This tree helped frame a scene of calm water.
Caveat: Poem #2744 “Intention”
Caveat: Tree #1837 “Power”
Caveat: Poem #2743 “Predator”
Caveat: Tree #1836 “A blueish sky”
This tree saw a blueish sky as the car thawed its windshield for the commute to town.
Caveat: Poem #2742 “Sudo”
ㅁ I craved great power... a poem for an admin: sudo cat haiku
– a sudo-haiku. A note of explanation: this haiku is an inside joke, for those familiar with linux system administration.
Caveat: Tree #1835 “Along a misty road”
Caveat: Poem #2741 “Distortions on the territory’s map”
ㅁ Like drizzle but frozen: the snow had come, a slow world-filling, tree and stone covering, gradual envelopment, muting the atmosphere's flavors, leaving the territory all blurred.
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Tree #1834 “Snow on the driveway”
Caveat: Poem #2740 “An implicit teleology”
ㅁ so at last it happened snow made contact piled up on the ground not really that deep though still I got the shovel out and scraped the powder off the steps left footprints across the neighborhood
– a reverse nonnet
Caveat: Tree #1833 “As winter finally arrived”
This tree was by the sea as a proper winter finally arrived.
Caveat: Poem #2739 “The origins of consciousness”
Caveat: Tree #1832 “Speculations as to the inner life of a small greenhouse”
This tree saw rain shifting to snow, out by the little greenhouse with a moldy heart.
Arthur forgot how to pay at the store yesterday. Just stood there, while the cashier got frustrated. It was a bit stressful, but I stepped in and pulled the levers – helped him dig out his credit card, sort of gave directions.
It’s always doubly frustrating because half the time he’ll deny there was a problem minutes later. It’s just like this temporary glitch in the operating system.
Caveat: Poem #2738 “A godless theogony”
Caveat: Tree #1831 “In gloomy gloaming”
Caveat: Poem #2737 “Just barely attached”
Caveat: Tree #1830 “A view across the water”
This tree was adjacent to a nice view toward downtown Rockpit, out there across the water.
Caveat: Poem #2736 “Observations”
Caveat: Tree #1829 “On helium”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I like this tree. I took this picture in April, 2014, walking near my place of work in Goyang City, South Korea. I was only 6 months out from the end of my radiation treatment after my previous cancer surgery. I remember feeling quite terrible, but slogging along with job and life.
Today was a long, unprofitable day at the gift store. I had to go buy a new tank of helium at Tyler, for our balloon operation. As a side note, a tank of helium is a very heavy thing – not what you’d expect from helium, to be frank.
I learned that our local competitor in helium retailing, the monopoly grocery store, sells their helium at less than half what we do. If they pay the same for a tank of helium that we do (and I’m confident they do – they’re an obvious customer at Tyler, the only place that sells helium on the island), they’re selling at a steep loss. I pondered the economics of being a monopoly grocery store in a small, remote Alaskan town. Maybe there’s some weird philanthropic helium subsidy from some “Keep Rural Alaska Balloony” foundation. Or maybe they’re just incompetent and forgot to raise their prices over the last decade.
[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 9hr; helium-tank-loading-unloading, 10min]
Caveat: Poem #2735 “Mute”
Caveat: Tree #1828 “More wind, more rain”
This tree experienced wind and rain.
I ran across an interesting one-line take-down of Pascal’s Wager: “I don’t believe in gambling, either.”
Caveat: Poem #2734 “Inadequate result”
Caveat: Tree #1827 “Precipitation”
This tree saw substantial precipitation.
I finally had 2 days off from work in a row. And tomorrow too. I was feeling burnt out.
Caveat: Poem #2733 “The drain”
ㅁ They came and cleansed the dirty sea: ambitious clouds and rain. They came and washed the roads and trees: this path became a drain.
– a quatrain in ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1826 “A gift for the Christmas tree”
This tree was our Christmas tree. I put it outside again a few weeks ago and gifted it with a pink flamingo to keep it entertained.
Caveat: Poem #2732 “The photon’s strange journey”
Caveat: Tree #1825 “Alongside our potholy road”
This tree was alongside our potholy road.
Art and I both had dental exam appointments scheduled this morning, but the the appointments were cancelled because the dentist couldn’t make it to the clinic (he comes from Sitka, he’s not local). They didn’t tell us about this cancellation until we got there, though. So we had a much earlier “shopping day in town” than we normally do, every Thursday.
Then, the moment we got home, around 11 AM, I got a call from the the gift store and had to go back in, to complete a framing project that I had been led to understand was “no hurry” but in fact the customer wanted promptly.
So I did a lot of driving back and forth on our potholy road.
Caveat: Poem #2731 “A balladsalad for the ages”
ㅁ a meaning wanders by, some nouns, in silly, this here ballad, the lost and broken syntax is, bad like then, it's word salad.
– a quatrain in (deliberately bad) ballad meter.
Caveat: Tree #1824 “And no way out”
Caveat: Poem #2730 “The unexpected”
Caveat: Tree #1823 “Patch of ice”
This tree oversaw a stubborn, slick patch of ice despite unexpectedly warm (relatively speaking).
Caveat: Poem #2729 “Having been watched”
Caveat: Tree #1822 “The crooked tree by the ancestor’s grave”
This tree was near an ancestor’s grave in South Korea. I have no idea when I took this picture, but it was before 2014, and it was in Korea.
I had a very exhausting day. Morning at the dentist (always stressful, and I will always stand by my declaration that fighting mouth cancer is more pleasant than the dentist), then a full day at work, moving around mat board (heavy 32″ x 40″ sheets of cardboard) to rearrange my frame shop area at the store.