weekend

[dragonlady7]

nuclear waste warning messages, long post

via https://ift.tt/3vrwxmv

somehow this weekend flew by, as they often do. Saturday, Dude was antsy for an outing, so we went out in the bright beautiful sunshine and startling cold (it was above freezing… by two degrees) and went up to Lockport, to look at the flight of five locks there. In the winter they turn off the canal and it drains, so the locks stand empty; the canal bed below the shutoff does have water in it in some places but it’s at least ten feet below the usual high water mark.

I took some photos with the point and shoot camera, so I’ll put those up somewhere later. Nothing particularly artsy; it was sunny and I couldn’t see the screen and really should’ve brought my real camera but wasn’t feeling up to digging it out.

The fun part was right at the beginning there was a boat launch and we climbed down it and played in the canal bed, like kids. There was surprisingly little junk there, actually– a couple old bikes, some shopping carts, and a years-old carcass of a chrismas tree totally covered in zebra mussels. Dude found a dead clam and made me take photos of it because he’d told a childhood story of catching a clam while fishing and his coworker had mocked him because clams don’t live in the water around here, but they do, and this was proof.

I almost feel bad– his mood was so noticeably better during and after the outing, I hadn’t realized how surly and sullen both of us have gotten in all this being trapped in the house nonsense.

We walked down past the locks– the original flight of five locks from 1825 still exists in part on one side, partially-functional mostly as a debris catcher now, and as a place for them to store the replica historic boat they use in the summers for educational stuff, but the other side they cut out to be much larger in like… 1918 I think? I forget exactly, and it’s down to two much larger locks now.

Dude said he’d once researched renting a canal boat and having that be a vacation, just sailing up the canal for a week or so, but had rejected it as too boring. I said it actually sounded kind of nice, if the boats are at all comfy– bring a bunch of handsewing and some books and lie out on the decks and look at the not particularly exciting scenery and mostly embroider and read? Not bad. I mean, we’d have to take turns piloting the thing but it’s not exactly challenging sailing; the canal’s ten feet deep and twenty feet wide and the speed limit is 3 mph.

Anyway. Probably we won’t do that, but it’s an idea. If I just wanted to mostly be enforcedly idle for a week, that’d be just the ticket.

I did get some sewing done, which was the other thing I’d wanted to do this weekend. Not the sewing I meant to do, but other sewing, so that’s all right. I darned some damaged socks, and I repaired a dress I’d upcycled a few years back and then wore until the seams started to split. It’s my fault– I added panels to the dress to make it fit my fatter body, and used linen for the panels, and thought serging the seams would be enough, but they really needed French seams. So now I’ve sewn down strips of fabric and hand-mended the whole thing far more elaborately than it genuinely needed or warranted, but it was soothing to do.

Last night we went to Dude’s mom’s house for St Patrick’s Day dinner, and to celebrate both her and her sister having gotten their second vaccine shot. It was lovely to see them, and I baked King Arthur’s Cream Tea Scones https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/cream-tea-scones-recipe for dessert, adding frozen blueberries– this meant I had to bake them nearly twice as long as the recipe called for? but I made no other changes. I’ve made the recipe before and don’t remember it being quite so… much, but I think last time I added chocolate chips during the shaping stage, so there was less stuff in them and it wasn’t so cold. Who knows. They were delicious.

The one errand I had to run over the weekend was to pick up a new bulb for my headlight, which is burnt out for some reason, but I failed to do that, so I had to drive in nervously in the dark with a burnt out headlight. There are streetlights, it’s not a safety issue, it’s that there’s a cop that hangs out in the parking lot of the karate dojo looking for people to pull over and that’d be a prime reason to give him, and this bitch has never been let off with a warning in her life, and it’s a huge pain in the ass to get the lights-out-but-I-repaired-it dismissal to work– who here remembers the huge saga when a cop on the Thruway gave me a citation for a taillight and the town court of Canajoharie told me my I-fixed-it form had been received and then reported me for not showing up to court anyway? My god that whole thing took like five years off my life I think. I’m going to die at 92 shaking my fist like “canajoharie…. i coulda made it to 97 you bastards…”

anyway.

Did I write a single word? No. Ha.

Apparently this week there’s a big trade show my supervisor will be attending remotely via Zoom so I have to somehow do his job while he’s in the room, which will be fantastic. Yes he’s now vaccinated but I still don’t feel like i can just go work in a tiny unventilated room while he’s there. I guess why can’t I? I guess I can. It’s been two weeks since his second shot. So I guess this is where I realize that I don’t need to have my own closet anymore. Weird.

I don’t know how to live post-pandemic, especially when it’s very much not post for me. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[galadhir]

Oh, we did rent a canal boat last summer because it was one of the very few socially distanced holidays available. I can totally recommend it, and it's not as boring as you think because there's usually a lot of locks that you've got to go up or down. You've got to consider whether you're going to moor up in places from which you can walk into town to buy lunch or dinner. You might pass moored-up boats selling pizza or coffee and decide to stop - in which case there's all the manouvering into the side and jumping off and securing ropes etc. And then there have to be stops to refill your water tanks and pump out your toilet tanks, which usually happen at chandleries where you can also have a snack :)

And yeah there are also hours of uninterrupted cruising. I took a melodeon with me - I'd wanted to learn to play it for years and a week of spending two or three hours a day practicing absolutely did the trick. I imagine it would also be a good environment for writing or painting or knitting... or whatever.

We enjoyed it so much that we're doing it again this year.

[dragonlady7]

See, our canals here... our geography here... is likely quite different. The Erie Canal has a stretch where... well, there are two locks at Lockport to navigate a huge geographical feature, and then there's not another lock until Bridgeport, which is east of Rochester, which is... it's probably 70 miles between those two locks.

The canal's heyday was over by 1950. It's now only used for pleasure boats. The towns along it have mostly died and moved. The ruins are down to foundations.
I'd have to research, but. It's not exactly bustling. I think we'd have to drive or take the train to Syracuse (150 miles east of here) to pick up a boat, and it would likely head eastward as there's more geography there; most of the locks are that way. But I don't know that there's much even that way, near the canals.

Out of interest, have you ever heard the folksong that goes "I got a mule, her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal"-- I am always curious how widely that one has traveled, as sometimes overseas people have heard it and sometimes not! Anyway this is that canal, which is 300 miles long and something of an engineering marvel for its time.

[galadhir]

I haven't heard that song, but I am not actually very well versed in folk songs, even though I should be since the morris scene and the folk music scene are highly adjacent. But yes, I hadn't considered that your canals might be to our canals as your roads are to ours. Are they straight, for example? One of the nice things about just cruising on the canals is when you come round a corner and suddenly see something new, or the hilarity caused by three 70ft boats trying to get round the same bend at once. It definitely wouldn't be as much fun if there weren't regular places you could stop to tie up and have a cup of tea, but you'd certainly get a lot of sewing done!

[dragonlady7]

heh. the erie canal is about 300 miles and has basically no turns in it anywhere. it's a straight, slightly wavering line that only squiggles a tiny bit once it joins up with the Mohawk River.
It's... not quaint, LOL.

[galadhir]

Oh yes, that does make for a very different experience. OTOH, what with covid and never seeing anything but work and home for a year, I'd still snatch at any kind of holiday. We are taking a camper van out to an air show some time next month, and just the idea of parking in a field and looking at some distant aircraft is thrilling after having been so understimulated the past year.