When I was a child, Arthur used to pretend to be Mr Grinch. He liked the schtick, and it suited his personality.
Keith’s family is very musical. So they come and perform music. Here is Keith’s sister, Michelle, her husband Tim, and Ky (sp?), who is Keith’s nephew (but not Michelle and Tim’s son). They are performing the song, Mr Grinch.
“Mr. Grinch,” written by Theodor Geisel (Dr Seuss).
Lyrics.
You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch
You really are a heel,
You’re as cuddly as a cactus, you’re as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch,
You’re a bad banana with a greasy black peel!
You’re a monster, Mr. Grinch,
Your heart’s an empty hole,
Your brain is full of spiders, you have garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch,
I wouldn’t touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole!
You’re a foul one, Mr. Grinch,
You have termites in your smile,
You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Mr. Grinch,
Given a choice between the two of you’d take the seasick crocodile!
You’re a rotter, Mr. Grinch,
You’re the king of sinful sots,
Your heart’s a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots, Mr. Grinch,
You’re a three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce!
You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch,
With a nauseous super “naus”!,
You’re a crooked dirty jockey and you drive a crooked hoss, Mr. Grinch,
Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful
assortment of rubbish imaginable mangled up in tangled up knots!
You’re a foul one, Mr. Grinch,
You’re a nasty wasty skunk,
Your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk, Mr. Grinch,
The three words that best describe you are as follows, and I quote,
“Stink, stank, stunk”!
Our Thanksgiving Thursday was very low-key. Our main, feasting-focused, celebratory event will be on Saturday – that works out better for people’s travel schedules to get here, etc.
So we just had dinner, the four of us: Juli, Keith, Arthur and I.
I am not in the best of sorts, lately. Between the lingering head-cold and the stunning, frustrating and discombobulating news that I am not considered an Alaska Resident by the University of Alaska, I have been feeling physically and emotionally wrecked.
So I was struggling to feel much thankfulness today. Anyway, thanks for reading this, I guess.
We drove into the Portland VA this morning for a specialist appointment for Arthur. It was like “old times,” when Juli and I drove in there so regularly last summer.
Here is a tree. [daily log: walking, 4km]
Today was the day I needed to go online and register for classes, for the Teacher Certification program I was accepted to last month.
So I went online and did that. It went smoothly enough, until I got the bill.
It turns out University of Alaska has me recorded as a non-resident. This adds a huge amount to my tuition bill – about 300%. And much to my surprise, and against all supposition and against all intuition, I am, in fact, a non-resident by UAS standards – their standard is two years, not one year like most things of this sort that I’ve dealt with or known about.
I am not going to enroll at such a premium to my tuition.
I need a plan B.
Stay tuned.
As seen from the ferry crossing over to Ketchikan: the tree is a bit hard to make out – it’s on the bit of land in the lower left of the picture. There is a tugboat towing a fishing boat in front of that bit of land, and in the upper right, a floatplane. So it all seemed very Southeast Alaskan. [daily log: walking, 3km]
As Arthur and I were shutting down the water system, preliminary to our departure for points south, we had a crisis. The valve under the toilet in the attic broke. There was a flood. There was panic, as I raced out of the house to the cistern shed to shut down the water pump (and thus the pressure). Meanwhile water flowed out onto the attic floor. The carpet was soaked. It got under the bookshelves. I had to remove all of the books from one row of my bookshelves, and stack them in a dry area, and move the shelves, to get the water up from all the corners of the floor. It was a lot of work. We left a dehumidifier running (draining into the toilet) for while we were gone.
Arthur hired someone to come out and suck out the septic tank. He’s never done this before, since installing his sewage system 20 years ago.
There had been a lot of anxiety about this, because there is no way to drive close to the septic tank – it’s beside the water and dock on the north side of the house, away from the road and driveway. The septic tank sucker guy had to bring extra lengths of hose. His preferred spot, after looking at the options, was to park on the new house pad on lot 73, to the west, and run the hose through the woods across the creek. Each of the options was about 120 feet, but that option had the advantage of requiring less of an uphill component, since the new house pad is about level with the existing kitchen shed.
