Even in Kyoto

Although I tried to invite a whole bunch of people to come talk about bicycling, ultimately not too many people managed to brave the cold, dark, wet weather, although to my surprise and delight one rower did show up and she brought a friend!

Ultimately, that's okay. There were some other interesting outcomes from the talk, the largest of which was the chance to chat informally with a colleague about my aspirations to row the Hudson River next June. As it turns out she's in the midst of writing a grant for a flood resilience project, and we could see a way to use my rowing expedition to raise awareness about the need for flood planning in communities located along the river. What's great about that is she should be able to get students to work on the outreach and publicity side of things, so then I can just focus on the logistics of getting myself down the river!

I'm also starting to think ahead about other plans for 2027. In general I want 2027 to be less hectic than 2026 has been, and I'll at least partly accomplish that by NOT roadtripping to Arizona for a month, and by NOT traveling to Germany for a huge international conference. But I DO want to row the Hudson River from Albany down to the City, and I do want to get more serious about house-hunting, and I do want to go back to Chicago again for the Chicago River Marathon.

I also reached out to someone about hosting a Bike Smart class on our campus next April. Completing this class is one of the first steps to becoming a certified League Cycling Instructor. My hope is if the class gets offered here on campus, I'll be able to recruit other people to participate, too. I'm mostly interested in the certification because it seems like it would be beneficial for the sake of the bicycling class I somehow keep teaching here.

Lastly, yesterday I finished the second of two sessions on how to start building our area's low-stress bike map. The next step is to roll up my sleeves and actually get to work on it.

This sort of project is difficult to start and sustain on my own, so I need to plot and scheme and make some concrete plans to make it happen. I am thinking maybe I need to just start up a "Monthly Mapping Party" and take myself and my laptop somewhere pleasant to start regularly spending a couple of hours clicking away at the map, clickety click.

Yesterday I received a gift that included some primo sprigs of catnip for the cats. Naturally, I had to see how potent they were! So as soon as I got home, I offered a sprig to George.

He knew what to do.







Martha also came over to see what all the fuss was about. She has also been known to get quite silly when given a chance to roll around in some 'nip. Recently, however, she has been having some Opinions about the behavior of her offspring.



This is the best of the bunch, really.


She eventually decided she'd had enough of the antics, maybe it was time to depart.


This cat is Very High.


He still hasn't quite figured out the new cat flap, but we're trying.

Let's start with the one that is least attractive, but still an important improvement. This is the upgraded catio cat flap:



The cats haven't figured it out just yet, but they're motivated enough that they should be able to get it without too much cajoling. It lets in much less of a draft than the previous makeshift flap made from old bike tubing.

Enjoying coffee and treats with other area Coffeeneurs at Peebles Island on Sunday:


It was really wonderful to meet everyone that showed up!

There was a beautiful leaf collage on the ground near the picnic tables.



Our indoor winter rowing training is in a new location this year:


It's basically across the street from a Turkish bakery.


I'm not sure whether we'll make this our regular coffee spot or not, but we enjoyed some lovely treats after practice yesterday.

I got the last coat of paint on the first 5 sets of oars this morning, instead of rowing:


It only took me like 2.5 hours to do all the steps by myself: rough up the surface with 220-grit, clean everything off, mix up and get the paint applied. Makes me more glad I got help with the previous steps this time around. The final coat always needs to be applied with the most care, to ensure the best possible finished appearance.

Two more sets also got primed and their first dab of paint on the cones (where the shaft connects with the blade). There are still 4 more sets to work on after that, that still need to be sanded with the 120 and 220-grit before they'll be ready for primer. The forecast is looking rainy and cold later this week, though, so I'm not sure whether we'll get all of the oars done before winter sets in. Still, it's progress.

So many changes are happening. Many of the trees with colorful leaves have now dropped those leaves, seemingly many of them, all at once. I imagine it happening with a massive, "Whumph!" sound.

It was still 70 degrees F yesterday when I left work, incongruent with the seasonal decisions of the trees. It's going to be an odd winter.

In November, the rowing club holds its annual meeting and elections for Board positions. My current two-year term is up and I am not running for reelection. This is going to be kind of a tough change, but there are multiple reasons why it's a good time to step away and focus my energy and attention elsewhere.

In light of the change, I need to think about closing out some lingering rowing tasks and projects, and I'll need to think about how to hand over some of the responsibilities I've carried for a long time now.

