Even in Kyoto

That one chapter from the book, Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich.



It was cold this morning, but it is sunny and warm this afternoon. We had great weather for the class bicycling expedition. The air is so full of allergens, that even though I took an allergy pill, I feel like I'm high.

After the driving adventures of the prior weekend, it was kind of a relief to not have any involved travel plans for this weekend. Instead, it was a weekend of errands and housekeepery and cooking and projects around the house.

Destination one, Passano Paints. They had mixed up a gallon of Signal Orange marine paint for me, which I'll use soon to start working on repainting the rowing club's oars. I have been glad to learn about this paint shop, because they're a local business, located right along the bike path between Albany and Troy. They are also a dropoff center for leftover paints and related substances, and they have many of the small necessities that can make a big difference when painting and staining things. So I also bought a can of stain to use for the chair refinishing project, some painting pyramids, and a paintbrush spinner.

Then I biked home, ate some lunch, and we fired up the gasoline-powered vehicle for our next errands. Next was Tractor Supply, because from the internet I learned that chick feed can work as a reasonable food source for dubia cockroaches*, and it appears that Tractor Supply is the main place in our region for going out to buy chick feed in person instead of online. Of course, there aren't any Tractor Supply locations within Albany itself, and the closest one is in one of the strip malls in the suburbs to the south of us, which is not at all pleasant to ride a bike to. So we drove, although I observed when we arrived that there's at least one bus line that runs out there, in case I want to use that option in the future.

In any case, Tractor Supply had chick feed, although they did not have any ice choppers available for sale whatsoever, another item on the shopping list. And the place where there might have been baby chicks had exactly zero baby chicks, only baby ducks for sale. Also, they were playing the sort of country music that reminded me of shopping in every store anywhere I went in Texas. Also also, we did not buy any of the pre-built coops they had for sale, to turn into a luxury catio for our cats.

So from there, we hied us over to the nearest Ace Hardware by way of some freeways that did some really strange looping things (I-87 and I-90 interchanges, I guess?). The Ace Hardware didn't have any ice choppers, either, but had a handful of other items on our shopping lists. Oh - there was also a stop at the bike shop near the Ace Hardware, to pick up a wheel they built for S and some spare tubes for me, because on Friday afternoon while meeting with my research student my front tire started making some hissing noises and went flat due to failure of the rubber at the base of the valve stem.

Since we had only partial success at Ace, we next went to the Despot. One of the items on my list was "rocks for the work aquariums," but none of the things available at the Despot fit my bill. So we also visited the local pet shop, which DID have rocks for sale. It was a little strange to be paying money for rocks, but that's what I get for not gathering rocks somewhere during my sabbatical (never mind questions about the legality and/or ethics of rock-gathering, which I know nothing about).

Then, after a trip through the car wash, I dropped S off at the dentist and went home to engage in a cleaning** and cooking rampage. I made a tasty paneer curry out of 660 Curries, got started with a batch of red lentil curry burgers, and also prepped some apples and onions for ketchup-making on Sunday.

Actually, that reminds me that I took a photo of the bulk spice section at our grocery co-op on Friday night:


All I can say is, our local grocery co-ops is one of the best things about living here.

Today pretty much continued apace. Part of the cleaning and cooking rampage was preparation for a ketchup-making session with a friend, so this afternoon we made and canned 3 different varieties of ketchup. The recipe for one variety was for a "Green tomato ketchup," but the recipe notes say you can substitute ripe red tomatoes if you wish, just omit the green food coloring, so that's what we did. For varieties 2 and 3, we used the same base recipe but used 2 different kinds of canned tomatoes, and added roasted jalapeños to one of the two batches.

Then we taste-tested our work, with some help from our significant others, e.g.:


When asked which one was his favorite, S said, "Yes."

My favorite was the batch with the jalapeños, but all 3 batches came out well, far better than that one time I boiled the ketchup in the cast-iron Dutch oven and it came out very metallic-tasting.

Anyway, based on how the ketchups came out, I think I now have a good game plan for churning out batches of ketchup. I'll try and share the ketchup recipe here sometime soon.

At some point today I also used some jewelery-making wire to make a couple of small umbrella repairs:



I don't know how well the wire will hold up as a repair method, but I didn't have much to lose, and if it actually works for any period of time I'll be very pleased because I am fond of this umbrella.