So the guy set up his hose – I helped quite a bit – and sucked out the septic tank. It went smoothly, for the most part. The man said that for 20 years it was in very good shape, which Arthur found to be good news.
Here are some pictures of the hose laid out from the sucker truck.
I haven’t been very productive lately. I’ve been bit “under the weather,” as is said – actually I haven’t had many colds/flus coming to Alaska, I think, but it’s definitely been impacting my focus and productivity. I did get out on the hillside for about an hour today. I don’t suppose standing or tromping or working outside in the rain is good for me if I have a cold, but I have never believed the commonplace that being out in cold or rain increases one’s susceptibility to head colds or increases their impact. That just never made sense to me. I think any such risk is offset or mitigated by being active and getting fresh air.
Here is a tree from the archives, just for a change of pace. I hope I haven’t posted it before. It’s a tree along a street in my neighborhood in Ilsan (Goyang City), with my apartment building (the yuckier one in Juyeop neighborhood) in the background. I think the picture is from 2012 – I hope I haven’t posted it before. [daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 500m]
Before our Thursday shopping routine, Arthur had an appointment this morning at the medical center in Klawock. I took a short walk down to the bridge over the Klawock River while he was in his appointment, and saw a tree. [daily log: walking, 2.5km]
I recorded this tree before removing it. I am clearing a path on the direct uphill-downhill between the “middle stake” (lot marker) on the southern property line between lots 73 and 74. It’s damp and slippery but it’s actually easier clearing paths once the fall has removed most of the leaves from the underbrush. [daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 1000m]
Once a month, I should go over and start up the GDC (the RV), to make sure it’s still functional under its cocoon (tarp). I ran the engine, generator and heater for an hour, with the tarp partly lifted away so as to not poison myself with carbon monoxide. Everything still works. While it was running, I went on walk up the hillside to my neglected treehouse site and maintained my trails a bit.
Arthur and I went into town shopping – it’s shopping Thursday, one of our fixed traditions these days.
It rained continuously. We stopped by Jan’s office at the VFW – which we often do. She used an adjective to describe her husband Richard’s efforts in adding a carport to their house, which we’d seen driving past: “Trojanesque” (this is derived from their last name). I laughed quite a bit – Richard’s construction efforts do, indeed, have a quite distinct style, and I felt the adjective captured this quite well. I’ll have to see if I can come up with some kind of objective definition for this word, which has an obvious, intuitive meaning to anyone who is familiar with Richard’s work. Perhaps related to a kind of grandiose disregard for the conventions of design, without being for that at all incompetent?
The small tree grows on the hump of the log of a long-dead big tree. [daily log: walking, 2km]
I have been having a craving for borscht for a while. When I lived in Korea, I could satisfy this craving by going to a Russian restaurant (or Ukrainian, or Kazakh, etc.). Before that, I used to make it. I haven’t made it in a very long time, but I tried. My hands turned purple cutting beets.
It came out okay. I’ll give my efforts a B-.
Studying psychology for one of my exams-for-credit that I’ll take next month, I’m struck by how much of it is really just vocabulary – a certain way of talking about things.
This is an archival tree. Specifically, I saw this tree while lying on a bench at a buddhist monastery in northern Illinois, December, 2009. [daily log: walking, 2km]
I experienced a somewhat embarrassing emotional insight this morning, as I saw that it was raining. I liked that it was raining. Not just because I have always liked rainy days – that’s just something about my formation on the coast of far northwest California. It’s that when it’s raining, I don’t have to feel guilty about not working outside.
I don’t exactly resent working outside on the various “typical Alaskan” projects, here: the path-cutting, the chainsawing, the digging, etc. But they are not necessarily always “fun” for me either. I feel an obligation to do them because it’s the only conceivable way to prevent Arthur from trying to do them and ending up hurt or something.
