This is the continent of Preye, on a planet with a frequently-changing name (but colonized by those brutal Mahhalians). I drew it probably in high school, but I don’t quite remember.
Music to map by: Cimafunk, “Ponte pa’ lo tuyo.”
I have been working on winterizing the GDC. GDC is the name of the RV/camper that my friends Mark and Amy brought. It stands for “God Damn Camper.” That’s Amy’s humor. I decided to keep the name.
I got the water system flushed out, and decided to clean the vehicle before putting a tarp over it and parking it on Lot 73.
It is very dirty.
I made some progress, but it was chilly and drizzly and I lost momentum around 1:30 in the afternoon. The sun is sinking fast as the equinox recedes into the past, and it now disappears behind the mountain at around 2PM.
Today, Arthur and I took the boat in for its annual service (Arthur calls it “winterizing” but that’s not quite accurate – nothing will be different about the boat once the service is complete, vis-a-vis its adaptability to the climate).
We put the boat trailer on the Blueberry (the car). I drove that into town, while Arthur drove the boat into town. Arthur took his time getting to town, this time – normally this “race” takes each of us almost the exact same amount of time, but this time Arthur took an extra 20 minutes to get there. Apparently he took a slight wrong turn at Cemetery Island.
We pulled the boat out of the water at the public boat ramp down by the fuel dock (north end of town), and drove it to the boat store for its service. I took a picture of the boat on its trailer at the boat shop, with an accompanying tree, to meet my tree-photographing obligation.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Today we had our neighbor-from-down-the-road, Aaron, stop by and I paid him to help us clean the gutters. Just like last year, Arthur was ready and eager to simply do it himself: go up on the 32′ ladders, all the rest. Fearless. Last year, for gutter cleaning, Arthur fell from a ladder and was briefly unconscious, and it was a truly horrible day. Yet he emerged from that experience without apparent long-term injury, which thus left him confirmed in his own belief in his indestructibleness.
This gutter-cleaning is an utterly winless situation for me. If I let Arthur clean the gutters, at best I deal with the excruciating anxiety of him falling from a ladder. At worst, he falls and breaks his neck or dies – a more real possibility than he’s willing to admit, given his vertigo, his stability issues, etc. And in what happened instead, where I insist that he NOT clean the gutters, well, he glowers with obvious resentment of my overcautiousness, of my “supervising” him, all the rest. He grits his teeth and lurks judgmentally on the margin, unimpressed with my presumed incompetence and displeased with my own evident anxieties around heights. It’s emotionally painful.
I simply can’t win. Therefore this new tradition emerges, as I move into my second year here: The Worst Day of the Year: Gutter-Cleaning Day.
Aaron did a good job.
Here is a picture of a cleaned gutter, with a tree, so that I can meet the tree-picture criterion.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
I made good progress with dirt and insulation today.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2hours]
We went to town for Thursday shopping, and when we got back, I shoveled some dirt.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; shoveling, 1hour]
I moved dirt.
I saw a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2hours]
The rain returned. I tried moving dirt for a while, but in the rain that’s less fun.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 1hour]
Arthur once again tried to catch a halibut. He actually caught one! It was very, very small: a “baby halibut.” Not much bigger than the bait we were using. We threw it back. Sadness ensued.
I took this picture of the hillside at Caldera Bay reflected in the calm, smooth sea. You can see some leaves and other things floating… Pick a tree, any tree. That’s your daily tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2 hours]
Another day working hard moving dirt around, burying the pipes around the well-head.
A tree seen from the boat, from the last time we went out in the boat.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; shoveling, a lot]
I spent the day working very hard, putting insulation in the “dog house” at the well-head, and burying some pipe that I placed.
Here is a tree from my archives. It is a tree inside Bukhansan Park in Seoul, beside a stairway up to a Buddha in a cliff-face. I took this picture in October, 2013.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; digging, alot]
With the rain in remission, I undertook a mission to work on project to winterize the well. That went well, but I lost momentum in the afternoon. I’ll resume tomorrow. Meanwhile I studied some, in my CLEP book.
