This tree has a hole in it. I put the hole there, as part of my treehouse project. So this tree is the same tree that can be seen on the left in Tree #499.
[daily log: walking, 2km; smashing finger, 1]
Category: Banalities & Journaling
Caveat: Smashing
I was working on my treehouse. I was using a drill to drill a hole in the tree, to attach my special treehouse mounting brackets I got last year.
The drill had enough torque to drill the hole in the tree. But my hand wasn’t strong enough to hold the drill in place, and I smashed my left index finger against the tree with the drill as is kicked against my grip rotationally.
I took a break from treehouse efforts and made some Chilean-style fish chowder (chupe de pescado) using some freezer-burned salmon and some fresh-caught halibut. You can see a nice chunk of each on the spoon.
Caveat: Halibut #1
Last year’s fishing season we were halibutless.
We went out with Joe this morning, and out at San Francisco Point on the eastern edge of Noyes Island, we caught one modest-sized halibut. So I think (hope) Arthur was pleased.
We trolled for salmon, too. A lot. The salmon were uninterested in our hooks.
Here we are trolling by Joe’s house, just down the inlet a mile or so. Joe is gazing at his house.
Here is the small halibut.
Here is a view of the “back” side of Sunnahae Mountain – that is to say, we are looking at it from the north: it’s the peak in the center. This is not the view we normally have of the mountain – we see the south side of the mountain from our home. You can click this picture to make it larger.
Caveat: Radish #2
I grew a radish.
Later I ate it.
Caveat: building something
I have mentioned a few times that I have this kind of slow-moving “treehouse” project. For a long time, I had settled on a location up the hillside near the southern boundary of lot 73. However, over the past winter I came to realize that siting it there was perhaps one reason why I worked on it so little. And in any event, I like the idea of a treehouse near the water.
So I made the decision to move the treehouse location to a set of trees down near the northeast corner of lot 73, near the tide line. There are two Sitka Spruce there that I think will work well.
And I have been working on it.
I set up a kind of “guide beam” between the two trees today.
This beam is not part of the eventual structure. It’s merely something to use to make sure I’m at the same level on both trees, as I attach the main supports. And it’ll be something to lean against or hoist things up with.
I am making use of a pair of 4″x12″x8′ beams left over from the construction of Arthur’s dock many years ago. They are treated to be rot resistant, and quite hefty. I am unable to lift one of them, but I dragged them along the ground down to the treehouse site. I’ll have to work out some kind of pulley arrangement when I’m ready to lift them into place. I am installing attachment loops on them currently. One down, three to go.
I also saw a red bug enjoying a rock.
Caveat: image-shrine by the roadside
A Desolation Now mind is clear as a cloudless sky. Time then to make a home in wilderness. What have I done but wander with my eyes in the trees? So I will build: wife, family, and seek for neighbors. Or I perish of lonesomeness or want of food or lightning or the bear (must tame the hart and wear the bear). And maybe make an image of my wandering, a little image-shrine by the roadside to signify to traveler that I live here in the wilderness awake and at home. - Allen Ginsberg (American poet, 1926-1997)
Caveat: Differences among nations
I feel the below graph underscores a point I often try to make: I believe that “governance” matters. This is to say that different countries are governed in different ways, and that leads to different results. Something like this virus is a great test-scenario, since there is likely no actual difference in the way the virus itself behaves from one country to another. So the differences in the graphs below are all about the direct results of human behavior.
Caveat: beets me
A beet appeared in my greenhouse.
A ladybug visited a bean plant.
I played with hydrology today, somewhat disappointingly.
Caveat: and the sea
Arthur and I went out in the boat today. It was the first time of the season.
The water was flat. The sky was partly overcast, but it was not unpleasant. Arthur decided to go out because he heard our neighbor Joe was going to be out – on a different boat. I think Arthur is a bit of a “go with what others are doing” on matters of seeking to catch fish. So if Joe was going to go try, well then he damn well better go try too.
I’ve observed before, that Arthur’s engagement in and interest in fishing is surprisingly social in nature. He’s always looking at other boats, speculating what and if they are catching, asking other people what they’ve caught and where, etc. And of course he is motivated by the catching more than the sport of it, too – he likes to have the fish caught and in the freezer. They are a currency that he uses to lubricate his social relationships with his far-flung friends and family down in the lower 48.