I'm also due to inventory my own other personal tasks and projects. I tend to get frustrated in the middle of any semester, because the time and effort required by work naturally eats into my ability to make progress on all the other tasks and projects (but heck, it provides money, to make all the rest possible!). So it's time to ask: which of these do I want to continue working on? Which of these should I set aside? And are there any new projects I should commit to?

The list of papers to write and publish needs attention, too.

On Friday night while catching up with family on Zoom, my brother shared some fantastic stories about wearing his Ancient Chicken costume to work. By Ancient Chicken, I mean one of those inflatable T-rex outfits. Apparently they won't work on a bicycle, unfortunately, and he found that the outfit was a little too restrictive for teaching because he couldn't see well and he couldn't reach very far up on the whiteboard.

The water was beautiful Saturday morning, the penultimate team practice.



( yes basically a photo dump )

Last week at work was busy. I serve on two committees, and they both like to meet frequently. Last week in particular there were additional meetings in association with one of the committees. I only attended 3 of the 4 time obligations. That's a lot of time out of my work week.

We're also in the midst of course registration advising. That's also a lot of meetings. Some of them are short, for cases where things are straightforward. But I have a lot of new students, and those meetings are longer.

So I ran out of time during the week to grade exams, and had to grade exams on Sunday instead. Unfortunately, anymore the thing that winds up on the chopping block is time to blog.

These are short-term things, at least. For the moment I need to go home and do some of the cooking I couldn't do yesterday because I was grading exams.

Meeting with all of my Biology major advisees involves a lot of extra extrovert energy. They are good people and I want them to succeed. It was a tough week anyway because of extra administrative meetings - pitching of ideas and development of strategic plans.

I am making *some* progress on research, it's just very slow, and particularly hard when tired with a nonfunctional brain.

Time to go home. I am bringing a stack of grading home with me, which is never a good sign.

I know I've been blogging about What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures already (by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson). Now that I have finished reading it, I want to recommend it to you. Reading it reminded me of seeing the French documentary "Tomorrow" about a decade ago.

At the time I saw the documentary, most of the discourse around climate change was very doom-and-gloom. If anything, the planet earth forecast now is even more grim, and that is really hard news to live with. "Tomorrow" was the first thing I experienced that adopted a more proactive stance: what things can we think about and do that can help us create and maintain more resilient communities for the sake of surviving and thriving across the decades to come? Giving up is a choice, but it's a poor choice.

It turns out that in the intervening decade, a lot of people have continued asking this question and figuring out how to work on the project. Johnson has done the particular work of going out to interview a whole bunch of these people for us; the book is the collection of these interviews. So it is exceptionally broad in scope, covering topics ranging from farming practices, to urban planning and transportation, climate finance, cultural discourse, legal and policy changes, disaster management and community-building, and more. It is eye-opening.

One of the things that matters about this is our ability to see ourselves in components of this work. To give one example, the book contains an interview with Bren Smith, founder and co-executive director of Ocean Wave, which is focused on regenerative ocean farming. Think, rather than fish farming, of seaweed and bivalve production. Now I'm a person who loves the taste of delicious fish, but I generally don't eat fish because I'm highly aware of just how destructive fishing practices are, whether farmed or wild-caught. Depressing. But that interview got me rethinking my potential consumption of bivalves (mussels, oysters, clams). (I do eat and enjoy various forms of seaweed periodically already). I'm not about to go overboard on eating bivalves, because there are some risks to eating filter feeders, but I do appreciate the point that they can be produced in ways that are beneficial to people and ocean ecosystems, in contrast to how fishing and fish farms work (farmed fish eat fish meal, which is just processed ocean bycatch, gross, ugh).

In any case, I've also been witnessing how reading this book has been beneficial to other colleagues here at my institution. We keep bringing it up in conversations with each other. It's helpful to have it as a basis for these conversations about what we can do and think about.

An interesting note about the book: It was originally published in hardcover in 2024, where the political climate in the United States was rather different than it is now. However, the paperback edition got published in April 2026, and so the paperback edition includes valuable updates to many of the chapters, based on changes to the political and economic climate. I wound up obtaining the ereader version of the paperback edition, so that's an option. That said, the hardcover edition has some beautiful imagery (I wound up buying a used hard copy to keep in my office), and I'm not sure how that translated over to the paperback edition.

I really don't know what I'm going to read next. We'll see.

Here's a snippet of what it can be like to try and plan to do something together with scrottie:

( don't expect this to be short. )

Anyway!

