This tree had a raven (center).
Caw.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 9hr]
Category: A Daily Tree
Caveat: Tree #1745 “Raindroplets like pearls”
This tree was along the road to town – much like other trees.
I spend way too much time at work at the store trying to comprehend hard-to-understand quasi-invoices from vendors.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1744 “Mossy witness”
This tree bore witness to the loitering sea. I like the twisted, mossy branches.
I worked on putting the dirt back in the hole at the well. It is very tiring. This is a fairly long-term project, which would be done in 10 minutes with an excavator but I was stubborn when Richard was here with his excavator in August, about an aspect of the project at that time, so now I have to fill the hole with my shovel.
Quite unrelated, I like this quote:
"The unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." - Cormac McCarthy
[daily log: walking, 1km; dirt-digging, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #1743 “Almost”
This tree was almost home.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km;]
Caveat: Tree #1742 “Dailier than ever”
This tree is dailier than others, along the road to town.
Art had a difficult night last night. He has a thing that happens sometimes, where he wakes up disoriented – much more than usual. He needs to get up to go to the toilet but he can’t find his way from the bed to the bathroom. He crashes into things. Of course it doesn’t help that he is stubborn, in persisting in the belief that he can navigate in the dark. It’s impossible to get him to adopt a habit of turning on a light to find the bathroom – he believes with his heart and soul that his excellent spatial memory can get him from on place to another in a familiar environment, in the dark. Leaving a light on is useless – he’ll grumpily turn it off the moment I go to bed. He insists on sleeping in absolute dark – to the point of closing the blinds against the moonlight.
Anyway, his excellent spatial memory is long gone. He wakes up disoriented, can’t find the door out of the bedroom, stumbles around. I awoke to a loud crash at around 11:30 PM, and went down stairs. I found him lying on the floor. There was urine all over the floor near the door. He seemed to have head-butted the wall where a small heater unit is installed, damaging the wall and the unit such that repairs will be recovered. I don’t even know how he did that.
It took us more than an hour to get him back into the bed. In his disoriented state, he couldn’t figure out how to stand up. He’s week, and with shaky balance, but when his mental faculties are more normal, he’s able to get himself up off the ground or floor. But last night it was a struggle. I kept trying to explain to him what he needed to do: “Roll sideways, get a knee under you, lever yourself up by grabbing the edge of the bed.” These instructions just made him sullen, as if I was giving impossible advice. And I’m not strong enough to lift him. So we had to wait out the lack of ability – in the end we got him close enough to the bed that I was able to kind of lever him up onto the bed, against much protestations of suffering and agony (he had bad arthritis in the shoulders).
I got the floor cleaned up. I disabled the damaged heater so it won’t be a hazard, pending repair, and later I gifted him a portable one that I have been using to heat the RV, to control mold.
In the morning, he asked me what had happened to the heater – he apparently didn’t remember anything that happened. It’s unrealistic to expect him to be grateful for the help I give him, when he can’t remember needing my help.
It was a hard night.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 3hr]
Caveat: Tree #1741 “Beginnings”
This tree saw the beginnings of dawn, at around 7:15 this morning.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #1740 “Still surviving”
This tree is my small cherry tree that nearly died in the deerpocalypse last year. This year, safe in its little cage, it seems to have done fine, but it’s strange how the leaves seem uninterested in changing color in the Fall.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1739 “Trick or tree”
This tree was across the street from where I stood in front of the gift shop. A late October morning in Craig.
Some kids came by the store, trick-or-treating for Halloween. We were prepared, having candy on hand.
[daily log: walking, 5.5km; retailing, 9km]
Caveat: Tree #1738 “Kerosene in the garden”
This tree was in the background while I performed a standard daily cold-weather chore: filling the little kerosene tank for the basement heater from the big red kerosene tank in Arthur’s mushroom-and-moss garden (front yard).
[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1737 “Monotony”
This tree has probably been featured before. I’m feeling unimaginative. And the picture came out a bit blurry, too.
[daily log: walking, 2km;]
Caveat: Tree #1736 “The janitor’s closet”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture looking out the window of the janitor’s closet at my place of work in Goyang City, South Korea in November, 2012.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km;]
Caveat: Tree #1735 “Not actually snow”
This tree was next to a patch of frost so heavy it looked like fallen snow.
In the morning I went to town and worked on some bookkeeping stuff at the store and sorted out a bureaucratic mess at the Power and Telephone office.
This afternoon I finally got around to building a little insulated enclosure “cabinet” for the new water filters configuration for the re-engineered house water filters set-up I built last summer. This enclosure is important because down in the boathouse (basement) it can get quite cold in winter – it’s not an insulated part of the house. So with the filter assembly positioned where it is, I wanted to enclose them in a little cabinet with insulation in it where we could place a small heater to make sure things don’t freeze up on extremely cold days.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #1734 “Observed”
This tree was observed by some waterfowl (a flock of them in the water center-right).
[daily log: walking, 5km;]
Caveat: Tree #1733 “Sun-touched”
This tree (up on the ridge) was touched by the sun.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1732 “The frost”
This tree was covered in morning frost.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1731 “The chimney”
This tree was near the chimney.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1730 “Frost and leaks”
This tree saw the first frost of the season, on the hood of the blueberry (Chevy Tahoe).
I had a truly horrible day. It was all because of plumbing. I had a small leak in the well-house (on lot 73) which had come to light when Richard did all the installation in August. I’d been procrastinating on it, but I hoped it would be fairly easy to fix – the first frosty morning of the Fall inspired me to get busy with it. So I went to fix it. Somehow it was a kind of chain reaction – trying to fix the one leak led to the appearance of another leak. I would guess it’s related to putting strain on the manifold of pipes in the well-house. Soon I had several leaks. The whole manifold needs to be rebuilt. I am not a plumber. I shoveled dirt for a while (filling in the hole Richard left by the well), expressing my frustration, but there is still much dirt to shovel.