In fact, I often feel that with respect to the act of fishing in itself, Arthur doesn’t really enjoy it. He lacked the patience even when he was at the height of his faculties, and he quickly becomes frustrated with every single little mishap or unexpected complication in his procedures.
We never made it past Craig, today. First we had problems with the small motor (the “kicker,” used for trolling). That turned out to be an idiot-move on my part. The motor has a “lock” such that if it is in gear, it won’t start. And I was trying to start it in gear. And we were starting to take the motor apart. I can only blame Arthur in that it didn’t occur to him to check my efforts to turn over the motor with the starter using the ignition – where he might have noticed it was in gear.
Well, that got us off to a bad start. Arthur was grumpy.
And we had no end of difficulties with the downriggers. One simply wouldn’t work at all. The other seemed intermittent, and then he was fiddling with it and went and disconnected the coupling at the end of the wire. That had to be reassembled, which is detail-oriented work requiring fine motor skills. Arthur doesn’t have much of a supply of those, but the situation is rendered much, much worse by his lack of patience and very short temper. Soon he was cussing and throwing things.
When he gets like this in the house, I just leave. I go outside, or I hide in my attic. It passes – he doesn’t stew in it. But on the boat, there is no escape. And my very presence was one of the annoyances driving him mad. He sees me as barely competent even at the best of times, and the incident with motor before leaving the dock had only reinforced his utter distrust of my competence in the current moment. He found my efforts to help almost completely unacceptable.
He found uncountable ways to criticize things. Small things. “Aren’t you watching the shore? We’re getting too close.” No, I was trying to insert the wire in the end-assembly, I thought you were watching it. Et cetera.
To be honest, going out in the boat with Arthur has almost always been one of the most stressful aspects of my time here with him. He wants to be in charge, sees me as a hindrance half the time and an incompetent but tolerable neer-do-well the other half.
Days like today, I feel tempted to just let him go out by himself, and if that’s the end of it, so be it.
Caveat: Cake and Boat
I made a cake yesterday. This is to celebrate something: maybe Arthur’s love of chocolate? maybe because it is Cinco de Mayo? maybe my mother’s birthday?
Maybe in anticipation of the fact we launched the boat today?
But we didn’t go fishing yet. It’s raining.
Caveat: Sneaking Meeses
Arthur and I have been having problems with mice. Arthur calls them meeses – I think this is an old wordplay/joke of his.
They seem to be entering the house via the boathouse garage door – it’s not well sealed at the bottom where it fits over the boat trolley railing. Then they must come up the stairs and get into the kitchen. They ate half a bag of split peas I was storing in a drawer, and several corners of several of Arthur’s infinite stash of chocolate bars. They also got into the chocolate chips and under the stove, where they ate some cardboard in the drawer down there where the frying pans are stored.
Arthur has been putting out traps baited with peanut butter. We’ve caught at least 7 mice in the last 2 weeks.
Caveat: On Brokenwood and also the meta-mysteries of each day
Every evening, basically without fail, I watch TV with Arthur for 2-3 hours.
We don’t get broadcast TV or cable here. And streaming is too unreliable given our copper wire DSL connected to the rest of the world via Satellite uplink.
But Arthur has an immense library of TV shows and movies ripped from DVD and stored in his iTunes application hooked up to his Apple TV.
Mostly what we watch are mysteries and crime dramas, police procedurals, and old action movies. These are what Arthur prefers. He doesn’t like slow-moving dramas or “art films,” and doesn’t think much of comedy, either. But within his preferred genres his tastes are broad and cosmopolitan.
I enjoy these shows well enough, for the most part. But they aren’t compelling entertainment, for me. When Arthur has been gone at various times, and I’ve been here alone, I feel no inclination to watch TV on my own. I don’t miss it. But I don’t mind it when we do it, either.
One series I enjoy is a police detective series from New Zealand, called Brokenwood. The mysteries in each episode are genuinely mysterious – the show doesn’t telegraph the solution like many shows do. And there is a lot of understated humor in the scripts. I also enjoy the NZ accent. We recently started season 5.
In recent months, however, we’ve also been experiencing a kind of “meta mystery” each evening. A series we have been watching is the infamous NCIS – a US crime procedural which was ubiquitous on Korean broadcast TV, when I was living there.
