Category: A Daily Tree

Caveat: Tree #1681 “The blueberry bush”

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia / My Photos

This tree was behind a purple-leaved blueberry bush.

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Because of his memory issues, sometimes I’ll end up having to have the same exact conversation with Arthur 3 or 4 times in a day. And he gets offended if I point out that it isn’t the first time we’ve had a given conversation – but somehow I can’t resist pointing it out, as it gets emotionally exhausting reviewing where the spare chargers for his ipods are for the 4th time, while he seems anxiously puzzled that he didn’t know where they were (or that he has them at all), though he’d placed them there himself.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3km]

Caveat: Tree #1674 “Magpie with tree”

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture of a tree-trunk and adjacent magpie while walking to or from work one day in June, 2011, in Goyang, Gyeonggi, South Korea (경기도 고양시 일산서구).

A rainy sidewalk area with a tree trunk and a magpie

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; laboring, 6hr]

Caveat: Tree #1670 “Due to the fires”

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree caught some morning sunlight stained yellow by smoke from Canadian wildfires.

A tree snag (tall dead stump) with orange-yellow sunlight, and other conifers surrouding

These days I am quite exhausted at the end of the day. Too much going on, too much emotional energy getting used up. I’ve been in burnout mode.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5.5km; retailing, 8hr;]

Caveat: Tree #1669 “On edge”

A Daily Tree / Life in Alaska / My Photos

This tree was alarmed by an interloping excavator.

A view down a steep hillside with an excavator at the bottom of a gravel driveway and some tall trees in the background. The excavator has clearly been doing some work, making ditches and such

Richard, the excavatorer, seemed a bit on edge yesterday.

A closer view of the excavator with a grinning operator inside, holding a can of soda, and the excavator is balanced on the front of its tracks as it appears about to descend a steep hillside

Richard does excellent work and is highly competent – he knows the “right way” to do things and works efficiently – but he is difficult to communicate with, because he has very strong opinions which he believes to be facts. Sometimes you just have to let him do it “his way” and adapt to what he’s done afterward, similar to dealing with natural disasters.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5.5km; retailing, 8hr;]

Caveat: Tree #1666 “Arcata, California, 1965”

A Daily Tree

This tree is a guest tree from my past. Farther in my past than other guest trees, this photo was taken, probably by my mother or father, in front of the house they bought in far northern California in the year I was born. That’s my dad’s Model A Ford parked in front, and the trailer it had towed out from Kentucky a few years before. He still has both the car (which still runs, sporadically) and the trailer. The cherry tree in the photo, in the house’s front yard, is long gone, replaced by quite different trees.

A scan of a quite old black and white photo of an old, modest house in northern California, with an old 1928 Model A Ford parked in front of it, and a large cherry tree in the front yard

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

Caveat: Tree #1665 “Not fishing”

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / Fishing Report / My Photos

This tree was on the shore while Arthur and Wayne went out in the boat to try to catch fish.

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It was nice to have a break. As I’ve mentioned before, fishing with Arthur, for me, is not actually fun at all. Arthur has strong feelings about how fishing should happen, and he doesn’t have any confidence in my ability to navigate or assist. I’m still a 12-year-old kid in his eyes, often times. But with his cognitive and physical challenges, these days, he isn’t really equipped to actually be the captain of the boat. So going out in the boat with him is a huge emotional challenge. He gets mad and has tantrums, or he just gives up and sulks. Or he gets obsessed about one issue or another, like the time we spent 40 minutes circling a spot in the water because we’d dropped a bucket in the water and he insisted we try to get it back.

Anyway, I expect the dynamic with him in the boat with Wayne would go differently. Art and Wayne are peers, firstly, and secondly, Wayne is the person who actually taught Arthur much of his fishing skills and boat-craft, many years ago. So Arthur will not distrust Wayne’s suggestions or skills.

Regardless, I could tell Wayne was tired from their half day out on the water together. Simply communicating with Arthur is exhausting – the combination of incipient deafness and difficulty with language processing combine to make it a slog to interact with him.

I haven’t been avoiding going out in the boat with Arthur – if anything, he’s been avoiding going out in the boat at all. He seems vaguely aware of his issues and limitations, at some level, and so he spends a lot of time making up excuses for why we don’t need to go out fishing. And I’ve been happy to enable him. And I was happy, today, to let Wayne take it on. I feel guilty that I was happy about that. Living up here, it’s very hard to explain to the people around me that I have come to actually rather strongly dislike fishing. But that’s what’s happened. I’m sorry.

They caught a few salmon, and a ling-cod.

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

Caveat: Tree #1662 “Beside a runway”

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree was beside a runway at an airport where a friend coming to visit landed earlier today. The plane that Wayne was in is the one on the far left of the photo – it had just touched down. It was raining. It’s been raining a lot. You can click the pic to see it bigger.

A panoramic shot of a small airport runway, many trees in the background in silhouette, a plane just landed is on the left, another plane is staged on the taxiway a bit closer to the camera's viewpoint

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

Caveat: Tree #1661 “Cypress”

A Daily Tree / My Garden / My Photos

This tree is about one inch tall. I think I germinated a cypress tree seed in my greenhouse. I’m not completely sure on the identity, but it’s the only thing I planted in that bucket. I will try to grow a cypress tree.

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

Caveat: Tree #1660 “The sky”

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree looked up.

Some trees (mostly conifers) against a striking pattern of clouds and a distant mountain

I labored quite a bit today, moving a pile of stored stuff from one spot on my lot to another, in preparation for Richard coming out with his excavator to excavate trenches for plumbing stuff.

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

Caveat: Tree #1658 “우림보보”

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree is a guest tree from my past. I guess I mean one of those barely-visible, scraggly-lookin trees growing out of the sidewalk in front of that building. That building was my first apartment building when I moved to Goyang City, South Korea, in September, 2007. This is possibly the first photo I took there – I was still using a digital camera, then, no such thing as a smart phone. Although I lived in quite a few different buildings and locations in South Korea during my 11 years there, that building was also the last building I lived in before I moved away in July, 2018, and overall the one I occupied the longest, at around a total of 7 1/2 years occupancy. It’s the closest to a sense of “home” that I had there.

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

Caveat: Tree #1657 “More practical trolleyology”

A Daily Tree / Life in Alaska / My Photos

This tree saw that I had repaired the boat-trolley.

A view of a 'boat trolley' used to lift a boat out of the water on a ramp, with the boat in the water at the dock in the distance, and a tree to the left side

This is the boat trolley that Arthur engineered and built some decades ago, that allows us to put the boat into the boathouse without having to use the boat trailer or a regular boat launch ramp.

I had to fix the bolt-axles for the wheels. They were badly corroded.

Four cast aluminum wheels for the boat-trolley

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km]

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