Month: January 2022

Caveat: I will pray for your lucky

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Life in Korea / Working at the Gift Shop

My coworker Jan, at the gift shop, likes to order various exotic herbal medicines and supplements, often from Asia. She ordered something from Korea not that long ago – I don’t know what it was (some kind of mushroom extract?). But when she got her product delivered, it included this note from the vendor.

picture

To Buyer,

Thank you so much for your purchase!!!!!
I hope you had a pleasant transaction as much as I enjoyed:-)
You are such a beautiful, gorgeous, perfect, incredible, fabulous,
fantastic, the one-of-a-kind, mind-boggling, and Excellent buyer!!!
Even though we are oceans apart, I feel it's my honour to have a
chance to get to know you through Amazon.com. That's why I love
having transactions on Amazon.com
I will try to meet your needs by providing better service and
products.

I will pray for your lucky,if you leave a good feedback on Amazon.com.
I wish that you are in good health and fortune with your family.
Hope to deal with you again. Thank you.
Have a wonderful day!!! Have a great day!!!!

Many thanks and Kind regards,
Kevin Kim

This made me nostalgic for my Korean students’ inimitable English style. This could have been written by one of them, easily. So much hyperbole!!!! So many exclamation points!!!!!!!!!

picture

Caveat: Tree #1089

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree (a tree frequently featured here) oversaw a road-to-town still coated in ice.
picture
I drove to town anyway. It was remarkable – it was like driving from Minnesota to California in under an hour. There’s NO snow on the ground, in town, just brown grass and it was a sunny day. Craig, out on a point of land, is just a little bit warmer, but, more notably, it gets more rain and less snow than at our house – just enough that while we still have a foot of snow on the ground, downtown Craig is snow-free right now.

picture[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 5hr]

Caveat: Aspirant to nothingness

Buddhism & Zen / Not My Poetry 
Buddha

Swooning swim to less and less,
Aspirant to nothingness!
Sobs of the worlds, and dole of kinds
That dumb endurers be--
Nirvana! absorb us in your skies,
Annul us into thee.

– Herman Melville (American novelist and poet, 1819-1891)
picture

Caveat: Tree #1087

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree saw fog roll in off the Pacific like a tsunami. Wait… no, that simile was contrived: there was also a tsunami, today – but it was very small.
picture
The fog reminded me of my childhood.
picture[daily log: walking, 1km]

Caveat: Tree #1086

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

This tree is my coast redwood tree that nearly died outside during the super cold spell we had at the beginning of December. Then I tortured it by making it serve duty as our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. But since then its spirits seem to have improved. It’s put out some little light green young needles on the ends of its branches. I put it out on the balcony to enjoy the rain and wind today.
picture

picture[daily log: walking, 2km; cistern-filling, ~1500gallons]

Caveat: Tree #1083

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree saw much meltage of snow, revealing a nearby pile of rocks.
picture
I didn’t go to work today. The road was too bad to drive on – too much ice. Likely same, tomorrow.
picture[daily log: slushtromping, 1km; failing-to-retail, 6hr]

Caveat: Tree #1082

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree saw me fall flat on my butt while attempting to walk on the icy road. I was wearing “chains” on my shoes, too!
picture

I think the plan is: I’m not going to work tomorrow. That’s been okayed by the new bosses.

picture[daily log: walking, 25m; falling, yes]

Caveat: Tree #1081

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree was there as the road filled with water, unable to drain due to the embankments of snow on each side.
picture

picture[daily log: slip-sliding, 500m; slush-shoveling, 1hr]

Caveat: Après moi, le déluge

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

The rain came. Two inches so far today, in our rain-counter. And it’s not dark yet.

But on top of 6-inch-thick layers of ice on the roads, and 2-3 feet of snow piled on everything, it’s not enough, even there, to clear anything. It just creates lakes on the road, on top of the ice, and it turns my carefully-hewn network of snow-shoveled paths into slush-swamps, ankle-deep and devoid of friction.

My network of paths also created a bit of a problem: they channeled the rain and melting snow down our stairs toward the house, which would, of course, make a mess under the house under the upper front door. So I built a “dam” of ice and snow across the stairs and dug a channel off to the side to divert the waters.

picture

For future reference, I should try to make sure to dig out “drains” when putting in snow-paths.