Arthur has been struggling with his computer, and his efforts to rip and organize his shows. With respect to NCIS, he has repeatedly managed to mix up the titles/episode numbers vis-a-vis their actual contents. So for example we will start watching an episode labelled season 3, episode 18 only to find it is in fact season 3, episode 8, or season 2, episode 18. There is no particular pattern to the mistakes, but they are abundant. And Arthur gets quite perturbed, yet he struggles to sort out what is going on.
Each night, we have to start and stop several episodes to find the “right one” with respect to where we are in the series – given we are trying to watch them in order. Some nights, we give up and just watch one we haven’t seen. It doesn’t help that most of the time Arthur has no memory of any of the previous episodes, so he has to rely on me to tell him whether we’ve seen a given episode or not. I suspect this lack of short-term memory is also why the labels on the episodes get mixed up in the first place – he has his routines, which he won’t consider changing, where he does various cut-and-paste actions in his applications on his computer, and he holds information about which files he’s working with in his working memory. But if the working memory is unreliable, that can lead to the mislabeling we’re seeing. He won’t consider changing his procedure – I’ve suggested he write things down, or start breaking the steps down in such a way that he’s not trying to process multiple files at once. But he would rather spend an entire day re-arranging his files on his computer, cussing the whole time, only to find a mystifyingly still incorrect labelling of a collection of episodes as we sit down to watch in the evening.
It’s hard. There’s not much I can do. So lately I’ve taken to thinking of it, in my mind, as a kind of “meta mystery of the day”: to puzzle out what happened this time to the labels on the NCIS episodes. This has been going on for several weeks. I don’t expect it to change anytime soon. And given NCIS has some 400 episodes, we’re in for a long ride.
Caveat: just one more post about books of poetry…
I’ll post this one more time. I’ve made the second volume of my collection of poetry “official” now, too. I made a little “Books” page on my professional website, which I’ll reproduce here.
I have published two volumes of poetry. Paperback copies are available on Amazon, on my author page. The prices are set based on cost of printing – I am not out to make money from my poetry.
I had originally intended to also publish Kindle (electronic book) versions, but Amazon was making that difficult, and so I decided that if what you really want is to read the poems cheaply or electronically, I’ll give them away for free. Here are PDF versions of both volumes:
Here are the paperback books on Amazon.
Caveat: Let’s
The problem with growing in a greenhouse is that you still have to water your garden even when it rains all day.
Let’s look at lettuce. It’s growing well.
Juli said (on the phone) that lettuce and onions shouldn’t be next to each other. I didn’t know that. I told her it was too late. The lettuce and onions seem okay so far – but times are early to judge success.
Unrelated nonsense…
“This sentence has seven syllables” has eight syllables
“This sentence has eight syllables” has seven syllables
Caveat: Poem: Mostly in Alaska
I have created an author page on Amazon. It’s rudimentary – they don’t give you a lot of room for customization, but that’s fine. I’ve added a link to the top-most menu on this blog, to the right.
More significantly, I am now getting ready to publish the always intended second volume of poems, which will cover the time period from my departure from Korea to the current date. I suppose the poems included in it will be those right up through the moment I am ready to push the “publish” button.
The Library of Congress number has been applied for, and I have finished the formatting work for the text. I have also made a draft cover design.
Caveat: Tarp and Bean
“Tarp and Bean” sounds like the name of a roadside inn in a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel.
I finally got around to finishing my effort to “unfloor” my studio (green tent storage facility). I had hoped that putting down a large tarp as a kind of floor would help limit the moisture. But much of the moisture inside is due to condensation, and the tarp just collected that and made a little lake in the middle of the floor. So I resolved to get the tarp floor out – just have a muddy floor.
That’s what I’ve completed. I did it without taking out the stuff in the studio. It was like a large-scale implementation of the “tablecloth trick” – where you yank out the tablecloth and all the things on top of it remain in their places.
Here is the tarp drying.
Here is the interior with its new mud floor.
Here is a bean appearing in my greenhouse.
This is not a greenbean, but a black bean. It wasn’t clear that these would grow here, so the fact that I have a sprout is a good first step.
Caveat: on the ranch
I tend to put a lot of salad dressing on my salads.
That wasn’t always the case. But ever since my mouth surgery, I like my foods to have a more “squishy” character – easier to chew with my “handicapped” tongue (shortened, limited in range-of-motion, and without a sense of touch, due to the cancer surgery). So I pour on the salad dressing and then the salads don’t create the problems I can sometimes have, especially with pieces of lettuce adhering to the roof of my mouth where my tongue can’t find them.
