nosrednayduj

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.

There were various protests today, but surprisingly there was less wind than had been predicted, so we took the opportunity to put in the first 1/3 of the dock. It went fairly smoothly. Water temperature 54; air temperature 75. It will be more seasonably temperate tomorrow, and windier. (Unless there is less than predicted again. But we will not put in the outer sections until it is warmer.)

Somebody told me there would be a protest in the center of my town at noon, so at 12:30 when we finished I hopped on my bike and rode up there. I saw nobody, so I rode my bike around instead (8 miles). Apparently they were actually at the town hall which is 2 blocks away, and I did not pass that point. If I'd been thinking, I would've ridden past it on my way just in case. Anyway, I got a nice bike ride.

Last weekend I went to the "Fall Challenge Weekend", held in Vermont and organized and attended by various people associated with MIT Tech Squares. I often don't go, because it is quite a long drive; just about four hours with a stop to charge the car. But this time I went, because I wanted to be distracted from the current political situation. It did an extremely good job of that. Pretty much everybody who was there was in agreement and pretty much nobody talked about it.

Not only that, the dancing was awesome, and there were some fun boardgames and jigsaw puzzles. A lot of the attendees are queer in some form or another, so I danced with boys and girls and everything in between, and took the boy and the girl dance role randomly throughout the weekend.

The food was meh and the housing is dorm style and also meh but I coped.

I brought my bicycle and rode my 2000th mile. There wasn't actually that much time to bike in between all the dance things I wanted to do (and the fact that the sun sets before 4:30 makes the hour before dinner not useful for this purpose). Mostly the bike was useful for commuting to and from the level 2 charger about 3 miles away. The place is on a lake, and there is a 6-mile loop around the lake, which has some steep-ish bits, but is a reasonable ride. There are some spur roads coming off of that loop, some of which are dead ends, but before they get to their dead end, they go straight up! I am not used to that level of steepness. So I didn't get very far up the spurs. I've been up some of them before, and they seemed to be steeper this time. Possibly because the other times I've gone it was warmer (this is held at the same place as the spring gaming weekend). I seem to have a little trouble moving dense air in and out of my lungs, or at least that's what it feels like when I'm riding in the cold.

Earlier, we took the dock out the day after I posted about taking the sailboat out. It's been so dry, and they let the water run out of the lake in order to keep the downstream aquifers alive, thus the level has dropped, so we are just putting the canoe and kayak on the shore. Someday we will have to move them up on top of the wall.

Tomorrow, the garage people are supposed to come and demolish the existing floor! Fingers crossed that this project goes well.

Much boating activity on this warmer than average October weekend.

Saturday we went waterskiing! Air temperature 67, water temperature 58. My crazy neighbor did this without a wetsuit.

Sunday we thought about going waterskiing again, but the neighbor wasn't going to be home until 2:30, and I wanted to haul the boat and get it winterized, and I did not want to start so late. As it was, we got going with the hauling process at 1:30, and it took until just after 6 to complete the winterizing and putting to bed. My exercise today was walking up and down the driveway and back and forth from the boat to the house and so forth. And holding things at awkward angles for a minute or two here and there. There are just a lot of steps, especially involving cleanup of all the oily bits. It is our only internal combustion engine anymore. So there's about a gallon of gasoline left in the tank, and I think I need to wish it on the neighbor, because he still has gasoline cars. I will deal with that sometime this week probably, siphoning into a Jerry can so it can be put into a car.

Sailboat is still in the water, and the entire dock is still in the water. More to do!

Today we used our whole house fan to heat the house: it was 75 outside, and 65 inside. Might do it again tomorrow, when the same situation will obtain.

We have been having many guests over the past two weeks. We started with a couple of friends of Jocelyn's from Portland Oregon who were in the East for two separate family reunion vacations, with a few days between them. So they killed some time here, where I taught them to waterski. They are both fun people.

