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on a motorboat in Lake Ontario
Sunday, July 7 2024
location: Mulberry Street, Rochester, NY
Jasmin and Moore were still occupied with their sick cat, so this morning Gretchen and I took our hostess Maryann out for brunch at that vegan-friendly Greek place we'd liked a year ago, Voula's. I don't monkey around with success, so I ordered the exact same thing I'd ordered a year ago, the faux meat gyro, though it didn't seem quite as good as I remember it being. I also got a double Greek coffee with no sugar, and that wasn't very good at all. As for Gretchen and Maryann, they ordered vegan scrambles, since they actually like breakfast food. Our conversation was mostly about transgender people, with Maryann staking out a surprisingly reactionary position. She's a leftie vegan lesbian, but she's also about the same age as Stevie Nicks (well, more like Stevie Wonder), and on this subject her age seemed to do most of the talking. She insisted that men are men because of their XY chromosomes and women are women because of their chromosomes. Anything else, she insisted, was a mental issue. She also claimed (to Gretchen's bewilderment) that it's "always been that way." Of course, similar arguments have been (and continue to be) made about homosexuality. Maryann was particularly concerned about womens' sports and how difficult it is for women who were born women to compete against "women" who were born men. On that point, we could find some agreement, though of course there are also hypermasculine women who were born women (Brittney Griner comes to mind), so should they also not be allowed to compete in women's sports? One thing we could all agree on was that the "companion" of our teenage niece S, who insists on using the pronoun "they" but is a cis white male in all respects, is doing his gender identity stuff as some kind of weird fashionable that is more cringe than anything else.
Next we drove out to Pittsford, that lily white suburb southeast of Rochester, where Gretchen hoped to get some more of a decorative string featuring little stars and crescents and such that she'd bought at Cleo & Kin (a vegan gift store) a year ago. But they didn't have any more of those, so we ended up buying nothing, even after visting the new expansion store targeting male customers they'd just opened next door.
After we returned to Maryann's house, Jasmin picked up Gretchen and me for our next activity, one Maryann would not be participating in; swimming in Lake Ontario. (Maryann had a knee replacement some years ago and now her other knee is wearing out and she's been hobbling around a bit as a result.) Jasmin drove us to the Southpoint Marina behind a hotel-like apartment complex at the very south end of Irondequoit Bay (named after a creek that travels north into Lake Ontario a little to the west of the Genesee River). The thruple we call "the As" have a membership in the marina that allows them to take a motorboat out into the lake, and the plan was to go out into the lake with them and go for a swim. (Supposedly this is a lot more pleasant than swimming from the beach, as the water near shore tends to be full of debris and pollutants.)
When we parked in the lower lot, a young man driving a golf cart asked if we had a sticker to park there, which of course we didn't. He told us that we had to park in the upper lot but was super nice about it and even said he'd give us a lift down if we did. We took him up on this even though the walk was not far at all.
Out on the floating docks of the marina, we loaded our stuff into the boat we'd been allocated and then waited for a dock worker who had experienced several lifetimes' worth of sun to unhook us from the moorings and give us the blessing to set out. About ten minutes later, we were free to go, and Alex (one of the two lady As) piloted the boat. Apparently to be cleared to drive a boat, one must first pass a class where one masters the nomenclature and learns the basics. It looked to me to be a similar process to driving a car, though there are more rules of etiquette, such as only going at a crawl when near the docks or passing through narrow channels. Out in the middle of Irondequoit Bay, though, we could go at top speed. At that point the wind blows anything away that isn't secure and it was terrifying enough for Jasmin to hold onto Amaud's hand (he's the one male A) for most of that part. As we entered Lake Ontario proper, we passed through a narrow channel where a side-swinging bridge had been swung out of the way. There people stood along the edge with fishing poles and a mother duck with six or seven mostly-grown ducklings swam past. We then parked a little to the east several hundred feet north of the nice houses along the lakeshore.
Alyssa (the tallest of the A ladies) jumped in first, followed by Gretchen, who immediately swam a couple hundred feet further out into the lake, causing me to shout that she had to be careful about boat traffic. Jasmin got in next, then Alex, and then Amaud, all of them wearing life vests (apparently Amaud swims about as poorly as I do.) As for me, I was very slow in getting into the water. It was considerably colder than, say, Woodworth Lake, so I couldn't make myself just jump into it. I was also wearing a lifevest, since there was no way I was going into 20 feet of water without one. I dilly-dallied for a long time on the ladder going into the water, which was a little unpleasant since the boat was bucking up and down with every wave (some of which were caused by the wakes of passing boats and jet skies). Eventually I got in and did a little floating, though my lifevest forced me into an uncomfortable face-up stance that was hard to fight against. So I was only in the water for maybe a minute. But I'd already taken my piss, and that was really the only thing I needed the lake for.
