Caveat: Tree #1887 “Bent”

This tree was bent.

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I had a pretty terrible day. Feeling “under the weather” and suffering a couple of financial “gotchas” at the store. Feeling inadequate the tasks I’ve taken on for myself.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5.5km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1886 “Sparse clouds”

This tree was below some sparse clouds.

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A silly joke: My wife screamed “you haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said, have you?!” I was taken aback….what a weird way to start a conversation.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1883 “The rant that wasn’t”

This tree anticipated more photons, soon.

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I was planning to write a long rant about road maintenance and technocracy… but I’m too tired and can’t be bothered. Imagine that a rant was written.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 4hr]

Caveat: Tree #1881 “Pre-house”

This tree noted the lack of progress on the little house thingy (I call it the “pre-house”) on Lot 73. I’m not bothered by this – the neighbor who’s doing this project for me has had other jobs that are much higher priority, involving improvements to his own lot. The pre-house will wait.

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The reason I call it the pre-house is because the future actual house will be attached to it – at which point, this structure becomes a kind of previously-existing small appendage to the future house.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1880 “Sunshine”

This tree saw unseasonal morning sunshine on the first day of Spring. I still expect we’ll see a bit more snow at some point, but who knows – the weather here isn’t very predictable in that respect.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1877 “Death by the window”

This tree is a young bay laurel tree I had in a bucket in the house. It did really well for about a year then just mysteriously seems to have died (or having grown quite unhealthy, began approaching death asymptotically) a few weeks ago. I am very sad.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 1km;]

Caveat: Tree #1876 “Resting”

This tree was in some snow a a few weeks ago, at the 8-mile bridge. I am showing this picture because I didn’t take a fresh tree picture today.

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Art took a walk down the road today, and apparently (I wasn’t there) sat down (or lay down?) to “rest” and someone thought he was a body in the road and “rescued” him and brought him home. Art claims nothing went wrong he was just resting. I’m not so sure.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4.5km;]

Caveat: Tree #1873 “Waiting around / sheer panic”

This tree awaited the approaching darkness.

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I’m really not doing well lately. I’m really stressed by the financial “bookkeeping” side of running the store – especially preparing for and dealing with tax-related stuff. I hate preparing taxes even when they’re easy – and this year, for the first time in my life (arguably), they are definitely NOT easy. Running a small business is a bureaucratic tangle worthy of Kafka.

Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve increasingly lost a technical grasp of the websites I run – they coast along but there are aspects of how they work that I truly cannot understand, and that leaves me feeling helpless when things go wrong – as happened this evening with the main map website.

Arthur is unpredictable – as I’ve mentioned many times before, being a caretaker to Arthur is a bit like being an active-duty military person: 95% waiting around and doing stupid make-work, and 5% sheer panic and SOLVE THIS PROBLEM NOW!

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1869 “손병희”

This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture in July, 2009, in Seoul. The tree is behind a statue of Son Byeong-hui, a Korean religious leader, modernization advocate, and later independence activist, who died in Japanese prison in 1922.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 3hr]

Caveat: Tree #1867 “Dumptrucks and rain”

This tree saw a dumptruck parked at the neighbors’ place, where Richard is doing some work moving gravel and rocks, helping prepare the spot where the neighbors’ pier is going.

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The day included over an inch of rain, which, layered on top of the packed snow and ice on the road, did no favors to the driveability of the road. It was horrible – very slip-slidey.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 1hr]

Caveat: Tree #1862 “제주나무”

This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture in the suburbs of Jeju City, South Korea in early 2011. I was there on a work-related “team building” excursion that was in most respects quite horrible, but it had some good moments.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 1km;]

Caveat: Tree #1858 “The return”

This tree observed that winter had returned, after a strange month-and-half long hiatus (we had average daily temps in the 50’s F for most of the past 40 days).

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 8hr]

Caveat: Tree #1857 “Frosted rocks”

This tree witnessed ice on the beach. This happens when we have below-freezing, windy nights, with a high-tide in the middle of the night. The fresh river water freezes on top of the sea water, then the sea retreats leaving the ice on the beach.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 9hr]

Caveat: Tree #1856 “A la gringa”

This tree experienced some rain turning to snow this morning.

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Arthur has told me he no longer likes making chicken chile verde (a sort of family traditional dish that he always did really well). I think the last few times it hasn’t gone well – forgetting ingredients, lose track of where he is in the process… somehow these difficulties actually gained traction in his memories. And so… I made an effort at making the stuff. I’m not sure I follow the exact same recipe – I lived in Mexico too long and my take is maybe a little less ‘a la gringa.’ But I think it came out alright.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 2.5km;]

Caveat: Tree #1854 “The expressway at dawn”

This tree has no doubt appeared before. This is perhaps a very common view on this here daily tree feature – because it’s what I see when I step out of the house and walk up the driveway to the expressway. This is the Port Saint Nicholas Expressway, as I like to call it.

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I had a somewhat disconcerting experience with Arthur when we stopped at the bank yesterday, while running our Thursday “shopping day” errands.

I pulled into the parking lot at the Wells Fargo bank in town, and said “Both you and I need to go to the bank.” Arthur asked what he needed to do at the bank, and I said we’d discussed that he needed to withdraw some cash – his cash reserve in his wallet was running low. Then Arthur said, as confident as could be, “Why are were here. This isn’t my bank.”

Bear in mind, this Wells Fargo branch is the same as it ever was. I have a vivid memory of walking into this bank, in 1998, with Arthur, when he opened this account. So his bald assertion that this wasn’t his bank struck me as quite… disturbing. So far most of his memory failures and lapses are related to things that just aren’t salient (new or old), and I can’t quite figure how the local bank he’s been using for 25+ years isn’t salient. So this was a new type of problem.

The fact that he didn’t think it was his bank threw him off, and when we went inside, he couldn’t for his life figure out how to ask for what he wanted – and the teller was one of the frequently replaced sorts the bank in town struggles with – barely competent and probably only employed because no one more qualified can be found.

Once he was on the spot and couldn’t put together what he needed, and I had to step in, Arthur became embarrassed. His standard reaction to that is to get angry. When we got to the car he was combative and incoherent. He asked what we had to do next and I said grocery shopping and he said “whatever” in his exasperated way when he feels I’m being overly controlling.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 2.5km; retailing, 1hr]

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