Even in Kyoto

At some point after I met scrottie, he showed me his potato ricer and the special rolling pin he has for making lefse, that Norwegian specialty food. I'd heard a bit about lefse from another friend of mine with Norwegian heritage, but really didn't know much more than all that. Fast forward, and just about every year there's a period of eager anticipation for the arrival of a special package from his mother and sister, containing lefse.

Describing lefse is tricky.

( blah blah blah lefse lefse lefse )

The next item on the mending list after bike jerseys was bicycling gloves. I have a pair of relatively thin Smartwool gloves where the palms and fingertips have been wearing out, but I really like the gloves so I thought maybe I could reinforce the palms with some material similar to what's used on actual cycling gloves.

I spent a little while trying to figure out just what that material was, for the Specialized "Grail" gloves I've come to favor, but everything I found suggested that it's a synthetic material that isn't available to retail markets. Eventually I wound up talking with a rowing friend whose daughter is working on a degree in fashion, and she gave me a small piece of scrap goatskin leather of the appropriate sort to work with.

Of course, I don't have much experience with sewing leather. The full extent is the one time I sewed a piece of leather onto the bottom of a pannier, to reinforce it. So it seemed like a good idea to approach the project in stages.

I started out with the realization that I have a second pair of cycling gloves in need of repair. I had enough scrap leather that I could use some for the purpose, and learn a few things about stitching this particular thickness and type of leather (I think it's maybe?? goatskin??).

Here you can see George "helping" me with the first bit of stitching:



The end result certainly has a handmade look, but is far better than the worn-out material it's now covering!



One thing I discovered during the first repair was that it was tricky to hold the material together, just so, while stitching. After doing some poking around on the internet, I came to understand that it can be helpful to at least tack-glue pieces together first, before sewing down the edges. But I didn't have any contact cement or rubber cement on hand for the purpose. So for glove #2, I just grabbed some double-sided sticky tape, and it did indeed help the process go more smoothly.



But I noticed the double-sided sticky tape was a bit stiff, so my quest for rubber cement continued. Because of various constraints, I checked a couple of grocery stores and a CVS only for rubber cement, but came up empty-handed. I'd asked S if he happened to have any, and he didn't, so he instead suggested a small bottle of a type of Gorilla Glue he'd gotten not too long ago and had used to glue some leather.

Anyway, here I am last night, getting ready to glue:


And here I am this morning, learning that unfortunately this glue is way too stiff and won't work because it has ruined the inside texture of the gloves (I'd put in nitrile gloves in case of any seepage, and some of the nitrile is now glued on, too).


So now these gloves are ruined, argh.

The real trouble is that I don't think my ideal glove of this sort actually exists as a thing that a person can buy. What I want is a wool liner glove with a reinforced palm, so I can wear them on their own OR wear them inside my ski mittens when it's 4 degrees out. Smartwool was on the right track with the reinforcement of the palms of these gloves, they just aren't as durable as they should be.

And now I've used up all of the goatskin leather scrap and don't know whether/how I can get more (it was just BEAUTIFUL material, setting aside the point that it is leather).

And I'm pretty sure that this Gorilla Glue is permanent can't be removed with a solvent.

So anyway, hopefully your morning has gone better than this.

My Buy Nothing Day activity: working on mending my wool Nebraska Sandhills Randonneurs jersey, which I now notice has moth damage in addition to the wear and tear just repaired. Sigh. Most likely I need to do a very thorough round of wool management.

My wool cycling jerseys all seem to wear out in the armpits first, so this repair will be an experiment to learn if extra reinforcement will work and be sufficiently comfortable. I have only completed 1 of 2 armpits so far on this jersey, and I have a second jersey in the queue now.



While it will not have the same appearance as it did originally, there is no mistaking the point that time has been invested in maintaining this jersey instead of throwing it “away” (wherever that is). I have seen a number of similar sorts of repairs on wool garments in museums.

But along with that I also remember reading about how many of the old, tired wool mittens of yore would eventually just get shredded up into wool felt. There will come a point where that will be the most appropriate outcome, but I am hoping for at least a few more years before then.

Today I was originally going to play hooky and go rowing again in Petrichor with some teammates. However, the teammates both bailed, and I ultimately decided I should probably try to be a more responsible adult and focus on projects at home, especially given that the weather for the day turned colder, with some potential for snow flurries.

