scrottie

One of my Sacramento-San Joaquin river rescues was a red plastic, textured ball. This was light weight and more of a toy than any kind of serious sports ball. Given other recent finds, I do have to admit that I do tend to investigate red things. Most bits of plastic I just remove from the river and that's it. This I decided to throw in the Person-Over-Board bin at the club, which is full of sets of plastic laundry soap etc jugs, each pair tied together with a line, one half full of water, to simulate a person floating in the water needing rescue. Sometimes the club does this thing where we lob tennis balls in to each other's cockpits, or try to. If you land it in the cockpit, you sank them, and they're invited to try to sink you in turn. If you miss or they manage to defend, you have to go pick it up and try again. So sportsballs aren't completely out of place. A few days later, yesterday, we had an open house. Open houses always have a communal dinner and hang out afterward (I managed to jump on the new club J80, the only one in the fleet I hadn't been on yet, aside from the Senior-only dingies, and the Lasers). One person had a small child who found the ball and was happier than a pig in mud getting strangers to play with her with the ball. When they went to leave, I told them the story and suggested they take the ball. They did. I feel good about that.

In other news, California is throwing millions of dollars more at the Rio Vista lift bridge that they're already constantly working on at night and repainting every year. This is just one of dozens historic lift and bastile bridges out here. The contrast in bridge maintenance between NY and CA is stark. Apparently the bridge is getting an ADA complaint ramp so I don't have to carry the bike up and down stairs. And the new bridge decking will be polyester-concrete, and I'm sure riding by traffic I'll get some of that in my brain.

Back in the land of signs that say "POSTED" on them in large letters, the Empire of Texasland. It looks like humans forgot how to build or repair structures about 30 years ago and civilization has just been coasting since, with the help of some imported modular buildings and trailer houses.

Finally broke the pattern last night of staying up until midnight PST then being woken up at ever earlier and earlier times relative to PST. If I were in charge of this shit, I'd run it very differently. Wake-up calls would be optional. Less like the military, more like a resort. There would be a buffet.

No students by the time I got to the club, which is right around 2pm with the train landing a bit after 1:30. Walking out on the Berkeley peninsula always involves indirection. The couple snogging on a park bench by the bay gets a wide berth. The turkeys get a wide berth. Give the crows some room too. There's the famous Berkeley Drum Circle and inexplicable meetups of 30 friends on the path. The Humane Society is right by there, which is lovely, so all kinds of nervous and shy dogs get walked, or if the dogs aren't nervous or shy, they get walked in big packs. Staying with my friend A and catching up with him at his park, it was similar but different, with martial arts practice taking place in the park, casual adult soccer games, people practising taunt line, couples camping out, friends gathering. There's no straight line through that kind of stuff.

Week day lessons start at 1pm. Sometimes (contemporarily and historically) I'll show up and there will be no students waiting and a bunch of boats already launched in that time with more instructors wandering around looking for students. Other times I'll show up and there will be a mass of students and no one else rated to teach anywhere. Today there were an abundance of instructors, three boats already out, one boat with an instructor and two students getting ready to launch but stuck in a protracted "dock talk", and no other students, so I sailed with someone else who showed up to teach and had the rare pleasure of sailing with someone senior rated, Camille. By the time we were about to launch (which took about 10 minutes), a student showed up, so Camille had him get and suit up a harness, after asking him if he'd done trapeze before and wanted to. Winds were moderate. Camille was a drill seargant; everyone demonstrates their docking and does it again if needed; everyone demonstrates their crew-overboard recovery; capsize recoveries; etc. The student is frazzled and overwhelmed and is no longer interested in the trapeze, so we do a hot swap in the boat, of taking off PFDs and doffing and doning the harness, and I'm on the trapeze, whee! It works something like this: I'd only done that once before. Technically people of my rating (junior, the popular rating in the sandwich of novice-junior-senior-cruising skipper) are allowed to do that, but not fly the spinnaker, but for some reason, we don't very often. It's kind senior insanity to just decide that *someone* *must* trap out. When we came back, there was one late straggler student, so just he and I went out and did small circles after a bunch of tacks and gybes. As happens a lot with students working towards their junior rating, there were almost-broaches, where he went through the gybe too fast and didn't hold the boat down (stops multiple positive feedback systems that culminate in you getting wet the boat laying on her side) and the boat violently headed up and nearly capsized from a broach. So, we worked on that. Gybing a dinghy in 20 or 30mph winds (was probably 12 or 14) and not getting wet takes a lot of precision. **

