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I've wanted to visit the Radix Center here in Albany for quite a while now. I eventually figured out that one of the more timely ways to learn about what they have going on is to keep tabs on their social media updates, rather than relying on their website or newsletters. Through social media I learned they were holding an Open House this past Saturday from 10-2. I convinced S to join me there at 11 am, which is when there was a tour scheduled.

Rushing over there from Yet Another Boathouse Work Party, at first I didn't really see any other people. Just a whole lot of intriguing vegetation, including fruit trees loaded up with fruit.

Tour of the Radix Center

I did appreciate seeing their Community Compost Drop-Off Station.

Tour of the Radix Center

And the Free Food table and fridge.

Tour of the Radix Center

While I was standing around, waiting for S and/or some more official-seeming people to show up, a woman drove up and said, "Hi there, can you help me?"

"I don't - I'm not a part of the programs here," I stuttered.

That turned out to not matter; she had come from a food pantry event where they wound up with a lot of leftover plums, frozen asparagus, and frozen fish. She knew about the fridge and table at the Radix Center, so people had helped load up her vehicle, but she wasn't strong enough to actually hoist all the boxes out of her car.

Well, THAT is certainly something I could help with! We filled the table with 6 boxes of plums, the freezer with tons of fish and some of the asparagus, and the fridge with even more asparagus and plums.

She seemed to know more about how the Radix Center worked, so she led me through to a spot near the classrooms where S and the folks from the Center had congregated. It turned out I'd found the rear entrance, not the main entrance. Whoops.

There was a small group of 4 of us for the tour, led by two of the Center's employees.

Tour of the Radix Center

If I tried to do a full recap of the tour, this would turn into a really long post. Instead I've tried to write reasonably thorough captions under the photos, which can be seen over on my Flickr photostream for anyone who really wants to know.

Highlights, though. Behold, this glorious hoop house, full of tomatoes, potatoes, and squashes!

Tour of the Radix Center

Awesome electric trikes for compost pick-up:
Tour of the Radix Center

Beautiful and productive passion fruit vine inside the glorious main greenhouse:
Tour of the Radix Center

Chickens responsible for the primary composting step:
Tour of the Radix Center

Full facility map:
Tour of the Radix Center

Community gathering space:
Tour of the Radix Center

By the time the tour had wrapped up, almost all the food was gone from the free food table and fridge. The Radix Center was very intentionally located in this neighborhood in Albany, because it's a neighborhood of great need. Meanwhile, the woman who had brought over the food, B, turned out to be the sort of person more than happy to tell us about her life story, which included a period working on the Half Moon, a replica of the ship that Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in 16-whatever.

I felt like I'd heard of the Half Moon before, but I'm not entirely sure. It was interesting to learn that it was built at the behest of a millionaire, and that after a number of years, it eventually made its way to the Netherlands and is now rotting away because of a lack of interest in and money for maintaining it.

I mean, I'm not so sure I'd have much interest in trying to keep it going, compared to any number of other wooden vessels these days. There are several other wooden ships that still ply the Hudson, so I guess that niche is still filled.

But it still feels important to know about, as another element that has been present on the Hudson River for some years, bringing people down to the water.

A somewhat silly morning of errands

Jul. 18th, 2025 02:24 pm
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Overall I have been finding that signing myself up for 3 rowing practices per week is the right level of commitment for me. Part of this is because there are benefits to having a couple mornings a week where I have some time at home to do things like cook myself a hot breakfast and tackle small house and garden miscellanea.

While I ate breakfast this morning, S and I had a bit of conversation about meal plans for the upcoming week. At this very moment we have a fair amount of foodstuffs around the house, but didn't have any broccoli on hand in the event that it becomes time for me to mix up a batch of broccoli-chickpea burrito filling. Somehow or another, this conversation led to the idea to run up to the Farmer's India Market in the car, with side trips to the grocery co-op, sporting goods store, and hardware store, before dropping me off at work.

