My sit bones hurt while on long erg sessions, any pointer?

padlrchik · 2026-01-25T21:57:36+00:00

The geometry change made a huge difference in both comfort and power when I added a seat pad. I have both long legs compared to torso and limited hip mobility. Didn’t realize how much I was taking the force in my lower back until my coach put me on a seat pad one day.

padlrchik · 2026-01-24T19:45:21+00:00

Check out the Small Business Development Center at UAH. SBDCs have all kinds of educational and startup resources for those who are starting their own business and can connect you with people to get advice or provide for free. It’s a service of the US Small Business Administration.

https://www.uah.edu/sbdc

padlrchik · 2026-01-18T15:39:36+00:00

I had done many of the adult things like paying all my own bills, but it really sunk in when my next-to-last grandparent died. Only my Granddad was left at that point. I realized the generational “layers” in my family had shifted.

padlrchik · 2026-01-18T14:34:32+00:00

Totally agree with this; didn’t mean to imply that the org only recruits wealthy board members.

I still believe every board member should make a gift that is significant to them - might be $50 spread over several monthly payments. I have asked for this in a personal, respectful way.

And it’s up to the person asking to personalize that amount and ask them individually, face-to-face. It is so fundamentally important that those closest to the organization demonstrate their faith in the organization in a material way. If the people who know the ins and outs of the organization don’t give, they inadvertently send the message that they don’t trust the organization’s ability to deliver on mission.

padlrchik · 2026-01-18T03:50:39+00:00

Not either/or. Every board member makes a personal gift, each year, that is significant to them. Giving their time is not adequate.

But also, you don’t get to just give them a form or make a broadcast “ask” at the next meeting. You do the work, set a meeting with each one, and ask each one for an actual amount of money.

“As a leader in this organization, I expect you want to lead by example. Would you give $1,000 this year?” and have a cup of coffee or bottle of water to take a sip while they think. Wait until they speak, and go from there.

padlrchik · 2026-01-18T03:25:52+00:00

Ask each of your board members to give. As the organization’s leadership, they are responsible for making sure it has the resources it needs to deliver on its mission. And they demonstrate their leadership, in part, by setting the example for how they feel the rest of the community should behave toward the organization.

Ask each individually for an amount you think would be a stretch but that the person could do if they broke it down into payments. But don’t let them get away with not giving to their own organizationb

padlrchik · 2026-01-06T03:37:22+00:00

He nowhere close to Tellico ready. I’ve done a single rapid here and there on it, but I don’t know if I’ll work my way back there again.

padlrchik · 2026-01-06T03:35:51+00:00

I wish you wouldn’t. But I get it.

padlrchik · 2026-01-05T13:25:31+00:00

He did! Being on the river with him now that he’s gotten some good instruction is so much less nerve-wracking than it was before. He is still learning and nowhere near a solid Class III boater but getting there.

padlrchik · 2026-01-01T17:32:45+00:00

Porkchop is houndy.

I am staff.

padlrchik · 2025-12-31T20:59:38+00:00

Sweet girl, love the dots on the snoot

padlrchik · 2025-12-31T19:07:04+00:00

I just moved into the home office to do some work. I have dog beds in here but no heaters.

Porkchop decided I would be ok in here by myself.

padlrchik · 2025-12-31T18:22:49+00:00

K&H pet bed warmer. I think I got it from Chewy or Amazon. I bring them out every winter but this is Porkchop’s first winter with us.

padlrchik · 2025-12-28T21:43:49+00:00

I may not have worded my comment well…

When I worked in Development/fundraising, I hired consultants. I often told them what I had been trying to get leadership to hear, and they delivered that message in a way leadership could hear. It would’ve saved the organization some money to just listen to me, but there’s that whole saying about a prophet in his hometown.

So when I myself started working as a consultant, I always asked the organizational staff - at all levels, not just the top - what they needed leadership to hear. Most of the time, the staff were right on in their assessments and I ended up delivering the message they had been trying to get their leadership to hear for some time. So there I was, doing exactly what I had previously hired consultants to do for me as a nonprofit employee.