99% of the people I've taught I never see and are gone but a few are holding the fort in a major way. One is Gene. Almost every time I've been there, I've run in to him. I was his first instructor. He won't let me forget that I let him capsize. I told him to let the mainsheet all the way out before tacking so that if he went too far, he wouldn't capsize. He asked what would happen if he didn't let the mainsheet out [mainsheet hauls in the main sail which can easily wind up sideways to the wind, which makes a crap wing and a great lever when 90 degrees to the wind]. I asked him if he wanted to find out. He said sure. We tacked and capsized. It was probably blowing 24 or 28mph winds. The waves were half as high as the capsized boat. CSC is positioned just at the receiving end of the straight the Golden Gate Bridge is built over, so winds are like a jet. He's now the type of instructor who has a detailed safety "dock talk" with students before leaving the dock. I'm pretty sure that didn't traumatize him, and this has come up many times and I've asked a lot of questions, and often capsizing and recovering from it builds confidence in students that mistakes are ok and the worst that can (likely) happen isn't that bad *, but verbal foreknowledge is good too. Theory and practise have a yin-yang relationship at CSC. Also, ask a stupid question, say "yes" to "do you want to find out", get wet. (I do now generally ask students individually how they feel about getting wet and work hard to accommodate people who don't want to... but also, the water is really really nice right now.)

* It often happens that the largest crowds of students show up on the hottest days, but the hottest days smoother the winds. So you have this combination of not being able to sail and being too hot, so it often happens that people just capsize and chill in the water. The dayleaders are used to this and don't even drive the rescue skiff out to see if people are ok. It's a good time to practise righting boats, and some of that happens, but often we just bob around in the water with a half overturned boat. Capsizing with no winds requires intention but isn't difficult.

** Sometimes these boats will break free of the water and start skimming the surface, or "planing", but unless that happens, you wind up in situations where you have 28mph of wind and the boat's hull really, really, really wants to do absolutely anything except push a trench faster than maybe 12mph through the water, and the boat will do anything she can to escape pushing that trench, and that typically involves everyone getting wet.

One of the ways that New York reminds me of Texas is people overwhelmingly make great effort to keep their dogs away from people. People will be walking the cutest little lab mix puppy that obviously adores everyone and wants to say hi to everyone and they'll reel that poor little thing like until it is half way hoovering off the ground the moment they see someone, then pull it off the sidewalk at 50 paces away. I know people take dogs with them for protection and people train dogs for this and that is a dimension here. I think the only time a New Yorker has really apologized to me is when I was walking along and a hit a corner with overgrown shrubs and ran in to adorable puppy a couple was walking from the other direction. We had a whole slobber fest full of tummy rubs and face licks before they even realize what happened... then they apologized to me. And I'm sitting there on the ground soaking up their dog's spit while they profusely apologize. New York is no where near Canada all in all and the exception doesn't prove the rule.

So, conversely, one of the most wonderful things about the California Bay Area is people will show up places and their dog just gets elevated to human levels of liberty, running around, making friends, seeing what people are up to, begging snacks, getting pets, getting strangers to throw the ball, whatevs. Almost every time I go to CSC, I make a new dog friend. I've also made cat friends there. Hell, the squirrels are friendly. Somewhere I have a pic someone else took of a rat that crawled in my hung motorcycle helmet and took a nap. And out here in the sticks, there's a friendly tom with a collar who soaks up the pets and hangs out in the community room like he owns the place. I haven't tamed the coyotes yet.