And now we're back on the precipice of another work week.



*Last week I got some young dubia cockroaches to rear as food for the campus reptiles. With a fairly good but basic setup, they should be relatively low-maintenance.

**For posterity, the cleaning rampage included full moppings of the kitchen and bathroom floors. Also, the vacuuming picked up a LOT of stuff because it had been 3 weeks since the last time I'd vacuumed. Also also WOW the kitchen sink really needed that scrub-down.

-Rowing practice. Three and a half weeks off the erg did not make me better at erging, but I was at least able to hold a consistent pace where that was the goal.

-Coffee after rowing practice, a sacred ritual.

-Boat repair projects; in December teammates and I did pretty thorough inspections of four of the club's older boats, to identify repair and parts needs. While I was out of town, parts came in, so we were able to spend some time replacing worn out wheels, shoes, and a pair of tracks. The track replacement made me better understand why a lot of people tend to have a strong dislike of one particular boat brand. One of our boats basically has a design flaw that makes it extremely difficult to tighten the wingnuts that hold the seat tracks in place. They're already tricky to begin with because they have to be accessed through a narrow hatch. I can't say we did a perfect job with the replacement, but it was all a good start, at least.

-Bike cleaning and repair projects: I've been riding my Brompton, Princess TinyBike, while working on getting things sorted out with Frodo's rear wheel. Princess TinyBike needed at least a small bath, so she got one today, plus some fresh chain lube. I also had success with using the old axle and cone from Frodo's previous rear wheel where the rim failed, to get the newer wheel back in action.

-Walked over to UpStitch to see if they had any Size 1 double-pointed needles. I found a pair that looked like it might be the right size, and was then able to use a knitting needle size gauge that was also for sale to verify that they were Size 1. They probably aren't as great as the Size 1 needles I could have bought for myself new, but on the other hand, they only cost $1. If I start using them and discover I don't like them, I can upgrade later and return them back to UpStitch.

-Groceries. The grocery store was bonkers, more full of people clogging up the bulk section and spices than I've ever seen before. Clearly, Saturday afternoon is the wrong time of the day and week to be there. At the Indian grocery store beforehand, it took me 5000 years to figure out how to lock up to the poorly-designed bike rack. The bike rack is shaped like a bicycle, but that means all of the locations to actually lock up a bicycle to it are awkward and in the wrong place.

-Scrabble with annikusrex and S. I bingoed, and so did AKW, but I managed to edge her out for the win. (*tiny victory dance*). While Scrabbling, I worked on stabbing my slippers. More on that project soon.

-Cooked dinner: pasta with artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes, feta cheese, spinach, and veggie sausages.

-Litterboxes.

-Vacuuming. I made it about 3 minutes into vacuuming, when the vacuum cleaner died and went home to Jesus. Ya'll, this is a housekeeping disaster for me. This whole week I've been itching to vacuum since I got back into town, because it's really impossible to keep the dust and hair and crumbs in check without a regular vacuuming in this house, and the buildup doesn't bother S enough to get him to deal with it when I'm out of town.

In the Lincoln apartment, I could get away with sweeping and just the occasional vacuum, but not here. There are just too many nooks and crannies and cats and humans. I usually vacuum the cat perches along with the floors, once a week.

Ugh. So I did some stopgap sweeping, but I am very unhappy right now. I was trying to tackle all of the loud house chores today, because S is getting back into town late tonight / early tomorrow morning and I wanted to be able to just focus on quieter projects to try and give him a chance to sleep in.

-The list of things I want to get done tomorrow is too long.

Weekend activities:

-Baking (+ some canning, not pictured):



Those are double-almond biscotti:



-Scrabble, where I finally recouped my recent losses.

-Rowing practice on Saturday, naturally. My Holiday Challenge meters are coming along fine, but I am not going to come even close to last year's total.

-Vacuuming, for which we were badly overdue.

-Other cleaning - stove, toilets. Also overdue on both fronts. Things got thrown off by Thanksgiving and term paper grading.

-Cleaning off the ficus's leaves and inspecting it for any remaining mealybugs (looking promising so far?).

-Other miscellaneous tidying, ironing, washing, and organizing.

