nosrednayduj

Here, have a blort. I've been thinking I've been boring, but my boring is actually pretty interesting. There's been a bunch of waterskiing; we tried to get up on the knee board at a separate time, but it seemed like I'm missing some body part involving core strength to succeed in that, so I didn't try for very long, not wanting to break some unrelated body part.

Our summer house guest will be leaving on Sunday at oh dark thirty. I decided that I would rather spend money than get up early, and so I made him get Uber on his phone and we have reserved one and paid for it with my credit card. It's been entertaining being fed wild mushrooms – he is a big mushroom hunter – but I don't think I'm going to continue with that plan after he leaves. Also, he's a vegetarian, and I'm a little bit missing meat. I'm not a big meat eater, but there are a couple of dishes that I make with meat that I haven't had in a while.

We are getting ready to go to Germany. (They will feed us meat there.) Ken has a conference, and he is going with Valerie for the weekend before, and then I will join him for the weekend after, and we will go (not making this up) to a square dance convention. We will also randomly take the train to places and be tourists. I have selected the towns of Lorsch where there is an abbey which has at least one brick that still remains from the year 746 (and other tourist trap things) and the other town is Aschaffenburg where there is Johannisburg Palace. It seems like there's kind of a castle desert around Frankfurt, so there weren't that many that were train accessible and moderately close. Probably it will be cool, even though it is of a kind of blocky square design rather than Cinderella kind of castle design, because there will be nifty things inside. Anyway, we will pay our 9 euros and like it!

We think we've figured out how to buy tickets on the train. Ken and Valerie are leaving at oh dark thirty on Thursday for a flight to London, where they will stay overnight, and then make their way to Frankfurt the next day. They have some plan about all day boat ride down the Rhine. Not wanting to be left out, I have a plan about a one-hour boat ride on the Main. I will be leaving the following Thursday, but I'm having an overnight flight, which I mostly hate, but decided not to spend the extra time and many hundreds of dollars going through London. So instead I have arranged that I will be able to check into my hotel in the morning when I arrive and hopefully get some sleep, and then I will mainline penguin caffeine mints when I get up so that I will be perky for square dancing. Ken will join me after the conference ends. The conference is in the town of Mainz, which is an hour away; the square dance is in Frankfurt itself.

Ken and Valerie will be taking a car to the airport, and I'm going to go get it on the train, and then come back via Perry's college, where he is having his last class of summer semester. He has one final, which he will commute to on the train; everything else is projects. So I will pick up him and all of his junk. In the fall he is supposed to have a co-op job; he applied for many but regular jobs were not calling him back.
However, there is apparently some professor at the university who has some projects that kids can work on for their co-op time if they fail to get a job job.

On top of all this, I seem to be sick. I had some very mild upper G.I. symptoms yesterday afternoon and evening, and then I slept really well, and then in the morning I was slightly off but mostly fine, but by 2 PM I was really feeling bad with lower G.I. symptoms. So I took my temperature and I had a fever. Which I thought was weird. I haven't been anywhere. I went to the bank on Saturday morning where I spoke to a teller for a few minutes, and I wore a mask the entire time. Other than that, I have been riding my bicycle places and working from home. So I just have no idea how I could be sick, unless it's something I ate, but nobody else is having issues. And usually you don't have a fever with bad food.

Hopefully I will feel better in the morning. And really hopefully I will feel better by Thursday when I have to go do this airport plan. Also, there's a meeting with the customer tomorrow at 11 AM, so I hope I'm able to take that call.

Before the pride stuff we went waterskiing.

After the pride stuff we put in the rest of the dock! So we are all ready for summer.

I had the first waterski ride of the season yesterday, which is late for us. It's been a pretty cold spring, after a heat wave in early April, so the lake is only 66.

Then we thought we should put in the rest of the dock. I have notes from previous years that say that I should wear my thicker wetsuit when it's 66, because otherwise I get cold while standing in water up to my neck working on the dock for an hour. But, I was already wearing the thin wetsuit for skiing. Guess what? I got cold. So we stopped early, and we will finish it tomorrow, when the wind will be from the East, which means it will be calm at our shore. Today it is when from the southwest, so there are waves. The remaining bit is actually considerably less work than the portion we just put in, so maybe I can get away with the thin wetsuit again, but we'll see. Today it's going to be over 80 in the air, which will help with the water temperature.

Jocelyn is visiting for a couple of weeks, so she got to ski. She's been slightly annoyed that it has been so cold (it was 40 a couple of nights ago) because she's going away on June 6, and was hoping to do "summer stuff" here before running away to join the circus! I see I neglected to mention here that she got a surprise offer from a traveling circus in California, Flynn Creek, to tour with them. She had applied in the spring but not been accepted at that time. The tour season lasts late June through late October.

I'm going out in July to see her, do a little square dancing, and stop in on my stepfather. I have plane flights, rental car, and a plan for where I'm sleeping three of the four nights.

Perry is here for the weekend, to see his sister. He's taking classes this summer since he spent the spring having a co-op job, at which he apparently did extremely well. I'm not surprised that technically he was a star, but sometimes he has interpersonal issues, and apparently he managed to get beyond that with these people. So he's mostly living at school.