Mitsu is still kicking. He's pushing 80 and still windsurfs every day as far as anyone can tell. I don't know what the story is and I'm afraid to ask, but my imagination says he was a champion windsurfer who immigrated to the US when he was in his 20s for the windsurfing scene then just never fucking stopped. He always recognizes me and asks me about stuff. Today, he asked me about the tallbike, which I confirmed I still have and is indeed in NY as he suspected, but not NYC, just NY state. He asked me how I come between New York and California; I told him Amtrak and he approved of that. He said he used to ride Greyhound a lot and I said I did too. As far as we know, he's been in the states for at least 40 years, but he still has a thick Japanese accent and my audio processing isn't great to start with. He was telling me about a few years ago no longer volunteering for a center, whose name I think was in Japanese, that helped new Japanese immigrants get their footing in San Francisco, on the other side of the bay, but that closed down because of the Internet, and the Internet helping Japanese immigrates. He hadn't been there in a while. He said ten years ago, his car broke down and he didn't have it fixed. I didn't know Mitsu had a car. He's a gardener specializing in climbing trees and he's still doing that. He feel out of a tree a few years back and was injured for a while, which somehow resulted in him running around in his boxers in inclimate weather a lot. I haven't been hanging out at the club late in to the night recently, but in the past, I've looked at the time well after most things have wound down and people left, and after dishes were done and all of the blunts smoked, and it's 11pm, and thought oh, I should go, then right then, Mitsu comes crawling out of the bay with his windsurf rig like Swamp Thing. He says he always knows how to find the wind, but he can't windsurf to San Francisco because the winds change, and you can't make sail changes on a windsurf board like you can a sailboat. He seems to realize that he's winding down a bit and can't easily go all of the places he used to. But he's still windsurfing. I don't think it's the still the case, but for decades, he sat in the tiny clubhouse and sewed windsurf sails in to the night. And if you windsurf, he'll talk your ear off about boards and sails and technique and the wind. The unofficial club motto is "windy, windy", from Mitsu's, "oh, windy windy!".

Edit: I'm probably going to forget to take my final exam.

Finally today got around to changing the little diesel's oil. Instead of a drain plug, there's some hose attached to the drain hole. I think this 500cc engine takes about two quarts tho really it probably takes liters. It's Japanese. Ran myself out of shop towels doing that so didn't get around to replacing the little in-line fuel filter with a water separating one. The fuel fill is in the cockpit, and I often come back to find the cockpit full of water because the scupper (still just one, still need to re-add the other) clogged. Anyway, engine fired right up. Still should put that separating filter on tho. Arriving this trip and finding water again, I had decided I should just hire the neighbors to check on things since the shower drain filter has failed me twice now only to find out they're being evicted. Took down the old, well worn, patch riddled mains'l.



The cherry trees are popping. I took pics but vintage point-and-shoot pics don't do them justice. Amtrak has a great view of the Rio Vista wind farm, with the windmills being barely identifiable in this blurry photo. In real life, they aren't blurry but they are still tiny. At this distance, I mean.



Suisun Fairfield station has an interesting to me vibe:



It reminds me of pictures of underground villages people have made, with little fake jolly old England facdes on small buildings, fake trees, and never remotely reasonable lighting.

Was going to go hang at Cal Sailing... but I woke up to a massive cloud burst a bit before the alarm was set and turned it off. The alarm, not the cloud burst. That was in the middle of a sustained hard rain. So I guess I should get work done today and try again next week. Problem with starting to do anything fun while in middle of grinding is my mind then very much gives up on trying to grind.

I'd put covered one of the portlights in Gorilla Tape brand duct tape (McMaster sells this as "high tack duct tape" and I love how they unbrand things and just pick something that's at least reasonable quality and probably better) before I took off last time after finding it dripping yet again right before leaving and not being able to deal with it. The glazing in the framing had gone so I tried re-doing that with silicone, but I did a kind of terrible job and wound up with a lot of large air bubbles in there (I tried to really fill it up and then slide the plastic in to the aluminium framing so I'm miffed about how I failed so badly). So now I don't know if the bad window glazing job is leaking or the bedding of the frame to the hull that's leaking. And the aluminium frame has holes eaten in it all from saltwater. So I guess my current plan is to pull it out, trace the hole, have either one or four custom (there are four this size tho the openings may vary slightly) new ones made, and then just keep a bunch of duct tape over the hole in the mean time. At least this tape comes in colors so I can match the hull so it's not screamingly obvious at a million paces. So while I've been getting buckets dumped from the sky, we're staying dry, minus the small annoyance of driving wind splattering rain drops some times in just a perfect way that the splatter makes it bounce off of trim designed to stop normal splashes and rain. And condensation dripping from the extreme humidity.

