Making it through another year '21-'23

[Old Greenhorn]

I am ignoring the mentioning of grits, it's just my policy, sorry. (The voice in the back of my head says "Do NOT ENGAGE!")

 I did however, get the license and go through some gear (I have a lot) and picked out some of the rotten stuff, but it would take me a half day to sort it all and figure a tackle box setup for the reservoir. In the 33 years I have lived a mile from this reservoir, I just never got around to that detail, just grabbed what was handy. I don't have a boat there and never caught anything of consequence walking from shore. There are plenty of big fish in there, big browns, steelhead, walleyes, and others, but none have met me yet.
 So I dug a few worms and headed over for a little while and just set up a chair in a poor spot. There was a big crowd of noisy folks where I wanted to be, so I went around the bend into a cove where it was quieter. I tossed a couple of worms and they lived about 5 seconds before the little guys poached them. Switched to bigger floating plugs with diver lips and got nothing. I tried several colors and sizes....zippo. So I resolved to just sit and enjoy the non-raining afternoon. I watched some bugs get consumed off the water surface. Lots of small fish.
 Eventually the skeeters got to be more than I could stand and that noisy crowd had a good echo working off the trees across the cove from me.  Next time I will pick a less traveled spot, which means a good walk in, which means I need to get my kit a little better put together for the walking part. Its a big reservoir, lots of walking in.
 Eh, it was a start anyway.
 Today I have to get my stuff together for the workshop tomorrow and get it all in the truck. Now they say somebody else is going to hack those logs in half because I am not covered under their insurance. I think it's ironic that they believe it is safer to have a guy that hardly ever picks up a chainsaw do a job while a guy who runs a saw every day stands there and watches. Whatever, I don't care, it's their party.

[Bert]

Rash and just feeling down and out? My mother just went though something similar and turned out to be Lyme. She doesn't recall the tick. Just wanted to through it out there. Might be worth the test. 

[Resonator]

I attended an online zoom session on Ginseng harvesting, cultivation, regulations, and all that stuff, which was interesting. One of these days I may look further into that ($500./lb.!!).

$500 a pound sounds like wild ginseng, not cultivated. I live in the Marathon co. WI, regarded as the ginseng capital of the world, and growers here are getting $30 to $50 a pound. You have to wait 4 to 5 years to harvest it, (if the bugs, mold, weeds, and bad weather doesn't get it :D) and once you grow it on a plot of land, you can't grow it there again.

[Old Greenhorn]

Well it was a long day yesterday, but easy 'work', meaning I really did nothing. ;D Left the house at 7 and got to the Museum at 7:30 to help setting up for the day. The Cornell expert arrived, and the boat had gotten to the dock Friday around 6:30pm after sailing down on the second leg from Hudson, not much wind made for a long trip.
 SO there was a lot of stuff to set up for inoculating and they were teaching 3 different types of Mushroom cultivation: Shitake's, Lions Mane, and [i forget]. Broken into groups they did the log drilling, inoculating and waxing and one side, and the other cultivation on the other side. 


 

The log drilling station:


 

We set up and worked under the shadow of the last remaining steam tug bug from New York Harbor, The Mathilde, which has been at the museum since the mid 80's.


 
I am wondering if @BargeMonkey  ran around on this one for a while? ;D Certainly he knows the company well.



 

All went well and there were lots of happy people. I answered a lot of questions about log harvesting here and there. Around noon they took a lunch break, then around 1 we began loading the boat using everyone in the class and even a few folks walking by who joined in. With a bucket brigade setup we just passed them along across the grass, over the bulkhead, then dock up onto the boat then down in the hold. So I got to take the front of the line and pick up off the pile, giving me one last opportunity to lift EVERY log one last time. :D They took everything we had, so about 280 logs, in about 25 minutes.
 Then the Captain gave a little talk about the boat and invited folks on board to look it over.


 

It was full high tide when we were loading and the Captain was anxious to get underway and catch that ebb tide to get down-bound asap. While we cleaned up the mess we made, he and the crew got the boom crutches stowed and cargo secured, 15,000 pounds of logs, maple syrup, honey, brewing hops, some river mail, and other stuff is loaded on this run. I followed the progress on the ship tracking APP and they finally tied up in Poughkeepsie at 11:30 last night. Next leg to Newburgh/Beacon today and they got underway at 6:30 or so. I believe they have another event to make.
 Anyway, I left the museum around 4 and grabbed a little food, then headed over to some kind of Brass Band music fest across town. A friend was running their first aid group and asked me if I could come fill in for a cancellation last minute. 