It’s not in fact clear to me that Arthur ever enjoyed these types of projects either, but they have always been part of how he prefers to organize his life. Really, his motivational apparatus is wholly opaque to me.
I am, I suppose, an “indoorsman” (in an oppositional sense to “outdoorsman”). I enjoy the outdoors, but I have always despised outdoor “athletics,” and these task-oriented, outdoor work activities are not inherently rewarding to me for the most part. Perhaps it’s just that I have never received positive feedback about my efforts, too. Certainly that has contributed to the current psychological aversion to them.
Well, it was raining. So I sat at my desk and read history and worked at my hobby coding projects on my server.
Meanwhile, trees asserted their ontologies. That leaning tree has been featured before, but I think its leaningness has been increasing lately. It may be headed for seashore. [daily log: walking, 2km]
I received an email today confirming my acceptance into the graduate teaching certification program at University of Alaska Southeast.
The program is largely online. I am skeptical about the ease and efficacy of online coursework, but it will be as it must be, and hopefully I can be successful. I am returned to studenthood, after a 22 year hiatus. Thank you to all who assisted me in my application process.
And now to return to studying US History, to satisfy a never-before-satisfied prerequisite.
Since the school never calls me to do substitute teaching, and since it often rains outside, when I’m not working on studying history and psychology for my exams-for-credit, I continue with my activities and efforts related to my “fictional map server.”
Recently I’ve received several queries from people interested in trying to build their own “map servers.” I decided the concept needed a handy acronym, so I coined “HRATE” (High-resolution alternatives-to-earth – also, handily, an anagram for “Earth”).
I have been trying to collect in one place my documentation for how to build your own HRATE: here.
Here is a tree from my archives. It is a tree in the front yard of the house where I spent the majority of my first 17 years. I took the picture in 2009, I think.
That tree almost entirely post-dates my years there – it was planted in my childhood but was just a small tree as I grew up. Now it looks more substantial.
Here is another picture I found of the same house, from a different angle, and taken many, many years ago, when there was a different tree in front of the house. That’s my dad’s car. I would guess mid-to-late 1960’s for when the picture was taken.
Continuing that theme, this is the same house again, but with no tree at all. This is my own ink drawing, but done from a photograph of the house that I suspect predates my parents’ ownership by a few decades. [daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing, 1hr]
We pulled out the “rails” for the boat ramp last night at dusk – because that’s when the low tide was low enough to make that doable. I probably should have been paying attention to the tides, knowing Arthur had that project in mind, but I hadn’t been, so it came out as one of those “ambush projects” that Arthur hits me with, that stress me out so much.
In fact I don’t mind helping on Arthur’s projects, but, like a small child, I don’t manage my stress well when I don’t get advance notice about what’s expected of me. Arthur is not inclined to communicate his plans or intentions ahead of time. After dinner, without preamble, it was: “I’m going to pull out the rails now.” Of course no invitation or expectation that I would help, but I simply can’t imagine Arthur in his increasingly frail state doing this project himself – those rails are heavy, and pulling them up the ramp is awkward. So I had a choice: let him start it himself and then be there to help when he finally asked for help, or otherwise I could simply start out helping knowing it would get to that. It’s one of those “military moments” when the arbitrary “task” comes down the chain of command and one simply has to leap to action in that moment.
Lo, a tree did grow. [daily log: walking, 2km]
[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
The point is clear: the purpose of the Organization is to be organized.
Several committees will have been created to pursue this goal, with necessary but not sufficient technocratic support staff.
The Committee and Directorate of Teleological Debate (for All Intents and Purposes)
This committee and associated support staff attempts to address the question, Why does the Organization exist? Is the ongoing organization of such organizations as this Organization strictly necessary? Importantly, it advocates that a main purpose of the Organization is to discuss (but avoid resolving) such questions.