It was good to get these errands done, although ultimately it was a somewhat silly trip, because we weren't actually able to get any of the 3 items on our "Asian Grocery" list from the Farmer's India Market (good Japanese soy sauce, giant cans of hominy, Salsa Lizano). Not finding any Salsa Lizano was the most disappointing; we know of other places where we can get the other two items, but Salsa Lizano has historically been almost impossible to find on store shelves, and I was thrilled to find it at the Farmer's India Market last year.

Somehow or another, we still left the Farmer's India Market with an ample supply of various other enjoyable things, like mango-flavored Tang, frozen okra, pepper spread, and the good kind of sheep's milk feta. And we got broccoli and other items at the grocery co-op, so we're set on groceries for the week.

We also struck out on finding another swim buoy for S at the sporting-goods store at the mall, but did have lots of chances to marvel at how many arcades were there, plus all of the stores that somehow still exist all these decades later (Hot Topic! Newbury Comics!). Best of all, we probably won't have to go back to that mall again for a very long time.

So now the rest of today and the weekend can be devoted to other things.

Two more things to read [news]

Jul. 17th, 2025 05:37 pm
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It's important to learn about examples where people have been successful in reducing violent crime. The methods might not be all that surprising, and yet there are still many places that could stand to better implement some of what's described in this article about Baltimore.

https://popular.info/p/the-secret-to-baltimores-extraordinary


Next up, today I encountered an essay by the Tufts graduate student who was abducted by federal agents because she had helped write an op-ed in the student newspaper. In this essay, she has written much more extensively about her experiences in "detainment" in this country - as someone who was ultimately released relatively expediently because the charges against her were horribly flimsy. Accounts like hers are important to read, because many of the people who go through experiences like hers never have a chance to be heard.

https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2025/07/op-ed-even-god-cannot-hear-us-here-what-i-witnessed-inside-an-ice-womens-prison

Who owns these prisons, anyway?

Double rainbow practice [rowing]

Jul. 17th, 2025 05:16 pm
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My timing wasn't fantastic for getting a photo, so here's the best I could manage:

July 17 rowing practice

By the time we got out on the water, the rainbows had disappeared and turned into raindrops falling on our heads.

Altogether, though, the water was flat and we were able to get in some good rowing.

July 17 rowing practice

And I am continuing to chip away at boathouse projects. Today I changed out oar handles on two sets of oars where the grip material had worn out, and got a small step closer to figuring out the next set of parts I'd like to order.

Things to attend to [news]

Jul. 16th, 2025 09:24 am
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In this first article, there isn't much for a person to do directly, other than continue to work on providing insect habitat wherever feasible. I'm mostly just sharing this because Dan Janzen is one of the scientists I really look up to, particularly because of his long-term commitment to the places where he has been studying insects for decades. So I'm glad he has a voice in this piece, even if the overall news just echoes what we've heard before about global insect declines.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-aoe

We are once again experiencing some wildfire smoke from Canada, although the particulates haven't yet *quite* reached even the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" category. I still noticed the effects on my commute to work. So it's a good idea to understand the consequences of inhaling wildfire smoke, and to appreciate the need to try and reduce one's exposure whenever practical.

https://theconversation.com/wildfire-smoke-can-make-your-outdoor-workout-hazardous-to-your-health-an-exercise-scientist-explains-how-to-gauge-the-risk-255812

I thought the comment towards the end about exercising later in the day was interesting. In Arizona, the early evening often felt like the worst time of day to exercise, in terms of air pollution exposure. So I'd take that particular suggestion with a grain of salt.

I was pleased to encounter this third article, about research on how climate change might impact the nutritional value of food:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250709091658.htm

This summer I worked with my students to think about how to make our ant head research relatable to other people. The simplest way is to present our work in the context of thinking about the nutritional value of crops we grow, and how that might affect our own growth and health. So it's helpful to have other research to point to in this regard, although the above article references work that isn't published yet, to my knowledge.