-Designing and printing a holiday card to send out, one of those projects that always seems to take longer than one wants.

A lot got done, but many things did not. I made some progress on taking the cardigan back apart. Getting that right is towards the top of the list of things I'd like to tackle.

But this week I need to really buckle down on grading. There's always too much to do.

So, about that regatta on Saturday. On Thursday night we got word that the regatta had been canceled: rainfall south of here sent the relevant stretch of the Housatonic River into flood stage, and the organizers concluded it would be unsafe for anyone to be out on the river under those conditions.

These weather patterns in this part of the country sure have been interesting. We haven't gotten any head-on pummelings recently right in the Capital District, but it's clear that it will only be a matter of time before Mother Nature delivers a direct hit.

There have been some major silver linings to the cancellation. First off, the rowing club took delivery of a brand-new quad on Friday night, so for Saturday morning practice we managed to convince Coach Y to let us rig it and take it out for a spin.







I had the honor and responsibility of bow seat in the quad.



To my great relief, nothing major happened, aside from a component on my rigger that worked loose while we were rowing.

After rowing and the requisite coffee with teammates, S and I rode over to the farmer's market in Troy, for our first official Coffeeneuring expedition of the 2023 season.







S augmented his mocha with a tasty double IPA, enjoyed after we finished trotting around the farmer's market. Next we stopped in at the hardware store for a couple of items, at which point I commented that the darkening skies suggested that the forecasted "Heavy Rain" was about to arrive within the next 15-20 minutes.

My prognosis was accurate: the skies started to open up just as we finished getting the bikes loaded up for the return ride home from Troy. By the time we got home, we were both thoroughly drenched. Thankfully, almost all of the goods from the market made it home unscathed; the 6 tomatoes that suffered a pummeling were swiftly eaten to put them out of their misery.

In the afternoon, not wishing to repeat the whole rigamarole of gearing up for an errandonee in heavy rain, I walked over to the local conventional grocery store instead. Walking home with a backpack and grocery bags slung over both shoulders reminded me of the 3-mile grocery circuit I used to do way back in college.

Dinner was mostly leftovers, but with a final course of homegrown figs, stuffed with goat cheese, roasted, and then drizzled with honey.





I did not get any photos of them post-roasting. They, um, were too delicious and needed to be eaten immediately.

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Today has involved cooking projects and housekeepery. Mostly the cooking has been pancakes for the week, plus a pot of beans, plus preparing pizza dough to make pumpkin pizza with goat cheese, walnuts, apples, and crispy sage.

For the sake of housekeepery, I would like to report that, among other projects, I mopped the kitchen floor today. I tried to make it a quick mopping. It desperately needed to be mopped.

I also managed to get my act together enough to tackle a small pile of mending, and to go through about 6 months' worth of accumulated mail and receipts and get everything filed away.

Clearing the backlog makes me feel a tremendous sense of relief. Also a sense of, "What more important thing am I forgetting to do?"

Whatever it is, I am sure it will make itself known tomorrow morning, or in the middle of the night while I am trying to sleep.

Ages ago, the Root Simple blog had a series of posts on how the Japanese approach cleaning (see, e.g., this post). I found it interesting that schoolkids are taught to clean the school as a part of their education. It reminds me, to some extent, of how Dutch children are taught how to ride bikes as part of their curriculum. Both types of lessons translate into cultural differences when those children reach adulthood.

Here in the US, cleaning appears to be one of the places where I've noticed higher ed institutions attempting to cut costs. This is often most noticeable in stairwells, especially in buildings where the majority of people use the elevator.

Because I often wind up spending a lot of time crawling around on floors on my hands and knees at work, chasing after crickets, I'm particularly fussy about floor cleanliness. But I don't want to create a big stink about it all. Which is why I've swept and mopped my office this morning, and momentarily I will wax the floor as well.

One of these days I should do the Animal Phys lab, too. That floor often winds up with shards of broken glass when students from other lab sections drop their coverslips on the floor.

Once that's all done I'll be completely out of excuses for not working on the things I should really be working on.

Preamble: Saturday was the Derby Sweeps and Sculls Regatta in Connecticut - wonderful to be there for my first time since Covid. Since it's now rather late on Sunday, perhaps I'll blog more about the regatta tomorrow?

