Mitt liv som Tobin

One of my other projects this past Sunday was preparing to mail out packages containing silver medals for those who won them at our regatta in September. I had inventoried our strategic stockpile of medals over the summer and had noted it was time for a new order, and put in the order in August. But apparently that is not quite enough time, for the new medals arrived a week after the regatta had concluded.

Most of the medal shipment is now in our strategic stockpile for the next couple of years.

I felt like a real winner, hauling this many boxes of hundreds of medals down to the boathouse one morning:


Here are the ones I delivered for our youth crews:


Hopefully people are happy to get these. I'm just relieved to have the task checked off my list so I can move on to other things.

In other randomalia, here's a view I was treated to on my commute home from work Monday evening:


That harvest moon peeking out from the trees was wonderful to see! Later along my commute, I observed people with fancy photography gear all set up to take their own photos of the rising moon.

Tuesday morning, I did not make it to rowing practice. Instead, I ate breakfast on the catio and appreciated having some time with the garden as we head deeper into the fall.



This morning after I got packages mailed out, I stopped at the pet food store and got 200 crickets for the campus animals. Then I biked along Fuller Road towards the hardware store. Fuller Road is not a pleasant place to ride a bicycle, as evidenced by this ghost bike I stopped to visit:



The thing that is the most disheartening is that the rear wheel on this ghost bike has obviously gotten trashed, likely because the bike was probably originally closer to the edge of the road.

The bike was located close to where the local art supply store and a local donut business can be found. The ghost bike might help to explain to you why I generally don't patronize either business; they are not just unpleasant but dangerous to try and reach on a bicycle.

Thankfully I did not experience any kind of close call this morning, and instead was able to obtain some items from the hardware store and then carry on to work.

Saturday morning we had Yet Another Beautiful Rowing Practice. I did my best Rowing Paparazzi impression.









Immediately after rowing, I met up with some other bicyclists for a Coffee Outside expedition. I was so thrilled to have the company!



We rode up to Peebles Island, found an empty picnic table, and set about brewing our coffee.



The other people who biked are all members of Albany Social Cycling, which makes me really want to make it to at least one Social Cycling ride this year. We'll see.



I brought along a glass vacuum brewer and the teacups in the hard-sided box, but neglected to notice the vacuum brewer didn't have its filter disk. So I was very glad to have also brought along a moka pot. Everyone enjoyed the pumpkin muffins I brought along (shh, made with butternut squash puree!).

Back at home, I continued work on the coxbox charging shelf. On Saturday I mostly determined that I didn't know how to use my pocket hole jig, sigh.



There are definitely NOT supposed to be pointy screw bits sticking out!



But after that failure, I read further instructions, so today I had much greater success.


I am adapting the cover from an old coxbox charging station for this new one:



It will look somewhat silly, but that's fine. What matters the most is that all of the charging wires and other accessories will soon be organized!

I do need to obtain and install some hinges next. But I will be really glad to have this project done and out of the house soon!

I did not make any progress on oar blade repairs, but people are going to come over next Saturday to help and learn. So that will happen next. In the long term I am hoping to work on rowing projects at a slower, consistent pace. This year is still Way Too Much.

Where did we even leave off? Oh, with Saturday happenings.

Sunday was a regatta I got to race in! The Mohawk Fall Classic. I was originally signed up for 3 events, the Women's 1x, Women's 4x, and Men's 4x. Because of this head cold, I asked to scratch the Women's 1x so I could focus on the team boats where a change of plans would be disruptive to other people.

Oh, I should note: I volunteered to be in the Men's 4x for this regatta because we had 3 rowers sign up for the regatta who identify as male, and by joining forces with them that meant they each got in 2 races rather than just one.

Both the Women's 4x and Men's 4x were eventful in different ways. I sat in bow seat for the Women's 4x and we had a really good race overall. The only disappointment was that I didn't realize where the finish line was, so I caused us to stop rowing at race pace too early. That was personally frustrating but my boatmates were understanding and were generally pleased with how the race went.

