Even in Kyoto

Saturday morning: National Learn to Row Day went well! I mostly ran around the boathouse like the Boathouse Gnome I am, poking at all the various projects.

Saturday afternoon: The bike valet at Art on Lark also went pretty well! We were located directly in front of Albany's Only Remaining Active Horse Trough. We did wonder whether humans could also drink the water, but no one actually tried. We did not have a ton of bicycling customers, but that was okay, we did learn a lot about site location for something like this festival, and were able to talk about plans for continuing to grow the valet (e.g. I need to register a domain name and put together an extremely simple website, suggestions on domain registration places welcome; I'll probably host through my existing website).

Sunday: All The Chores: groceries, litterboxes, vacuuming, laundry, and I even (hold onto your hats) mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors. And cleaned off the stovetop. The clean floors feel so amazing underfoot, I need to get onto a more consistent mopping schedule. I also had Princess TinyBike Spa Day; I had to get her a replacement generator hub wheel, then figure out how to wire it up. I also put on fresh rear brake pads and a fresh chain, although I might be too late with the chain, sigh. Oh, and I finally put the teeny-tiny mud flap back onto the rear fender. It's odd, the front fender's mud flap is bolted on, but the rear mud flap was riveted in place and the rivet failed. My repair is bolted, hopefully it works okay.

Monday: Played hooky from work. I first led a safety training during rowing practice, then joined teammates for a lovely, leisurely 2-hour morning coffee break. Then I biked up to the lumber store and bought a bunch of 2x4's and 1x4's. I trucked those back over to the boathouse and then spent the rest of the day sawing and assembling them and some other wood into a monstrously huge sweep oar storage rack/cube.

The oar storage cube isn't completely done yet, my drill ran out of batteries around when my body ran out of batteries, so I need to add a whole bunch of cross braces soon. But the process went well, overall.

Then I hauled the remaining parts of S's former kayak storage rack home.

I think I will sleep well tonight, and I am NOT going to get up and go rowing in the morning. I'm not signed up for the summer season anyway.

I have a major photo backlog. Tomorrow I will go to work and work on work things.

This past weekend, our team went to the Pittsford Regatta on the Erie Canal just outside Rochester. It's a favorite regatta, which is a little funny because just a few years back it was hard to convince my masters teammates to participate, and now we have a big crew that goes. This year the regatta weather didn't fully cooperate; when we arrived it was warmish, then it started to sprinkle, the sprinkle turned to rain and blowing wind, and temperatures dropped through the day. It has been a while since I've had such a rainy regatta experience, and I've definitely forgotten how to manage myself in the midst of it all. Being out in the elements all day is different from being out in the elements for just a rowing practice. Overall our spirits weren't too dampened; boats had decent races and we didn't have any serious misadventures (this time!).

I've started to think of my singles races as "scouting" opportunities.

( lots of photos in this post... )

This morning I was disappointed to learn that the word SHART is not in the Scrabble Dictionary. In case you wondered.

I still managed to win the weekly Scrabble game, so I wasn't that disappointed.

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When I was cleaning out the freezer the other day, I noticed that there was a bag of frozen strawberries in there, dating back to 2022. Also a bag of frozen rhubarb.

So there is now some strawberry-rhubarb cobbler.

I also made a batch of tomato-lentil soup, and more cherry-almond scones, to serve as breakfasts for the week.

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The middle of the day got allocated to a trip to the hardware store in Troy, followed by more boat work. Because I am substitute coaching tomorrow morning, I tried to keep a brisk pace for the ride.

I need to figure out where I can buy some peel ply, that stuff looks super useful for my life. Just saying.

Most of my spray paint work was fine, except for one section where I applied too much at once, and caused drips. But I have time, because we haven't yet ordered the replacement skeg for the boat. It's going to be one of those projects that gets worked on for 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. Lots and lots of sanding. Good thing I'm good at sanding by now!

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I let the cats have some supervised catio time this afternoon, because the weather was so nice. George, of course, LOVED it, and now that the cats are back inside they've been crying and crying to go out again.

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Time to go eat some of that cobbler, then maybe have a quiet evening. Ha.

1. Tuesday lab crayfish! So fun.



( clicky for that, and more... )

The past week and weekend were hectic, so to my relief, this weekend is a quieter one.

I also finally got relief from the bureaucratic purgatory I've been in for the past 6 weeks-plus, so I can finally talk more about it all. The bureaucratic purgatory has been just one part of what made the past week hectic. Basically, I'm still the point person for the rowing club's special events, which involves applying to our municipality for Special Events Permits. This year, the city threw in an added complication, in that technically our event is happening in space owned and managed by the State, so for the first time in the 8 years I've been doing all this, the City said we also needed to obtain a permit from the state.

