Even in Kyoto

1. When I was in REI, browsing through various cycling products, I was surprised to discover that yes, you can buy specifically-made cycling jorts, of all things:



News you can use?

2. The Westlake Center Bus Tunnel will forever be the Westlake Center Bus Tunnel, no matter how many light rail lines run through it. I hadn't realized that construction for the 2 Line is well underway.



3. Enroute to Pacific Fabrics, I walked past this door store. They had a huge sign painted that read, "Come on in, we'll gladly show you the doors!"



4. The front of the building where Pacific Fabrics is located is given over to Pacific Iron and Steel, where you can sell back scrap metal. The fabric store is around the corner, on the upper floor of the warehouse:



Here's a great example of some of the fun fabrics for sale:

The first time I think I really became aware of the challenges of "stuff management" was back in high school, when a documentary called Affluenza highlighted how a lot of Americans wind up getting trapped in a cycle of materialism and overconsumption. That, plus many moves, make me occasionally mutter to myself, "Stuff: Do I own it or does it own me?"

Anyway.

Since my intention this winter is to do a blend of exercising on my own and exercising with the rowing team, I will be spending more time out on the front porch on the rowing machine and BikeErg. Both implements were facing towards a large pile of cardboard boxes and packing supplies, and I have to tell you I really wasn't excited about the thought of staring at all of that stuff every time I went to do a workout.

It was kind of the equivalent of that point in Arizona where all of the stockpiled tupperwares in the cupboard avalanched out onto my head one day: enough is enough! Do we need 4,000 yogurt tubs? No, we do not!

So I sorted out a subset of the boxes and padding to keep on hand for occasions where we want to send out packages, and then broke down the remaining boxes and aggregated the packing material together.

The stockpile had grown so large that I quickly filled up the garbage can and recycling bin.

Here are the remaining items waiting to be thrown away / recycled over the upcoming weeks:



It might take about a month altogether to cycle all of this out.

The three bags in the front of this photo are from a separate stuff management project. More on that in a moment.

That and a game of Scrabble and some laundry were my Sunday morning.

There was rain in the forecast for the afternoon. Originally I'd been thinking I would bike back down to the boatyard for the afternoon, toting Big Mama (big bike trailer), to finish the project of disassembling the kayak rack and to bring home it, its remaining contents, and all of the club's electronics with batteries that need to stay in relatively stable temperatures over the winter.

But rain and carryover exhaustion from taking out the docks on Saturday were a bridge too far. So I drove down instead.

Disassembling the kayak rack wound up being more challenging than I'd hoped. The star-bit screws were really IN the wood, so I stripped a couple of bits again (argh). But I eventually got the whole thing mostly disassembled so it should now be easier to transport the wood home.



I did manage to get S's windsurf board, my single shell cartop rack, and another pair of oars all onto Big Red's roof rack, so those items are now all at home.

Then I worked some more on the neverending boathouse and boatyard tidying for a while.

Here's the main space where a lot of stuff accumulates at the boathouse:



Right now the space is really cleared out; the bags in the first photo in this post are full of the abandoned clothing and water bottles I picked up. I will launder all the clothing and will then probably just go ahead and donate useable items to a clothing donation bin.

I threw away several bottles of partially-used sunscreen, figuring no one would want to touch them next spring (cooties!). I brought home five (5!) other new or almost-new bottles of sunscreen. I'll put most of them back out again in the spring, in the hopes that their presence will deter people from buying and leaving even more sunscreen bottles next year.

I think I can now basically walk away from most of the boathouse projects for a while. There are two tow dollies in need of bearing replacements, but the safety launches won't be going out again anytime soon.

Just about the only thing I might go back for are more dock-related tasks. Here are some of the dock pieces that were pulled out and stacked for winter:



At least 5 pieces were seriously compromised and need to be swapped out because they filled with water - those are what the orange X's are for. But technically the actual swapping can wait until spring.

The project that can't wait is bringing in what we call our "bubble dock," which is the temporary dock on the far right of this photo:



Disassembling it involves use of a specialized tool, but when we searched high and low for the tool on Saturday we couldn't find it anywhere. There's a good chance someone tossed it during one of the boathouse cleanup days. Ugh. So a new one needs to be ordered to ensure we can get the dock out so the winter freezes and ice don't destroy the bubble dock further.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty owned by all the stuff right now, that much is certain.

