Friends

Raspberry season has arrived!





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:



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.



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


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


And the porch herbs and smaller fig are pretty satisfying, too.


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.

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:



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:



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:


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?



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.

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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:


Design on the back of all the shirts:


Shirts waiting while they dry:


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.

It was an eventful weekend. I got up at 3:40 am on Saturday to head down to a regatta at Rockland Lake State Park. I was signed up for 3 events, which meant 6 races total, and a very full, busy, wonderful day in the sun. I also got to give a Top Secret present to a teammate who is moving away: an oar blade painted with a map of our stretch of the Hudson River. Photos to follow. All of the races went well! Altogether it was a very smoothly run regatta.

Saturday evening S came to get me and then we drove over to my Aunt C and Uncle D's house in Connecticut. It had been TOO LONG since I'd been over to visit, and wonderful to have even a brief period of time to catch up and hug them.

Sunday morning, S and I then headed over to the Wooden Boat Show at the Mystic Seaport. I got him tickets as a birthday gift. While getting a bite to eat and reviewing information about the show, I noticed that we had missed a talk on Saturday by a guy named Roger Barnes, whose internet videos about Dinghy Cruising we've been watching for years at this point. Drat! S joked that maybe if in the midafternoon we went back over to the pub on the Seaport Grounds that we'd spotted, we might just find him there.

Lo and behold, dear readers, we did!! I don't get fangirlish very often, but I definitely got fangirlish at that point. It took me a while to screw up the courage to go over and ask for a photo, and then, of course he was as kind in person as one would gather from the videos he creates. Cheers to that!

And that's to say nothing of all of the delightful boat-ogling we got to do. And to say nothing of how you can check out a boat for a half-hour to toodle around on the water, for free as part of your admission to the Seaport. We had so much fun in a small sailing dinghy of a type I'll have to ask S to describe for me again.

I took a thousand pictures, but those will have to wait until I have a few more minutes to process them.

I feel like I have so much to be grateful for right now. My heart is full.