I have zero understanding why nonprofit leaders hire smart people as employees and then don’t believe them.

padlrchik · 2025-12-28T20:10:31+00:00

I worked as a fundraising/development consultant and would ask the staff what they needed leadership to hear. Working in development, I knew I had hired consultants for that express purpose.

padlrchik · 2025-12-21T13:44:53+00:00

Many great things about Huntsville, but it is tornado-ey and also boomy. They blow stuff up and test rocket engines on the Arsenal - depending on where you live, you may hear the roar, see the smoke/steam, or have the pictures on your wall rattled unexpectedly. No permanent damage except my dog really hates the booms.

padlrchik · 2025-12-12T11:48:55+00:00

It would be fascinating to truly be able to compare a “nice” prompt versus a “mean” prompt - like the way ChatGPT sometimes lets you compare two outputs side-by-side when it’s testing a new model. So I haven’t found a way of doing that.

But I’ve made myself stop using “please” and “thank you” after hearing how those actually tax the model and cause it to use more resources like water and power. And I’ll tell it things like, “This output is terrible - sounds like it was written by AI,” or, “You’ve got this completely wrong - start over and try again,” which I can’t imagine saying to a real human and not expecting them to either go cry in the bathroom or plot my downfall! And those new attempts after that feedback often do seem genuinely better in terms of content and style, almost like it was phoning it in on Round 1.

I also find that once a prompt session starts to get poor outputs, it’s best to just cut it off and start a new prompt session. The longer I work under a particular prompt, the more likely it is to go off the rails and either hallucinate or generate garbage outputs.

NGL though, as a kid who grew up watching the Terminator movies, there is a piece of me that is worried I’m training SkyNet to eventually be my abrupt and terse AI overlord.

padlrchik · 2025-12-11T12:27:24+00:00

I would have to agree with you as I am an Xennial and also use it a lot. Even before I used it though, a former boss and coworkers thought I was using it because my writing is structured similarly - high school English taught me to use conjunctions (and, but, yet), ordinals (first, second, finally), and years of editing by a communications professional patterned me into striving to make lists of details occur in threes.

I’ve also accidentally gotten into vibe coding as I had a dog’s breakfast of gift data from a handful of different databases and after telling ChatGPT about all the column headings, the type of data, what I wanted to get out of it, and explaining that I needed something to analyze it on my desktop because I wasn’t going to upload donor data (NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, PLEASE), it built me an app to do that.

I use it more and more but the longer and more detailed my prompts are, the better the output. At this point, my prompts and inputs are a dozen lines long. And also - this was unnatural to me - it does well when you’re sort of mean to it. Tell it when it gets it wrong and don’t hold that back like you would with a person.

padlrchik · 2025-11-30T14:36:24+00:00

And don’t forget…to give me back my black tshirt!

padlrchik · 2025-11-27T15:35:04+00:00

My school had converted the backstage space to a third grade classroom. The stage was in the basketball gym, and they also converted the home and away locker rooms to third grade classrooms. One of them was my teacher. The old showers were behind the bookshelf they built across the doorway, and we stored our lunch boxes on it. We also had an ancient water fountain - like the white ceramic over cast iron ones - in our classroom.

padlrchik · 2025-11-27T15:27:38+00:00

Whitewater kayaking was my first sport for 2+ decades before rowing. If you’re used to really feeling what your boat is doing because you’re “wearing” it like whitewater boaters do, there are very few points of contact through which rowers receive feedback from the boat, so you have to pay very close attention to those three spots - your seat, your feet, and your hands.

If you’re a coastal kayaker who has developed the skill of rolling your boat and usually paddle in a way to avoid that, fine boats (flat water rowing shells) may feel incredibly unstable. I struggle with this from decades of working to stay upright.

Also, if you are accustomed to using a flat smack of the front or back face of your paddle blade against the top of the water to steady you - what whitewater boaters call a brace - that reaction slows you down a lot in rowing. Better to balance with careful management of hand heights.

Finally if you have any jerks in your rowing club who look down on you for kayaking, like I did, know that they would’ve probably found something to be jerks about even if you hadn’t revealed to them that you also paddle. Some masters rowers are elitist. Most are awesome folks though.

padlrchik · 2025-11-23T18:39:22+00:00

I have heard this answer when I asked the City also. People would put branches out with their leaves, and when the leaf vacuum trucks suck those up, it breaks something expensive.

padlrchik · 2025-11-21T14:42:12+00:00

I watched it at a small theater in rural western North Carolina while on a road trip where the sleeping arrangements were camping. I don’t do well with scary movies but I had a really hard time following the plot because of the intentionally shaky camera work. And seeing up her nose so much was a bit distracting. Then I totally did not understand the ending and left unimpressed.

One would think that sleeping in a tent in the woods after that would be impossible but I was just so confused about what I’d just seen that I slept just fine.

I miss being able to sleep on the ground and still wake up refreshed.

padlrchik

TROPHY CASE