nosrednayduj

Today's adventure was visiting friends and family: an old friend of my mom's, who lives in one of those all-inclusive retirement/assisted living communities in Marin County, and my stepfather's great-granddaughter, who is also estranged from the family, though for completely different reasons. She's the same age as my kids, and kind of got handed a tough lot in life by being born to a flaky teenage mother. Eventually she got raised by her grandmother (the ex of one of my stepfather's sons), which was a better choice, and she seems to be turning out really well. Unfortunately, her grandmother (who is only a little older than me) had a stroke recently. We visited her in the facility that she's in. She is, understandably, worried about her future and her chances for recovery and returning home, which the granddaughter says are not good. She needs too much care to be at home, and there's really only the granddaughter to help. I've been helping them a little financially, and they seem to be okay, but I'm worried about what's going to happen when the Medicaid cuts go on.

In the "nobody knows how bad the big horrible bill is" department, I told my mom's friend that Ken's funding had been cut by NSF, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen, especially to his graduate students, she was like "but they were only going to cut fluff" and I said "oh they cut a lot more than just fluff" which seemed to be news to her. She probably voted for Trump.

On the way back from Marin, I stopped in San Francisco at the beach, dipped my toes in, and watched surfers. It was lovely, even though chilly.

We just had some more solar panels stuck on our roof, since the original set is not keeping up with our demands, now that we have two electric cars and heat pumps. Last time when we got the solar panels completed, we had to wait until they were inspected before they could be turned on, and so until that happened, on sunny days we were just sad.

This set has inverters which are smart enough to know how much power they are making and to not give any to the grid, which we are not yet allowed to do. So, we get to use the power, as long as we don't push any to the grid. This is very strange, because on a sunny day it makes more than we generally use unless using the air conditioner. Usually we are pretty conservative about when we use the air conditioner. But now, as long as the sun is shining on the new panels, "it's completely free", because the excess electricity would otherwise be wasted. So we are doing things like waiting to charge the car until it's morning, so as to use the free electricity, and keeping the house cooler. This must be how people who are fully off the grid live all the time. If your battery is full, you'd better use the power in some way.

Hopefully this silliness will come to an end shortly. One inspection is scheduled for Wednesday, and then there some other thing that we hope will be fast, because we don't actually need them to replace the electric meter with a bidirectional meter; we already have one. But, they might be stupid and decide they need to replace our current meter with a different one.

Then we will go back to our normal conservative ways, where we minimize our use and push our excess to the grid where it would offset somebody else's usage and thus delay the need for a dirty peaker plant, and bank the extra for winter cost offsets. (Net metering is kind of a scam. A nice homeowner-centric scam. Thanks, MA, you did one right.)

Today's adventure was a tour of the town's water system. Valerie had won a bid on this as a church fundraiser – a member of the town water oversight board is also a member of the church and offered such a tour.

The town's first large communal well was dug in the late 1800s as a private enterprise for people in the town center area. The operation was sold to the town some 15-20 years later and has been municipal ever since. Originally, there was no water metering; you paid based on expected usage by counting the number of people in the home and acreage and what you were doing with that acreage. Now we have metering. There are 6 different wells that the town uses in different parts of town, and they have different qualities and so some of them are only run at high summer when there's great demand, because there's a lot of iron and manganese in the earth, and that ends up giving discolored water, which people don't like. The town uses about a million gallons a day in winter and about two million gallons a day on the hottest summer days.

There is an old historic building which was used for the original pumphouse that was recently restored and is now being used as offices and labs. They did a beautiful job on the restoration, saving old rolltop desks and original blueprints and pressure meters, some for decoration, some for actual use. Then for some of the extras, like they needed a large table, so they actually built one out of wood so it would look nice with the historic desks rather than getting some Formica crap.

We then walked over to the construction site of the new PFAS removal plant so we could talk about what it was going to look like, and where the giant tanks for this and that would be. The site is also where the current pumphouse is for one of the wells, so we got to go in, and there was some handwaving of where the pipes go and how they go through a temporary PFAS removal station and then return to have chlorine etc. added. The chlorine tank was not huge, maybe three times as big as my water heater, but I guess you just don't put that much in.