Today's bonus housekeeping project was vacuuming off all of the fan blades, before reversing their direction (so they help redistribute the warm air from the radiators). That meant many fewer dust bunnies flying all over the place compared to when I reversed the fans last spring. Oh, and also deep cleaning a second refrigerator shelf.

I don't have much photographic evidence of me then balancing my checkbook, so you'll just have to believe me on that front. That project also got temporarily interrupted by the project of figuring out how to reset the printer toner cartridge status, so I could print off a couple extra checkbook ledger sheets. I also eventually tracked down what I did the last time I actually bought printer toner cartridges, and ordered more, so that when the current ones really do legitimately run out I will have spares on hand.

Exciting business, I tell you.

By then, it was somehow midafternoon. What next?

Well, a somewhat urgent project has arisen. On Thursday I happened to notice that the backpack pannier I use every single day for bike commuting is on the verge of a catastrophic failure: one of the two straps that secure the pannier to my rear rack is about to wear all the way through.

That was enough to motivate me to track down all of my broken panniers and all of my broken pannier supplies. Instead of starting on the backpack right away, I decided it was time to work on further disassembling one of the ancient Overland panniers. The Overland pannier that isn't currently in service, is out of service because its plastic stiffener is cracked, compromising the overall structure of the bag. It seemed like a good idea to try and extract out the entire cracked plastic piece, but it is riveted in place. So, time to see what it's like to drill out rivets.

( cut for photos and blah blah blah )

We have several groups of plants in the house that have plant lights on timers. One of the timers is currently set to turn the light on promptly at 4:30 am, which is when I have been waking up to go to rowing practice. I have to say, that light turning on works as well as any auditory alarm clock!

To rewind slightly: this past Wednesday, I overdid it on Romanian deadlifts during a strength training session; parts of my lower back on the right side have been talking to me about that decision ever since. I didn't trigger a full back spasm, but things are tender enough that I ultimately decided against trying to go to rowing practice this morning.

Instead, I got ready for an otherwise busy morning. The main project involved going back to the boathouse to take all of the hardware off of all of the dock sections that have failed and are cracked and had filled with water. There are always a hundred side projects at the boathouse, though, including gathering up even more oars to continue the oar repainting project.

I also wanted to get in a trip to the bank to deposit some reimbursement checks, to the Asian grocery to buy more squid tentacles for the horseshoe crabs (at work), to the hardware store for miscellaneous hardware items, the grocery co-op for groceries, and to the pet store to stock up on cans of cat food.

Given all that, I drove.

Teammates were super helpful with the dock project. In this photo, my teammate L is sitting on top of the furthest back tall stack of dock pieces, unbolting one piece from another:



Some of the failed pieces had hinges attached to them. When the dock pieces were originally acquired, the hinges were attached with massive carriage bolts. That was fine, until the time came to remove the bolts. These are not proper carriage bolts that seat into the material they are securing, they rest flat on top of a washer on top of the material they are securing. Since these things live in a very wet environment, the nuts tend to seize, and there's nothing on the top of the carriage bolt to hold onto to loosen things up.

It was a good thing I brought along my angle grinder again!



We cut off the sides of the top of the bolt head, which then gave us enough surface to hold onto and unbolt the hinge piece.

When we put this hinge back onto a replacement dock section, we'll use hex-headed bolts. We'll put the bolt in through the bottom, with a nut or two on the top. We have to be careful to make sure that the new configuration isn't a trip hazard, but we've done this on a number of other hinges already. Aside from that it is helpful to put the bolt in from the bottom instead of the top because then it's extremely obvious if the nut has loosened to the point of falling off. It isn't cheap to replace the nuts and bolts, but it's better for the dock overall if we catch things when the nuts work loose (and we may use nylock nuts, but also you'd be amazed by how much jostling this dock experiences because power boaters around here are idiots about dock etiquette).

We also got a bunch of miscellaneous reorganizing done. The most satisfying part of that was that we managed to completely empty one of the three storage containers we've been using during boathouse renovations. Here are our sweep oars in their new home in a different shipping container from before:



Emptying out one of the containers means we can return it and stop paying monthly rental fees. Hooray!

Even better, my teammate K helped me to get a fresh wheel onto one of the tow dollies where the wheel bearings had failed.



Those bearing cartridges were press-fitted in there so tightly! So now there's just one remaining tow dolly in need of repair.

I ultimately made it to all my destinations except the pet food store. A headache started brewing during boathouse tasks and I just didn't feel up for that part of the trip. Folks, it is just not pleasant to run errands by car, even if it is faster. I bought a couple cans of food at the grocery co-op, which will tide us over another week or two.