This morning, I finally managed the approximately annual deep clean of the refrigerator. It always takes a while to work through a backlog of awkward leftovers, to get things emptied out to the point where it isn't too annoying to shuffle the remainder around while taking out shelves and drawers. Every time I clean this fridge, I am grateful that it isn't as huge a hassle as trying to clean the Villa Maria fridge was. Also did the usual litterboxes, vacuuming, and laundry. Cats sure like to sprinkle kitty litter everywhere across the floors. I hate foot crumbs. Things will be okay for at least 24 hours now.

From the Annals of Bike Maintenance, today was a tube-patching day. I got 4 tubes more-or-less properly patched up. I declared three tubes to be beyond hope and killed them (cut them through so they are unambiguously dead). Three other tubes might actually be okay, or might have slow leaks. I pumped them full of air and left them on the front porch for now.

The tube-patching project took longer than hoped in part because scrottie's black Serfas pump has a part that is wearing out. It isn't the pump head, it's the part inside the main barrel of the pump that has some sort of one-way air valve to it. As a result of it failing, sometimes when one pushes down on the pump handle, there's a feeling of resistance and air goes into the tube. Other times, there's no feeling of resistance, and no air goes into the tube. It's sporadic, and made it impossible to do test inflations of tubes that needed patches. I'd brought my blue Serfas pump in to work, for the bicycling class, so last Thursday I brought it home again. Now that there's at least one reliable bike pump at home, I can try and take S's black pump apart to determine if it can be repaired.

One of the patched tubes went on Frodo's back wheel so I can go back to commuting on Frodo this week instead of Froinlavin. And now I can do some more maintenance work on Froinlavin in preparation for France in August.

The strawberry bonanza is still going! I complained on social media about how I have all these strawberries, but our rhubarb plants aren't making enough juicy stalks, so a nearby friend offered me some of their rhubarb because they have a household where one person loves it but the other thinks it's as pointless as celery and they haven't had time to cook with it recently. It feels a little silly to be receiving rhubarb from other people, but hopefully in another year the five plants we have going here will actually produce a meaningful amount of rhubarb.

So I have made a strawberry-rhubarb cake. If it's any good I'll say more later.

Stuff and Things 1. I was today years old when I learned there's a place in the US that will recycle old race medals! FINALLY an answer to a longstanding dilemma. I'm offloading almost the entire box of "Rowing medals - less meaningful," keeping just an example from various different regattas attended over the years. And someday I imagine I'll send along even those examples.

Stuff and Things 2. I also managed to clear out one full box from my storage closet, labeled "Spare Office Supplies." The items that remained in that box are either getting donated or moved to other places where they'll actually get used.

I am still generally accumulating things faster than I'm getting rid of things, but this is a start, at least. There's a miscellaneous heap of things I'd like to acquire, but I keep hesitating because of all the already-acquired stuff all around me.

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Since I didn't go on a 300k bike ride on Saturday, I finally had time and energy today for some overdue bike maintenance. At long, long last I installed the Eazy Wheels on Princess Tinybike. I don't entirely understand why Brompton rear racks don't come stock with the Eazy Wheels, but what do I know? The actual wheel swap was straightforward, and that's one more item checked off the to-do list.

I also replaced Frodo's entire drivetrain, excepting the smallest chainring, because I hardly ever used it so it wasn't worn out. This was actually the first time I've ever swapped out chainrings. It wound up being slightly more of a production than I'd hoped, but not too huge a production, all things considered. While I was at it, I gave Frodo a good bath. The bike stand is still in the basement, so I wound up working next to the sump pump drain, which had a small stream of water trickling through it due to the day's stormy weather.



At various points, both cats came by to inspect my handiwork. Martha seemed a bit skeptical and perturbed by my interference with her sump pump viewing.



So very shiny and new:


So very, very grimy and old, and worn out:



It will be really nice to be able to shift into the big ring again. And pedal without worrying about the chain skipping on worn teeth on the rear cassette.

There's nothing like a shiny, clean bike to encourage the weather gods to stir up more rainstorms, though. Sorry, everybody.

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Meal Prep was fairly basic. Pancakes, some cookies, and I finally turned the precursors from last weekend into aloo gobi, along with cooking up some chana dal curry. We won't start for the week.