I was originally thinking that today I would try and build a wall in the boathouse, but ultimately I chickened out on that project, because it will involve hauling 5 sheets of half-inch plywood from the lumber shop to the boatyard, and it was still rainy this morning, and I'm still mostly riding Princess TinyBike around because Frodo is still in the shop. I'm just not sure about hooking Princess TinyBike up to the Big Mama. I could have hooked up Froinlavin, but I also know from prior experience that Froinlavin definitely isn't built to haul heavy loads. And I could have hooked up S's GT, but it lacks fenders, has too much reach for me, and can only take front panniers right now. I suppose in theory I also could have hooked up Old Faithful, but that also would have been a disaster of a different sort.

So anyway, I didn't do any of that.

But another next big project at the boatyard, is getting tools and supplies all organized, so that some of them can go back on the workbench in the back of the boathouse. We call it "Yuri's workbench," because he is the main workbench user, and is the person responsible for its general state of organization/disorganization.

He uses an organization system based on "security by obscurity," where he has squirreled away a whole bunch of useful boat parts and tools in places where he can find them quickly, but almost nobody else can, because they're stuffed in-between bins and boxes full of kipple. This is partly motivated by the fact that the workbench is very much an open space, where anyone using the boathouse could walk up and just grab things off the workbench. In any case, Y isn't around at the moment, and the rest of us DO need to be able to find things relatively quickly, so it's time to undo his organization system.

I wasn't around for the initial stages of moving everything off of the workbench and out of the boathouse; I was only around for the later stages, after about 50% of the stuff had been cleared off. So I didn't have a chance to develop much of a mental map of what came off the workbench, or where it went.

Instead, this morning, I first cleared all of the remaining bits and pieces off of the workbench, and vacuumed the whole thing, and then worked on the shipping container.

This is the cleanest this workbench has been in a very long time.



I have a teammate who really wants to paint the top of the workbench. For some reason this doesn't seem like the greatest idea to me, but I can't articulate why not.

After all that, I spent a whole bunch of time going through every single box that's currently in the shipping container. That then made it possible to finally consolidate a bunch of stuff, according to type. Now, all of the new oarlocks and oarlock bushings are in a bin together, and those are grouped near the enormous collection of brand new oar sleeves and the bazillion clams (Composite Load Adjustment Mechanisms). All of the footstretchers and shoes are also together, as are all of the coxbox speaker wires, all of the skegs, all of the hatch covers, et cetera, et cetera. It's also now clear that we DO need to order more new boat shoes. Also, the bins with items that are rarely needed are stacked together in the way-back corner. And all of the various solvents and paints and other chemicals are also grouped together. And the epoxy and all kinds of gloves (all kinds, I tell you!) are in that general area, too.

Most of the tools are also now in or near the tool chest. The most commonly used wrenches are grouped in a box, and almost all of the half-disintegrated cardboard boxes full of randomness are now completely out of the shipper.

Here's how it looked right before I closed up for the day, noting that I did not touch anything in the tool chest to the left, because that is our first aid cart:



It helped that our youth rowers are at the state championships this weekend, so all of the supplies they needed for the regatta are currently out of the shipping container, freeing up more space for me to fling the remaining things around.

Some of the things in the shipping container also needed to be moved elsewhere. For example, the safety logbook is now back in a place where it's more accessible to people who don't have access to the shipping container:



I eventually put a handful of things back on the storage shelf under the workbench, and also set up a temporary walkie-talkie charging station back there, while I was at it:



The most fun thing back there is now the giant blue bin, which I have labeled, ?? Mystery Items ??.

Regarding the walkie-talkies, I want to feel vindicated for a little bit. I advocated for purchasing them a couple of years ago, first and foremost for our annual regatta, because we really need them for it. (phone calls or texts are WAY too slow!) More recently, it seemed to me that we should test out using them during our on-water practices, because sometimes our boats get spread out pretty far apart, to the extent where a coaching megaphone isn't going to help at all.

Some teammates were a little reluctant to start using them, wondering what sort of protocol we might need to put in place. But from day 1, they have immediately demonstrated their worth. They are making it SO MUCH EASIER to coordinate with each other, and I also think they are much better from a safety standpoint! Plus, using them during our practices means everyone will have a much better idea of how to use them at the regatta. The kind we got are water-resistant and will float, and we quickly learned that if they come in contact with water, the included flashlight will start to flash. Great stuff. But another item that needs to be kept charged.

While organizing the shipping container, I also encountered a handful of items that really needed to go in our storage shed instead, where we keep specialty items for the events we host and whatnot. So that then also led to some additional reorganizing of the storage shed.

This is the most organized the storage shed has ever been, in the time I've been with the club. I also moved some things from the shed into the shipping container.