Tomorrow will be an at-home day, which will be nice because it's supposed to be pretty rainy.

Up until now, we have been leaving a basement window wide open so the cats and come and go from the catio whenever they please. However, it's starting to get cold, so it's unwise to have a big open hole for heat exchange with the outdoors anymore.

Scrounging around over the weekend, I discovered that a piece of wood I'd salvaged from the boathouse fit *almost* perfectly into the window. I just had to saw 1 inch off of one side, and then make use of some of the existing holes in the wood to saw out a cat-sized door.

What to use for the cat flap material itself?

I have some dead bike tubes sitting around, so I figured I'd just start with some bike tubes and see how they worked (or didn't).

The result is not going to win any beauty contests:



But it will work well enough for now! Here's Martha checking it out from outside on the catio:



S has some insulation panels in the basement, and so I think my next move will be to add a couple layers of insulation to this piece of wood. The latch mechanism I put in to hold it in place isn't quite as secure as I would have liked, so the insulation should help snug up the fit, too.

By shaking a bag of the cats' favorite treats, I did determine that both cats can come back indoors through the new cat flap. S wants to build them a shelf to help make it easier for them to climb up and go outside. It is kind of a big jump, about 4 feet above the basement floor.

The region of an oar that sits in the oarlock is referred to as the oar's sleeve. Historically, oar sleeves were made of leather, which helped to reduce wear of the wood shaft as the oar was used and repeatedly turned from square to feather with every rowing stroke.

On modern fiberglass oars, the sleeves are made of plastic. Plastic sleeves inevitably wear out, and need to be replaced, as illustrated by these photos from the last time I worked to refurbish rowing oars, way back in 2012 in Texas.

Modern sleeves are also designed to have flat surfaces that hold the oar at very precise angles, helping to ensure that the rowing movement is efficient both when the oar is in the water and when it is out of the water.

That makes sleeve replacement fussy and stressful. Thankfully, the major oar manufacturer provides detailed instructions on how to set everything up correctly. I ensured that the oar blade surface was level across a specific part of the blade, and then ensured the shaft of the oar was also level, lining the oar up across the surface of our basement workbench.



Then I used a rowing "pitch meter" to set the sleeve with a 3-degree pitch.

One part that was confusing to me, however, was whether that needed to be a positive 3-degree pitch or a negative 3-degree pitch. Thankfully, I had another pair of oars nearby, so I could check and confirm a positive 3-degree pitch.

Once the pitch was set, I secured the sleeve by applying a 2-part polyurethane glue.



I completed the process for a pair of oars, one specialized for the starboard side of the boat, the other specialized for the port side of the boat.

Last night while on the verge of falling asleep, a question occurred to me about whether I had correctly set the pitch at a positive three degrees for the second, port-side oar. I will need to recheck it this evening. If I got the port oar backwards, I'll need to take everything apart, pry out the glue, and try again. Sigh.

While I was in the basement, I also sanded the oars to be repainted, and applied the next coat of paint.

It's really important to sand between coats to ensure the paint adheres well.



Even after just one full coat, these oars are already looking so much better than before.



The work will continue.

Unsurprisingly, a substantial fraction of the weekend was devoted to Rowing Projects, which I should blog about in a separate post. However, on Sunday, I did a round of more general Car Errands, which included one adventure that was most particularly entertaining.

My first stop was the closest Goodwill to drop off some donations that have been sitting on our front porch for several years. The Goodwill is one town over and 8.3 miles away, in a direction generally inhospitable to bicycling, so we rarely go over there. I noticed an Ace Hardware on my way as I drove over, so I stopped in after the Goodwill leg, and obtained most of the hardware store items I was after (various nuts, bolts, and screws, some buckets, et cetera).

My destination after Ace was Target, largely in the interest of obtaining one of those big, plastic folding tables. But after I departed from Ace, driving along, I eventually realized a small problem: the Target is located along Central Ave, and I was driving on Western Ave, not Central! Argh!

I didn't have the Bossy Lady turned on, so I figured, what the heck, I'll just make a left somewhere and start working my way over towards Target and Central Ave.

This is where the State Offices come in. It seems like anytime S and I are driving around on our regional interstates and highways to try and complete some errands, we inevitably go past signs for the State Offices.

The State Offices are part of the Bermuda Triangle of Albany. Here's a screenshot of the area:


You can see lots of bicycling infrastructure directly around the SUNY-Albany campus, sure. The State Offices are that large ring area to the right, where you can see tiny dotted scraps labeled as "trails" or "bicycle-friendly" roads, and you can even see how in theory, Washington Ave might get a person on a bicycle into the State Offices.