The Committee and Directorate of (Mis-)Direction
This committee and associated support staff attempts to address the question, Who controls the Organization? How is this control (if it exists) implicated in processes of organizational creation and perpetuation? Is it possible for the various committees and directorates of the Organization to accomplish their goals without direction? Is direction perhaps inimical to the Organization?
The Committee and Directorate of Cryptic Origins
This committee and associated support staff attempts to address the question, To what extent are the demiurges behind our perceived reality (this knowable Ardisphere beneath our feet) actually more real? More troubling, what are these demiurges’ motives? Are they a unified front, or a disparate group operating at cross-purposes? What are their origins? And to what extent do they wilfully misrepresent their true motives and origins?
The Committee and Directorate of Semiotic Action
This committee and associated support staff attempts to address the question, How can the Organization best emit a maximum proportion of signs to actual meaning? How best can the resources available (e.g. diaries, newscasters, hermetic hypertexts and encyclopedic simulacra) be leveraged to increase the full coverage of the Known Universe with (and by) content-free organizational representations?
Music to organize to: Mexican Institute of Sound, “Mi negra a bailal.”
Arthur and I went to a kind of “community meeting” this evening. Apparently the City of Craig has imperial ambitions with respect to the denizens of Port Saint Nicholas Road (“PSN”). The denizens, however, are quite ambivalent about this. I would myself be inclined to agree that the city offers little of value in terms of improved services, given their fire department’s poor showing during the house fire next door in August (which currently they are legally obligated to provide despite being outside their tax base, but which they receive state monies to do, too, so it’s not like they are losing money on it).
Right now, the battle is about who really controls, owns, and is obligated to maintain the road. This is taking the form of the city’s “Ordinance 719,” which appears to be an unconstitutional “taxation without representation” proposition, wherein the city is allocating to itself the “extraterritorial” right to tax property owners along the road despite their not being voting residents of the city, in exchange for road maintenance – which the city is already legally obligated to do because of where they chose to site their water treatment plant. There are a number of dramatis personae: there’s the city (and specifically its hapless yet hubristic water department), there’s the tribal association (nominally non-profit), there’s the tribal corporation (for-profit, that owns all the non-parcelled land around Craig and PSN, and that originally built the road – it’s not, in fact, “public” in origin), and there are the helpless denizens themselves. At stake: the gobs of state and federal grant money lurking out there for whoever can control the road.
But the City of Craig’s long game is pretty obvious – they hope to undertake an expansive regional annexation into their taxable territory a la Ketchikan (which took over its entire island) or Juneau (which took over several large islands as well as the mainland and became the single largest city in the US in land area). Arthur finds the prospect sufficiently alarming that he was motivated to dislodge himself from his hidey-hole and go find out what was going on. There is a grassroots, community-initiated “legal defense fund” that has hired some lawyers to battle the city and their plans in the courts. So we attended the meeting and became better informed. Arthur donated money (“…pay voluntarily now to avoid paying [taxes] involuntarily later”).
My own opinion is slightly more ambivalent. I don’t share the majority of my neighbors’ instinctual distrust of government and visceral resentment of taxation. I can see that the city has, in this instance, been poorly managed and ham-handed with respect to their treatment of the PSN community, but I refuse to generalize this behavior to the potential of governments in general. My own instinct would be to counter Craig’s ambitions with a move toward a greater degree of counterbalancing self-government: at the least, one or more legally-empowered and -chartered homeowners’ association(s); at the most extreme, pre-emptive incorporation of Port Saint Nicholas as its own “city” (village, but “city” in the legal sense) to effectively “block” Craig’s expansion.
And on that note, I provide this photo of a member Port Saint Nicholas’ silent majority: the trees. [daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Today was shopping day. It rained most of the day, but we got our errands done in town. I made my chupe de pescado (Chilean-style fish chowder) for dinner.
From the archives, this tree was seen in Manitoba, in 2009.