So I see that I have not been keeping up with posting!

Health update: I had the implant put in where I had a tooth extracted four months ago. It was kind of unpleasant; I don't remember it being quite this traumatic my previous implant. But, this is a rear molar, and so it is apparently more difficult.

I still have that stupid leg pain; I went to a different PT and they did different things than the previous people and give me different exercises, and they may or may not have helped. Thing that seems to help the most is not wearing jeans anymore, but wearing loose pajama pants. Then I did some mild trauma to it, so now I have a bruise, so it's making it hard to tell what part is actually hurting, since now I have two problems.

The fallout from Covid seems to be that I sleep an extra hour than I used to. This is annoying, because I already sleep more than the average person.

Lake update: we put in the first section of the dock today! It was 59° in the water. I wore a wetsuit, and Ken wore waders, and we learned that the waders leak pretty badly, so he got almost as wet as I did.

Bicycling update: as of this morning I had 666 miles, which is 1/3 of my goal and it is 1/3 of the way through the year, so that's great! (Then I rode 11 miles today, so I didn't keep the number of the beast for long.)

Kid update: Perry had a co-op job this past semester (Wentworth's schedule is little skewed, so the semester is over already and he's home). Apparently he did well at it. He will go to school during summer semester, and then have another co-op next fall semester.

Jocelyn seems to be dropping out of school before her last year and going to do circus stuff in San Diego. She applied to real circus schools, but once again did not get in. (Still waiting for a response from the final school in France, but not really expecting acceptance.) The San Diego place is a step down from a real circus school, but it's a place that she is familiar with, and maybe something good will come of it. I don't know what her plan will be about finishing her degree, but I'm expecting that eventually she will do so. I have explained to her that she needs to pay attention at around 10 years to whether she wants to do that because it will become harder and harder to get places to accept old credits as time passes. She doesn't know what her plan is; I think she's going to see what happens at the end of the year, like can she get a job doing circus stuff (performing, not just teaching), or is that too much of a pipe dream and she should give it up as a career and have it just be a hobby, and finish her degree and get a day job. She's been talking about physical therapy as a potential career, which would require first finishing the bachelors, and then going to PT school. So that's all much in the future. This summer she will live in Portland with her boyfriend; she'll get some kind of job probably teaching circus.

Last Saturday we took the power boat out of the water. Then we had to winterize it, because Saturday night it was predicted to be below freezing. Since we had never winterized this motor before, things were a little slower. Also the instructions for this one say to actually drain the fuel out of the lines and filters and so forth, and that was a pain. Other motors have said simply to stabilize the gas and run it for a while to get the stabilized gas into all of the innards of the motor. We stabilized the gas before driving it to the launch ramp, just for good measure. There was a brief time in which we thought we were going to have to hare off to the boat store, because we thought we had the wrong kind of gear case oil, but it turned out to be okay. It stupidly did not print its weight on the label, so we weren't sure what we had. Investigation on the Internet revealed that what we had was 75/90; specs call for 80/90, but more investigation on the Internet revealed that "75 is just fine".

Wednesday, we took the sailboat out of the water. We were worried about the future weather, so we blew off work and did boat things, since Wednesday was beautiful. The sailboat doesn't require winterizing, but it does require derigging, which takes a while up at the launch ramp.

Both of these recoveries from the water were made more entertaining by the fact that the town has removed the dock from the launch ramp, so we couldn't just tie up to the dock while we backed the trailer in and so forth.

Using the Tesla made everything more entertaining as well, because it decided that when Ken was trying to back up, that he wasn't actually sitting in the seat or something, and the car was out of control, so it put it in park. It printed a message on the dash for about two seconds, which he wasn't able to read because he was looking behind himself at the back of the car and the trailer trying to back up, and also because it was in a tiny font. Later, we tried to elicit this behavior with me staring at the screen where the message was going to appear, and I could not read the second line of it because it was in such a small font and displayed for such a short time. Eventually he figured out that if he put his seatbelt on, it was more likely to think that he was sitting in the seat, and he was able to back up. Meanwhile I was driving the power boat around in circles. At least I had brought my phone so he could call me and tell me what was the delay. When I was backing up the trailer for recovering the sailboat, I opened the rear hatch and used the rearview mirror rather than turning around, which gave me good visibility, and solidly sitting in the seat, and so it never bothered me. It did complain about driving with the hatch open, but it let me.

Then, today was way better weather than we expected. We had expected it to be raining, and fairly windy and gusty. Instead, it was kind of drizzly and only a little windy. So we took advantage of this opportunity and removed the outer portion of the dock. The rest of it we can get in waders, but for this we had to use wetsuits. The water is 47°. It was pretty cold with the water crawling up inside the wetsuit when I first got in. I squawked a lot. I also decided that I didn't want to do that again this year, so I took the windsurfer board off the shore and stored it back in the garage for winter.

