/dev/mull

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.



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



And the Free Food table and fridge.



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.



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!



Awesome electric trikes for compost pick-up:


Beautiful and productive passion fruit vine inside the glorious main greenhouse:


Chickens responsible for the primary composting step:


Full facility map:


Community gathering space:


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.

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.

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!


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!




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:



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:


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:



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:



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.

First off, some photographic evidence of cherry picking and meeting 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.



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:



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.



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.



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.



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.



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


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.



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.



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.



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 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.



So refreshing!

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



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.

I finally got to meet 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.

This large guy is, apparently, an 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.



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.