A Short, Blunt, Human Pyramid

Saturday's plan: first loop down to Connecticut, then loop back up through Massachusetts to Vermont.

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/54901197

With so many other things buzzing around in my head lately, I think I'll be glad for a day where I have One Job.

I've decided that it should be an annual tradition for me to gather up all my research ducklings for an end-of-year lab celebration. Conveniently, we have a day dedicated to research presentations, so we're going to just use one of the hours for our celebration.

In an ideal world I would have the bandwidth to make the festive drinks and snacks myself. Looking at my calendar for this week, I had to unfortunately conclude that I would need to resign myself to going to a conventional grocery store to obtain premade festive drinks and snacks.

Dear reader, the sticker shock. My usual grocery shopping habits involve purchasing ingredients in bulk from the grocery co-op. The co-op actually works really hard to keep prices down, with an awareness that everybody needs to eat and not everybody is rolling in the dough. Also, bulk raw ingredients and locally-sourced produce are inherently going to be less expensive than anything created and marketed by a middleman.

Somehow I was most amazed by the prices for a bag of chips, easily pushing upwards of $5-6/bag now. All told I still went ahead with my purchase of festive snacks and drinks, but, wow. Guess I'd better not develop a chip-eating habit anytime soon. More than anything, the unevenness of the price hikes fascinates me.

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Right now I'm in the midst of a supply ordering frenzy at work, and a supply ordering frenzy for miscellanea for the rowing club. It's a hectic double-whammy. You might be surprised to learn that rowing our carbon-fiber and fiberglass rowing shells out on a river full of fishing boats and logs results in damage to said vessels. At present it seems the rate of damage is outpacing the rate at which we can carry out repairs, particularly in cases where we have to order specialty replacement parts, sigh.

The ordering frenzy at work is always stressful. I have to sort out which of the various expensive instruments I might possibly be able to afford to replace, then go through whatever rigamarole is involved in getting a quote, sending it to the right person, et cetera et cetera. Right now I'm at the stage of just replacing all the consumables in need of replacement, which I need to do before I will have a sense of what else I can afford.

I'm also going to need to do additional parts management for my Bicycling class fleet, as mentioned previously. For that aspect I don't yet know whether I will be able to pay for things through work, or whether I need to set up a side hustle. The parts aren't going to be insanely expensive, but on the other hand, just on principle I don't really want to join the legion of teachers who pay for supplies out-of-pocket.

Oh, and then there's thinking about what field supplies we might want and need for the summer.

Yeah. Whee.

1. The spokes on Frodo's rear wheel almost reached the point of being dangerously loose. I'm going to have to spend some quality time with the truing stand now, sigh. At least I caught it in time? Maybe?

2. I tried riding Princess TinyBike to the Empire State Museum this past Saturday, but the dyno hub is making some really horrible shrieking noises that make me think some saltwater managed to work its way into the exceptionally well-sealed cartridge bearings, sigh. You might be amazed/horrified by how far the saltwater from winter riding can work itself into things. It's really bad, really.

3. Today during Bicycling class (~10 students total):
-Bent gear in the middle of a cassette (??!!)
-Pedal fell off - no idea how that worked loose, it re-threaded back on just fine, at least (whew, not stripped).
-A second bike whereupon the rear wheel ate the derailleur, like it does.

...I definitely need to come up with a fundraising/funding scheme for general management of the Bicycling fleet. Also, the helmet-wearing resistance of this cohort is obnoxiously bad.
Was sunny and warm better than last Monday's snow flurries? Or just different?

4. Planning for a Bike Valet at Albany's annual Tulip Fest is well underway. I hope some other people sign up to help run the valet with me? I need to ply people with food and drinks, but not alcohol, at least not directly at the event itself.

The old couple who owned this house for decades planted flowers everywhere. Those are their snowdrops that come up first thing in spring. (pictured earlier this year)

They also planted grape hyacinths through the lawn:



The hyacinths last up until the guy hired by the landlord comes by and starts the annual lawnmowing.

Useless Rhubarb update:


I have two varieties of tulips:


Some are Teeny Tiny Tulips, you can see a teeny tiny white flower from one of them in the above photo.

I don't think I'm going to get many flowers from the larger tulips this year. Plus, the bunny rabbits do love to snip off the flowers. If I had bunny rabbit teeth, I'd probably enjoy snipping off the tulip flowers, too. I don't know what kind of soil amendments the tulips like.

Next to the Teeny Tiny Tulips are some blooming violets. The side yard lawn has a number of violets embedded in it, too.

The violets all made me think about the Creme de Violette liqueur I obtained several years ago, so I also mixed up an Aviation cocktail for myself this afternoon.

Gin is strong, and I think that's why I wound up spilling chopped garlic all over the kitchen floor while cooking today's soup. On the other hand, cooking while tipsy is pleasant.

I thought I had signed up to go rowing this morning, but then I had one of those mornings where I had insomnia through the night up until the hour before the alarm went off. When I went to check what the consequences would be of dropping out, I discovered I hadn't signed up after all! Whew, off the hook!

But was I able to fall asleep again after that? No, of course not.

So I got up to start working on the hundred things that were on my mind waking me up all night. Namely, dealing with all sorts of Stuff and Things and Projects.

In that regard, I did a bunch of work rearranging various bits of rowing stuff. Well, to begin with, I finally ordered and received another batch of rare earth magnets, so I could finish the project of gluing magnets onto rowing trophy plaques, as seen here, with George for scale (and for aesthetic reasons, naturally):



The plaques got loaded into the pictured yellow-lidded storage bin, carted over to the boathouse, and installed. I'm so DONE with the plaques that I didn't even take an updated photo of the trophy wall.

( more on the boathouse adventures... )

1. Tuesday lab crayfish! So fun.



( clicky for that, and more... )

Because Cat News is the Best News.

Here's a carpenter bee that got stuck on the front porch on Thursday:



The cats were quite interested in it.



I released the bee back outside shortly after this video, and it flew off.

Part of the reason George is keen for Catio time is that he loves hunting and chasing things out there. Here he is with his favorite stick:



This video can give you a sense about how much he LOVES to chase this stick, except imagine this video is about 10 times as long and the chasing and pouncing are even more ferociously cute:



In fact, he loves his stick so much that when I tossed it into the basement to try and get him to go back indoors, he jumped back through the catio door into the basement, and, well, see for yourself:



Hilariously, if I keep George out of the catio and just let Martha out, she loves the exact same stick game. I think they like being able to chase and pounce on the grass since it's softer than many of our indoor surfaces.

Meanwhile, here's the part of the catio where George has been making his more recent escapes:



I tried wedging those pieces of wood between the pole and the side of the house, but (a) they're going to fall out, and (b) George just climbed up onto that window ledge on the side of the porch and then climbed over all my handiwork.

So that whole corner is just going to need to get redone, but that isn't something I'm going to manage to get to right now. But clearly it's something that needs to get done, based on how much the cats appreciate their outdoors time.