Caveat: Tree #1786 “Outside”

This tree was outside, with others of its kind.

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Yesterday, I read a novel, cooked and did laundry. Today I had been intending to go into the store, but Jan said she could handle it and I stayed home again. I’m pretty tired from store stuff. So I tried to do some work on my map servers but didn’t make much progress – I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do stuff.

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

Caveat: Tree #1782 “Snowy redwoods”

This tree is a guest tree from my past. These are dawn redwoods in snow along a pedestrian way a few blocks from my home is Goyang, South Korea, as seen in January, 2017.

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The power kept going out this morning at home, so I went in to work earlier than usual and worked for 10 hours at the store today. The power went out in the store for about an hour, too. But I can sit in the half-dark and put prices on new merchandise, still.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 10hr]

Caveat: Tree #1780 “The return of the tiny spruce”

This tree is a small live spruce tree that uprooted and put in a planter. It’s doing duty as our Christmas tree, for a second year. It’s not clear to me how the tree feels about this.

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Art and I had a 90-minute telephone appointment with some of the doctors at the neuropsychology department at the Portland VA. This was follow-up on the tests that were run during our visit down south, in November.

There was a lot of detail, not least starting out with about half an hour’s worth of CYA gobbledy-gook (“cover-your-ass” medical discussion of the validity of the tests, baseline, etc) which, with its abstraction, immediately left Arthur uncomprehending, which wasn’t a very good start.

I won’t go into details – they confirmed my intuition that his dementia (since that’s what we’re officially calling it now) has progressed substantially since a similar evaluation in 2020, and my gut feeling is that he was actually much more functional directly after his accident in 2018 than he is now.

There were three salient moments.

First was when the doctors raised, off-handedly and as if it was a previously discussed thing, Arthur’s “depression.” I use quote marks because Arthur actually became visibly agitated when it was mentioned, and angrily said, “I don’t have that problem.” My personal addendum, which I was probably unable to convey to the doctors clearly with Arthur sitting right there, is that Arthur has always struggled with some degree of undiagnosed depression, but it’s something he has never been open to discussing. The mere mention of it left him much more closed off and uninterested in the rest of the talk – he spent a lot of time looking for specks of dirt to pick out of the carpet at his feet, as he does now when he’s had “enough” of whatever telephone or skype conversation we’re having.

Second was when we got into some summary of etiology (medical cause of the dementia). The verbiage was thick in the air, but what I finally gathered is that they’re most comfortable assuming multiple causes, broken into three categories. 1) He’s had repeated TBI (traumatic brain injury), due to the main fall that broke his neck in 2018, but likely other “head bonkings” (Art’s words) such as when he fell off the ladder in our first year up here, down in the road last year, or even when he modified the sheetrock in the bedroom last month; Art seems to prefer encountering hard objects with his skull rather than using his hands to catch himself, because of the severe arthritis pain in his shoulders. 2) They mentioned vascular problems in the brain, a kind of medical shorthand for stroke and stroke-like events, such as the scarring noted in CT scans at the basal ganglia; these stroke-like events are not singular, but something that seem to occur occasionally, and perhaps back in time to well before the fall/stroke in 2018. 3) They used the word Alzheimers repeatedly (and for the first time), and while observing that if it’s Alzheimers, it’s a “non-typical type” but it’s still within an Alzheimers type dementia; I could tell that Arthur recognized the word and found it alarming, by watching his reactions as we talked.

Third was that despite his extremely slow processing speed and quite limited ability to recall recently mentioned facts, stories, words, sequences, etc, his comprehension vocabulary is still amazingly high – which is to say, once you penetrate past the extremely slow processing speed, entailing multiple repetitions and a lot of patience while you see the “loading” icon spinning in his eyes, he’ll know what you’re talking about. His underlying well-educated mind is still there, but just weirdly shrouded by these processing and memory issues.

During all the interview, I did most of the talking. Arthur sometimes seemed to follow, though he did his schtick of pretending not to understand when he didn’t like what he was hearing. It’s quite difficult, with him, as he’s always done this thing of pretending not to understand, as a jokey way of getting out of certain sorts of discussion, and of course, now, he often really actually doesn’t understand. So his pretending to not understand (and not care) is a facade to conceal his actual non-understanding.

In the wake of the call, Arthur was grumpy. I went to work. At dinner, when I got home, I gave him a summary of the talk – which he asked for. I skipped over the depression part, but spent a lot of time talking about etiology, and focused on the final part – the doctors’ recommendations. Most of these are quite self-evident: exercise, develop strategies for dealing with forgetfulness, adapt social interactions for dealing with very slow processing speed. But these efforts of course run up against Arthur’s return to comments like: “Wait, I don’t process things slowly” or “I don’t need routines, I do things when they need to be done”. Then other moments, he’d say “I have no brain” or “I forget everything.” It’s all provided together, a word-salad of mutually incoherent cliches that are what’s left of his self. And they all require a proactive interest in self-care, which is Arthur’s single hugest weakness, to be frank. And I can only nag so much – it’s very much a “pick your battles” thing at this point, and so I can’t always focus on these types of things.

Life goes on.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 8hr]

Caveat: Tree #1779 “Windless”

This tree was beside a windless sea, after several days of heavy wind. You can see lots of fresh snow on the ridge of Sunnahae Mountain, across the inlet, but the snowline never made it down to sea level. It is now quite late for “first snow” not to have arrived yet, here.

