Pizza Oven Phase 2: First Firing

We fired the pizza oven for the first time yesterday. It seemed to perform quite well. We'll build a bigger fire today. Most of the barrel burned out, and it looks quite solid. I am thinking we might want an additional skim coat of adobe before we paint it...

Aaron's Wedding

On Sunday Aaron Lazarus, one of my close friends from college, got married to Lydia Belzer. It was a traditional Jewish wedding complete with all of the traditions, customs, singing, and dancing that go along. It was an epic time during which we all sweated nearly our own body weight in water, had many great laughs, and a ton of reckless abandon. A good time was certainly had by all involved, and we unanimously agreed that Lydia is awesome, and she's perfect for Aaron (something we never thought would occur in nature...) One of Aaron's brothers (Chaim), during his toast, said that watching Aaron get married made him want to chant like a rampant Obama supporter 'Yes, We Can! Yes, We Can!' It was a beautiful time watching two wonderful families come together and be joined in a ceremony and party with thousands of years of history and tradition. One of the best weddings I have ever been to. Also, for our schtick during the group dancing, we gave the infamous 'ball and chain' to Lydia as symbolic of the burden she will be shouldering as Aaron's wife... ;-)

Joe, Me, Aaron, and Matt at the tisch.

Aaron and Lydia being danced on chairs as the 'king and queen' of the party. They are both tugging on a handkerchief which symbolizes their union.

All the webbies and spouses (L-R): Brian, Joe, Ann, Matt, Kelly, Hannah, Russ, Me, Steve, and Liz. Good times, all around.

Another group shot with Me, Ann, Matt, Aaron, Lydia, Joe, Liz, Steve, and Russ. Sorry for all the sweat...that dancing was a lot of work! Joe is actually sweatier than I am but you can't see him because he's in the back row...

Pizza Oven Phase 1: Construction

I have always wanted to have a wood fired brick pizza oven in my backyard for al fresco cooking. Let's face it, making pizza and eating outdoors are both just awesome. The brick pizza oven is a special thing because it makes really great crust and is just generally awesome. I can say now that it is also a lot of work! I have had a lot of materials for the oven in question for over a year, and gotten more than a little grief for not having completed the oven before now. The catalyst for this project was that last weekend Parrish volunteered to help me build it, and even after I discouraged her saying it would be a lot of work, she persisted and was adamant that she could help me. Her experience building wood stoves in Honduras was invaluable as she turned out to be a much better mason than I am. I have some pix that are interleaved with the story so follow along...

I built the oven according to the following plan:

http://www.sunset.com/sunset/garden/article/0,20633,690891,00.html

First, I had to haul the masonry. Turns out the Tragic Wagon isn't quite such strong sauce as I thought as I had to make 4 trips to the brickyard. Who knew bricks were so heavy? The first load they put in with a forklift and I thought they were going to break the springs on the truck. It wasn't pretty.

She was saggin a little low in her boots...

Here you can see the rear spring compression factor...it was pretty significant.

A load of firebricks and cinderblocks. Note that the trailer hitch is bottomed out on the curb. Ouch!

I used 6"x6" Burnie Blend paving stones for the base, which I laid twice because I did it once, and it wasn't perfect, but I called it good. Unfortunately, Will came along behind me and did a bang-up job of laying the patio for the picnic table and I just couldn't let myself get shown up like that so I took it all apart and re-laid it. Anyway, this is a picture of the base with some cinderblocks down.

Base, cinderblocks, capstones, and some of the firebricks.

Base, cinderblocks, capstones, firebricks, slab, and dome arch cut and installed.

Here you can see the granite slab I'm using as the cooking surface. The plans don't call for this, but my parents gave me this slab which was an offcut from when they re-did their kitchen. This whole project is basically an exercise in figuring out how to make use of the granite slab. Awesome.
Parrish mixing the refractory mortar. I should add in here that we attempted to make a brick arch over the oven dome, but we aborted that plan when it became apparent that our (and when I say 'our' I mean 'my') arch building skills are not quite on par with the Romans (though we are somewhat ahead of the Greeks, maybe...) Anyway, we tried to make a brick arch and well it didn't work out so we punted on that and switched to just using straight up adobe.