Arthur, however, always looks on disapprovingly as I slather on my creamy dressings – blue cheese or ranch being my preferred ones. I suspect he just feels aware of how much money is spent on bottles of dressing, and it seems exorbitant to him. I’m really not sure why he has a right to disapprove – given his chocolate and ice cream habits. Or maybe it’s just not appealing to him, in that he would not enjoy a salad so adorned. But… anyway.
I decided to try to save some money and make my own ranch dressing. It’s not that hard – some milk, sour cream, mayo, some spices. I added some finely chopped onion.
My homemade ranch dressing was better than I had expected – better than store bought.
Meanwhile, in the morning, I did some more maintenance on our back-up heating system. So to speak. I had bought a new, bigger maul for pounding the wedge into the log-rounds to split them. The result was pleasing.
Caveat: logs and lettuces and loopy isolines
I worked on my firewood collection for a while in the morning.
I saw some lettuces growing nicely in my greenhouse.
I created a really messed-up topo map on my server. Something went wrong with the algorithm. I later learned it had to do with not deleting some temporary files left over from a previous run of the same program.
Another day in my moss-covered, misanthrope’s paradise.
Caveat: Tree #467
The four hundred and sixty-seventh tree is one among many.
In other news, rumor has it there are now not zero, but rather two cases of covid-19 here on our isolated island.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Cursing his name (what’s his name?)
Arthur was really mad at my brother Andrew earlier today. But he couldn’t remember his name. It was funny, because the target of his anger floated from “person to person”: “damn Aaron” … “what was Jeffrey thinking!” …
The reason he was angry was because we were putting the boat railings back in the water after their winter hiatus.
Last year when he was here, my brother Andrew had ambitiously taken on the task of trying to improve the safety of how the boat trolley is mounted on its cables. Andrew had added these extra U-bolts and changed the configuration of how the cable attaches to the trolley. Arthur hadn’t been opposed in principle to this improved safety, but we were now finding that we’d increased safety at the expense of reducing the flexibility of the system, such that it had become essentially impossible to get enough slack in the cable to re-attach it to the rail-brace down at the bottom in the water
So I spent more than an hour removing one of the supplemental U-bolts at the base of the trolley so that we could increase the slack in the cable. Once there was some slack, we were able to re-attach the cable, and we could tighten things back up.
But now the U-bolt is gone. Andrew would not approve. Arthur thought it had been overkill anyway. We know what Arthur thinks of safety: “Better to be lucky than smart!” is his operating motto.
Meanwhile, a second radish appeared in my garden. The greenhouse was actually hot today, for the first time, I think: a combination of a sunny day and warming temperatures. Here is the second radish, on the right, with the first radish, on left and more in the foreground and out-of-focus.
And the patch of lettuce is doing well.
Caveat: Purplish Propensities
As seems to arise on a regular basis, I developed a craving for borshch. I happened to see some beets among the vegetables at the store on Thursday, so I took a piece of beef that Dean and Pam had brought to us last summer out of the freezer and made some borshch this morning in the slow cooker.
Meanwhile I keep trying to fix the old broken links in this here blog. But I don’t have a vast amount of patience for that project, sometimes.
Caveat: Isolated activity
I am normally living an isolated lifestyle. So this period of “social isolation” during the virustime doesn’t imply any kind of true lifestyle change for me, whatsoever.
One thing I continue is my geofiction hobby. Here, for lack of anything more interesting, is a cross-post from my other blog (which is pseudonymous and focused on geofiction).
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I keep making small incremental progress on the imaginary city of Ohunkagan. I start to imagine the city it will be when I reach the “present” – from the perspective of around 1900, which is its current historical moment.
[Technical note: screenshot taken at this URL (for future screenshots to match).]
You can see that the near-northeast has filled in (Balto area). Also, the Conagher Rail Car Company, in the southwest along the portage shoreline, and the Signal Hill area straight west near the line with the town of Mythic.
I have done work farther out, beyond the frame of the “standard” screenshot above, including work at Iyotanhaha, Riverton and Prairie Forge. All these towns will be within the Metropolitan Area’s modern perimeter, once we reach 2020.
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What I’m listening to right now.
Tears for Fears, “Mad World.”
Lyrics.
