Weekend Edition [stuff, food, rowing]

I slept well enough Friday night to go to rowing practice on Saturday. Immediately thereafter, I headed home to load up the bike trailer with my rowing machine, EZ-up tent, and some chairs, for rowing recruitment activities at Albany's Tulip Fest.

Once again, our tent was a hit!



It turns out that if you put out a whiteboard with the question: "How far can you row in a minute?" people will read the sign and then give the rowing machine a try.

The rowing club has a cheer, "Our Oars Are Orange!" During setup, I had a realization: Our Beverages Are Orange:



Saturday afternoon was fairly low-key, with some grocery shopping in the mix and an early bedtime. I also discovered that Martha has an affinity for this new laptop's fabric-wrapped USB cable:



Sunday was the college's graduation ceremony, but I also wanted to get up early to make headway on household chores, so I did. Along with laundry, litterboxes, and vacuuming, I made some shakshuka and cherry-almond cake:



I think this cherry-almond cake might be the closest thing yet to that rhubarb gateau from Sizun in 2015.

I got some good reading in during the graduation ceremony, so soon enough it was time to go home and head back over to Tulip Fest for some volunteer shifts. The weather was exceptional this past weekend, so there were still throngs of people, including people who still wanted to jump on the erg machine at 6 pm when it was time to pack up and go home. Overall, Sunday was a lot of time on my feet.

This morning I wound up coxing our current learn-to-row 8 in gloriously beautiful weather:







And now, this week is my week to buckle up and work on manuscript-writing. Wish me luck. Distractions and excuses abound.

Dongled again! [computers]

New computer notes:

The speakers on this laptop are pretty darned good! Same goes for the webcam.

I'm glad to be back to the Fruit Company's touchpad and windowing system. And relieved that this model does indeed have a real function key row with a real escape key.

The most inconvenient element I hadn't realized was that this machine is part of the switcheroo over to USB-C. Most of my pluggable devices are USB-A. Whoops!

There are, of course, inexpensive adapters that can be bought for money. And in this case I can mostly forgive the Fruit Company for making this change, because I understand that USB-C has its advantages. So long as they Don't Do It Again. I believe the EU is attempting to help with this point.

They did something similar with this third-generation MagSafe power supply cable. That one is slightly more inconvenient, because there has been a wiring change between MagSafe 2 and MagSafe 3, so where I was able to get an adapter for an old MagSafe 1 adapter to use it with a MagSafe 2 machine, I now can't really use my old pair of adapters to spare myself the hassle of hauling a working adapter back and forth with this computer.

Unless I pony up more money for more stuff.