For the Men's 4x I sat in stroke seat, and we had something of a wild time. The boat in the starting position behind us seemed like it had the potential to be pretty fast, but during the warmup I got some signs suggesting it might not handle random wildcards very well. And lo, we had adventures. They caught up to us fairly quickly, but then couldn't sort out which side they wanted to pass us on, causing all kinds of interesting jockeying back and forth. When they did eventually get up next to us, they forced us off the course for a while. Then we encountered a section of the river with a lot of recreational traffic, plus some bridges, and they didn't handle the boat wakes especially well. There is a substantial turn towards the end of the course, and we had another skirmish at around that point. But altogether we were pretty pleased with the race because we were able to keep up with the competition and didn't allow them an easy pass. So it was very exciting.

It feels like Monday involved a lot of catching up on work. And Tuesdays are busy teaching and research days. Plus a regatta recap meeting for our own regatta.

So I should probably forgive myself for feeling like my brain wasn't working especially well for teaching today.

So, I retested for COVID yesterday, and that came up negative. Whatever is going on with my sinuses feels like mostly but not entirely allergies, so I'll just continue to try and lie low.

I'm not doing an especially great job of that, though. I have major insomnia right now, and a lot of things I'd like to be doing.

Yesterday was the first time in a long while where I actually had a block of time to work on some of the projects I've been itching to work on. Specifically, it was a day for some sanding.

I did some sanding and block planing of the edges of what I think I'll just call the Heavy Cabinet, to get them more even and square. The Heavy Cabinet is a shelf for charging and storing even more rowing equipment. I won't pretend that the edges are anywhere near perfect, but they are definitely now in much better shape than before. So, square-er. Now I need to look at my information for how to drill pocket screw holes, and then I can work on actually drilling them and assembling this Heavy Cabinet (will be held via a combination of the pocket screws and glue). I'm enjoying working on the Heavy Cabinet as a way to continue getting woodworking experience.

I also sanded down two pairs of oars I brought home for refurb work.





After the sculling clinic in August, some of my teammates were highly motivated to work on readjusting our club oars so they will work better for everyone. The basic implementation for that was to make sets of oars that are either short, medium, or long, for people of corresponding heights (although for those more interested in the geometry problem I'll also note that both length and inboard were adjusted).

One of the downsides of this configuration is that our club's oars have multiple different styles of grips, and the grip type can have a big impact on the oar use experience. I didn't do the actual length adjustments, so I don't even know how decisions got made around how to distribute the different grip types across the different lengths. But I do know that there has been some discussion amongst rowers about not having what they want (correct length and grip), and considering buying their own oars. (I can't say I blame anyone on that - before I had my own oars I had several memorable occasions where I wound up with grips I don't like, and the grips and oar adjustments can make or break the rowing experience!). Also, recently at a practice we completely ran out of medium-length oars, so clearly, more need to be set up.

Anyway, that all made me feel bad about the above sets of oars the club owns, that are currently out of service. But I think you can tell from the above pictures, why I took those particular oars out of service. Now that I have finished the initial sanding, I'm going to do some epoxy work to reconstruct the parts of the blades that have chipped, and then once that is complete the repainting journey can begin.

Even better, over the course of conversations about the state of the club oars, it looks like there will be an oar repainting party happening soon. (and I wasn't the person to make the oarganizing happen! Although I will host it because that's easier than schlepping all the supplies somewhere else). The more people who know about what it takes to do this stuff, the better, as far as I'm concerned. I think people are going to be surprised by the amount of time it takes to do this stuff right. But that's the point, really, because that is motivation to take very good care of our equipment.

Last night after going to bed, I felt something change about my saliva, which is an oddly specific thing to experience. It now has a mildly uncomfortable edge to it. By now it seems that was a very early sign of fighting off some form of infection. I will COVID test the second I get home. Honestly, I'm not too optimistic. I've been in a series of higher-risk environments over the last week or so.

I finally found a few minutes to go through and upload a handful of photos from the regatta and surrounding activities. I'm just going to share two photos, altogether.

Here is our sunrise view from Tuesday morning's practice:


And here is George, perched smugly on top of my pile of rowing kit:


George has figured out how to escape from the Catio. We don't know where he's escaping from, yet. The very good news is that when I called to him on Tuesday evening, he came running over to me, then flopped down right at my feet so I could carry him back indoors. He seems to understand that we are his source of dinner, if nothing else.

It's starting to feel like the middle of the semester.