I am studying US History. This is because I need to fulfill a prerequisite for this teacher certification program I want to enter, and despite having actually taught US History in Korea, I have never taken a college-level history class of any kind. So I do fine with the broad, outline-y questions, the order in which events unfolded, I know my presidents. But a lot of details are not well established in my mind. I don’t know the specific names of the originators of policies or events, e.g. the name of the presidents of South Vietnam in the period leading up to the Vietnam War, or the specific act of congress that tried to get Native Americans onto reservations on the Great Plains. So I have some studying to do. I scored about 70% on practice versions of the two “tests for college credit” that I am planning to take.
Meanwhile, I saw a tree. [daily log: walking, 2km]
I didn’t have a very good day. I tried to do some work outside, since it wasn’t raining. But I felt low energy, got really tired without getting much done, and came inside and did almost nothing useful the rest of the day: reading blogs and messing around with small, unnecessary and goal-less tweaks to my server and its plethora of not-quite-functional applications.
Perhaps I’m coming down with something. I can’t even tell. [daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 500m]
Arthur surprised me today. He wanted to go out on the roof of the boatshed to fix his raingauge, today – it occasionally gets full of debris and needs to be cleaned out. In the past when he’s decided to do this, he will, without warning or discussion, walk out on the deck over the boatshed, climb over the railing and simply go do it. This approach is difficult for me and stresses me out. His record of falling and issues with stability and vertigo mean that I am constantly worried he will slip and fall off the roof of the boatshed. Anyway, this time, instead of just doing it, he consulted with me beforehand. He said he wanted to do it, and asked what we could do so I was comfortable with it. This type of consultation with Arthur feels almost unprecedented, so I was very pleased. In the event, he looped a rope around his belt and I held onto it while he walked out there. It’s not really that much of a safety factor, I’ll be the first to concede, but it meant that if he lost his balance, there would at least be a bit of a break on him slipping all the way down the roof/side of the boatshed (it’s a continuous curve of metal, quonset hut style).
After sending off my Professional Objectives essay, I also made some good progress on a little database programming project I’ve been working on, related to my geofiction server.
All in all, it was a very positive day. I needed one of those.
Here is a tree. [daily log: walking, 1km]
I completed my “Statement of Professional Objectives” and sent it off to University of Alaska Southeast. It’s the last piece of my application process, except for an annoying ancient university transcript that I still need to sort out. But it’s a weight off my shoulders, anyway.
Now back to studying history.
We stored our vehicles just in time, yesterday. Today the rain came hard and continuously.
I worked on my final application essay for the teaching certification program at UAS. Also, I procrastinated on that.
Here is a damp tree. [daily log: walking, 1km]
I finished cleaning the GDC (RV) today. To the extent I’m going to get that done, anyway – not perfectly pristine, but the best I can manage for now.
The vehicle was placed in what is to be its medium-term parking spot, down on the house-pad Richard helped create.
An aside: I suppose that that picture above could have been my daily tree picture, too. But that particular tall tree has been featured as a daily tree before, so I decided not to do that.
And then I wrapped the GDC in a giant tarp.
Meanwhile Arthur got his boat rinsed off and stored into the boatshed. So we had a productive day of vehicle-storing.
Arthur and I got the boat out of the water, up the ramp, but parked outside the boathouse for now – Arthur wants to clean it off, debarnaclize it. And it started raining quite hard in the afternoon, so we both became demotivated with respect to outdoor activity.
Here is a tree. [daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Below is a tree from the archives. It is a tree in front of the house in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where Michelle took her own life in June of 2000. The picture was taken in 2009, when I stopped by there at the behest of Michelle’s ghost, who sometimes makes requests. [daily log: walking, 2km]
When I was with Michelle, I often made mole poblano – the classic “chocolate chicken” in the old Aztec style. It was one of her favorites.