I'm getting on an airplane on Tuesday to go see my parents. Nothing special, just been a while, and my mother has a dentist appointment where we are going to discuss extractions and so forth and I thought maybe I should be there, and we arranged her neurologist appointment to also be in that same week, although not as close to the dentist as I would've liked, so I will be gone an extra couple of days over what I normally am. Arrival back in Boston the following Wednesday. Sort of. I suppose 11:55 PM is still Wednesday. Although I will not be in my bed until Thursday.

I got disgusted at car rental prices, so the plan is for my stepfather to pick me up at the airport, and part way through the stay I will pick up a Turo car in Chico, and then he will bring me back to the airport will after releasing the Turo car. This is saving me $600.

As a result, I didn't do any organizing of Bay Area socializing at one or the other ends of the trip. It really annoys me that there is no Sacramento airport bus to Chico. There is a bus from the Amtrak station to Chico, which isn't near the airport, but you can only take that if you are also taking a train trip. Which I suppose could be possible, because one could go to Oakland on Amtrak. The timing might terrible.

Anyway, back to the exercise: I'm going to miss out on Lake activities during my trip, so I made sure that I got some this weekend. The weather cooperated. We had very nice wind yesterday and I got some windsurfing runs, and then we had no wind this morning, and so I got two waterski runs. "One for this weekend and one for next." Then, I hopped on my bicycle and went 16 miles today, and 17 yesterday. If nothing goes horribly wrong, I am well-suited for my goal of 2000 miles by the end of the year. I just rolled over 1300 today.

There will be some exercise in Chico, but it will mostly be walking, and it will be limited to before 9 AM. I might get a swim in some afternoon.

On one of the six latest sunset days (I was too lazy to find a site that gave it to the second; it showed me sunset at 8:25 for six days running, of which this is the second) (if you want to know why it isn't on the solstice, go Google stuff about the analemma and the earliest sunset not being on the winter solstice) we finished putting in the dock! The water's probably around 75 (I'm not using a thermometer anymore; I'm just feeling how cold it is and how loud I squawk when I jump in), so we wore wetsuits even though it seems kind of dumb, because standing around in 75° water gives you hypothermia. Of course, it was hot, so we had to make sure we were in the water most of the time…

Started the day with a waterski ride. First ride was spectacularly beautiful; second was not so good because some bonehead had come out and was driving his power boat in circles around the lake, and that was generating wakes. Perhaps tomorrow there will be another waterski ride in the morning.

And it was a successful start to boating season.

Yesterday we put the power boat in (the water's still too cold for waterskiing, so we didn't do it yet). Unfortunately I remembered a repair that I kind of want to mess with only after we put it in, when it will be less convenient to do it. Oh well.

Having hauled the old rotten moorings last year, we managed to acquire new ones of a different style over the winter, and used the power boat to install them. I turned out to not have done the right thing with making sure that the shackles don't come undone (I used cable ties rather than seizing wire), so we fixed one of them, but we had already installed the other one, so we will haul it sometime and fix it. But meantime it's going to be fine; it's just not clear it will last for decades.

Today we discussed putting in the sailboat, because there was a light wind, and while we were discussing it, the wind completely died. So we went for a bike ride and when we got back the wind had picked up, so we went to launch. By the time we were actually done, the wind was really quite blowing and it was a little bit hard to get away from the dock. But a quick sail back to the (newly installed) mooring.

I checked the temperature of the water, and it was 55, which is pretty cold, so we did not attempt to go waterskiing in the time when the wind was gone. The neighbor called us wimps.

So the fun thing is that we launched both of these boats with the Tesla. Turns out that its hitch is sufficiently much lower than the one on the SUV that it is difficult to get the boat off of the trailer, because it is too flat, and there's not quite enough floating by the time you get the car with the wheels at the waterline. We're going to try to buy different hitch that has a higher rise. We have one of these, but it is for a 1 inch receiver and we have a 2 inch receiver.

We started our boat work on Wednesday, retrieving the power boat from the shop, and putting it in its winter home in the front of the yard.

Thanksgiving afternoon we took the sailboat out of the water. It was not really windy enough, so there was a little paddling by the crew, but it was lovely and warm (55), so we thought that was a better day. No mishaps occurred on removal. We waited until Sunday to cover it and put it in its winter home in the back of the yard, because we needed to have Thanksgiving dinner, and the other two days were going to be pretty windy, which makes handling large tarps more challenging.

We hauled the other mooring before taking the sailboat out, and discovered that it was actually past time to remove it, because the ring to which you attach the chain was very thin. We are lucky there was not a hurricane with wind from a direction that would have caused a real problem. We could have lost a boat. And, this time, I did bring a bathroom scale down, and learned that the formerly 100 pound anchor now weighs 80 pounds, which is about what I had been estimating.

The final lake work this weekend was to take out the rest of the dock and pile it neatly in pieces on the shore. This work was made slightly more amusing by the fact that it was snowing. Not very hard, and it wasn't windy, so even though the air was 38, it was moderately pleasant to finish this job. This is not the first time we've taken out the dock while it was snowing... Ken pointed out that this was the first time in three decades that we had nothing in the water.

The sunset this evening (afternoon? it was after all before 5...) was spectacular.