There are so many bins full of t-shirts in there. But there is NOT a giant tent that no one has used for at least a decade!

The new organization isn't perfect, but it's definitely an improvement compared to how things were jumbled in there previously.

The entire 5 hours that I worked on moving stuff and things around, the river looked like this:


No signs of any change with the tides. The water is the color of chocolate milk, full of silt and giant tree trunks. The flow got up over 92,000 cfps, moving fast enough that I was not particularly keen to go out there (and we didn't try to this morning, we just headed to the fitness center for cross-training). But the flow now appears to have crested, and is back down to 86,000 cfps now, so with any luck we'll be able to row again starting Monday.

Anyway, when all that was done (for now), I was very tired. I biked home, showered, and still managed to get in a grocery store run.

Tomorrow I should have at least a little time to finally work on some garden things! And it is even supposed to be sunny! Imagine that.

On account of today's weather, which has been vacillating between freezing rain and snow, I decided to stay home. I'll do more of the zookeeping tomorrow instead.

Thursdays are the day when I mostly just lick my wounds and try to brace myself for the next round of teaching ordeals, anyway.

But before getting to that, I wanted to work away at the List of Things to Acquire. To wit, mostly placing orders for even more plastic storage bins:

-A greeting card organizer. I tried ordering one about a month ago off eBay, only to have the seller refund my money because they oversold. Ugh! Besides, nowadays eBay is mostly just a Jungle reseller. An annoying repeat of my recent online shoe-shopping experience. I eventually resigned myself to ordering things from the Jungle, because there are a handful of other bits and bobs that it appears can only be readily and accurately found through the Jungle site or equivalent these days (replacement mounting brackets for my bike odometer; the correct replacement hook & loop pads for my orbital sander; the specific face lotion I want; a sufficiently long boot tray for my bike in my office). I hate this, but as I've noted, I live in a depauperate area when it comes to shopping for many things. We did at least purchase lots of bike parts last weekend from our local bike shops, because we do want them to stay in business.

-Medium-sized bins for organizing woodworking/hardware tools and supplies. This is modeled after ranunculus's scheme of maintaining a set of grab-and-go bins for her various projects around the ranch. I'm getting really sick of dealing with piles of things on shelves, but also, the bins need to not be too giant and deep as to be unwieldy.

-File boxes. Ages ago I attempted to use coroplast file boxes. Total junk that fell apart. Then I got a set of cardboard file boxes. When I put actual files in them, the files caused the cardboard to collapse. So now I'm moving on to hard-sided plastic of the correct dimensions for files. Sigh.

The latter two came from The Container Store. The big-box stores in this area all sell various kinds of plastic storage containers, but those all tend to be flimsy and of the wrong dimensions, and I am so over that.

But now it's time to get back to work projects.

One of the local grocery chains around here is called Price Chopper. The people who own Price Chopper, also own grocery stores they have rebranded as "Market32," which are supposed to be more upscale than their Price Chopper locations. But we know what they are, so we call the smaller, nearby Market32's "The Chopper," and then we have called their larger location in a strip mall on Central Ave The Big Chopper.

While we were out of town, there was a story in the paper about how a different grocery chain, Shop Rite, was closing its stores in the area. If you don't already know this, grocery stores are big business, but they often have a tricky time staying in business because profit margins are often slim. There was also something about Price Chopper taking over the Shop Rite locations, including a Shop Rite location along Central Ave, near the Big Chopper.

Anyway, the other day while we were driving around running errands, I noticed that the prior Shop Rite has been transformed into a Market 32.

This morning, I needed to visit the Big Chopper to buy some littleneck clams to add to our campus saltwater tanks. Well, when I got over there, lo and behold, the Big Chopper no longer exists. The strip mall plaza that used to contain the fun Ocean State Job Lots store, the pet food store, and the Big Chopper, is looking pretty damned empty now.

I don't yet know the bike route over to what we should henceforth call the ShopRite Chopper. Central Ave is a terrible street to try and ride a bike on, so we typically access shops using some strategic back routes.

Thankfully, on the more accessible side of things, there's one other big grocery store, Hannaford's. We just never got into the habit of shopping at the Hannaford's previously, even though it's more convenient to reach, in the same strip mall as the nearest Asian grocery store. Today was a good day to start changing that, by scrutinizing their inventory more closely.

They did have littleneck clams available, and also the salsa and cheese we tend to buy from conventional grocery stores. Altogether it actually looks like the Hannaford inventory is better than the Big Chopper's inventory.

