Mitt liv som Tobin

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.

It's warm and humid. I appreciate it for that feeling, because I know that all too soon it will be cold and dark and rainy instead. We really need this rain. Yesterday, even after some locally heavy showers, the ground was still dry around the base of trees.

I probably spent more time than I should have this morning, at the boathouse, cleaning up and organizing things from the regatta aftermath. On the other hand, now things at the boathouse are cleaned up and organized, so I can move on to other projects! As one example of what got done: I had loaned a bunch of sets of binoculars to the club for the regatta last year, but never got them back. The bin of binoculars did reappear again just in time for the regatta, so I put the bin in a corner of the boathouse so I could collect it up after the flurry ended. So now they are all back in my lab again, where they belong.

And now, time to grade some (more) papers and exams.

Thankfully a number of us wound up going over to Wolff's Biergarten on both Saturday and Sunday to have some food and beverages at different points.

Our annual regatta went really, really well. But it was a very long day. I got interviewed by two news channels while wearing my pirate costume, heh. The reason for the pirate costume is that sometimes people need to be able to find the regatta director, and a costume makes the regatta director easy to find.

I am writing this instead of grading papers. So now I should grade papers.

This morning, while carrying our 4x boat down to the dock, one of my teammates noticed something off on the horizon in the dark morning sky. It was lit up but looked like it had a fan-shaped, lit-up tail, and it was moving across the sky but from where we were watching it did not appear to be traveling especially fast or slow.

Our primary hypothesis is that it was space debris returning to Earth.

You just never know what you'll see out on the river at 5 am.

I recently finished reading Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I'm not sure where I learned about this book since I don't seem to have it listed on my List of Books to Read, but I think that wherever I got the idea was in association with learning about Gurnah's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. I can also say that the book was excellent. There are several specific sections that stand out, particularly some of the conversations about religious beliefs and practices among various characters. Altogether, I'd recommend reading it.

Last night I finished read Blood over Water, about the 2003 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. This was gifted to me by a rowing teammate who was downsizing in preparation to move. There were some fun parts to the story but it was also kind of Privileged White Men Having Emotions. So unless you're a rower wanting to read about the minutiae of our sport, shrug. And now I should try and decide what to do with the book, heh.

I plan to start in on reading Lyssenko's Ghost next. I may have to remove the dust jacket, because it is slightly too much Solemn-Faced Creepy White Man Staring At Me.

Saturday morning, S and I biked over to the farmer's market. It was definitely in full swing for the autumn harvest. We got lots of wonderful vegetables, plus eggs and bread and milk and whatnot.

In the midst of our market shopping, we also popped over to the hardware store in Troy. Now, S has been keeping an eye out, for months, for decently large kiddie pools. He wants to use one to apply Evap-o-Rust to the underside of rusty vehicles; he will put a moderately-sized fountain pump in the pool to apply the Evap-o-Rust, and then the pool will recapture what drips back off of the vehicle's irregularly-shaped underside. The trouble is, the hardware store we visit more regularly has only had the small kiddie pools, and the small kiddie pools are too small.

So naturally, the one in Troy had the larger kiddie pools. Finally! Thankfully we had brought along a bike trailer and had adequate straps and rope to lash the larger kiddie pool to the top of the trailer. Unfortunately I did not take any action photos.

In the afternoon, after some additional bike errands (grocery co-op and credit union), I worked on sawing a large sheet of plywood into smaller pieces, to eventually build a new charging station for more of the rowing club's electronics.



Now I will get to figure out how to actually square up the edges I sawed. They don't need to be perfect but they could stand to be better. The box is going to be far stronger (and heavier) than necessary, so with any hope it will make up for those deficiencies by being a better size and configuration than what we used to have.

In the evening, I finished patching and mending a pair of jeans. This was an interesting mend. One of the main reasons I bought the book make thrift mend when I was in Berkeley in July is because it included a set of instructions on how to mend holes that result from thigh rub, and that's exactly where my pants tend to get holes, as is true for many other people. (the author noted it's the most common repair she teaches!)

Anyway, back in the grad school days of the Farmer House, I'd tried to do this same type of repair, but in that case I sewed patches with a sewing machine on the outside of the fabric, and the jeans I tried to repair at that time really didn't last all that much longer. So at that point I basically gave up on trying to patch jeans (plus I had decent access to thrift stores in AZ).

The mending book suggested using sashiko thread and putting the patch on the inside of the pant leg, then attaching it in a very systematic fashion. I liked working with the sashiko thread, which is closer in thickness to embroidery thread than to sewing thread. So we'll see how this patch goes. So far it is comfortable, at least.



Today I spent the afternoon down at the boathouse. First, we hauled some things down, including a new set of safety steps:



I was worried about how we would get the steps onto the trailer, but they fit very well, and the trailer load was manageable.

Down in the boatyard, S and I drilled a couple more holes in one of the rowing units so it could be repositioned to the center of Petrichor to row her has a single instead of a double. Then, S went out to mess around in Petrichor while I worked with my regatta co-organizers to paint a whole bunch of tiny trophy shoes:



It felt good to make progress on a number of things, although somehow or another *stares off innocently* I did not get any grading done. So I'll need to tackle that tomorrow. It is going to be a very busy week.