What was yesterday even [status, work]

I think yesterday morning's rowing practice wore me out more than I'd realized, maybe largely because it was in combination with a number of other happenings.

When I'm worn out, it becomes a lot harder to think clearly, and to plan.

So at work I mostly just focused on some simple tasks, like changing out fish tank water, attempting to organize the bike pile, and chatting with colleagues about strategies to try and get students to actually read things. (I wanted to discuss this with colleagues for the sake of coordinating approaches across classes, so habits developed/enforced in years 1 and 2 can be brought up again for students taking my upper-level Animal Phys class).

Then I went home early and managed to get a bit more done on household randomness (e.g. baking a fresh batch of muesli, playing with the cats).

In reality I still have a lot of organizing work to tackle right now. But right now is also a precious window of time for Thinking projects; I have a week and a half before I'll go on a bike touring trip, and as soon as I get back I have a month of quality time with my research student team, who are going to need a lot of attention this summer.

And just typing these sentences out caused me to dig through some files to send an email I was getting ready to send back in January, before the semester ate me. So, yay. Progress.

But as usual, with writing and thinking work, there will be spurts of blogging, and then periods where all my writing juice will be going elsewhere, heh.

Onward.

Sometimes we need a good throwback post [projects]

Getting ready for my research students, I am thinking that we'll need to go through the Steps for Doing Anything. I tried to look for a copy of the Steps on my computer, but came up empty-handed. However, when I searched Ye Olde Blog, lo and behold, I found a post where my father typed out the steps for me! He did teach them to me, after all. Thanks, Dad.

And it's a gem of a post, because it's one where I posted photos of the process of building the first Worm Bin Bench. Here it is, in its entirety, from the LJ days:

https://rebeccmeister.livejournal.com/508937.html

A series of random photos [gardening, rowing, bicycling, cats]

I guess that today I'm making up for yesterday!

Some recent photos.

A boathouse treasure:


We have found two of these spoons in the boathouse, but we only found a single Godzilla figure whose hand has been modified to hold the spoons. I have no idea what the story is there. Fun relics.

Tiny leaves appearing on the outdoors fig:


Grapevine planted to the left of the front porch:


Grapevine planted to the right of the front porch:


Note, I am not going to be doing much of anything to nurture these along. I gave each of them a generous helping of compost, but the overall goal here is low-maintenance gardening, and something other than/better than the wild grapes and other aggressive vines that want to grow here.

The two tomato starts put into the half-wine barrel planter:


This year won't be entirely jungle gardening, but I'm still unlikely to do a lot of high-maintenance gardening.

With Frodo in the shop, the other day I tried out hauling Big Mama with Old Faithful. Let's just say it was for the best that this load wasn't any heavier, although I'll note those black things are indeed sandbags full of sand. I was able to stop when I needed to. Barely.


Beautiful sunrise from Tuesday morning:


Trying to reach the dock when the water level is too high:


A good catch on the river:


And to conclude, a big kitty yawn.

Waypoint Wonderment [bicycling]

So, I'm really excited to be getting ready to bike tour the Erie Canal very soon!

I did figure out how to make gpx segments for each day of riding, using RideWithGPS. I mean, it's the Erie Canal trail, so it will be very well marked, but there are always occasions where it's helpful to be able to pinpoint where we are at any particular point in time, relative to where we came from and where we intend to head. The whole reason to have a GPS, eh eh?

But there are also a handful of points of interest that I would like to have marked on my GPS (Garmin Extrex, FWIW). Things like campgrounds, grocery stores, geological features, et cetera. The points of interest aren't located immediately along the gpx segments, so it looks like I can't just add them to the gpx tracks.

Any suggestions on the least painful way to get those POI's into my GPS?