Good thing I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.

picture

Caveat: Contempt of Generations

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Not My Poetry / Quotable 
This World is not Conclusion

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond -
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -
It beckons, and it baffles -
Philosophy, don't know -
And through a Riddle, at the last -
Sagacity, must go -
To guess it, puzzles scholars -
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown -
Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -
Blushes, if any see -
Plucks at a twig of Evidence -
And asks a Vane, the way -
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -
Strong Hallelujahs roll -
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul -

– Emily Dickinson (American poet, 1830-1886)
picture

Caveat: Tree #1079 (for reals this time)

A Daily Tree / My Photos

This tree was meditative, beside still seawater that was littered with patches of frozen riverwater floating along, after an appropriate numerologically-induced respite from tree pictures.
picture

picture[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 5km]

Caveat: Dogwalking #17 and a thought on solitude

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos / Quotable

I walked the dog yesterday after a long break from dogwalking due to excessively icy roads and my own under-the-weatherness over the New Years weekend – mostly it was burnout from the hard push of extra hours working at the gift shop up to and through Christmas. She behaved quite well yesterday.

Today I walked the dog again, but she was quite badly behaved. She decided to chase a car, and pursued it at least as far as the shooting range – about a mile from our house. I had to walk to catch up to her, in very cold weather and calling for the dog. Then when I found her, I had to convince her to come close to me so I could catch her and put her leash back on. That was time consuming and difficult.

Then we made the trek back to her house, on the leash rather than letting her run free.

She seems to realize the leash is a problem, and frequently pauses and engages the leash in a game of tug-of-war to show her feelings.

picture

It was a longer walk than usual, anyway. Probably good for me.

I had a thought about solitude. Actually, the following quote is my own modification of something I must have run across somewhere online, which I have been unable to track down.

I like being alone. I have full control over my own life and my imagination has free rein. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude. You’re not competing with another person, you are competing with my own mental landscape.

picture

Caveat: 100 years in the future

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Found Online / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

I read weird things online, almost every day.

Today, I read an article published in 1922, predicting the future! It told me all about what life would like in 2022. So now I know! The article is here.

Like all efforts at futurism, it had its hits and misses. I like the use of the term “kinephone” – by which the author means something like television. No inkling of the universal information and communication device in each of our pockets, now. On the other hand, this sentence is quite perceptive and interesting (bearing mind the context – in 1922, the women’s vote was 3 years old, and very fresh in people’s minds):

…[I]t is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.

In other news, I went to see the doctor today. For the first time since moving back to the United States in the summer of 2018, I had a doctor’s appointment of my own (as opposed to being a drag-along for Arthur’s doctors’ appointments). It was a general health checkup, not related to any specific ailment or concern. I had been told by my diagnostic oncologist, Dr Cho, in 2018, that “maybe after about 3 years” I should see a doctor as a follow-up to the cancer surgery. It’s been 3 1/2 years, but I just decided I should at least be “on record” at the local healthcare provider, and see what the doctor had to say after a short prodding / checking, along with review of relevant medical history (such as I could report – obviously he doesn’t have access to the Korean National Cancer Centers records).

The doctor took a look in my mouth, prodded my neck, asked some questions, and together we opted against a CAT scan (which I was hoping to opt against, given the hassle and cost). He seemed to agree with Dr Cho’s reported assessment from 2018: any cancer at this point will be a “new” one, as opposed to a follow-on to (metastasis of) the previous one.

So we’ll continue to assert, as I have been, that I am cancer-free, with the caveat (really, a caveat?) that biologically, none of us are truly cancer-free.
picture[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 3.5km]

Caveat: 404

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Life in Alaska

The code “404” is the message a webserver gives to a client (to your browser) when a resource (a specific webpage or URL) is “not found.” It’s a kind of error code.

Most web 404’s are pretty boring. This here blog thingy has the standard apache 404: here – it doesn’t even bother saying the number “404”, which actually bothers me a little bit but not enough to go try to fix it.

Some websites use their 404 page to post jokes of various kinds, or to say something vaguely amusing. Google’s 404: “That’s an error…. That’s all we know.”

One of my favorite 404’s is the Financial Times (of London) newspaper website: here. [UPDATE 2024-01-05: It seems this 404 page at the Financial Times is no longer amusing. It’s become quite boring.]

In other news, I had a dead battery this morning. An annoying circumstance, but I survived – it didn’t happen at the house, but rather after I’d gone to town and parked at a merchant while running an errand this morning. The car said, “404 – battery not found.”

We’ll see how it does tomorrow morning. The NAPA store here in town didn’t have the needed battery model in stock (of course if didn’t). So I’m carrying around one of those nifty battery-pack jump starter thingos, now.

picture[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 6hr]

Back to Top