This tree was along the road.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
I got my CLEP textbook yesterday. Now I can take my studying to a new level. CLEP is a formalized “exams for college credit” system. Since UAS is requiring me to fill in some holes in my undergraduate transcript of 30 years ago, taking a few CLEP exams seems the most efficient approach. We’ll see how it goes.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
I have been reading some, online, these days, about quantum computers. I don’t understand them at all, but I was made curious by the recent news about Google’s new, supposed “quantum supremacy.”
This led me down a garden path of blogs and articles, and one thing that I ran across was this picture, from a 2017 article about an IBM quantum computer.
What happened is I became sidetracked by the aesthetics of the picture, which seemed more within my grasp than the nature of the machine.
The picture looks like illustration from the cover of a science fiction magazine. It does not seem to, in any way, resemble what we think of as a “computer” as they currently exist. It is mysterious and beautiful and abstractly futuristic.
Work proceeded apace on my effort to complete my application to UAS. I have just two remaining things to complete – one more essay and an old college transcript request.
Meanwhile, outdoors, the rain proceeded apace.
Arthur is doing his annual “re-paint the boat rails” project. These are the rails that sit down in the water, that underlie the trolley that pulls the boat out of the water and into the boatshed. This project fills the house with petrochemical fumes. I have a theory that Arthur either cannot smell petrochemical fumes, or actively enjoys them – every time he fills his kerosene heater that lies in the boatshed, the house also fills with a similar smell. Today he did that, too. So I sit in the attic on my computer bundled up with both windows wide open, to get a cross breeze and ventilate the space.
Here is a picture of a tree from the archives. The picture was taken in August, 2007, in Mexico City. There are actually two trees, I admit. But the building (although there are two facades, in fact it is a single building inside) is notable: that is the building I lived in, in 1986. The second floor window near the center is onto the hallway in front of my bedroom.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
I went into town today and took a “proctored impromptu writing sample” test, with the help of a person at the Craig School District who was kind enough to help. This is part of my application for the Teacher Certification program at University of Alaska Southeast. Normally this type of “proctored writing sample” would be done by going into the appropriate college office, sitting down and taking the test. But because this program is an “All Online” type of program, that doesn’t really work. But they occasionally want you to prove who you are, and the way to do that is to get you to find a proctor that they approve of in your local community, and work with that person to proctor your test. I’m not sure how frequent this type of thing will be. I’m only in the application process.
Since I was busy with that (and preoccupied by the surrounding anxiety), I failed to take a picture of a tree. Here is a tree from my archives. This picture was taken in November, 2012, looking out from a window at my workplace in South Korea.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
With a supposed break in the rain, Arthur and I attempted to go out and put heat tape around the water pipes that run out of the new well-head “doghouse” (where the pump controller, etc., are).
But every time we started working, it rained. If we stopped working, it stopped raining.
After a while, we gave up that project. Typical Southeast Alaska.
I put some time in on my computer instead.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
I have utterly neglected this blog [meaning that other blog].
I offer no excuses. Just didn’t cross my mind. I had other things going on. I have other blogs and other, non-geofictional projects that occupy me.
In fact, I have been quite busy with geofiction, too. Over the last 6 months since my last blog post here, I have been developing my “Ohunkagan 1880” snapshot, at OpenGeofiction. This is my city in my fictional state of Makaska, in the parallel-universe US called FSA. Here is a screenshot of the city, in its 1880 incarnation. I intend to then roll the historical window forward, mapping in changes and additions, over the coming decades, until it catches up to the present.
[Technical note: screenshot taken at this URL (for future screenshots to match).]
But I have also been working on my own, long-neglected map server. I have named my planet: Arhet.
It’s just a name. But one thing that always annoyed me about OGF was that the planet not only lacks a name, but there has always been strong community resistance to finding a consensus name for it. Someone is always bound to object to any proposal, and thus, “OGF world” remains unnamed. For my planet, I decided to just put a name on it from the start, so no one would end up grappling with the dilemma later.