Cue lots of internal screaming. The last time I tried to obtain a permit for something from the State, it was for a liquor license for our regatta, and while that all eventually more-or-less worked out, it took forever, was an extremely opaque process, and wound up costing us over a grand in surprise fees. After that all wrapped up we all concluded we would never, ever bother to try and have alcohol at one of our events, ever again. Just not worth it in any way, shape, or form.

Anyway, in this case, thankfully the permit point person for the State was pretty responsive (at least, once I called in instead of just emailing), and that is how I was able to learn fairly quickly that the info I had about a paper permit application form was out-of-date, and I should submit the application through a newer electronic system. Okay. At least that meant I wouldn't be blindly assembling a bunch of paperwork to mail in and then wonder whether it ever arrived successfully, let alone whether it was actually filled out correctly, etc.

Of course, it was only later on, partway through the whole application process, that I then learned that yes, we also had to submit a whole bunch of additional insurance information as compared to what we've had to submit in the past to the City, including some forms that don't make much sense for the nature of the activities we have planned, that have more to do with construction insurance than with people running and walking on a bike-hike trail. So we then had a terrible time hunting down the appropriate insurance forms, which have all sorts of obtuse acronym names and numbers, and where certain information must be EXACTLY the same in every place and must appear in EXACTLY the right place on the form. After a ton of casting about by a bunch of us, I eventually wound up tracking down a person involved in organizing a larger regional running event to ask how they handled things, and then finally learned from them that we'd picked the wrong one out of two main options for providing our event insurance. Ugh. Sigh. Still - that person saved us.

Yes, it wound up costing us extra money to go back and submit a sanctioning application to the other insurance-providing entity, but the people who provided the correct insurance were amazing and expedited our application on their end, so it was only 4 days or so of waiting instead of 2 more weeks of waiting. I then immediately turned back around and finally furnished the updated, correct documentation to the State. That was towards the end of the week before last. Then, another agonizing wait of several more days, as the clock ticked down closer and closer to our event date. To my great relief, we FINALLY got the State approval this past Tuesday, so then I turned right back around and sent along all of that documentation over to the City. Last but not least, I was then finally able to call in and submit the final payment to the City this past Friday. For an event scheduled to happen a week from today.

No sweat, right? Ugh. It is so, so bad to cut this kind of thing so close. It would have really sucked for about 20 different reasons if we'd been forced to cancel; we've had to keep working on the rest of the event planning while the permits were in limbo. (things like having t-shirts made, securing timing services, securing a DJ, wrangling volunteers, promoting the event to get people to sign up for it, etc etc).

Small silver linings: Now we know exactly what we will need to do next year for this event. We also have more lead time to get working on repeating the whole permitting process for the regatta we hold every September. That, of course (of course!!), relies on a separate insurance source, but at least I can give the relevant entity in that case the example insurance paperwork we gathered for this event.

Oh, and also, I have a teammate who is willing to take over this particular set of paperwork filing tasks for next year! The handoff will require some work, but I just think it will be far better for all of us to have more than one person versed in how to navigate this whole bureaucratic nightmare, and this particular teammate has much more relevant experience than me in doing this sort of stuff.

This all meant that this morning's project of going out to measure and mark our event's course was fun, finally, instead of being clouded by uncertainty.

Not too long ago, I read something by a designer about changes a Scandinavian town made to its snow plowing strategy after people realized that they could cut way down on emergency hospital visits if they focused on plowing side streets first, then plowed the main roads. Apparently the reason why this works is because of gender differences in travel: most men make fairly straightforward trips, e.g. to and from work, whereas most women trip-chain and wind up needing to use many more of the side streets (think: groceries, picking up and dropping off kids, visiting elderly relatives, etc). When the side streets aren't plowed promptly, more accidents happen there.

Anyway, because I usually bike everywhere, I also do as much trip chaining as I can, and that's particularly true if I'm going to do driving errands. Today's driving errands:

1. Drop off finished oars and plaques at the boathouse, pick up more oars to fix and paint:

Do you see the plaques, all lined up out of the way now?


Can you tell which oars were freshly repainted?

As a hint, it's the shiny orange pair in front towards the left, heh.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like there are too many more oars that are so seriously beat up that they'll require major surgery. Just these two sets:



These two sets seem to have the same sort of damage as I repaired on another recent set, on the inner surface of the blade, but it's somewhat odd damage that I'll probably show you later on.