A view of a smooth seawater with a reflection, and a low, tree-covered mountain across the inlet, all under an overcast, blank-white sky

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 2km;]

Caveat: Tree #1778 “Caught in a web of illusion”

This tree was caught in a perpetual drizzle that failed to be the expected snow.

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I decided I needed a day off. I was very lazy today. I read a novel I’ve been reading: one of S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad books (call it “Islamic swords and sorcery fantasy”).

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

Caveat: Tree #1776 “Broken wrenches”

This tree was there while I decided it was the time of year when I needed to switch to the studded snow-tires – snow is in the forecast for the next few days (though that can be hit-or-miss, here). The lug-nuts were very tight, and I broke not one, but two lug-wrenches, before I got them all loosened.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 1 hr; breaker-bar-banging, 2hr]

Caveat: Tree #1773 “강선로”

This tree is another guest-tree from my past. I took this picture on New Year’s Eve, 2011, a block north of my apartment, on 강선로 [gangseon-no], a major road in Ilsan, South Korea.

A silhouette close-up of a twisted, bare tree trunk, with the sun's disk directly centered and some vague apartment buildings on the right

Quote of the day: “Earth is literally the worst planet I’ve ever lived on” – a meme on the internet. I don’t mean this in a bad way. Earth is also the best planet so far.

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

Caveat: Tree #1769 “임진강”

This tree was in a plaza I walked to near Imjingang (임진강), South Korea, which is at the DMZ border with North Korea. This was a walk I took in October, 2007, during my first Fall living in South Korea. I was revisiting haunts from my year stationed as a soldier in the US Army in the area, back in 1991.

A plaza of paving stones, benches and some orange-yellow trees, with a few pedestrians standing around

I have come to the realization that my 2 1/2 week long vacation down south wasn’t relaxing or recuperative at all. It was very stressful. I mean, I was glad to see all the people I saw, and I value those interactions highly, but Arthur was a pain in the butt with his constant argumentativeness over just about anything that could occur to him, any time we spent time together – which was more than usual because of the travel and such. He is constantly upset when I challenge his take on reality, but that take on reality feels increasingly detached from anything that feels objective or true. And since he rarely remembers a conversation from one minute to the next, we have the same arguments over and over and over.

Anyway, all I mean to say is that I will be quite pleased to relax and work at the store for 6 days a week for the coming month, and let Arthur stew at home with his incoherent obsessions. I can count on routine to protect him from self-damage, hopefully. There’s only so much I can do to protect him. He’ll sleep in the bed he’s made for himself – an aphorism he’s fond of citing. I am burned out.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 1.5km;]

Caveat: Tree #1767 “Fog”

This tree was ensconced in heavy fog at our motel parking lot in suburban Seattle. We journey today and tomorrow, return to Rockpit, Alaska.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 2km;]

Caveat: Tree #1765 “The aliens and the Christmas present”

This tree is a guest tree from my past. I drew this “holly” tree in December, 2013, with accompanying aliens and Christmas present, on the whiteboard for one of my elementary school English language debate classes that I taught in South Korea. Drawings of silly aliens in various strange contexts was a staple of my standard just-before-class whiteboard art of the period.

A crude drawing on a classroom whiteboard of a tree in green marker, with some strange-looking aliens of various shapes and with lots of googly eyes, coming from their flying saucer to the left of the picture to examine a small christmas tree with a large present on the right

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

Caveat: Tree #1763 “Backdrop”

This tree was a backdrop for some people being photographed at the Oregon Zoo today.

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That’s me on the left. Beside me are Rita – a woman who was my 3rd grade and 6th grade teacher, among other things. Beside her is Jeannine, Rita’s daughter, one of my closest childhood friends, who I haven’t seen since high school graduation, maybe. And Jeannine’s child, River, who is recovering from Covid right now. So it was a kind of little reunion at the Oregon Zoo, which was sunny, not too crowded, but quite chilly, down in its little canyon west of downtown Portland.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 6km;]

Caveat: Tree #1762 “A tall yellow tree”

This tree is down by the gate to the road that goes up along the Tualatin river.

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Juli and I and the dog took a long walk along the valley today. Then a bunch of Canadians showed up, including Wayne (the annual visitor to Rockpit, Alaska – a close friend of Arthur’s), who are Keith’s relatives, so we had a kind of pre-Thanksgiving. We’ll do the main Thanksgiving on Saturday, which is Juli and Keith’s tradition.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 6km;]

Caveat: Tree #1757 “The fake lake”

This tree was out next to a fake lake, which was lacking in water. It’s called Hagg Lake, or Scoggins Valley Reservoir. The Reservoir was quite low. We drove there, but it’s really not that far – a few miles. We went there and walked around, Juli and Keith and Arthur and I, and their dog.

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

Caveat: Tree #1755 “Have a heart”

This tree is in front of Arthur’s infamous yurt, his bedroom-away-from-home since times immemorial (about 20 years).

 

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Before the yurt, he had an ancient school bus converted to an RV, parked in a similar location in Juli and Keith’s yard. So Arthur calls the yurt “the bus.” Keith worries about Arthur being in the yurt, but I think he’s better off there than in some location (e.g. the guest room here) which is less familiar to him. Since he himself built the yurt, it’s quite to his liking and very familiar.

Art and I did another appointment at the VA hospital and clinics this morning. This time, he got an echocardiogram. The tech was very chatty and explained to me what he was doing and seeing as he did it, which made it pretty interesting for me. Art’s arhythmias were quite noticeable.

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

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