That was in the 1990s, of course. The last time I made it, I think, was maybe 2006. I never thought to make it since coming here to stay with Arthur because he had declared a preemptive disinterest in such an “abomination of good chocolate.” However, our friend Jan expressed interest in it, when it came up in conversation, so she convinced me to give it a try. I successfully resurrected my old recipe. I’m sure it’s not exactly the same as how I used to make it, but when I taste-tested it I could reasonably declare it “at least as good as restaurant style.”
I was surprised to learn that Arthur had no blender. I find it hard to believe, given his plethora of gadgets of all kind. So I broke out my low tech “pre-war Korean blender” (AKA stone mortar and pestle). It gave my mole an authentic Aztec flair. The picture shows the work in progress.
The completed sauce is below.
Arthur, on his own initiative, ordered a birthday cake for Juli. The thing is, Juli isn’t here – she’s down in Portland. I believe Arthur was mostly looking for an excuse to have some more chocolate cake, in the wake of the one we bought and ordered for our respective birthdays last month.
Anyway, in fact, Juli’s birthday not until two weeks from now. But we celebrated anyway.
Earlier we went into town for our Thursday shopping day. And we picked up the boat from where it was being serviced at the boat shop. Arthur surprised me, because as we were going to the boat launch area to put the boat in the water, out of the blue he said, so do you want to drive the boat back, or the car?
Our standard division of labor on these ventures has always been that Arthur drives the boat, while I drive the car. I couldn’t quite figure out the motivation behind this offer, but I often have found that when Arthur offers for me to do something that is normally his remit, it’s because he wants me to. So I took it to mean that he preferred that I drive the boat. So for the first time ever, I drove the boat alone, while Arthur drove the Blueberry home.
I did OK. I’m not as good as Arthur at backing the boat up – which I had to do when departing the boat launch. So it got a bit hairy when I was trying to go around another boat parked at the boat launch. But once on open water, I made my way home without incident. It was quite windy and choppy, this afternoon, on the open bay between Craig Harbor and the entrance to Port Saint Nicholas. Perhaps that’s why Arthur wanted me to drive the boat? I even managed to land and tie up the boat alone, at the dock at home, in a quite gusty east wind.
What I’m listening to right now.
Cake, “Comfort Eagle.”
Lyrics.
We are building a religion
We are building it bigger
We are widening the corridors
And adding more lanes
We are building a religion
A limited edition
We are now accepting callers
For these pendant key chains
To resist it is useless
It is useless to resist it
His cigarette is burning
But he never seems to ash
He is grooming his poodle
He is living comfort eagle
You can meet at his location
But you’d better come with cash
Now his hat is on backwards
He can show you his tattoos
He is in the music business
He is calling you “DUDE!”
Now today is tomorrow
And tomorrow today
And yesterday is weaving in and out
And the fluffy white lines
That the airplane leaves behind
Are drifting right in front
Of the waning of the moon
He is handling the money
He is serving the food
He knows about your party
He is calling you “DUDE!”
Now do you believe
In the one big sign
The double wide shine
On the boot heels of your prime
Doesn’t matter if you’re skinny
Doesn’t matter if you’re fat
You can dress up like a sultan
In your onion head hat
We are building a religion
We are making a brand
We’re the only ones to turn to
When your castles turn to sand
Take a bite of this apple
Mr. corporate events
Take a walk through the jungle
Of cardboard shanties and tents
Some people drink Pepsi
Some people drink Coke
The wacky morning DJ
Says democracy’s a joke
He says now do you believe
In the one big song
He’s now accepting callers
Who would like to sing along
He says, do you believe
In the one true edge
By fastening your safety belts
And stepping towards the ledge
He is handling the money
He is serving the food
He is now accepting callers
He is calling me “DUDE!”
He says now do you believe
In the one big sign
The double wide shine
On the boot heels of your prime
There’s no need to ask directions
If you ever lose your mind
We’re behind you
We’re behind you
And let us please remind you
We can send a car to find you
If you ever lose your way
We are building a religion
We are building it bigger
We are building
A religion
A limited
Edition
We are now accepting callers
For these beautiful
Pendant key chains