Ho hum [status, rowing]

Jul. 15th, 2025 01:21 pm
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It's both good and bad to reach a point in the summer with a bit more breathing room. On the one hand, ahhhhhh, finally a chance to THINK and get organized and whatnot! I can tackle more of the miscellaneous rowing projects I've been wanting to tackle!

On the other hand, those darned manuscripts and reports still don't write themselves, argh.

Focus, brain, focus!

It was beautiful out on the water this morning. The rowing club is reaching one of those stages where we're having the opposite problem compared to what we had at the start of the pandemic: too many people! I mean, not really too many, just...we aren't accustomed to having to manage this many rowers and boats at every practice. It's a lot. I'm talking, 27 people signed up for practice this morning, 9 boats planned to go out. That means getting out extra safety launches, and managing ourselves effectively when launching and landing from our dock so we get actual rowing time.

Anyway, given the numbers, I volunteered to be the second coach for the morning, and I think overall that made things better for everyone. On the other hand, sitting in my office now, I can tell you that mornings in the coaching launch are still not equivalent to mornings in a rowing shell, doing the actual rowing.

But I'll get back to the actual rowing again on Thursday.

In the meantime, back to writing an assessment report, whee.
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Yesterday was largely a day of satisfying things.

S was able to make plans to go sailing with P. This was kind of a big undertaking, because this trailer needed to have some work done on it, plus the boat needed a good cleaning, plus the schedules and weather had to align.

Towing the O'Day with Big Red seemed to go okay. S came home very tired and sunburned, but it seems he and P had a great time. On his behalf, I am very satisfied, because I know just how hard it has been to orchestrate this expedition!
Going sailing

Originally, I was going to accompany S to help with rigging and launching the O'Day, so I got most of my weekly chores done Saturday afternoon so I'd have a window of time to help out early Sunday morning. But as it all turned out, my usual weekly Scrabble game time wound up interfering with that plan, and S pivoted to launching from Henry Hudson Park anyway, so I found myself with some extra time Sunday morning.

That meant I had time to punch some ducks!
Punching ducks

Punching ducks

I've been out of ducks to give for a while. I'm pleased to have some again. Yes, I make that joke every time.

Since I had vacuumed on Saturday, that also meant that I could do some mopping on Sunday, while S was out of the house. It's easiest to mop when I'm home alone, because if both of us are around someone inevitably needs to walk through the kitchen in the midst of the mopping. The mopping was badly needed, is all I can tell you. I even managed to get some wood floor polish applied to part of the dining room floor, and now that part looks so good! And I even wiped down the basement steps! So satisfying. There was also a half-assed effort to clean some windows and mirrors in there, somewhere. Better than they were before.

For the afternoon, I headed down to the boathouse to try and tackle at least a couple of the things on the long boathouse project list.

I spent some quality time with some of the club's singles, mostly just trying to get a sense of their condition and what repairs they might need. This is partly in the interest of building a list of parts to order so we aren't just doing one-off emergency orders.

As part of that, I tracked down the riggers and seats for a boat that has been on loan to the club:

Matching riggers to boats

It is very satisfying to get all of the club's equipment better situated. I do enjoy finding and organizing things.

I also spent a few more minutes in the shipping container filled with supplies and tools:
Shipping container supply organization

There's still work to do to get this space better organized, but in this case I put some storage boxes away, and then got a small donated shelf moved into a spot where I could start putting painting, cleaning, lubricating, and finishing supplies on it:

Shipping container supply organization

You can see on the lower right that after a certain point I stopped trying to put every single can of spraypaint onto the shelf. But it is so helpful to finally be able to see what's here, most especially so we can get rid of the stuff we don't need, like the 800 different kinds of wood stains, and the chalkboard paint. And now I have a better sense of what things I might want to get so we have more of the stuff we actually need and use.

After that, I moved to the shed to inventory some regatta supplies. Here I am partway through the project of putting all of the regatta bow number cards in numerical order:

Sorting regatta bow number cards

You can see from this picture that we have lost some of the bow number cards over the years, and that people have industriously made replacements in at least some cases. Many of the replacement cards are terrible, however, and there are even more numbers that have gone missing in recent years. But it was very satisfying to get what's here into numerical order. I then did a voice recording inventory so I now know exactly what needs to be replaced and can get the replacements ordered in a timely fashion.