[daily log: walking, 3km; shoveling dirt, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #1729 “Stumped”
This tree has been stumped.
I ended up quite lazy today. Working so much has left me tired.
[daily log: walking, 1km;]
Caveat: Tree #1728 “San Juan Island”
This tree was beside the road as I drove home from town at about 4 pm, and decided to stop and take a picture of Bucareli Bay.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #1727 “The little bridge”
This tree was near a little improvised bridge across the stream, swollen with recent rains.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #1726 “The fruits of autumn”
This tree is the tallest tree on lot 73. If the sun comes out in the next week or two (that’s asking something unreasonable, to be sure), I’ll get to watch the midday autumn sun’s illumination retreat up this tree over several days and then disappear off the top, as the sun undertakes to hide for the next four months behind the mountain – that is winter’s shadow.
My greenhouse produced this cherry-sized tomato, below – I’m not even sure why. I had a tomato plant. It struggled, as tomato plants do, here – even in greenhouses. This is the sole output of my tomato plant – a desultory nod toward tomatic destiny.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km;]
Caveat: Tree #1725 “Identifying the season”
This tree is the pussy-willow tree I (trans-)planted last year. It seems to have figured out when Fall is.
A customer came in the store, with her child. The woman was speaking Haida with the child. This is what you do when you’re trying to help a child develop some bilingualism – it’s an attempt at some immersion. When she bought her products and was checking out, she said (I’m pretty sure) “Háw’aa” which means thank you. That was the first time I’ve had a customer speaking Haida in the store. The language is close to extinct, but there are strong community efforts being made to resurrect it. I told the woman I thought she was doing a wonderful thing.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1724 “Ancient proof of trees’ existence”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. It’s hard to say which tree I’m talking about – just pick one. I took this picture near my hometown (Arcata, California) in Spring of 1983. This was on film, of course. I scanned the picture in July of 2011.
This might be the oldest photograph I still have that I took myself. My uncle Arthur had given me a hand-me-down Pentax camera at some point during my senior year in high school. I wasn’t interested in photographing people at all. I went out and took pictures of buildings and nature and such. The picture above was taken above Kneeland, an area east of Eureka. Most of those pictures somehow didn’t make it through the subsequent years, but this one made it through until I went on a binge of scanning old photos in 2011 – I think I’d recently acquired a flatbed scanner again after not having one for many years, and I had unearthed a box of old photos somehow, and the two felicitously collided.
[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1723 “Looming”
This tree loomed.
[daily log: walking, 2km;]
Caveat: Tree #1722 “Forest meet sea”
This tree was where the forest met the sea.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km;]
Caveat: Tree #1721 “Trees or ditches”
This tree saw some clouds in the morning, but fewer clouds than yesterday.
After working at the store for a bit in the morning, I drove around running errands (buying gas, which requires a special drive over to Klawock, since Craig has no gas station these days). Then I came home and since it wasn’t raining, I worked outside, on that “last six feet” of my electrical conduit on lot 73, at the top of the driveway, connecting to the little well-house there. It was brutal work, but I exposed the previous conduit (a stub I’d put in 3 years ago, determined now to be the wrong size), pulled it out, and put in a new piece of larger-diameter conduit. I now need to expose the water pipe because there’s a rather bad leak on connector to the down-the-hill line of water pipe – I never was able to test the water pipe before, since it’d just been a stub, but when Richard helped install all the downstream faucets and connectors back in August, I had a chance to test it all, and sadly, there was a leak at the uphill end of everything. So that can be a project for the next few days – when it’s not raining again next.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 3hr; ditch-digging, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #1720 “The Rockpit Palms Resort”
This tree is a cartoon palm tree in a stop-motion gif I made while messing around in January, 2014. Really, the tree is ancillary – the alligator and mouse play the central roles in this drama.
The power went out today, because of high winds. A standard Southeast Alaskan gale. It was out in town for only about an hour, but it was out at home for more than 6 hours. Arthur and I heated some leftover spaghetti sauce with rice on the wood stove, it went fine. As long as the temperatures aren’t substantially below freezing, power outages at home are very low stress, really. The stress only arises when low temperatures cause anxiety about our water system freezing.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 5hr]
Caveat: Tree #1719 “The skies cleared”
This tree across the water saw the skies clear – briefly.
[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1718 “Location, location, location”
This tree was beneath the sky.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1717 “Attempts were made”
This tree leaned into rain.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 9hr]
Caveat: Tree #1716 “Neighborly”
This tree saw a wandering neighborly dog.
[daily log: walking, 4km;]
Caveat: Tree #1715 “The tree that fell down”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. It is a tree that fell across the road between Coffman Cove and Thorne Bay, about 40 miles northeast of here. I photographed the tree in October, 2009. I wonder if I’ve posted this picture as a daily tree, before, but I can’t find it if I have.
I did a lot of work around the house today – it’s the first day I haven’t gone into work over two weeks – since the big transition to ownership (mentioned in last blog post). I did work on winterizing the plumbing repairs I did earlier this past summer on where the water comes into the house at the west side of the boat shed (basement). I helped neighbor Brandt with his sheetrocking efforts in his new laundry shed. I made a giant batch of spaghetti sauce to eat as leftovers for the coming week.
[daily log: walking, 5km; lifting sheetrock to the ceiling, 2hrs]
Caveat: Tree #1714 “From green to red and brown”
This tree provided a backdrop to a fireweed plant, which has mostly changed from green to red and brown.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 5hr]