This was a farmer's market expedition with an impressive number of side quests. The first side quest was to quickly pop in to Passono Paints to buy another paintbrush for Even More Oar Painting. So convenient that they're right on the bike path!

Then, because I needed to pee, we stopped at Hudson Shores Park and also got to admire the beer garden that opened up there this year:


Hopefully we can go back at some point when they're open!

Our first stop in Troy proper was the bike shop. I wanted to drop off Frodo at that shop instead of one of the ones in Albany because the last time I visited the Troy bike shop it became clear to me that the people working there actually understood my style of bicycling. I don't yet really know the owner of the new shop that's closest to our house well enough to trust him, and I needed a shop that could understand me and my bike and post-crash needs. Here's the most obvious damage, for instance:



(Oh, also, as I'd hoped, they had EXACTLY the correct style of replacement rear rack that I wanted, in stock). When riding around on Friday, I also found that my front wheel had been knocked out of true (makes braking quickly and effectively more difficult and risky), and close inspection could reveal a number of other issues.

From the bike shop, which was wonderful in its own right*, we walked back over to the farmer's market. By happenstance, we went past a booth run by another bike person that I went on a camping trip with last summer, so we stopped to say hello. He sells handmade leather goods and somehow the sight of him stitching pieces of leather together caused a thought to occur to me: could he be the right person to help me with repairing/replacing my keychain-wallet thing? As it turned out, YES!! He happened to have purchased a bunch of the right replacement keychain parts. He'll have my repaired keychain-wallet ready by next Saturday!

That also made me think...I showed him my worn-out Queen Bee wallet, and he thinks he can also make a (leather) replacement for it. And you know, I already have more than enough hobbies, I don't need to add leatherwork to the list, I will gladly pay him money to make me a replacement! So next week when I go to pick up the keychain, I'll drop off my wallet and will eventually have a replacement that should last a really long time (recognizing the advantages of leather as a material).

So then, coffee. The line for coffee at Alias was exceptionally long, but my friends who own it were working diligently to fulfill all the coffee orders (I mean, ultimately it's good business to have that flow of traffic, and with a weather-dependent sales opportunity like a farmer's market, make the most of it whenever you can!). While we waited for our coffee, it occurred to S to run over to Burrito Burrito for some burritos (yum!), and then we enjoyed our yummy coffee sitting on a sidewalk curb in the sun.



(yes, on the Tiny Table, I am civilized). It was a fantastic vantage point for people- and dog-watching.



In addition to goods from the market, we admired a number of the local shop windows. This one is a bit hard to see because of the reflections, but how about a lamp made out of a deer spine and skull?



This one made me laugh:


Good stuff.

Not pictured, but we also stopped by the hardware store, where there were Clearance items for sale on shelves outside. Among the Clearance items was a stainless-steel dish rack. I think our current dish rack is over 20 years old at this point. It was coated steel, but the coating has been flaking off in little chunks, and the underlying metal is all rusty. The $5 price was right on the Clearance dish rack. Sold!

Then on the ride home, we got pulled in by the temptation of drinking a Speckled Hen on the patio at the Old English Pub.



So while it ultimately took us most of the day to complete this 25-mile Coffeeneuring expedition, I am Very Pleased with how it went and everything that got done.



*Encountered the person who did my bike fit for PBP there - she had been working at the Albany shop that had closed, and our paths hadn't crossed since then. SO GLAD to see her there!!

I'm still working on my presentation about bicycling for the climate change talk series here on campus, but in gearing up for it, I can't help thinking about how bicycling is just a small piece of a bigger transportation puzzle that has to be addressed at the scale of cities and urban planning.

That sent me looking for something. You might recall how, when I was in Tucson this past summer, I dragged my research students to a home composting presentation so we could obtain a compost bucket and drop off our food scraps instead of sending them to a landfill.

At some point in it all, I remembered learning that the scaling up of the composting initiative was part of a larger Climate Action and Adaptation Plan that Tucson had drawn up, after declaring a climate emergency in 2020. Here's the website that serves as a resource hub for the plan, which has more about the history of the plan and a copy of the entire plan:

https://climateaction.tucsonaz.gov/pages/caap

An interesting element in the Tucson plan is that things are structured around an aim to become carbon neutral.

What I don't know is, where are other cities right now, with regards to these sorts of plans? For Albany, I didn't find anything at the municipal level, but I did find some "Climate Resiliency" things happening at the county level here. However, the things happening at the county level seem more aimed at "preparing for the impacts of climate change" rather than the more ambitious "carbon neutral" approach being taken by Tucson.