Another shot of the completed basework and dome form in place.

I am holding back the fence as Parrish applies mortar in this picture. I kind of hit the wall right as she was getting all motivated. Something about mixing up the mud got her real fired up so it was good timing because I had become overwhelmed, tired, and dehydrated...

Parrish, getting excited about mudding up the dome.

Parrish lays the smack down. Fortunately, we had some help all day in the form of Matt and Will. But late in the process, James and Elaine showed up and the whole thing turned into a barn-raising. I am not sure we could have finished if this had not happened, so thanks to Elaine, James, Will, and Matt for helping us out completing the job!

Parrish and Elaine trowel on the adobe. Note the door (Matt and I built the door as they were putting on the mud...)This is the last shot I have showing the final mud layers going around the oven opening and the door installed with flashing.

Overall it was a tremendous 2-days work. Thanks to everybody who helped out. Thanks especially to Parrish who is absolutely awesome for helping me do this. Hopefully we'll get to see the oven in action in a few weeks here!

Get Down

Someone sent this picture of me, Kevin, and Steve shakin it on the dancefloor at Keith's wedding. What I think is funny is that we're each doing our own, independent and unique, dance. A trio of white boys gettin down. Funky. Awesome. Hillarious. Having a great time. It was a great band. Wish you had been there.

Buoys

After finding ground on the way out of Mill Creek Saturday night, I thought this was a propos:Don't find earth the hard way! Spotlight the buoys!

Cantler's and Poossers

This past weekend Elaine invited me to sail with her on a Jet 14, and so I gave that a whirl. It was a lot of fun. The Jet is a very manageable boat (translation: it's kinda underpowered). Elaine was a fun person to sail with, and the folks in the fleet are an enthusiastic and fun-loving bunch. Since it's a manageable boat, people sail them with their kids and it's just kind of a cool scene.

We had some pretty bad thunderstorms roll through on Saturday afternoon that forced us back into the club around 1 PM, whereupon the keg was tapped and food was brought out and we proceeded to spend the afternoon drinking and eating and socializing. Parrish had wanted to organize a trip to Cantler's with some of her friends, but I wasn't sure about the weather until around 4 it started to clear up and we decided to put together a group and head over there. In all we had 11 people on board and Luke & Suze met us over there for a total of 13. Unfortunately I don't have pix of us all ripping through the crabs at Cantler's, but I do have some pix from the sail over...

Seamonster and I get ready to roll out.

Dorian keeps the jib in perfect trim.

Bruce, Will, and Seamonster watch for puffs coming from behind.

James explains the finer points of sail trim to Parrish and her friends while Bruce listens in.

Elaine keeps a sharp eye on the mainsheet trim.

After we were done at Cantler's we motored back to Annapolis (it would have been an upwind sail so we decided to be lazy). We tried to navigate out the mouth of Mill Creek using only the instruments, but this didn't quite work out as well as I had hoped, and we found the earth. Fortunately, it was a soft ground, and we came off easily. Once we got back to Annapolis, some folks decided that they needed to take off and go home for an early start on Sunday, but the more intrepid amongst us (that would be Erika, James, Elaine, Will, and myself) took a poll and decided that we weren't yet finished and that we'd stop off at POOSSERS before we'd call it a night. So we headed over there and got rock star parking right on the bulkhead. Coincidentally, we ran into Rook Singer (one of the SJC sailors who I coached back in the day) who helped us tie the boat off and we headed in to get some drinks. Things went downhill from there as Erika and Elaine decided that it was time to molest the mannequin, so they got into it:

Starting off it seemed so benign...

But it quickly degraded into molestation from ahead and astern!

At the end of the evening, I think the mannequin felt he (she?) had been man-handled...

On the way back to the mooring both Erika and Elaine passed out while Will, James and I kept the ship moving...go figure. The night didn't end till 0230 and given that we started drinking at 1400, it was a solid 12 hours of beer and drinks. It was TOUGH to get up for sailing on Sunday, but well worth it as we were treated to a beautiful sunny day with gorgeous breeze. Thanks to Elaine for having me out!

No news is good news!