And really, these are all excellent projects to have undertaken, in the name of getting ready to roll my sleeves back up to work on manuscript-writing, the highest priority work project for July.

Fruitmonger [food, recipes]

Jul. 12th, 2025 03:02 pm
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First off, some photographic evidence of cherry picking and meeting [personal profile] mallorys_camera!

I didn't realize, until I arrived at Samascott, that you can also rent out Surreys there. This gives me lots of Ideas for future visits.

Samascott Orchards u-pick produce

When I paid the picking entry fee and the person working there handed me the list of what's available, I was dismayed to see that cherries had been scratched off the list! After asking her about that, the person working there said, "They're pretty much gone but you can try and pick whatever you can get."

I found a couple rows of sour cherries, and this is what many of the trees looked like:

Half-picked sour cherry trees

If you look closely, you'll notice there are lots of beautiful red cherries towards the top of the tree, and basically none lower down. It looks like people went for all the easy pickins, probably over the Fourth of July weekend, leaving only the fruit towards the top. Well, dear readers, it was a good day to be a fairly tall person. And also a person willing to walk towards the end of the row.

I did try going up a ladder once, although it wasn't positioned especially well and my feet informed me that I was definitely NOT wearing shoes with metal shanks in them.

Caught in the act of picking cherries

On the other hand, I was wearing a brand-new leafcutter ant dress, and it was an excellent choice of apparel for cherry-picking on a warm summer day. (though I hesitate to recommend this particular dress to others because some of the stitching was very poorly done and I'll have to resew parts of it momentarily).

It saddened me to see that there are a lot of people who don't seem to fully grasp the concept of u-pick produce.

Don't steal produce bro

But at least we could console ourselves with ice cream. As you can see from this photo, both P and I have impeccable taste when it comes to outfits for cherry picking and/or gardening.

Cherry picking and conversation with P

After returning home, what to do with all the fruit?? I managed to pick nearly 17 pounds of sour cherries, mostly without the stems, so processing needed to commence immediately.

But also, it was Hot, hotter still because S was doing some cooking in the kitchen.

So after washing a bunch of the cherries, I retreated to the basement to pit them.

Pitting cherries in the basement

Here is what 16 pounds' worth of cherry pits looks like:
16 pounds' worth of cherry pits

Not pictured: the amount of cherry juice all over my legs and on the floor where I worked.

I saved the final pound for making some Luxardo maraschino cherries.

Making Luxardo cherries

The making of the Luxardo maraschino cherries was highly satisfying on multiple different fronts, all at once.

The first front is that I never, ever intended to buy a bottle of Luxardo in the first place! I had gone to a liquor store at some point, in search of decent kirschwasser, and the person working there pointed me at the Luxardo instead. I figured I'd take the gamble, and, dear reader, I very much lost. Luxardo is very much NOT kirsch. Good kirsch is very hard to find. Frankly, I find the Luxardo horrifyingly sweet. So, not only is is NOT kirsch, it is impossible to use in any sort of large quantity.

Except if one is making Luxardo maraschino cherries, which are cloyingly sweet by design.

Making Luxardo cherries

With this batch, I was able to finish off that damn bottle of Luxardo, for once and for all.

The second satisfying element is that Luxardo maraschino cherries call for a stick of cinnamon, and I have some top-notch cinnamon sticks from my Sri Lankan rowing teammate (who also points out that much of what gets sold as cinnamon, isn't actually cinnamon). One went in and it smelled fantastic.

Luxardo cherries

The third satisfying element is that recently, a couple other rowing teammates were discussing how one teammate's significant other is exceptionally good at mixing up Old Fashioneds. When I asked him about why he thought his Old Fashioneds were particularly good, one of his comments was that he used Luxardo maraschino cherries in them, along with other fruits.