I neglected to take pictures in the pumphouse or of the construction site. But I did take pictures of our next stop, which was down the road a ways, of the newest water tower. On the outside it's just a cylinder; on the inside it's also just a cylinder with a flat ceiling pretty high up. The water is above that ceiling. Hope it doesn't crash down upon us while we are standing inside it! It's fiberglass lined, and has an 18-inch concrete slab as its base. Perry was surprised that there was such a high ceiling and that the water was all the way up there; he expected more volume to be used for storage. But it's really all about water pressure and you need height for that. All of the water towers are targets for cell phone companies to put antennas; the steel ones get antenna bases welded to them, which the water guy was underwhelmed about. The new one has cell phone antenna mounts built in. Which means that they can't add any more beyond the 3-4 that they've got.

The water guy was seemingly thrilled to spend a Saturday afternoon leading people around town, answering all kinds of questions we had, volunteering all kinds of information. Apparently they are having a labor shortage problem because there's some certifications that you need to get in order to work on or supervise water systems, and people aren't getting those certifications. Hopefully they'll be able to hire some more folks soon. They have reqs out.

The big pump at the bottom of the water tower.


The big pipe going up to the top of the water tower.

It's summer! Officially, even, being the solstice and all.

The lake is lovely, I didn't measure it with a thermometer, but I measured it with my body, and I would say it was 78 today and 77 yesterday. Unfortunately, after it's 95 on Monday and 100 on Tuesday, the lake may get annoyingly warm.

The boat is working, because we replaced the propeller and it now works great. I have skied many times now, and obviously no more wetsuits are required. The lake got up to 75 a couple weeks ago, so I skied with no wetsuit, and then it was cold and rainy and it dropped to 71, and that time I did use a wetsuit. It's completely optional, but there would've been a lot more yelling about the cold had I not used it.

The dock is completely in. The power boat was too close to it. It is unclear whether heavy winds yesterday actually caused the anchor to drag, or if it just was too close after we put in the rest of the dock (making the dock bigger). I think it was dragging. I got my mask and snorkel out and went for a swim and hauled the anchor block about 20 feet away. If it was dragging, that is a sad too bad, because it means that we have to be worried if it's going to be windy all night or something. I don't really want to go swimming at night. And what if we are away for several days? We have a new anchor, which is an upside-down pyramid shape that is supposed to be good, because it lies on one side and then when the wind moves it lies on the other side and the edge of the pyramid is supposed to dig in to prevent dragging.

Previously we had a mushroom anchor, which is supposed to dig in even better, but does not do well with the wind changing directions and undoing the "digging". We got rid of the mushroom because 30 years of rusting had made the place you stick the shackle thin enough to likely break in a big storm. It had originally been a 100-pound anchor; I brought the scale down and weighed it, and it was 75 pounds in the end, so 25% of it rusted away. With the shackle place being the thinnest and also most likely to have the rust knocked off and more rust happen, so it would be easy most rapidly degrading area. (It was alarmingly thin.) Anyway, it's possible that the mushroom shape does superior digging in, even in the sandy soil we have at the bottom of the lake. They are designed for mud where they really dig in. Anyway, we are concerned. Maybe we will try to find something colorful and heavy that we can embed in the lake bottom so we can compare and see whether it actually is moving in the next windstorm.

Anyway, while I was wet anyway yesterday after noticing the boat gently hitting the dock (no damage to either), I took my first windsurf ride of the season. Windsurfing is a pain, because there's so much set up. Of course I was already tired from hauling the anchor around, and I don't do it often enough to be good at the set up so things went wrong and had to be fixed etc. But I did get a couple of good runs in before I was blown downwind and had to walk back a quarter mile in 3-4 feet of water towing the windsurfer. That also took a long time. But, I was well-exercised!

Valerie's church organized a very small protest. Apparently they are going to do these every Wednesday at 5 PM for an hour, perhaps with different themes. Don't know if I'm going to go every week. There were about 25 people there.

