Caveat: Unarthurized

I watched Arthur get on an airplane this morning. He’s bound for Portland, Colorado, Oklahoma – points south. He was pretty disappointed that Covid interrupted his standard winter tour of his friends and relatives. So once vaccinated and all that, he pretty quickly moved to remedy the missed trip. I’ll stay here and work at the gift shop and ‘hold down the fort.’ It will do us both good, a bit of a break from each other. Hopefully his  travels go well.
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Caveat: Tree #800

This tree feels somehow more significant in a numerological sense. Anyway, it’s  been featured before. It’s right downhill from my storage tent – it’s the tree that “caught” the tent when it tried to roll away in the big wind.
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picture[daily log: walking, 2.5km]

Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #5

It was a slow week at the frame shop. I actually only made one frame for a paying customer – it was a repair job, at that, and not a new frame at all. The customer was very pleased, though, because in taking apart the frame, I found a bunch of “long lost” family baby pics stashed behind the picture shown and sealed into the frame.
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Sometimes the frame shop is slow not due to lack of customers, but because we rely on our supplier to send us the pre-cut frames ready to assemble for orders we’ve requested, and sometimes those deliveries are slow – that’s life on an Alaskan island for you.
To use up some time during my frame shop hours, I focused on improving my mat-cutting skills. I got adventurous, and tried some circles (using a special, very finicky tool) and some “lines” in box shape around the cut area of the mat (I’m not sure what these lines are formally called, but they’re popular on high-end matting styles).
So I did a bunch of mat cuts and then dropped random objects – a company brochure, a cartoon cat I quickly sketched – into them to give them focus.
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Caveat: Tree #796

This tree is dying due to fire damage. I took this picture a few days ago when there was some fresh snow.
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picture[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]

Caveat: Tree #795

This tree saw the sun make an appearance and illuminate my little greenhouse (maybe pick the small alder tree that I planted last year just to the left of the door). So I worked in the greenhouse preparing some planters for planting soon.
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picture[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 2hr]

Caveat: Tree #794

This tree (foreground) is preparing to leave (that is, send out its fresh spring leaves).
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picture[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Caveat: Tree #793

This tree was near a little plastic and fabric rainbow windmill thingy that I bought at the gift store for about 15 bucks and planted at the head of lot 73’s driveway.
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picture[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Caveat: Tree #792

This tree was outside in the returning snow.
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This lettuce was just planted in my little greenhouse.
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picture[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 3hr]

Caveat: Poem #1692 “Memoirs of the Architect”

ㅁ
-> . . . )  Memoirs of the Architect ? {Post title}
When the calico cat on the couch fades
in the slanted rays of the wintersun
And when the streets outside the window
reach not for home but for their origins
Gentle, gentle, do my tears come.
Without the calculus of my memory to guide
those tears
Without the nurture of my once heroic
imaginings
Quiet, quiet, the pain slips heavily.
Toward anger                .    Time
the                            .        out
Knife                .            of
slips                            time
home.                    lost,
Cannot,
for whatever reason,
That these viscous drops of blood are mine.
And so bloodied a knife in my trembling
hand
Call me to mind,
A japanese garden I once
saw in a photograph which I perceived
with an ambition to become an architect.
A designer of my struggling end.
Little pebbles, little pebbles
meaning
.    for
.            nought
Quiet    .
11/17/83 JARED
There's no eagerness here.
Nor will it ever come to pass
But in the thick, timid soul
of the non-architect.
There.
It is irremediable.  ( . . . ->

– a free-form poem, which I wrote in the Fall of 1983 – in mid-November – the evidence is right in the text, for this one. Back around 2010, I posted this under my “retroblogging” category (at the appropriate date), but I’ve thought to occasionally include these ancient efforts in my “daily poem” category so that they will eventually be included in a book. This poem appears to commemorate the exact moment in my youth when I gave up my childhood dream of becoming an architect. I’m not sure why I gave up that dream – it seems to have been largely a function of lack-of-self-confidence and laziness.
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Caveat: Tree #790

This tree saw the snows from last weekend had mostly melted away.
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This picture is almost exactly the same view as tree #786.
picture[daily log: walking, 2.5km; retailing, 6hr]

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