Edit:

Oh yeah. One of the two bus systems up, the Solano County one (Rio Vista, Vallejo, etc... stuff west of me and still north of the river delta), still has its route 52, which goes up from Antioch (closest part of mainland served by the BART Bay Area light rail) listed on its schedule: https://www.riovistacity.com/sites/default/files/fileattachments/delta_breeze_transit_system/page/2577/schedule.pdf . I checked the schedule. I checked the site for news. No news. Route 52 is on the schedule. Route 52 does not exist any more. That's a huge pain because strategies for making it in to mainland and making it back up here again in the same day revolve around being able to get there relatively quickly and it leaving at a relatively late 6pm. The other route takes hours to traverse. If I were king, failing to update transit info with changes and leaving even one rider stranded would result in the immediate termination and public humiliation of the mayor. People get cranky about their trash not being picked up. Have they ever *themselves* not been picked up, I have to wonder. Rio Vista now has one bus route left. Sacramento, the wrong direction for the sailing club and also a long, slow slog with multi-hour layovers, still has a bus that comes a few times a day. Neither run late or on weekends.

Jury duty: Assignment issued Fri was to *maybe* appear at 1pm Tues depending on whether at Tues 11:15am they figured out they needed people. At 11:15pm, I watching a Sacramento light rail bus while waiting for updates... no jury duty, thanks for making myself available. Foiled again.

Quickly caught one of the SCT (Sacramento County Transit... the rural routes) buses back to the one-third way point, Galt, where I had a three hour layover. Walked around the flea market more. It's extremely Hispanic. Previously, I didn't get away from the doodaads but decided to do a quick pass before hitting the library that's also right by the bus stop... on one far side (this thing is pretty big) is produce. Avocados in stores are inexplicably $1.50 to $2 each and at the market, $3 buys you a small bucket. So apparently only gringos buy avocados at the supermarket and they don't buy that many. A satsuma tree was for sale and a lot of people fawning over it like it was a baby. So far I've resisted the urge to push my way to the front and pick it up. Satsumas aren't in season but there were several other varieties *of mandarin oranges. I bought one then immediately forgot what type I was told it is. They're pretty good, with nice flavor and a bit of tang, but not easy to peel. I got two pounds, which cost a dollar. I may have to go to Galt more often. Oh, there's a large trailer making corn tortillas. There was a long line and I have store tortillas. Next time.

I was sure I saw grapefruits on a grapefruit tree but saw none at the market. Checking the trees in Isleton, one yellow grapefruit is full of fruit but another grapefruit tree I've stolen from is bare. Oranges are exploded now, in Isleton and at the flea market. I'll steal some later but I'm taken care of for now and I'm doubtful the yellow grapefruit will make good marmalade and it's hard to steal enough to marmalade from one person's private tree without it looking like a robbery. It's probably too late or I'd see blossoms or immature fruitballs.

One work task derailed me while I was on the train (which always has way worse cell coverage and way more tunnels than I ever remember) turned out to be a module that bundles up emails with their images as inline-MIME attachments running the images through the same (default, unrequested, whether you use it or not) template parser as the body of the email. And it took $company this long before I came along and tried to use an image where the two character template escape sequence appeared (not once but twice in the image). And the error was incredibly unhelpful. So that was a day debugging that module and slowly realizing the horror and continuing to fail to get what is expected to be a basic task done.

Work is in bad shape. Most coursework for the week is done. The thought of falling off the edge two weeks in a row was too much so had to clear that off. No more major running around until next week, where I promised to stop in and pick up the new sail. That might be getting up at 5am or something ungodly to catch the Rio Vista bus so I can make it there in time to make it back on the last bus at 6pm. If I hadn't kept them waiting on that pickup for a long time already, I'd make them wait until it was convenient for me. The Bermuda Triangle of Davis, Sacramento, and the Bay Area is surprisingly disconnected but also kind of surprising that it has any bus connectivity at all.

Oh yeah... the ride in after getting off the train in Martinez Friday:



That first hell climb I pushed the bike up after trying to mash a short time. That didn't help with average speed. Fully loaded single speed has limits and it looks like despite my repeated insistence on the non-plastic bottom bracket at the bike shop when I was asked, I got the plastic bottom bracket and I cracked it. The second climb was easy, for me, but my bottom bracket was already having a sad. They probably went to order it and saw the metal ones were out so went oh well and ordered that. I made three routes and jumped from being on one to the other to the third which thankfully had zero closed military checkpoints (thanks, Google) and got in at about 1:30am. Incidentally, I rode past three BART light rail stations but for some reason decided that exploring military checkpoints and pushing my bike up hills sounded like the thing I wanted to be doing instead. With a failing bottom bracket. Tho in its defence it did handle the 40 mile Nassau loop a handful of times and a couple of trips to the store before cracking.