2. Pick up some cinderblocks. This turned out to be as cool as I'd hoped it would be. I went over to visit a place called Grimm Building Materials, near Troy, that has apparently been in existence since 1879, because I really don't want to patronize big-box hardware stores if I can help it anymore. A challenge with patronizing Grimm is they're only open weekdays from 7 am - 3 pm, and I generally don't travel towards Troy on weekday mornings. So, car trip. To my relief, they did indeed carry regular old cinderblocks (8x8x16"), and the price was right ($2/ea). I can't even describe how much better it is to buy something like cinderblocks from a shop like this as compared to those big-box hardware stores. I'll definitely patronize them in the future, if/when I need this sort of material.

Whenever I think about cinderblocks, I think about The Impoverished Student's Book of Cookery, Drinkery, and Housekeepery, which is essentially an old-school Zine on those three subjects, written by a Reed College student. Ages ago annikusrex and I encountered a copy of Rosenberg's book while reorganizing her parents' books, and I was sufficiently enchanted by it that I bought my own copy. One of its tips for impoverished students is to use boards and cinderblocks to build inexpensive bookcases.

My plan for my cinderblocks isn't all that different, really - I want to use them to elevate a wire shelf for germinating and growing plants out on the front porch.


3. Drop off some freeweights at work. I have students who want to carry out some exercise physiology experiments next Tuesday where they want to carry or lift weights. I could certainly have hauled the 40 pounds of freeweights by bicycle, but if I'm going to be out and about with the car, I might as well add that to the errands list.

And now it really is time to work on grading, really.

When I checked the thermometer on the back porch this afternoon, it read 50°F! Everywhere on the roads, there were puddles, rivulets, slushy snow.

The current forecast is for a Sunday overnight temperature of 6°F, however, so it isn't suddenly spring.

This winter I have been noticing that my cuticles are in rough shape. Almost on cue, NPR wrote a story about nail health, with tips for improvement, including information about cuticle management. I don't know about you, but I hadn't realized that fingernails are more water-permeable than skin! The article helped me to appreciate that I probably need to do even more to keep my nails and cuticles moisturized as compared to what I've been doing to keep my hands moisturized in general. So far the general skin on my hands has been in better shape this winter compared to previous winters because I've been more consistent about applying lotion, but as I noted, that hasn't seemed to help my cuticles.

So I found a recipe for homemade cuticle oil this week and mixed up a batch this afternoon, and now hopefully that will help. My DIY blend includes sweet almond oil, jojoba oil, sunflower oil, some Vitamin E, and a small bit of lemon verbena for scent. Most of the ingredients I already had lying around from the days when I used to make my own lotion; I gave up on that lotion-making a year or two ago after finally finding premade lotions I actually like.

Meanwhile, Saturday morning was devoted to rowing. We had a pretty intense workout that involved crab walks and squats and pushups and other things, done with a teammate in a relay that included a series of 6-7 500m pieces. After the rowing, I went over to the boathouse to work on the latest of the neverending boathouse projects.

First, satisfyingly, the plaques that I glued magnets onto stuck to the boat shed's support beams successfully:


This is really good because it means I can now figure out how many more rare earth magnets I'm going to need, and finish that darn project for once and for all! I had tried testing the strength of the magnets by putting the plaques onto my refrigerator, but they didn't stick to the fridge very well even after I added on a ton of magnets. So it was good to learn that it takes fewer magnets to get the plaques to stay attached to the thicker steel of the boathouse beams.

It's also time to start reassembling what we call the "bubble dock." We took it completely apart last fall so as to be able to reassemble it to spell something out, instead of having it consist of a random mosaic of black and gray pieces. Let's see if you can figure out what it now spells:






We use this as something of an auxiliary dock to our main dock, but it takes on a particularly important role in the early spring before we get our main dock put out. This is really just the first part of reassembling it, but it's an important part because each piece is supposed to line up with its neighbors in a specific order for everything to go together correctly. Next, we'll put in the connecting pins to lock the pieces together. But it's probably best to wait until the snow under the pieces finishes melting before we try that step.

And it's going to be a couple more weeks before we actually put it out on the river.




This has been a long winter, and it definitely isn't over yet.

Edit: At 2 pm and a toasty 10°F, the car did start again. So I have some homework to do, but not all hope is lost. Just the hope of making it to my erg race scheduled for 9 am this morning.