Then Valerie's grandson, who stayed with us several weeks last summer, returned for a week. Last year he had been very disappointed that he had to go home before the annual Sharon triathlon, and this year he arranged that his stay would include that, and he competed. He came in 45th out of about 500 participants. Not bad for not really training, and just running on raw strength and youth. Our house is on the route for both biking and running, and my neighbors like to stand by the road and play uplifting music (the Olympics theme song was rotated frequently into the playlist) and cheer as people go by. I joined them for a while, but it turned out that he'd already gone by.

I did my usual unithlon of riding the bicycle part, and then seeing how I did after the results were posted. Worse than usual; I came in last in my age group by about five minutes. Took me 57 minutes to ride 12.4 miles. Which is faster than I usually go; I was trying hard to never coast but power down the hills and trying to go up them at a faster pace than usual etc. But, there's a reason I don't enter such things. I'm at 1400 miles for the year, though, so I'm not doing too badly.

Now we have three others of Valerie's grandkids: the first one's younger brother and two cousins. The cousins are 13-year-old twins, and so we had to do the whole pickup unaccompanied minor from the airport thing; it was a big deal for them to get to go by themselves without parental units or older brother. They aren't here for very long, but we are making the most of it. There has been a lot of boardgame play in the evenings (Perry has been here on and off to participate in that). One of Jocelyn's friends came back for a couple of days on her way to some other thing, and she and the twins went to Salem to do witch things yesterday.

Then today it was outdoor activity day: we visited Jocelyn's aerial rig, which we lent to somebody in town a couple of years ago after it was clear Jocelyn wasn't using it, and Jocelyn and the friend (of course also a circus performer) did a lot of stuff, and the younger set tried a few beginner things. Then we came back, had lunch, and hit the lake for skiing (by the older grandson) and tubing (by the twins). I got a ski ride with Jocelyn driving, before she had to deliver her friend to the train to go off on her next adventure. (It looks like we will see her again in a week or two, because she left a large duffel bag which she needs to retrieve.)

Dinner, more boardgames, and playing with my cats, which is also a hit. Tomorrow the people who live here will be away in the afternoon watching Perry graduate, so the visiting small fry (medium fry?) will have to amuse themselves for a few hours. But, there's the whole boardgame wall, and they have permission to swim as long as more than one of them is down there at the lake, and there are any number of places they could go by bicycle or foot. I think there will be shopping at the thrift store in the morning. I think this is a random activity, but the twins were both excited about it. Then, off they go at oh-dark-thirty Sunday morning. The other one will still be around for another couple of days. His activity on the Salem day was to go into town and take the self-guided tour of MIT and then a Perry-guided tour of Wentworth. He's applying to college this fall. His impression of MIT: "it's big."

During all of this I have been managing to work a moderate amount, but I have been taking time for lake activities (I got a lot of ski rides with the older grandson driving when he was here), bicycling, and stuff, so I have been working less than usual, which is good, because I've been unhappy about the amount of working I've had in the past few months.

I reported on having put the power boat in last weekend. This past Monday we managed to have an after-dinner ski (yay late sunset), when the water was in the mid-60s, and I wore a wetsuit. Some struggle getting up, caused by wetsuit plus about 5 extra pounds over the winter. Skiing prowess once up was also somewhat lame but acceptable for first run of year.

Today, Jocelyn was visiting with a friend, and she can't ski because of her ACL recovery, which made her sad, but I talked her into offering the friend a tubing ride, and I talked her into "it'll be fun you should also ride". And then I said "want to drive the boat for me?" She was game, and so we did the thing of pick me up at one end of the lake and I drop at the other end so she doesn't have to make a turn, which is a bit tricky. So it was somewhat shorter than I would normally have ridden, but it was fine. Water was 72 this time, so no wetsuits needed, and I came right up. Then we did tubing and they both did have a good time.

Of course, waterskiing for 90 seconds is not really a day's exercise, so I was thinking of bicycling later, but instead we put in the next section of the dock. This is a lot of work, and the water is a little deeper because of more rain this spring, I guess, so it was working neckdeep in water carrying heavy pieces of metal and fastening them together. We did wear wetsuits, despite it being 72, because even though it's a lot of work, it is not aerobic, and you can get pretty cold standing neckdeep in 72° water for over an hour. And despite that, we did get pretty cold and we have left the last half-hour of the job for another day. That day might be tomorrow, so we didn't really put everything to rights down at the shore. If we don't actually finish this weekend, I will neaten it all up so we can get to and from the dock without tripping over canoes and dock parts.