And so! One of the two jars I made will go to him, for feedback, and also because it's satisfying to give someone exactly the Right Thing. Especially when the Right Thing contains some of the liqueur I've been wanting to get rid of for ages. A very good use for some of these cherries!

By the way, here is the recipe I used for the Luxardo maraschino cherries:

-Combined 1/2 C sugar and 1/2 C water in a saucepan, along with a cinnamon stick and 1/4 tsp nutmeg. Bring to a simmer, then add 1 pound cherries and 1 C Luxardo. Simmer for 5 minutes, then allow to cool. Put in jars and store refrigerated.

Meanwhile, some other things done with the sour cherries:

Three gallon ziploc bags into the deep freeze. Naturally, S now says he would love a cherry pie. I might be inclined to wait before turning on the oven for that project. The cherries will keep in the deep freeze until the time is right.

Pitting the cherries released some extra juice, which I recaptured, because I've learned of another fine cocktail involving cherries, from [personal profile] annikusrex, originally with Maker's Mark, ginger ale, and sour cherry juice. My modified version uses whiskey (that's what's on hand), a dry ginger ale (lower sugar), and the extra cherry juices from the pitted cherries.

Tart cherry cocktail

So refreshing!

I am also experimenting with homemade dried tart cherries. Here's how they're looking after ~18 hours in the dehydrator:

Dried tart cherry attempt

I'm really hoping the dried tart cherry experiment goes well. If it does, I could very well go back for even more sour cherries in a future year. Dried tart cherries go very well in muesli.
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I finally got to meet [personal profile] mallorys_camera in person! In case you wondered, she is as lovely in person as you'd expect her to be. We met up to go cherry picking at an orchard in between where each of us lives. The easily picked cherries had all been pillaged, probably over the Fourth of July weekend, but we were still able to find plenty on the trees towards the back of the row. And I am 100% going back to Samascott Orchards in the future. Great spot.

For now, I need to go obtain more feeder crickets for all the campus animals. It never stops. And then I have a billion sour cherries to process. That's a great problem to have, really.

Seen around town

Jul. 9th, 2025 05:54 pm
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This large guy is, apparently, an Eastern dobsonfly:

Eastern dobsonfly

Seems a bit random to encounter one just outside my building, but when I was leaving work yesterday, there he was.

This morning S and I went on a little jaunt to look at a small piece of land up for sale in Watervliet (verdict: meh.). Heading to campus after, we biked past a shop I've wanted to check out called the Tool Box. It's a tool thrift store.

Tool Box

I found a couple of useful items, and so did S, but any enthusiasm I might have felt about the shop was quickly obliterated by the tone and nature of the political conversation the people running the shop were having. Sigh. The Historic Architectural Parts Warehouse was far more fun.

Good times in the garden [gardening]

Jul. 9th, 2025 12:58 pm
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Raspberry season has arrived!

July 8 garden updates

July 8 garden updates

Time to stockpile more raspberries so we can make more of that delicious raspberry sorbet.

This garden bed is known as the BBQ Garden, because it originally looked like it used to be the site of a barbecue grill. Our lease explicitly says we can't have a barbecue grill, so instead we've got the BBQ Garden. A good, full-sun location:

July 8 garden updates

The tomato, basil, and pepper plants in the BBQ Garden have really taken off over the past month, to the point where S figured we could roll up the chicken wire fences for the year. These tomato plants and the ones in the half wine barrel seem to be doing better compared to the tomato plants in the main garden bed.

July 8 garden updates

Oh, here's what's at the other end of that rope:
Garden time

In the meantime, the Dark Dahlia is getting big, and the lavender makes me happy every time I look at it.
July 8 garden updates

And the porch herbs and smaller fig are pretty satisfying, too.
July 8 garden updates

Overall I think we've reached a pretty good state with the garden and house plants. S would really love to take out all of the burning bushes on this property, which is understandable. But it isn't my top priority, because this is a rental house, and I've got too many other projects to work on in the meantime.
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Sometime soon I am hoping to start on the project of refinishing a lot of the rowing club's oars. On some of the blades, the surface has worn down to the point where we're starting to scrape through the fiberglass layers. Other blades have chips and cracks. Not good. Those things ain't cheap!