 
So I played EMT for 4 or 5 hours and got home between 9 and 10. They had about 400 folks on a working farm and plenty of loud music.
 Long day, I have to unload the truck this morning. We had more rain overnight and the air is really heavy this morning. Not sure what I'll do today, but I'll do something.

[Nebraska]

Sounded like a good day,

[Old Greenhorn]

Sounded like a good day,

Well I did get a sunburn on top of my suntan. ;D
Funny thing i forget mention: They decided a couple of days before the event that we needed to cut about 25 logs in half and I offered to make a short sawbuck and do that. But apparently there was a big deal with me using a chainsaw on their property with respect to liability and insurance. I am not an 'employee', so the Captain who works at the Museum, had to do the cutting. I didn't care, but rather than have a guy with the proper gear on and a good saw get this done, we had a guy in bare feet with no other gear using a little battery chainsaw do the cutting because he was insured and I wasn't. That didn't make a lot of sense to me, but apparently they found that to be acceptable. :D The lawyers run the world and common sense is nowhere to be found. ;D

[doc henderson]

neat!  wish I was closer.   8)

[aigheadish]

Did you ask for volunteers to bucket brigade logs in the woods? 

That all sounds like a neat day. The romance of that ship seems really cool!

[Old Greenhorn]

There were no 'volunteers in the woods that didn't have 4 legs, and of those, the ones big enough to lift a log were big, furry, and black and would have been hard to train, so I avoided them. :D :D I only had a helper one day. The day the video guy came up he didn't lift a finger except to do his work.

 Yes, it's a nice boat, steel hull, sleek lines and very nicely done rigging. I admit it tore at me a little bit and I mentioned to the Captain that if he ever came up short on crew he might give me a holler. He seemed to be pleased to put me on his backup list. I had tracked the boat down bound Saturday night and could se they retally had to work the second half of that leg to hit their tie up by midnight. There was a LOT of tacking involved to hold that 3MPH breeze. The next morning they were off at 6:30 and made their dockage in Newburgh by early afternoon. I had been texting all along with the Captain and it turned out they were 24 hours ahead of schedule so had a day to kill with boat work until their appointment today at noon. Time moves very differently on a boat, especially under sail. If you are in a hurry, you shouldn't be in a boat, especially a Bald headed Gaff rigged schooner. Still, I wouldn't mind spending what will probably be 2 weeks or so in bare feet crewing on a boat such as this.

 If you go to this LINK and click on the 24 hour or 7 day track, you can see how much they had to do in working with the breeze which I don't think got over 4mph in the last few days.

[aigheadish]

I don't know that I'd do well on that kind of ship but as I mentioned the romance of it is pretty cool. I'm reading Robinson Crusoe right now and while it doesn't go deep into sailing across the ocean it does make one think about how crazy an idea that is. And, it was mentioned (could be baloney, I guess) like 4-6 months to make it across the Atlantic. I can't imagine.

Stepping back in time, with the boat you are talking about, has got to be interesting, and it's cool that it sounds like you are making a friend with the captain. I bet he calls on you some day soon!

Am I seeing the tracking thing correctly that it took a week to get what I assume would take an hour or two in the car? Does that river flow the wrong way or am I misreading it? 40ish miles? Weird!

[Old Greenhorn]

Last question first, I am not sure how you configured the tracker so I don't know what you are seeing, but it took about 8 hours to travel [very] roughly 20 miles on Saturday night, and a little less for around 15 or more miles on Sunday. They had almost no wind, and that is a tidal river, so when down bound you want to catch the ebb tide, and upbound you want to catch the flood tide. There is little way to find this unless you have favorable winds of decent velocity. There are also come merge points and very tricky bights in that river one would want to hit at just the right time in the tidal cycle because of the odd currents. If you zoom in on the plot, then click on one of the icons along the route (the little sail boat) it will pop up a window with the speed, heading and time, so you can just look at a a bunch of those to figure time and distance traveled or pick the beginning and end of a leg to see the overall time difference. I really don't know very much about traveling under sail though. I do know a little about boats, having been raised on one for the 1st 7 years of my life.
 As for sailing big water; I am Norwegian and my Grandfather was raised in the old country. When he was a boy(late 1880's)they all went to school and worked the farm until they were 14 years old, then the males were expected to spend a year at Sea and upon returning home decide where they wanted to spend their life, farming or on the sea. That was just before steam really became something viable, so he was on a large 3 masted schooner running cargo from the west coast of Europe around The Horn up into the middle east and India. In his first year they spent 2 months becalmed in the middle of the Indian Ocean. That was enough for him. When he returned home he began plotting a way to get to the USA and he started studying steam engines. In 1893 he emigrated and also earned his license as a steam engineer running the big steam power and heat generators that supplied heat (and later power) to many of the big office buildings in NYC. His main office was 2 blocks away from where some crazy guy named Tesla used to have his shop and he met him when he was feeding the pigeons at lunch time one day. They struck up an acquaintance and there is another story for another time.
 At rate, travel by sail is a whole different world. ;D

