Category: Banalities & Journaling

Caveat: image-shrine by the roadside

Banalities & Journaling 
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)

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Caveat: Differences among nations

Banalities & Journaling / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

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.
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Caveat: and the sea

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

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.
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Caveat: Cake and Boat

Banalities & Journaling

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?
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Maybe in anticipation of the fact we launched the boat today?
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But we didn’t go fishing yet. It’s raining.
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Caveat: Sneaking Meeses

Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

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.
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Caveat: On Brokenwood and also the meta-mysteries of each day

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc)

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.
pictureOne 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.
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Caveat: just one more post about books of poetry…

Banalities & Journaling
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: Poem - Volume 1: Mostly in Korea - Book CoverCaveat: Poem - Volume 1: Mostly in Korea - Book Cover

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Caveat: Let’s

Banalities & Journaling / My Garden

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.
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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
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Caveat: Poem: Mostly in Alaska

Banalities & Journaling / My Poetry & Fiction

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.
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Caveat: Tarp and Bean

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Garden

“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.
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Here is the interior with its new mud floor.
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Here is a bean appearing in my greenhouse.
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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.
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Caveat: on the ranch

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / Life in Alaska / My Photos

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.
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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.
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Caveat: logs and lettuces and loopy isolines

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Geofiction / Life in Alaska / My Garden / My Photos

I worked on my firewood collection for a while in the morning.
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I saw some lettuces growing nicely in my greenhouse.
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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.
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Another day in my moss-covered, misanthrope’s paradise.
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Caveat: Cursing his name (what’s his name?)

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

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.
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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.
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And the patch of lettuce is doing well.
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Caveat: Purplish Propensities

Banalities & Journaling / Food & Drink / My Photos

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.
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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.
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Caveat: Isolated activity

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Geofiction

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).
———————————————————————-
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.
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[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

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Caveat: A day like others

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

The morning dawned with a bit of fresh snow having fallen, and cold and clear. Winter’s not done yet.
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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.
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Caveat: Tree #457

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

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!
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picture[daily log: walking, 2.5km]

Caveat: a brief incursion of reality

Banalities & Journaling / Geofiction

… 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.
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Caveat: Oh well, and someone’s mobile home

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

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.
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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.
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Caveat: Published

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Poetry & Fiction

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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.”
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Caveat: Tree #454

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

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.
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picture[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Caveat: Not for Resale

Banalities & Journaling / My Poetry & Fiction

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.
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Caveat: Beware of Software

Banalities & Journaling

I spent the day trying to learn a new bit of software. Results were mixed. I documented the more positive aspects of the experience on my other blog, but I didn’t mention the more frustrating aspects.
Still, I shouldn’t be so negative, right?
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Caveat: Tree #450

Banalities & Journaling

This is a guest tree from the past. Its picture was taken New Year’s Day, 2009, in the Gangnam District in Seoul, looking west along Tehran-no (Tehran Road, a very posh address in the city).
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picture[daily log: walking, 2.5km]

Caveat: Link-rot

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I have been working on a project, lately, involving the back-end of this here blog. It keeps me occupied while I wait for the galley proof for my upcoming book publication, and while I wait for my radishes to grow.
Over time, there is a thing called “link-rot” – links to websites become stale due to changes on whatever site is being linked to. Sometimes videos disappear, sometimes new articles get re-named by their hosts, etc.
So part of keeping a long-term blog functional is going back and fixing those rotted links – either replacing them, or simple putting a note, “link no longer works.”
My blog has accumulated a fair number of rotten links over its 15 years and 7500 entries.
But by far the worst offender is the vast number of broken “internal” links – links from one blog entry to another, including to my many pictures. The reason I have this problem is because I had to abandon my previous blog-host two years ago and move to a self-hosted version of this blog. I’m happy with that decision, but it means that 1000’s (yes 1000’s!) of internal blog links from before 2018 do not currently work. Perhaps if you’ve visited older entries, you’ve noticed this.
Anyway, I’m trying to fix all this link-rot – both the external and internal variety. It’s very tedious work – there is no magic “find-replace” that can do it, because the format differences between the old links and the new links are arbitrary.
Ah well. It keeps me socially isolated. Which is, apparently, a goodly thing, these days.
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Caveat: seeds

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Alaska / My Photos

I put some seeds in one of my planters.
Later in the day Arthur asked what I was doing. I told him, “Checking my seeds. Nothing yet.”
“Nothing?” he asked.
“Right. I think to grow a garden, I need to be more patient.”
Arthur found this amusing.
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