Certain things clicked into place during a conversation with teammates about how to honor one of our teammates who has just moved down to NYC for three years while his fiancee undertakes a pediatrics fellowship there. P mentioned the idea of giving J a map of our section of the Hudson River, with our usual landmarks illustrated, so J would remember his rowing roots. When searching online, he wasn't able to find anything of the sort, but that all gave me Ideas.

Here's the original dirty old blade I worked with, one of a bunch of blades I salvaged when teammates wanted to throw them all away as Useless Boatyard Junk:

Hudson River oar painting

After sanding the blade down and coating it with primer, I put the first layer of paint on with a bristle brush, and quickly concluded I didn't like that application method, for reasons such as what can be seen here:

Hudson River oar painting

I switched over to a foam brush for the subsequent layers, which worked well enough for this purpose. Oar blade painting is almost as stressful as putting on coats of varnish, except at least oar blades are much smaller and easier to reposition. When it comes to repainting the oars the club uses, I'll mix in a couple of paint additives that a teammate recommended based on her prior efforts to repaint oars about a decade ago.

I used SignPainter's One Shot for the major design elements:
Hudson River oar painting

Then some Sharpies and more One Shot for the finishing details. Overall I'm pleased with how it turned out! I don't know how durable the SignPainters One Shot is, but hopefully durable enough?

Hudson River oar painting

As I told J, I'm now hoping that he can convince his future father-in-law to come up with a good method for mounting the oar for display, since his future father-in-law is a really good woodworker. And if the FFiL does...maybe additional ones can be made for the other 5 blades in the pile? That has been one of the aspects of Art Oars that I just don't really want to deal with.

I should point out that I've been carting around one of the oar blades in the pile since the Texas days, so it might be another decade before I'm struck by inspiration again, heh. Still - these are nice materials to work with for the sake of making display/art items for rowers.

----

Project 2 came from thinking that my research students and I should make something to commemorate our summer of research work. Just based on our personalities, I came up with the idea of some sort of "Easily Distracted by Ants" concept. One of my research students is artistically inclined, and agreed to create a design based around that concept. After working on it, she got inspired to make a second design featuring the name of the ant species we're working with.

Once I showed the designs to S, he asked if we would like to do DIY screenprinting if supplied with a screen, ink, and squeegee. But of course!

On Sunday I picked up a stack of blank shirts at Goodwill, and yesterday I got additional shirts from 2 of 3 students, to print on.

The first design, which also went on the front of all the shirts:
Lab shirts

Design on the back of all the shirts:
Lab shirts

Shirts waiting while they dry:
Lab shirts

I am SO PLEASED with these. There are definitely going to be more rounds of shirt-printing in the future.

So now you have some idea of some of the things that have been keeping me busy lately.
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I can't even remember where I left off. Ah yes. I didn't even get to blogging about taking my research students on a boating adventure Thursday morning. That was pretty entertaining, but definitely kept me very busy.

Friday I got all geared up and went bike camping with a small group of local bike people. We rode out to the Beebe Hill State Forest, where we camped out at a leanto and watched all of the fireworks shows along the Hudson River from the top of the fire tower there. Incredible views.

S was going to join up with the bike camping expedition on Saturday, but it fizzled out, so instead he and I just met up at Kay's Pizza at Burden Lake, ate lunch (not pizza, they weren't open yet), then biked home. If nothing else that at least got S out of the house for some miles.

That meant that instead of more biking on Sunday, I could get chores done, and then we headed over to Wolff's Biergarten to help a rowing teammate celebrate her birthday.

I'm feeling pretty frazzled today, but it's the penultimate day for my research students, so my goal is to just power through the day. I'm having them come over for a pizza dinner tonight, plus a DIY project to celebrate the end of our summer research period. We've gotten a lot done!

But I could really use some down time. Soon.
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