Friday night I figured out a technique for resawing up to 4" wide boards with the Festool TS 55 EQ circular saw and MFT 1080 table, full write-up coming soon, probably after I resaw a few more such boards to get my technique down. It'll take a few finish passes through the planer, but this will let me get a few bookmatch panels without the monster bandsaw that I don't have the space for.
On Saturday I volunteered to drive SAG for the Wine Country Century. I actually ended up with a radio, but it had a problem transmitting, so I didn't end up being as useful as I hoped, but it was still a fun day out in western Sonoma county. I bailed out of there to catch the Amtrak bus from Petaluma to Martinez, and there on the train to Fresno, to catch up with Charlene who was down there this weekend and last to help the family out.
On the train I got into a cool conversation with two young ladies of... well... a different economic and social background than my own who were headed back down to Bakersfield after a visit to the Mendocino area. They called themselves Juggalos, fans of Insane Clown Posse, a "horrorcore" rap group, with a predilection towards Faygo soda. They were pierced, dyed hair, somewhere in their late teens, I'd guess, there were neighborhoods in San Francisco where they wouldn't turn a head, but in Bakersfield I'm guessing they stand out a bit.
We had a good conversation, I gained some cred by [knowing some Tech N9ne lyrics|http://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/5830.html], learned about Twiztid and King Gordy, both in the horrorcore genre, and which I'll save in my repertoire because sometimes it's nice to be able to tell a 15 year old that I do kind of remember what it's like to be a teenager, and Aesop Rock, which I'm still searching for a definitive link for, but which was my favorite of the groups I hadn't heard of before. At least played through a cell phone speaker there were some interesting lyrics there that sounded listenable. Rap and hip-hop generally aren't my thing (except when I'm driving at 2 AM and need to stay awake), but I keep finding flashes of "there is something deeper under here", and Aesop Rock had some of that.
One of the tasks in Fresno was trying to set up an easy to prep dietary plan for a diabetic heart patient, so on Sunday, Charlene and I spent quite a while trolling the frozen foods sections of Wal*Mart, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. This is definitely an area we'd never normally go into, and we came out with an extreme case of "what else can we suggest?". Alas, we left my notes down there, so I can't speak definitively, but the thing that totally blew me away was that as we got to the so called "healthy" brands, quite often the salt content was off the charts, and they replaced the fat with corn syrup. In the end we came back to "how can we make other tasks easier so that there's more energy left for preparing food that might actually be nutritious".