Yesterday's theme was immigrants. Mostly people honked in a supportive way. There was one pedestrian who started yelling about Laken Riley, which I'd not heard of. So we got our phones and looked it up, and apparently this person was murdered by an undocumented immigrant, and now there's a whole congressional act about detaining undocumented immigrants if they have been charged with any type of minor crime. I'm like, you're more likely to be murdered by a good old-fashioned white boy, but statistics don't make good press.

There is going to be some big nationwide thing on June 14 protesting the whole Trump making himself out to be a king thing, and it turns out it's going to coincide with Boston Pride. Should be fun!

We had the first ski ride of the season today. The wind had picked up by the time we actually got going, so it was kind of crummy conditions. Also, the boat was behaving kind of oddly. Eventually we pulled up the motor and looked at the propeller and one of the blades was MISSING. How did that happen? I don't remember hitting anything. Could be that it was damaged slightly earlier, and it just took a while for something to rattle free and fall off, and it did that while I was driving down from the boat launch ramp to the house. So now I have to figure out how to get a new propeller, and exactly what to get. Here's hoping the tariff-induced shortages have not started yet.

New England has direct democracy for town government in many towns. Which means that anybody can go to town meeting where we decide on the budget and zoning laws and pretty much anything in the town. There are committees that figure out the important bits, and there's a board of selectmen and various other elected boards, but it's the people who actually get to decide.

It's a bit of a zoo. Because anybody can get up and object to something and make an amendment -- and they do! And then they object to the meeting moderator's call of the voice vote, and make us all have a standing vote. But, it is still kind of cool, despite everything taking way longer than it ought to. We were there for five hours on Monday night and four hours on Tuesday night.

Of course, in some ways it's really "non-representative democracy", because a lot of people don't go, because it's not convenient for them to be awake until midnight (it wasn't really convenient for me, but I stayed anyway), or they just don't care enough to spend their evening sitting around the high school auditorium listening to people drone on about this or that planning board initiative.

I go every year. I even get up and speak on articles.

We launched the power boat today. It was kind of windy, so there was no waterskiing. It would have required a wetsuit probably, because the water is probably only barely above 60 (I did not measure). Unfortunately, while the motor worked great for the first 10 minutes, it then started to run very rough. It's possible that this was caused by my not properly opening the vent on the gas tank, so hopefully it will be better next time. Otherwise, we will see how long it lasts before we have to take it into the shop.

For Earth Day I decided that I should go to a protest. I figured Extinction Rebellion would be doing something so I checked their website, and they had a thing listed, conveniently at noon (the train gets me there at 11:45).

It turned out to be a very small event with only about 50 people. They had a sort of silly skit and some speakers about how private jets were killing the environment (they are), and then we had a little die-in, for only 5 minutes. The whole thing was over in about an hour, so I just took an earlier train home. There seemed to be more people taking videos and stuff than there were attendees. I guess they just didn't really advertise it very well.

I hadn't known whether it was going to be a real protest or not, so I brought a "Hands Off" sign that was relevant to the environment. When I got there, nobody else had signs, but I was randomly chatting with the other attendees and they encouraged me to get it out. A few more people with signs did show up later.

Their next thing is on Saturday, marching to the state house. Maybe there will be more people there.
https://xrboston.org/action/2025-earth-day/

From my mastodon post:

It wasn't as big as the Women's March, but it had that size vibe. I did not get close enough to any speakers to hear them, either at the beginning in the Common or later after we "marched" to Government Center. Really it was an extremely slow stroll as the huge crowd covering half of Boston Common had to squeeze onto the street.

I hooked up with my daughter and a friend of hers, surprisingly we both had cell service, so we were able to locate each other. By the time we got to Government Center, other people were already leaving, having had enough of standing around in the rain. (It did not rain very hard, but enough for people to deploy umbrellas or pull up their hoods.) I was there until my train left so I stuck around reading signs. I had seen a number of them before. My daughter got a kick out of "Porsche: fast. Ferrari: faster. Tesla: Fascist".

Favorite new chant: "We the People! Are Getting Pissed Off!"

The friend had been to a few of the "Tesla Takedown" protests at the Boston Tesla dealership. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, since I'm not ready to realize the $30,000 loss by dumping our very devalued Tesla and then having to buy a replacement. So we're driving it, with one of those "we didn't know" stickers.