But also notice allllll of the freeway onramps and offramps, most especially the corkscrews-in-corkscrews. Oh, and there's a giant mall to the left of the SUNY-Albany campus, you know, right on the OTHER side of Interstate-87.

I eventually managed to escape, but DAMN if that section of town/suburb isn't just completely miserable! I really cannot understand how people can work there and have any concept whatsoever of anything other than the hell that is suburbia.

Not that Target is any better. My main reason for going there was that it currently seems to be the least-awful of the various options for obtaining items such as 6-ft-long plastic folding tables. Not that the tables were easy to find inside the store, mind you. As I circled around for the eighth time in search of them (*not* exaggerating!), I kept thinking about mallorys_camera's recent comments about late-stage Capitalism, the evidence of which is all over the place inside of a "failing" big-box retailer such as this one. Every time I go into that sort of shop, a substantial part of me wants to shrivel up and die, and I completely lose sight of the meaning of life.

However! By some miracle I eventually found the section with the folding tables and chairs, and by a second act of a higher deity the very table I'd scoped out online was indeed exactly what I was looking for, and available! So I bought it and then promptly got the hell out of there.

My whole reason for buying the table is somewhat silly, but only *somewhat*. One of the local bicyclists has just started to run a bike valet at area events, but hasn't yet scraped together the resources to purchase some of the necessities for a bike valet, such as a pop-up tent and a folding table. I very much want to help the bike valet be a success, but I'm rather low on time for volunteering. So instead I figure I can contribute materially. I've already got a pop-up tent that sits idle most of the time, so let's get it out into the world more frequently as shelter for bike valet volunteers. Plus, we ran short on folding tables for our annual regatta, so another such table will get used on multiple occasions.

Hmm, you know, though, I should really cover MY folding table with bike stickers.

I can't say I know where the week has gone, entirely. I guess maybe very busy Tuesdays and Thursdays because of my teaching and research schedule, plus lots of grading, plus measuring ant heads, plus rowing-related things (so many meetings!).

Anyway. Last weekend when I had an impressive bout of insomnia, I finally managed to assemble an order for bunk boards for one of the rowing safety launch trailers. That whole project turned into quite the journey. I initially bought carpet and supplies to make 2 sets of bunk boards for 2 trailers, then eventually managed to get 1 of the 2 sets made and installed without much trouble. For the second trailer, things got complicated because some of the lag bolts that attach a metal bracket to the boards were stripped.

So I ordered a bunch more lag bolts, plus a set of spare brackets, and while I was at it, another pair of 5-ft bunk boards, pre-made. That way I could detach the brackets and replace them completely.

The rowers who went out for practice helpfully took the safety launch that lives on the trailer needing attention, so I could work on it while they were out on the water. You might think that unscrewing 12 bolts and then screwing on new pieces wouldn't be that complicated, but it clearly is. In addition to the lag bolts being frozen/stripped, one of the bracket bolts was stripped. It took me a good hour to tackle, all told.

Anyway, now that project is DONE. FINALLY. I used the pre-made bunk boards, so now we can see which bunk boards last longer, the ones I laboriously (time-consumedly) made by hand, or the pre-made ones. If it's anywhere close to a wash, I will never attempt to make handmade bunk boards, ever again. I've got too many other things to do with my free time.

I feel like this has been a year where I've learned far more about boat trailers than I might have ever cared to know.

BUT - we launch and retrieve our safety launches every single practice. So having functional launch trailers is super important and helpful.

Pictures later.

Things currently on the short list:

-Help S with installing oarlocks on the O'Day sailboat. Last week I obtained a small piece of stainless steel to fabricate into backing plates. Now it needs to be cut to size and have holes drilled into it.

-Make progress on building the coxbox charging cabinet. I think my method for squaring edges is going to be (drumroll, please), sanding. After that I will experiment with my pocket hole drilling jig.

-Finish the rowing safety launch projects - bunk boards, wired lighting systems.

-Use old bike parts to construct a solar-powered chandelier. I need to assemble my collection of old bike parts to develop my plans. I have some ideas, and I have also ordered some chandelier crystals.

-Both the Wild Blue Yonder and Petrichor need varnishing, preferably before the weather gets too cold.

-Maybe someday, building a galley box? I need to finish the chair rehab project first.

-Repainting oars.