So maybe I just won't bother trying to figure out how to get to the ShopRite Chopper. I'd only ever been to that ShopRite once, one year when we participated in a Cranksgiving event that involved going to a bunch of different grocery stores to get food for a local charity. That trip didn't give me any reasons to work on going back.

One of which is a portable task light. I'm hoping it will be helpful for knitting and mending projects, and also for reading books while traveling. I'm realizing I don't really even have a good setup for hand mending at home in New York. The lights in our living room are fine for ambient lighting, but not great for detail tasks. I have a phenomenal desk light in my home office, but I don't particularly like to work on mending while sitting at the desk. That might be part of why the mending pile keeps growing faster than I fix things.

I also ordered some hand-stamped plates for Petrichor's Hull Identification Number. Some states require that boats that are Petrichor's size and shape be fully licensed, and it also just seems prudent to have the HIN on the boat to be clear about ownership.

Plus a new set of lock blocks, because one of the ones I had wound up going for a swim near the Ashby Shoal, and so I currently don't have a great way* to attach my handlebar flashlight to bicycle handlebars.



*There are, of course, plenty of mediocre options, like rubber bands and duct tape. That gets old after a point.

As I'd hoped, sanding the outside of the boat with the 220-grit was, mercifully, so much faster than the 120-grit sanding. I got the entire hull sanded in about 4 hours. By comparison, I'm estimating I spent about 28 hours just on sanding the interior of the boat with the 120-grit.





It's still not perfect, but it's definitely better.

The only problem is, even with using only the 220-grit and trying to be careful and take my time with a delicate touch, I sanded back through about half of the places where I'd applied epoxy patches.

This isn't especially surprising, but confirms that a proper epoxy patch job requires multiple coats of epoxy, plus the waiting and cure time and more extensive follow-up sanding. It also confirms that the edges of my chines are too pointy.

In spite of that, I am going to forge ahead with varnishing. From what I read in the two-part article about how these boats age, my sense is that the boat isn't going to instantly deteriorate and fall apart after three uses - unlike the paper rowing shells that were manufactured for a period in Troy, NY back in the day (so lightweight! So ephemeral!). Instead, I'll eventually need to haul the boat out for a round of refinishing, and that day will arrive sooner rather than later because of these blemishes. At that point hopefully I'll have more space and more time and more energy to attend to the details. Hopefully. Or more money to pay someone else to do it for me, heh. I do happen to know a guy. But in the meantime, there are multiple good reasons to keep working.

So I got underway with the deep-vacuuming of the garage to prep for varnishing, which led to some questions for my mother: how thorough would she like me to actually get with the garage cleaning? There's a lot of stuff stored in the garage, and several decades' worth of cobwebs, too. Much of the dust is glued in place by decades of grime.

After consultation, the conclusion is I don't need to get too meticulous, overall. We eventually identified one shelf in particular as the spot containing things where we weren't entirely sure what they are or what to do with them, so that shelf deserved a bit more attention. It looks like a shelf that mostly contained stuff that my dad used or was accumulating, half car-related, half "other."



Lingering recycling and disposal questions:

-My dad accumulated different metals in different piles/containers, as can be seen on the bottom shelf - e.g. aluminum items like toothpaste tubes and baking pans and bike suicide levers, vs. almost an entire disintegrating milk jug full of steel nails and staples and whatnot (so heavy, so pokey!). How to get these to the appropriate scrap metal destinations?

-Steel cans: there's an empty steel gas can and an empty steel camp fuel can. Do these recycle somehow?

-Old Coleman Camp Stove: My mom attempted to replace the generator on this stove, but when she tried to test it out, it started leaking fuel at other points, which freaked her out and caused her to abandon the project. My sense is that someone who knows more about what they're doing could finish the repair and then there's a nice, working campstove. But I already have a campstove of this style, so I really don't need another one, and my mom currently has a small backpacking stove she knows how to operate, so she isn't inclined to keep or work on this one further. So, what to do with this one?

One of the challenges of the boatbuilding project is that it is generating a lot of waste. The packaging for the trailer has been the worst of it, so far. The trailer parts came in four packages, including two large boxes secured with some of those giant box staples. Inside the boxes (which you might remember, failed to protect the axle end anyway), things were somewhat cleverly cushioned by adding plastic trash bags and then filling the bags with some form of that expanding foam, so the foam would fit the shape if the items in each box.