I've gotten all but one lab report graded as well, finally. This week is the last week of classes, finally. The semester WILL come to an end.

Growing up, my parents established a household division of labor whereby my mother did the cooking and my father washed dishes. However, that obscures the fact that my father actually did do at least some of the cooking. He was in charge of Saturday morning pancakes and Sunday morning breakfast (hash browns and scrambled eggs).

As such, in the years spent with him in the kitchen in various capacities, I had many opportunities to observe his kitchen behaviors. Whenever he did the cooking, he was very strategic about his use of kitchen implements, because he approached cooking as an optimization problem whereby one should attempt to dirty the fewest dishes possible while preparing a meal. He had a pretty dialed-in choreography for making pancakes, for instance, something that I've basically adopted for my own circumstances.

I'm not sure if he explicitly taught me the "clean as you go" cooking method, or if that was something I picked up further down the road, but in my own cooking, hilariously, sometimes I manage to go overboard and start cleaning up dishes before I've actually finished using them.

My mother seems to have adopted a slightly different cooking strategy. I believe it's a strategy where the goal is to have food assembled swiftly, probably originally to appease small, whiny children who then proceed to turn their noses up and pick at things anyway. This tends to result in 6 extra dirty pans, 12 extra spatulas, 22 forks and 3 butter knives strewn about when dinner arrives on the dinner table.

My father was always incredibly patient about this stylistic difference. If anything, he would give a sigh before rolling up his sleeves to get to work, and the dishes would get done. I would note that he definitely DID teach me about the correct order of operations for handwashing dishes. At some point in the Scrabble Society era, the topic of dish handwashing methods came up, and caused me to eventually look up a WikiHow that very much affirmed my father's approach. Hot water in the soapy dishpan first, glasses and utensils first, rinse pan of clean hot water, wash the greasy cookware last. That's the gist of it.

I could never seem to master his packing algorithm for the dishwasher. I don't think any of us did. If we saw fit to attempt to load the dishwasher, that would be all well and good, and then just before starting it he would go back through every single dish to reposition items just so. The dishwasher would always be run only when it was exactly Full.

As a result of this, I absolutely hate dishwashers and refuse to use them for anything more than an extended drying rack.

Actually, that's not completely true. I generally avoid using them because if it's just me in a household, I never fill the dishwasher in time to run it before the dishes in it begin to fossilize.

At some point over the course of household negotiations in New York, I came to realize something. For me, the vastly preferable system for the kitchen division of labor is to divide things up according to cooking AND cleaning days, rather than creating a division between cooking and cleaning.

This is because to me, it is important that whoever does the cooking comes to appreciate the direct dishwashing consequences of their cooking style. Then he or she can make decisions about what they want to do about it all.

On weeknights, S and I do try to alternate cleanup; for those occasions we are typically eating leftovers rather than doing a lot of cooking. I still tend to do a bit more strategic dirty dish queuing, but that's a difference that must be lived with.

In light of this, it's now rather jarring whenever I wind up encountering people who assume the split cooking/cleanup approach is the correct social default. Especially when a big production is made of the whole "cooking a special meal just for you" without attention to the time and effort involved in cleanup afterword.

On the other hand, it remains true that it is way more entertaining to wash someone else's dishes than it is to wash one's own dishes. For the past several weeks, I've been bribing myself to be diligent about washing the dishes by making myself wait to eat dessert until after the dishes are done. The way my daily energy is, my default would be to wash dishes in the morning, but as Office Mouse makes clear, kitchen fastidiousness in the evening is requisite during Mouse Season.

I never would have thought that a lightbulb would be something that could fill me with rage, but somehow, these have managed to do so:



Two of the ceiling fan/light fixtures in this house take this bulb size, and most likely the landlord purchased these as an inexpensive bulb option.

They give off a pale, gray light that makes any reasonably cheerful room look dismal and grim.

We got the set in S's office replaced over a year ago, but I hadn't really noticed that they were what was going on in our bedroom until I started spending more waking hours in there recently.

We had one more of the "warm light" chandelier bulbs kicking around, so there's at least a partial remedy in place now.

...so I guess this is now my motivation to go to the farmer's market in Troy on Saturday and also swing by the hardware store while I'm there.