The consolation prize for not going bicycling was moving projects forward in small steps.
I glued on safety pins for the Shrinky Dink captain's pins, so those are now finished:
If all else fails, they are personally amusing to me. Probably more importantly, they are DONE so I can cross them off my projects list.
I finished the last couple of rows for the sleeves for the sweater I started in 2019 on the journey to bury my dad (with AKW's mom next to me, holding the yarn, commenting on how soft it was). So I was able to block it. This feels like real progress! George for scale:
Next up, I'll put the pieces together and work on the collar. It's getting closer to completion and will soon actually look like a sweater!
As mentioned in my previous post, I made it over to Up-Stitch to look for some supplies for a couple other projects. They didn't have any roving for my poor slippers, but now
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
threemeninaboat is my savior because she has some she'll send to me. Thankfully I don't really wear these slippers until it starts getting pretty cold out, so there's still plenty of time to work on the repair.
Eggplant and zucchini were on sale at the co-op on Friday night, so I cooked up the first batch of ratatouille for the summer, with oregano and rosemary from the back porch. The basil plants aren't quite big enough yet.
I also biked down to the boathouse (masked) to tend to a handful of loose ends. The boathouse gnomes have been up to their usual mischief, so there were lots of bits and bobs to tidy up and put away, including doing a proper job of folding up the World's Largest Tarp. Previously someone had attempted to fold it along the hotdog axis, then along the hamburger axis, which seemed cumbersome. So I instead folded it ~4 times along the hamburger axis, then rolled it up, figuring that if someone decided they wanted to use it in the future but maybe didn't need the entire thing unfolded, the next-best configuration would be to use it doubled up with a hamburger fold. (we are not trying to use it to cover our delicate, skinny rowing shells, which is just about the only time a hotdog fold would make any kind of sense).
Sometime soon I need to go through the collection of rowing club stuff here at home. Working with the rowing club stuff in general, one sees a large array of attitudes and methods towards stuff management. There's the "It's broken but it might be really expensive and we might be able to repair it someday" stockpile. There's the "Let's buy this thing quick to address this issue, disregarding how the thing will be stored/managed/maintained in the long run." This leads to a lot of awkward objects without homes. With our boats themselves, there's a general acknowledgement that we'd like to keep them relatively nice and clean and whatnot, although there's also often a limited understanding of how the rigging actually works, and what components are actually important to keep clean, so they experience their own wear-and-tear. The boathouse workbench is its own thing of beauty, with all of the actual high-quality bits and bobs carefully stockpiled away out of sight, but also with ready access to the basic tools that rowers often need to run and grab quickly. Seriously, one of the best boathouse workbenches I've ever seen, although not a Boatman's workbench per se. (a Boatman's workbench is carefully guarded by a resident Boatman; our Head Coach doubles as Boatman so he has a more lax system).
And there's so much more to it all, too. Today I picked up four walkie-talkies, to add them to the collection I have at home, because they only get used for the regatta and the conditions at the boathouse would destroy them prematurely if stored onsite. I also unboxed a second high-quality megaphone for coaches to use, and squirreled away a medium-quality megaphone before anyone has the chance to destroy it by dropping it in the water in the bottom of the safety launch or letting it get rained on. (Dead megaphone count for this year is already at 2, hence the push to switch over to the more expensive higher-quality ones that are actually designed for watery environments and might last more than one season).
A couple months back, someone purchased one of those over-the-door shoe organizers for me, so I could convert it into a better charging station for our boat lights. I got the organizer partly prepped, then brought it to the boathouse and left it there in a temporary spot when I figured out I'd need to do further work to finish the project. By now it is nowhere in sight, so I'll have to start over again with the second shoe organizer that was purchased at the same time, but which I kept at home as a backup. At least with organizer #2 I have a better idea of what I need to do to prep it at home. It needs a solid backing for attaching the USB charging stations. I won't bring it in until I can actually finish the project as soon as I get there.
It was kind of nice to just be in the boathouse by myself again, fighting entropy for a while. It has been a long while since I've had the space and time to hang out there on my own.