Edit: The second climb is the Antioch bridge! Scary on a good day, it's terrifying when the famous Delta Breeze is howling. Thankfully the wind was calm *and* it wasn't raining, coming in.

Swimming is kind of falling apart. I may hop the bus in a bit here and go try. The indoor pool closest to me is broken. The most bus accessible YMCA involves an hour of walking each way in addition to the bus. (Indoor swimming may not be a perfect Covid activity, but social distancing is fairly good and the room is large and full of moist, chlorinated air. The New Yorker compulsion to be directly up your asshole for absolutely no reason still bugs me for multiple reasons.) That onlly-an-hour-walk-each-way YMCA has now for months failed to stay open because they won't pay lifeguards better than $15/hour, NY's minimum wage. The college right by here has a pool I figured out from very indirect means. Maybe I'll start taking winter classes there just for access to that, but that's one hell of an expensive gym membership. I keep blogging (not going to dig them up) about the flight of pools from the urban cores to the opposite sides of burbs. And this isn't even urban sprawl; it's a patchwork of exourban shit. CDTA's carshare program seems to have lost a car and moved another. I was avoiding using the car that appeared being skeptical that it actually existed (there's a pretty big disconnect on their car share program). Turns out it was parked on-street on the worst part of the downtown district, so getting out of there took forever, getting back in took forever, then, of course, someone was parked in the "no parking car share parking only" spot and I can't check the car back in until I agree to a thing that says the car is back in its spot so I circulated in hell traffic with everyone angry at everyone and especially me for an hour until that person fucked off out of the car share spot. So yeah not doing that again. And I guess technically it means there are 2/5ths fewer cars in the system now as far as I'm concerned. I was trying to figure out if the further-away Greenbush YMCA had a larger pool and looking again, it does, at 8 lanes vs 6 in Bethlehem, but Greenbush seems to permanently keep 4 of the 8 lanes out of service, arbitrarily coning off two of them and then with two of them dedicated to free swim, leaving 4. If you are not adequately up someone's asshole in NY, the authorities will assist you. (But seriously, lap swim in the bay area is worse, but at least they fucking open the lanes up.) Trying to navigate this mess has been a time vampire and it's kind of falling apart right now. To have any chance of getting a lane, I have to break up my work day to get there mid-afternoon, and things that require expended periods of concentration are what pile up. So maybe I'll try again tomorrow and hope to get in one swim this week and go to the further away YMCA that only ever has four lanes open? Maybe I'll try joining a private gym that only has a four lane pool and see how that goes, and then have three gym memberships while I'm trying to figure this out? One of the ways NY is like TX is that virtually every lake is completely private. The river is full of sewage.

Guess the other possibility on Amtrak than decaf was I was fighting a (relatively) mild case of 'vid, obtained on travel, despite some significant effort at minimizing other people's fouled air. Sure felt like withdrawl tho.

Cats took a few days from this to lull me in false confidence, but they've started this back up again, and I very much remember the stickh... boycat at some point starts attacking my feet while I'm sleeping and refuses to stop. Get up, throw him out, close the door, look around for mamacat, but she's no where to be found. Go back to sleep. Woken up by cat crying and clawing at the door. Sit up and look at the door. No mamacat, so she must be outside. Go back to sleep with a pillow on my head. Crying and clawing continues. Eventually after enough repeats, catch her on the inside of the door, but she instantly runs under the bed when she sees me move, and if I try to hold the door open, boycat comes in and she does not go out. Have to slip out, catch boycat, lock him on the other side of the hall door, then catch mamacat and put her outside the hall door without boycat slipping back in, which is hard to do when you're groggy, and close the hall door and bedroom door, or else mamacat will sit there and claw at the bedroom door and cry to get in.

Past couple of days, I've travelled along the Mississippi, through the Wisconsin Dells, past countless lakes in Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. The keelboat exhibit (with one very odd shoal draft keelboat with a kinda Mississippi riverboat with a stem) just happened to be on Blue Lake, where my father often took my brother and I to swim as kids. I tried to get pictures of some of the small marinas further out on the Mississippi, which were small, eclectic, beautiful, and reminded me of the Sacramento delta. Before Minnesota, we followed the largely untouched Columbia for a long and beautiful stretch. But now the water is brown. It's the Hudson.