I am sore!

So my work is kind of sucking recently. We have a lot of customer issues, and our customer support organization is inadequate, so questions that I think ought not to go to development do go to development. We need to spend some time training customer support better, and we never have time, so instead we are answering customer questions ourselves.

So there isn't as much time for actual development as a result. In fact, the current deadlines do not affect me personally, because I don't have pieces that are going into the next release; I only have pieces that are going into the following release, which means that I should work on those some time, but it's not heavy pressure about that yet. But the customer questions do get heavy pressure, because the customers expect answers in a certain timeframe (dictated by severity and how important that customer is etc.) So there's still too much work. And then my team is too small and when people go on vacation, they aren't available to help with the customer support issues, and I've been really feeling it the last two weeks. My boss was out at a conference for three of those days, and it was stressful because it kind of falls to me to do the organizational stuff when he's out.

Anyway, I woke up crying on Thursday about how inadequate I was being even though I really can't try any harder. I don't work full time, but after six hours there's nothing left inside me and there's really no point in doing anything except reading or making cookies. (There's been a certain amount of stress eating, and 5 extra pounds over the last few months, which is not great either.)

So my boss came back and we had a chat and he was very supportive (my boss is awesome), and I confessed to a bunch of procrastiworking (I am forever grateful to Chris Hallbeck on mastodon for publicizing that phrase), and he was complementary that at least I was getting something useful done! Although, not for the customer case that I was having trouble with.

So then on Friday I got a slack message from somebody I'd vaguely heard of asking if he could talk to me about our product, and I thought he was going to ask a technical question, so I said sure, and he did a voice huddle thing with slack, and proceeded to ask me how some internal project was going where I'm helping his team, and trying to find out when it was going to be done. Now, I had ignored them for a couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago, but I had started to pay attention to them over the last two weeks, so I kind of felt like I'd been doing my part of that, and this harassment wasn't called for. And I hadn't read my email that morning yet, and so I guess I shouldn't have said sure talk to me, so I quick poked at my email and found that his employee had sent me an email about "there is a bug" and of course I hadn't looked at it yet, and so I was like "okay I see there's a bug, and I can't tell you when it's going to be done because I don't know if it's a hard bug or something trivial and I just don't know" and I got more and more frazzled in the conversation. Eventually I extracted myself from the conversation and burst into tears. Unfortunately, I had a meeting five minutes later.

So I called my boss (who was in the car having just dropped his kids off at school), and told him I was really struggling and this conversation I'd had and I didn't think I could go to this meeting because I wouldn't be able to stop crying soon enough. So we agreed that I would be 5-10 minutes late, and I would go outdoors and walk around for 10 minutes, and then come into the meeting in case I was needed. This plan worked, and I was able to put in my 2 cents in the meeting. Afterwards, I was still fragile, so I went on a bike ride (fortunately the weather was great), and came back at noon, and then I got work done for the rest of the afternoon successfully. Including dealing with the guy who made me cry's bug. I think that if I hadn't already been fragile from the day before, I wouldn't have been so upset about this random pressure from some random manager who's not in my chain of command. But, why am I so fragile? I don't feel like we have a toxic work place. But maybe secretly we do. Like, my manager is awesome, and his manager is okay, and the director seems to be very supportive of people needing time off or whatever. So some of this is internal "Protestant work ethic" or "I have to be able to do everything and can't fail" feelings, which are themselves kind of toxic.

Then I kind of took my feelings out on my housemates, so they are less than pleased with me, but I think we're making up and it will be okay.

Things started to suck right around the time my cat died. Is it because they were sucking earlier, and when things sucked I pet my cat and felt better as a result then was able to carry on? Or is this just burnout and the timing is coincidence?

