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rebeccmeisterYesterday was an all-boathouse day for me.
Practice in the morning, where it was too cold to row, so we had a big line of ergs going:
After coffee at our usual haunt, I went back over to the boathouse at 10 am to deliver maple syrup to one of the runners who won his event for the IceBreaker, and to meet with the club's Coxbox Fairy, who is retiring from Coxbox Fairy duties. Lots of batteries and finicky bits, to add to the existing collection of batteries and finicky bits.
Based on the tides, we scheduled this year's Docks-In to get underway at 2 pm. Given the timing, it seemed simpler to hang out at the boathouse and work on boathouse projects instead of trying to go home and then come back again.
The boathouse projects are endless. I got all of the towels, watering cans, and spray bottles of Simple Green organized. I also dug out the signs advertising the club's summer camps, and returned some miscellaneous items to the storage shed or other storage locations. Pretty soon, other people started arriving, including the company delivering our new dock ramps. My teammate L, pictured below, spearheaded the grant application to fund the ramps and has shepherded the project. She was very thrilled and relieved to see the ramps finally arrive.
The company that built them for us also helped with some of the installation work. Normally, we carry the ramps by hand, so this spared us some of the usual heavy lifting.
We still did a lot of hand-carrying of the dock sections, though.
There were a couple of snafus this year, partly my fault. I'd managed to forget that in the fall, the people who took the sections apart disassembled them incorrectly. That made fitting things back together much more challenging, because it added a lot of extra lifting and placing.
We were also low on people with previous experience with how the sections fit together, and I hadn't made all that many extra copies of the assembly schematic, so there were multiple points with confusion where we had to take sections apart and move them around and reassemble them. Even worse, there were some hinge connector misalignment problems. I barely caught a major one in time to address it on shore.
Even with the hinges in the correct places, we still had some trouble attaching the dock sections together. I suspect part of this is because we've been replacing old, worn-out float sections with brand-new sections that are shaped just differently enough to affect the overall shape of the dock, throwing the hinges out of alignment.
The best that everyone could come up with to try and get things together was an interesting form of tug-of-war:
But by now, almost everything is together. We still have one smaller section to add on to the end of the dock, but we'll need to dig up and attach hinges to that section first, and we probably need to order a bunch more spare hinge bolts before that happens, too. We managed to burn through the stockpile of hinge bolts, nuts, and washers pretty fast this year.
-
Last night I woke up at around 1 am, unable to sleep, with a flare-up of this horrible jaw pain. Unfortunately, this indicates that bourbon isn't a cure-all, because I'd had some before bed, and clearly, it hadn't worked. But it could still be the case that allergies are a contributing factor, because I forgot to take loratadine on Saturday. So I spent the second half of the night trying to find a comfortable position to sleep, and am groggy today. Bleah.
Since I put the word out regarding my sister, I've also been fielding some of the inquiries and replies from people. It kind of seems to me like one of the bigger things I could do on her behalf at this time is take on some of the emotional burden associated with this kind of health situation. With situations such as this one, a person comes to appreciate people who DON'T ask, "let me know if there's anything I can do" but instead just determine for themselves what they can do that is helpful, and do those things, including just being patient and standing by. I mean, none of the rest of us is in a good position to help her figure out how to get things squared away with her work (one of her priorities), and if anything, having to communicate with even more people just makes that worse for her.
With my dad, my mom and dad eventually got fairly good about providing periodic email updates to friends and family members. Perhaps eventually I can do something similar to that for R. Admittedly, right now, I'm kind of underwater, myself. But it isn't as though there's much to say yet, anyway.
Practice in the morning, where it was too cold to row, so we had a big line of ergs going:
After coffee at our usual haunt, I went back over to the boathouse at 10 am to deliver maple syrup to one of the runners who won his event for the IceBreaker, and to meet with the club's Coxbox Fairy, who is retiring from Coxbox Fairy duties. Lots of batteries and finicky bits, to add to the existing collection of batteries and finicky bits.
Based on the tides, we scheduled this year's Docks-In to get underway at 2 pm. Given the timing, it seemed simpler to hang out at the boathouse and work on boathouse projects instead of trying to go home and then come back again.
The boathouse projects are endless. I got all of the towels, watering cans, and spray bottles of Simple Green organized. I also dug out the signs advertising the club's summer camps, and returned some miscellaneous items to the storage shed or other storage locations. Pretty soon, other people started arriving, including the company delivering our new dock ramps. My teammate L, pictured below, spearheaded the grant application to fund the ramps and has shepherded the project. She was very thrilled and relieved to see the ramps finally arrive.
The company that built them for us also helped with some of the installation work. Normally, we carry the ramps by hand, so this spared us some of the usual heavy lifting.
We still did a lot of hand-carrying of the dock sections, though.
There were a couple of snafus this year, partly my fault. I'd managed to forget that in the fall, the people who took the sections apart disassembled them incorrectly. That made fitting things back together much more challenging, because it added a lot of extra lifting and placing.
We were also low on people with previous experience with how the sections fit together, and I hadn't made all that many extra copies of the assembly schematic, so there were multiple points with confusion where we had to take sections apart and move them around and reassemble them. Even worse, there were some hinge connector misalignment problems. I barely caught a major one in time to address it on shore.
Even with the hinges in the correct places, we still had some trouble attaching the dock sections together. I suspect part of this is because we've been replacing old, worn-out float sections with brand-new sections that are shaped just differently enough to affect the overall shape of the dock, throwing the hinges out of alignment.
The best that everyone could come up with to try and get things together was an interesting form of tug-of-war:
But by now, almost everything is together. We still have one smaller section to add on to the end of the dock, but we'll need to dig up and attach hinges to that section first, and we probably need to order a bunch more spare hinge bolts before that happens, too. We managed to burn through the stockpile of hinge bolts, nuts, and washers pretty fast this year.
-
Last night I woke up at around 1 am, unable to sleep, with a flare-up of this horrible jaw pain. Unfortunately, this indicates that bourbon isn't a cure-all, because I'd had some before bed, and clearly, it hadn't worked. But it could still be the case that allergies are a contributing factor, because I forgot to take loratadine on Saturday. So I spent the second half of the night trying to find a comfortable position to sleep, and am groggy today. Bleah.
Since I put the word out regarding my sister, I've also been fielding some of the inquiries and replies from people. It kind of seems to me like one of the bigger things I could do on her behalf at this time is take on some of the emotional burden associated with this kind of health situation. With situations such as this one, a person comes to appreciate people who DON'T ask, "let me know if there's anything I can do" but instead just determine for themselves what they can do that is helpful, and do those things, including just being patient and standing by. I mean, none of the rest of us is in a good position to help her figure out how to get things squared away with her work (one of her priorities), and if anything, having to communicate with even more people just makes that worse for her.
With my dad, my mom and dad eventually got fairly good about providing periodic email updates to friends and family members. Perhaps eventually I can do something similar to that for R. Admittedly, right now, I'm kind of underwater, myself. But it isn't as though there's much to say yet, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-09 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-10 01:40 pm (UTC)