Well, dang it! I am not very good at this whole "vehicle management strategy during actually cold weather" business, so I failed to set up a makeshift battery warmer overnight and now my car won't start. 😭 So now I won't get to drive myself down to the Bronx to then torture myself with a 2000m rowing machine (erg) race against myself*. BOO!!

There's probably a life lesson in all this somewhere, but for right now, GRRRR!

I did try applying the cats' heating pad to the battery, and also poured warm water over it, for a good long while, to no avail. By now, I am out of time to make it to the race on time.

This is all getting filed in the mental category of: cars: convenient, until they aren't.

And now I have the question of, so now what. Do I torture myself on my own rowing machine at home? Do something completely different?

One thing is certain: if I go for the rowing machine at home, I won't be trying to use it out on the front porch. I did a race piece a week or so ago on the BikeErg on the porch, and it was cold enough then at 20°F for the battery to glitch out.

But that means using the erg inside the house, which sounds unpleasant in other ways (air harder to breathe). Sigh.



*I was the only entry in my age category! It was going to be a guaranteed win!

And a super cute photo of George at the end, too!

( Read more... )

Anyway, quite the project roundup. So here's George, "helping."



I had to kick him out while I sewed. Too many exciting little things to bap around.

I already blogged about yesterday morning. In the afternoon, I cooked up a storm. First, I made a big batch of a creamy tomato-lentil slow cooker soup from the NYT. I didn't have any cream, but we somehow have a whole bunch of cans of coconut milk, so I can report that the soup is pretty good with coconut milk as a substitute. One of the reasons for making the soup was to use up some of the last of this year's garden tomatoes that S brought in to finish ripening. Done. I like the concept of a tomato soup with added protein for rib-sticking power.

Then I finished cooking the ingredients and assembled the Portobello Wellington, and got the Madeira Sauce underway. With those items well in hand, I got to work on some more pumpkin-apple-pecan pie filling. Yum. I mean, just look at it!



(Never mind the dirty dishwater underneath it!) In between cooking tasks, I finally got started on a mending project that has been in the mending pile for at least a year: dealing with sleeve wear on an older bicycling jersey.



From the looks of it, this is just going to be a common wear point for me with wool bicycling jerseys. If this mending experiment is a success, I'll be very pleased. Wool cycling jerseys aren't cheap and I'd much rather keep the ones I have going than have to go shop for more. I have another wool cycling jersey that will be in the repair queue once this one is done.

At around this time, I started to get suspicious that I hadn't seen much of Martha all day. She does seem like the sort of cat who might arbitrarily decide to go curl up somewhere quiet and dark for several hours, but this seemed like longer than usual. Shaking a cat treat bag quickly summoned George, but no Martha. Also unusual. Hmm.

I went around the house and checked all the most logical hiding spots. In doing so, I found several other items I'd lost track of, but still, no Martha.

It was getting close to time to head to a friend's for Thanksgiving. I messaged my friend to say I might be delayed by the hunt for a loose cat.

Shaking the treat bag outdoors failed to summon Martha, either. It was starting to seem like I might be searching for a missing cat for much of Thanksgiving evening.

It occurred to me that one of the more distinct noises the cats associate with me is the opening and closing of the garage door, as I get my bike out to go to work in the morning, and put my bike away when I get home in the evening. I didn't ride my bike yesterday, but with that thought in mind I went ahead and cycled the garage door.

A minute or two later, there was Martha, at the back door. She knows the noise means it's almost suppertime. Whew.

That meant that friends and I could enjoy our vegetarian Thanksgiving feast without added worry.



Here's Martha, later that evening.



I don't think she feels even an ounce of remorse. I'm pretty sure that she escaped off the front porch in the morning when I had the dim-witted idea of opening up the porch door for better ventilation while erging. It was only a few moments later that it occurred to me that the cats could escape if I did that, but clearly Martha had wasted no time.

I had a different sort of misadventure this morning. In the midst of a workout to accumulate more rowing meters, I had the thought that it might be a good idea to lubricate the rowing erg's chain. I had a small bottle of chain oil for that very purpose nearby, so while I was in between pieces, I started to apply the oil.

I failed to pay close attention to some ominous plastic cracking noises until it was far too late, and the bottle's brittle plastic shattered in my hand.

Mineral oil EVERYWHERE!!


THAT was a hassle to clean up, let me tell you.

Other than that, so far today has consisted of going to work to water ants and collect up some student writing to grade. There's some potential for heavy snowfall this afternoon, so I decided I'd rather come home and grade at home than gamble with having to deal with a snowy commute later in the day.