[HemlockKing]

Thanks for sharing that tid bit of your grandfathers history, interesting. Norwegian. Aren't they use to the rain and overcast skies?  :D
I don't know where my blood is from Britain I think but I do know my family has been in Nova Scotia since the American revolution, loyalist and all. Nickerson in both sides of my family. 

[Old Greenhorn]

Thanks for sharing that tid bit of your grandfathers history, interesting. Norwegian. Aren't they use to the rain and overcast skies?  :D
.....

Used to it, yes. Happy with it....NO. Actually 'my people' (including me) are most happy with clear cold and snowy weather, stormy seas are just another day too, but constant rain and mud is definitely on our list 'happy places'. I don't much care for freezing sea spray either, that scares me. There is no bad weather, just bad clothes. ;D

[BargeMonkey]

I never worked for Mac, 3yrs at Moran and Reinauer for 10yrs. I've been up the Roundout a few times. Spent more time in Feeneys fixing the boat than we did running the boat. A couple guys from Dann Ocean and I "caught" a barge that broke away one weekend, Tim sent us down to Mariners and we crawled thru the gate that night 😄 

[Old Greenhorn]

Funny, it was tough spending a day baking in the sun on the creek and not going up to Mariner's at the end of the day to 'cool off'. It was only 100 yards away. I had another place I had to be. Haven't sat at their bar in about 3 years now. I should fix that, but as I recall their were always women that wanted to talk to me. Very distracting. ;D
 Feeney's is what, about 1/2 mile upstream of the museum? I have a buddy on the board at the museum and when he saw me showing up there more than once, he began working on me to 'get involved'. I like the guy and the museum's mission, but I gotta buy food, y'know?

[Old Greenhorn]

I never worked for Mac, 3yrs at Moran and Reinauer for 10yrs. I've been up the Roundout a few times. Spent more time in Feeneys fixing the boat than we did running the boat. A couple guys from Dann Ocean and I "caught" a barge that broke away one weekend, Tim sent us down to Mariners and we crawled thru the gate that night 😄

My attempt at a joke was that the Mathilde sunk at the dock in around 1980 after being out of service for a number of years. She was(is) a steam tug, the last one serving in NY harbor. She was built and originally served up on the St. Lawrence river for decades. There is no way you were even old enough to work on her. I guess I didn't serve that one up quite right. My bad, I have to work on my delivery. ;D

[aigheadish]

The story of your grandfather is neat and meeting Tesla would be super cool! 

Not that it's the same at all but over the past few months I've done some reading on the some of the main folks of Dayton history, including The Wright Brothers, Charles Kettering, Edward Deeds, Arthur Morgan, and John Patterson, etc. I can't imagine some of the crazy stuff they were thinking of and coming up with and it's very interesting to think about how the world has changed by the course of a handful of people, living in the same era, within about 4 miles of each other. 

There is a commercial playing on local radio for one of the history museums (Carillon Historical Park) that said the Cheezit was invented here! (among many others) 

[WV Sawmiller]

Aig,

Tom's ancestors are actually quite famous. We hosted a Norwegian exchange student, Ruth, for the 1991-1992 school year and she has been back here many times and we have made several trips over to see her and I worked a project in Kristiansand Norway from 2007-2009. She said, truthfully so, that Norway looks a lot like WV. You follow a a winding macadam road through the mountains only when you reach the bottom of the mountain in WV you find a sparking mountain stream while in Norway you may find a dark blue Fjord. Tom's great grandfather Eric was very famous throughout the country and has been immortalized in song famous all over the areas of Europe where he frequently visited as Norway's leading "ambassador" and it has become popular here in the USA as well.