All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
Mad world
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world
Mad world
Enlarging your world
Mad world
Caveat: unknown machine-animal conjugations
I guess someone (2 someones) actually ordered my book.
That’s kinda cool. Thank you to whomever that was!
Joke seen on internet:
Q: What do you get if you cross a helicopter and rhinoceros?
A: Hell-if-I-know.
Caveat: Lettuce #1
And then there was an itty bitty lettuce leaf.
A joke seen on the internet:
“My snail was losing in races, so I tried taking his shell off. But it just made him more sluggish.”
Caveat: Tree #460
This tree lurks.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Radish #1
I went out to my greenhouse this morning, just after dawn. It was snowing outside. But inside the greenhouse, I think I detected a radish rising.
Caveat: A day like others
The morning dawned with a bit of fresh snow having fallen, and cold and clear. Winter’s not done yet.
I used some rocks to build a “planter” outside the door of my greenhouse. My thinking is that I will grow only local things in this “planter” but in a controlled way. I’ll stick in an alder sapling or some moss on a piece of wood, or see what emerges. Not for food or anything like that, but just out of curiosity. A kind of mini zen garden.
Caveat: Tree #457
I was being impatient with my garden. Nothing has sprouted – but it’s been less than a week, so of course nothing has sprouted. But I wanted to see something growing in my greenhouse. So I uprooted two 3-inch tall saplings from outside and planted them in a corner of one of my planters. The tree on the left is a cedar, the one on the right is a western hemlock. These are extremely common trees around here, and grow like weeds in the gravel by the road. Now something green is growing in my greenhouse!
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: a brief incursion of reality
… Not what you think.
On my homegrown geofiction server, I have temporarily imported some of the southeast Alaskan islands, because I want to test some functionality and sometimes using real-world data is easier. But I only brought in the coastlines for this island, and some nearby islands, but skipped the continent. I decided to make my own towns, somewhat tongue-in cheek. You can see them on this screenshot, below.
Caveat: Oh well, and someone’s mobile home
Yesterday, I decided to solve something that had been bothering me.
The new well, drilled last year, seems to have developed an artesian character. It’s not clear whether this is a new permanent feature or just a temporary or seasonal development. It is constantly pushing out water, overflowing its sleeve, at about a gallon a minute. That’s substantial flow. It’s not necessarily undesirable – if it’s a permanent feature, it’s another “backup” aspect of having a well, in that we will not run out of water even in the event of long dry season combined with a lack of electricity to pump water.
But it does create a problem: the overflowing water flows down the outside of the well-sleeve, and was actually creating some erosion in the gravel of the driveway pad where the well was placed. So I wanted to get the overflow routed to the hillside, away from the top of the driveway pad. My idea was to tap the side of the well-head and attach a simple hose faucet, to which a hose could be attached to re-route the overflowing water.
This is what I did, with Arthur’s “technical assistance” – he actually does know more about which drill bits were appropriate, and such. So we got it done.
Earlier today, we drove into town for our Thursday shopping. I saw this house on a tracked vehicle. I thought to myself, “that looks like something my brother Andrew would drive.” I don’t know if that’s an accurate thought, but it was amusing.
Caveat: Published
The book is now “live”. Link to Amazon.
This is the first volume, subtitled “Mostly in Korea.” The poems included are through July 21st, 2018, when I left Korea – it seemed a good breaking place. I’ll put together another volume, subtitled “Mostly in Alaska” for poems written subsequently.
I would like to be clear – I would be very pleased if people bought my book. But owning a book is a kind of fetish object, and if you’re simply interested in reading the poems, please don’t feel obligated to give me (and Amazon Corporation!) money. The poems are all freely available online. You’ll have to go back in time to the first page (highest numbered) to see them in chronological order, since the blog format provides them in most-recent-first order.
I made very few changes to them in making the book (mostly in the area of formatting), and that was intentional – I want the “free versions” to still be “canon.”
Caveat: Tree #454
This is a little hemlock tree that was in the way of the path I was making up to my new greenhouse. So I moved the tree to a different spot. I thought if it grows there it can help anchor the corner of the steep, landfill hillside behind my new greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Not for Resale
I received the “galley proof” for my book today. This is really the last step before the book can go “live” on Amazon. I clicked “publish” for the text, and now must await the censors’ approval (the corporate censors, making sure there’s no content in the book that violates Amazon’s terms-of-use). By the end of the week, I expect my book will be for sale online.