My mom carried out a small experiment with some of the expanding foam, to verify that it is not water-soluble, although it is easy enough to cut (although that makes a huge mess). I did figure out that if I stand on it, it squishes down somewhat. Seattle charges for garbage based on the volume and weight that households produce (as they should!), so my mom has the smallest possible volume can, and the expanded foam won't directly fit in it. Instead, it looks like if I squish, roll, and then tape up one bag of the expanded foam at a time, I can then basically get one piece at a time into the can. It is thus going to take several weeks to fully dispose of the foam pieces. Let that point sink in for a minute.

In the meantime, the remaining pieces are on the floor in the downstairs bedroom where I'm staying, and George kind of likes using them as obstacles when playing.

Meanwhile, the boxes and their staples. I have this long-ago memory of my dad gathering up small bits and pieces of metal for recycling, but I'm hazy on the details. My internet searches for information about metal box staples tended to be fairly useless, as they mostly turned up information about a horrible big-box office supply chain, or about staples in paper. I did eventually find something that indicated that box staples are typically stainless-steel coated with copper.

And sometime after that, I found information about scrap metal recycling in this area, which basically says, separate out your ferrous and non-ferrous metals. So, lo! The staples are indeed ferrous, so they went inside a ferrous can, crimped shut and now in the recycling bin.

While learning that, I also learned that yes, you *can* leave labels on your recycled cans, but they'll get burned off, whereas if you do go to the trouble of taking them off, they'll be recycled as paper (to the extent that actually happens).

My mom works really hard to be conscientious about how she disposes of things (and about thing acquisition), so she did try listing the more intact of the two large boxes on the local Freecycle, but didn't get any immediate direct hits. (side note, with her Ridwell subscription, she can usually recycle things like plastic bottle caps and bread tags, and more.)

Most of the people I encounter in New York might find this level of attention to waste disposal to be very foreign, and yet it seems to me that New York has a far larger and more complicated waste disposal problem than Seattle does.

At least one aspect of the solution to all this waste production is to buy less stuff (especially online!) and borrow more. The other day I came across this article about a 'library-centric economy', and while I don't think it would work for everything, it seems like it could work for a number of things. I have yet to make use of the tool library in Albany, but that's one example I'm glad exists. I'm now pondering what it would look like to set up a camping and hiking library at my college.

Also, puzzle libraries need to become more common.

I'm spending a lot of hours on the computer these days, to the point where when the evening rolls around, I'm tired of it. One of the things I've been doing recently is putting on internet videos while knitting or washing the dishes. Somehow or another, I am finding myself watching a lot of videos of people fixing things.

It's all kind of great, really.

I guess this all pretty much got started when S and I began watching videos about the keel-up Ship of Theseus restoration of the Tally Ho (completed, after something like 7 years of very intense work!).

I appreciate that the person with the below channel does not voice-narrate his videos, and he also provides a lot of tiny tips and hints about things I would never have learned anywhere else:

https://www.youtube.com/@NewYorkshireWorkshop

I haven't watched his videos about his kitchen remodel, mostly just videos about updating his small backyard and alley. His approach is interesting to me from the standpoint of what he saves/restores versus what he replaces and updates. I might personally make different aesthetic decisions, but there's still a lot to learn.

I especially learned a lot from this staircase restoration: https://youtu.be/46vpG9arDAM?si=x4YXgQ_mzGZ9tY6f

I also wound up watching a couple of videos by another person who seems to have created a business from restoring vintage furniture:

https://www.youtube.com/@ModernMakeovers

It's just helpful to see how much labor goes into this kind of restoration work, and to see/learn which tools work best for various processes. Also to appreciate how much life remains in many of the spaces and objects that surround us, and what some possibilities are. I did watch one where I was filled with great envy, because this restorer had far better success with a chemical finish stripper than I've had. It was also helpful to learn about some of the particular repair decisions made, and to see how different kinds of wood/veneer damage were dealt with.

I really don't think I'd want all of my life energy going towards an Extreme Home Makeover. But it's good to see what that actually looks like. On the other hand, there's something to be said for developing a connection to things by working with them directly. So I don't necessarily need to live in a house that is totally buttoned up, either. A balance is called for.

One of my biggest complaints about online shopping is the packaging!

Regardless, I online shop, because many of the things I want aren't available locally.

I just forged ahead and purchased a couple of wool tank tops I'd had my eye on, because they appeared to occupy that magical space between "something that is great for my sweaty lifestyle" and "something that can be dressed up to look good anytime, anywhere."

They arrived in 100% compostable packaging.

They were not cheap but I will definitely consider buying from this company again in the future.

Ibex wool, in case you wondered.