Ray Stevens - Erik The Awful - Bing video

I visited many places while I was working there in Norway and the results of Eric Lindtveit's "travels" were readily apparent. While in the rest of Scandinavia the women were typically tall, blonde and blue-eyed, in Norway it was common to see women with red hair, jet black hair, almond eyes, and other traits. Apparently they "immigrated" to Norway with Grandpa Eric and his shipmates many generations ago.

[Old Greenhorn]

O, now that's just weird. ;D

[Nebraska]

No it was funny  :D :D  ;D. Ok back to work....

[Hilltop366]

Subtle as a chainsaw, lacking all the Social Graces  :D

[Old Greenhorn]

Subtle as a chainsaw, lacking all the Social Graces  :D

Like it or not, that description does pretty much describe me a little too accurately sometimes.
........
Well lets see, Saturday I was contacted by and old work buddy who retired a month before me, he had a slab for me to finish and we played phone tag all of Sunday and part on Monday (cell phones are great unless you want to actually talk to somebody). He and his GF came over Monday afternoon and we looked it over and reviewed options. I'll start on that soon.
 Yesterday my wife was returning from Oregon but she had a late flight and I was not overly excited to be driving up the Thruway to pick her up at 11:45pm. I am not used to the late night driving and have become set in my ways about 10pm bedtimes. So I was concerned and stayed up late Monday watching the Olympics hoping to sleep in yesterday and be rested, Great plan, but one of the cats decided I REALLY needed to get up at 6am and he kept walking all over me dropping hints. He was hungry. I fed him and tried to go back to bed, but got up at 8 and just took a lazy day. Last she texted me (that I saw) her flight was delayed 20 minutes. I left the house just after 10pm and got to the airport around 11:30 (15 minutes before she should have landed). When I went in the terminal and checked the monitor it had her landing at 1am, an hour and a quarter late. I checked the airport listing online and it still said the aircraft was 'on time'. I was a tad ticked off. So I got to cool my heals for an hour and change. There was nothing open in the airport so I couldn't even get a cup of coffee, not even a bloody vending machine I could find.
 We finally got home at 2:30 this morning, not what I am used to and that drive down the Thruway with nobody on the road to speak of, even at 75mph seemed really long. I hit the rack as soon as we unloaded. Glad that is done and she had a fun trip.
 Now it's on to the next thing, which is cleaning out the truck and getting it ready for the drive to MI! I have to go through clothes and such to select just the right wardrobe  :D :D ;D ;D  and then get it packed. That alone could take over an hour. :D So today I will get a start on that. It's been a LONG time since I did any long driving, so I am 'interested' to see how that goes. I am more susceptible to white line fever these days as I get older. We planned room in the schedule for and overnight at a motel somewhere along the route, so this gives us lots of options to break up that 15 hour drive. 
 As always, with any trip I am excited to 'get there' and smelling the roses along the way was never my strong suit. I'd like to see if I can adjust this a little and learn to relax a bit more on the way out and not be so stressed.
 Today is another day and I am glad the wife is back home and the cats can follow her around for a while. ;D

[WV Sawmiller]

   I hates airports! Glad you made it back home to your loving felines. I am sure your trip planning and packing for your stay will go smoothly. I hope you have a great time and keep the Doc in line.

  Are you going to be getting together for some picking and singing with the rest of the folks. I am sure you will have some great jam sessions while you are there. Did you ever tell the rest of the forum members about the original source for your musical talents and especially your famous Uncle Ned from your mother's side of the family who was so popular back in the 30's and 40's who was your inspiration?

ned nostril song - Bing video

  Have a good time and drive safe.

[Old Greenhorn]

Well just because I really like all my friends here on the FF I am leaving my instruments at home. It's been too long since I have picked one up with any kind of commitment and I would have to re-learn every tune I ever knew from scratch, which were never many anyway. (However, if somebody needed a loaner, I would bring one for them, happily.)
 No, I never did share that heritage you refer to, which was hitherto unknown to me and in fact is still a little dubious. ;D That particular tune I had never heard before. Ray Stevens has to be the king of novelty tunes.
 Time to get at it.

[HemlockKing]

You'll be good, just pick a Johnny cash song only 3 chords lol