love it. The extra depth in the back is due to the balance of the chair. It is naturally weighted to be back heavy so it tilts back while hanging on the lift. This extra depth in my bench keeps it from flipping over. And thanks to a suggestion from Tim, the plywood on that extra depth makes a great place to set your beer. The bench is now sitting out on my deck and will be a nice place to sit while I'm cooking on the grill.

The vertical bar is stored safely in the back of my garage and will be reunited with the chair once I have a place to hang it.

benmartens May 3, 2008 Projects

Tulip Ride 2008

For the past four years, a large group made up of mostly Microsofties has made a ride up through the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. This was the first year that I was able to join them for the tulip ride, although I have joined them on various other rides to Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens.

The ride was originally scheduled for last weekend, but it was postponed due to the snow. This weekend the weather was around 70 and the sun was out for most of the day. Beautiful!

It was also my first long ride with a rider on the back. Rachel joined me and was a great passenger for the whole ride. I was a bit worried about how we would fare on a ride that long, but having her on the back was not any more uncomfortable than normal. That being said, spending that much time on a bike definitely leaves you sore.

My wardrobe choice was horrendous. I saw the 70 degree forecast and left home with a t-shirt, a linerless motorcycle jacket and jeans. BRR. I failed to remember that the day started out around 40 degrees. It was so cold that I couldn't stop shivering while we were riding. Thankfully Matt was well-dressed and let me borrow his long sleeved shirt. That, combined with the warming trend of the day, eventually got me warm enough to really enjoy the ride.

You can look at the actual route map, but I'll summarize. We started out in Redmond and made the boring trek up I-405 and I-5 to the Tulalip Casino. We hung around there and picked up some more riders. From then on it was two lane roads into the tulip fields. We stopped to snap some pictures but ended up leaving quickly when a cop started writing parking tickets. We regrouped in La Conner at Palmer's restaurant for lunch. Simeon, Matt, Laura, Rachel and I decided to leave the group at this point and headed out on our own. We drop around to the top of Whidbey Island and stopped to look around the bridge at Deception Pass. From there we headed down Hwy 20 to the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry. The ferry dropped us off just north of Lynnwood, and from there we went out separate ways home.

The number of bikes in our group rose and fell throughout the day, but it topped out at 40 bikes! Riding in a pack that big really turns some heads. I was trying to figure out how long our pack was stretched out on a 40mph road and my best guess is about 3/4 of a mile.

Photos are posted in my photo gallery. If you want to see even more, you can check out the photos on flickr. They include a bunch of photos from other riders in the group. A couple of my favorite photos are included at the bottom of this post.

Thanks to Jeff Henshaw for organizing all of this. He took a little video which shows all of our bikes parked at Tulalip and a sea plane taking off while we ate lunch in La Conner. Jeff usually organizes a couple of ridges throughout the summer and I'll be eagerly awaiting the next one!

[UPDATE] I forgot to mention that I paid over $4/gallon for gas on this trip. It's the first time that has ever happened. Granted, it was premium gas for the motorcycle, but how much longer will it be before regular unleaded is over $4 too?

[UPDATE] It appears that also forgot to post a link to my own photo gallery. It contains my favorite shots from the ride in case you aren't interested in looking through 100+ photos on flickr.

benmartens April 28, 2008 Motorcycle

First Hike of 2008

Tim, Rachel and I met at Tiger Mountain on Friday evening for our first hike of the year. We decided to take it easy and not go for the peak right away. Instead, we hiked up the cable line trail and then headed west around the lake, by the high school, up to the junction with Sunset Way, and then back east past the lake. We returned to our cars just before dusk.

While our route could have had a bit better scenery, it was still enjoyable and we get a few good pictures. I'm looking forward to a lot more hiking this year!

benmartens April 27, 2008 Outdoors

Books Completed

In February, I completed The Life and Times of Ben Martens: 2002. Lulu.com did a great job printing off the hardcover book for me, so I went ahead with books for 2003-2007. I have been spending ~5-10 hours/week for the past two months and I'm finally done with the next 5 books. It takes an extremely long time to get everything edited, formatted, and laid out correctly. Tonight, I finished the process of uploading them to lulu.com and placing my order. For the low low price of $148.70 plus shipping, you can now have six books covering the first six years of my blog, or you can download the eBooks for free.

Like I said before, I know no one will read these (probably including me), but I think it's pretty neat to have these volumes sitting on my shelf. Except for 2002 which was only a half year of blogging, the other volumes are all 500-650 pages long. Somewhere in there, there has to be at least one page worth the tree it was printed on.

Maybe.

benmartens April 24, 2008 Projects

Garage Shelf

One of the biggest (by physical size) projects that I’ve ever undertaken also turned out to be one of the quickest. I have a very tiny garage. It was a struggle just to get the motorcycle and the car in at the same time. Over the last two years, the floor of the garage and the three shelves got more and more full. It was time to build a bigger shelf/mini-attic at the back of the garage above the motorcycle. The only trick is that we had to build around the water heater and pipes in the corner.

Tim and I met at Home Depot at 5:45 on Monday evening. We headed home with the wood and soon BenH joined us. Ben and I built the frame while Tim notched the top of each post. The posts were 4×4’s and the 2×4 (and 2×8 front span) sit in notches on top of the posts for added strength. Just four hours after we started the project, we had the frame standing up on the posts and lightly secured.

On Tuesday night, we added some diagonal bracing and secured everything tightly. Screws were added between the structure and wall studs were we could to keep it all stable. For the final step, we cut the plywood to fit the top of the shelf and Tim screwed it into the frame.

Pretty much everything that we had on the floor of the garage now fits up on that shelf. We were even able to empty one of the white shelves. I’m probably going to be buying a cargo box for the top of my car and we should be able to hang it from the bottom of the shelf when not in use. We have just about crammed as much fun into the garage as we can physically fit!

We had about $20 worth of wood leftover due to some last minute design changes. Once I return that, the total project cost will only be about $80. We also learned that Stanley bits are worthless. We ruined about a half dozen of them trying to get all the screws in. Once we switched to DeWalt bits, everything went much more smoothly.

benmartens April 18, 2008 Projects, Woodworking