We didn't have access to the boat for very long, and soon after I got back aboard, the others kind of had to start wrapping things up. They were all being effusive about how great it was, which I couldn't really relate to. It was an experience, I suppose, but it wasn't all that fun for me. Making matters worse, there was no alcohol on board. I was drinking kratom tea from a travel mug, but it had sat overnight in our room at Maryann's where I'd closed the air conditioning vent (which was making things too cold) and it had gone off a bit. After the others climbed aboard, they busted out various snacks, including cotton candy grapes, chips and guacamole, and various non-alcholic drinks. I wasn't going to be drinking a NA beer, but when I heard there was a can of kombucha, I had that.
Back at Maryann's house, we found her reading in her rocking chair out on the front porch and Jasmin was soon absorbed ia phone conversation with someone about her sick cat Stella. Soon after that, Gretchen and I loaded up our car and began our long road drive east across the Texas of the northeast.
We'd be making our drive today considerably shorter by spending a couple days at our Adirondack cabin, meaning today's drive would only be about three hours. This was long enough that we'd have to charge somewhere, though we tried to push that out a bit by not using air conditioning despite temperatures around 86 degrees Fahrenheit. (We had the windows down a bit at 70-to-80 miles per hour, both of which are terrible for range.)
We were able to charge again at a level II ChargePoint charger while eating at Strong Hearts Café. This time I got the philly cheesesteak with macroni salad and Gretchen got a kale cæsar salad with tempeh (since they were out of fake chicken) and fries. Initially, though, Gretchen thought the kale was just raw and unmassaged and would be a chore to eat, so she started clandestinely eating from leftover Squatcho's pizza we'd brought into Strong Hearts with us so it wouldn't fester in a hot car. But then she tried the kale and decided it was fine the way it was, which surprised both of us. As we sat there eating, there was a young black person of indeterminate gender sitting by theirself wearing an eyecatching facemask that looked like a grid of enormous teeth. This person also had a large FREE PALESTINE sticker on their laptop. Since the person was sitting nowhere near anyone else, we had to believe the mask was more about catching attention than it was about preventing the spread of an airborne illness.
There aren't many fast chargers near the Thruway between Syracuse and the cabin, so we pretty much had to stop at the one ElectrifyAmerica station at the dreary Herkimer exit. It's the one in a Denny's parking lot in a stretch of industrial highway near the creepiest looking motel you can imagine. We didn't need much (or, as it turned out, any) more electricity for our Bolt to get to the cabin, so we were only in Herkimer long enough to wander across the road to the Tractor Supply, marvel at all the "free" stuff they don't lock up after hours, and then for me to go around back by the railroad track and poop in the bushes. (I mostly used big burdock leaves as my toilet paper.)
As it had last year, Google Maps had us leave the Thruway at the next exit east and drive on small roads for the rest of the way. Just before getting to Meco (the little crossroads hamlet west of Gloversville), we drove on completely unfamilar roads, one of which mentioned "Peck Hill," making me thing we might be near Peck Lake, though we were three miles to the southeast of that.
As we drove in on Woodworth Lake, we noticed that all the people who normally bring trailers to their parcels (except, of course, for "the rednecks") hadn't brought their trailers this year. And at Shane's parcel near our cabin, his solitary camp chair was still lying face-down, meaning Shane hadn't made it to the annual HOA meeting. Perhaps he is losing interest in his parcel. If so, this is great news for us.
The sun was going down when we got to the cabin. After opening a bunch of windows to let the summer heat escape into the night, Gretchen went down to the lake for a twighlight swim. Meanwhile, I spent the evening merging the code from my ESP8266 Remote into the code for the SolArk Copilot, the device that gathers highly-granular inverter data, since it would be nice to have all the features in the former present in the latter.
Friends swimming in the Lake Ontario off the motorboat. From left: Alyssa, Gretchen, and Jasmin.
Click to enlarge.
Boats on the northwest horizon in Lake Ontario.
Click to enlarge.
A view of the south shore of Lake Ontario from the north.
Click to enlarge.
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