Anyway, I'm going to yoga tomorrow, and that might help.

And we put in the first one third of the dock today.

Late Lake news: last weekend we had a houseguest, and we took him sailing, and we ended the sail at the launch ramp, where we hauled and derigged the sailboat, and put it to bed for the winter. Still have a portion of the dock left to disassemble and also one kayak and one canoe tied up to it. Might get around that this weekend.

Another thing I hope to get around to this weekend is taking the gas that used to be in the power boat and sticking it in the Prius, which is our one remaining gas guzzling vehicle, other than the power boat. I think there's actually like 3 gallons left, because there really wasn't much waterskiing this fall due to cyanobacteria. Unfortunately, when I went to do this a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the siphon had junk in it, sticking to the walls of the siphon. What eats or grows on gasoline? Anyway, I tried to use a coffee filter to filter out the junk, but the siphon was difficult to get going (later I noticed a large piece of particulate matter that seemed like it came from the siphon starter mechanism, so maybe that's why it was so hard), and when it did start, it rapidly overwhelmed the coffee filter and some splashed onto the driveway instead of going nicely into the jerry can. So, I decided I needed a new siphon. Which has now arrived, and so maybe I should try this job, directly into the gas tank. Which I'm pretty sure has enough space to accept the gas.

And of course we will have the usual cooking and eating activities tomorrow. We will have a few friends. Jocelyn is going to her boyfriend's in Houston, but Perry is here. We will have 10 people total. I made pies tonight, and Ken pressed apples into fresh cider.

It's that time of year. We decided that late fall waterskiing was not going to be a thing this year, and so rather than waiting until late November, we hauled the power boat on Saturday morning, just managing it before the rain started.

Today I did the winterizing project. I have the idea that last year I had written notes about this process, but searching on several different computers did not reveal any files with "winter" in their names. So I guess I never actually wrote the notes. Today, I came in and wrote little paragraphs after every step. So maybe next year it will go more smoothly. In fact, this year it went pretty smoothly, despite the fact that it was quite windy, which is a headache. You wipe your oily fingers on a paper towel and now you are holding a paper towel which you can't just put down or it will blow into the backyard. So you have to go find the little bag with the other oily paper towels, which is held down by a stone, because otherwise the whole bag will blow into the backyard. It was kind of nice not to be below freezing, which often happens when we haul it in late November. It did take about 4 hours total, though, which is kind of a long time.

The boat is still sitting in the driveway, uncovered. I decided at 3 PM that I wanted to ride my bicycle to the grocery store and then make dinner, rather than spending another probably more than an hour moving it and getting it covered. Unfortunately, now it's going to be weekdays, and it gets dark pretty early now, even though it is still daylight savings. We'll manage. I want to finish this before next weekend, because next weekend is the Berkshires square dance weekend, and thus we will be away.

My other activity for the weekend was to go to a games party yesterday afternoon. I played "Three Ring Circus", in which you have to build a circus out of different types of performer cards, and then put on performances to get victory points. There were kind of a lot of fiddly rules. I got confused about what I should focus on, and ended up with the least amount of victory points in the end. It was still fun. And themely! When people were deciding what games to play and who should play in which groups, and this game was floated, I said "I think I should be playing that game." And other people agreed that totally I should.

Then I played "Micropolis" which is about building ant colonies, in which you get victory points for different kinds of cards that you play and how they connect together, and there are rules about how you acquire these cards. I came in middle-of-the-road of five players. Finally, I played "Shake That City", which was a game of tile laying for creating a city, where you get points for different groupings of neighborhood tiles, and had a fascinating mechanism to restrict where and how you could lay tiles, to make it trickier. Surprisingly, I won that game.

It looked like good waterskiing, so we got ready to go, and then noticed horrible scum on the lake. We had cyanobacteria toxin tests from a previous such problem, and unfortunately it tested positive. The positive line emerged nearly immediately when the water got to that part of the test thing. It's more complicated than a Covid test, because you have to first stick the water in a little chemical reaction tube, and then drip it into the thing with the test and control lines, so it takes more like half an hour.

We were sad.