Arhet is tentatively open to interested mappers. I’ve written up my current thinking on how this will work, here:
http://wiki.geofictician.net/wiki/index.php/Arhet
Music to make worlds by: The Youngsters, “Smile (Sasha Remix)”.
Because of the raininess outside, I have been less inclined to pursue any of the outdoor projects I have in progress. I have been working more on computer-based projects, including messing with my programming environment (my largely unfulfilled fantasy of learning to program using Ruby/Rails), and adding some bells and whistles to a few of my server projects.
Meanwhile, on the equinox, I find attention-seeking behavior among trees. Hey! Quit goofing around!
[daily log: walking, 3km]
My birthday was last Sunday. Arthur’s is this coming Monday. Halfway between, last night, is our “interbirthday.” Being economical sorts, we celebrated once for both of us. He got me a cake. I got him a cake. It was the same cake.
I had what felt like a somewhat productive day – though in fact it was mostly recuperating ground lost on prior days. I got my map server back working the way it should be. It turned out there was a minor syntax incompatibility between different versions of the database utility that’s used, so the script I was running wasn’t working as expected after a routine upgrade. Software is fun!
I took some steps on my application to UAS. I feel like the end is in sight. And then I can begin.
I failed to photograph a tree. I’m neglecting my blogular obligations…
Here is a tree from archives. It’s not a photograph, but rather a scan of an ink drawing. I made the ink drawing in 1992. It shows the front of the old “San Marino House” – the one where my grandfather grew up on California Boulevard in Pasadena. There are in fact at least two large trees and many shrubs in the picture – the house was quite overgrown with vegetation. So let’s select the tree in darker ink lines on the right, to be tree #260.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
I had a frustrating day, trying to repair my map server. I’m not sure if I’ve repaired it, now, but I got into one of those obsessive mindsets that made me recall that in fact, Arthur and I behave quite similarly around computers. Although I think I don’t cuss quite as much as he does. It seems to kind of work. Something amiss with the database.
In darkness, in rain, trees still lurk.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
I spend part of the day outside working on some more aspects of the well-head “doghouse” – specifically, the outgoing pipes/conduit to connect to what I’m calling the “greenhouse” – I want to build a small greenhouse on the new upper parking pad, hopefully to be able to use next Spring.
I spent another part of the day trying to build a Ruby on Rails development environment on my server. It’s slow going, but I feel I’m making progress. So far the vscode IDE is working much better than all those times I tried to use Eclipse, so the switch over was a smart move.
Lastly, I have been writing an essay for my UAS application for the teaching certification program. I’m sure what I have already is fine, but I’m being perfectionistic. So there’s that.
I failed to take a picture of a tree today. So here is a tree from my archives. This is Gobong Hill with its distinctive radio tower, in Ilsan, Korea, as seen from near the top of Jeongbal Hill, a few blocks from my apartment there. I took it in October, 2015 – just short of 4 years ago.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
It has been one of those rainy days that just demotivates a person. I have been spending some time installing some programming tools on my desktop and server, while I wait for my enrollment process to move forward for the University of Alaska Southeast Teacher Certification program. I suppose I’m more and more feeling that in the long run, I may end up doing computer work, and it would be smart to keep my skills up. Frustrated with the Eclipse IDE, I decided to try out VSCode, which is Microsoft’s entry to the Open Source IDE market. It’s a kind of weird reversal, running Microsoft software on a Linux machine. But so far it seems to work better than the buggy Eclipse.
A tree I saw the other day. Not very well focused.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Today, the Ides of September, Arthur and I once again sought to catch a halibut, but alas, we returned to port having only hooked a number of ugly bottom fish of poor quality. Halibutless. The sea was flat and sunny, though. I saw some seagulls cruising on an improvised raft (hard to see, center of this picture, looking past the southern end of San Juan Island toward San Ignacio and Baker, in the distance).
Meanwhile, trees continued their efforts to touch the sky.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
The past few days I’ve been busy with my somewhat unsuccessful effort to remodel the plumbing in the well-head shed (“doghouse”). I’m not very good at eliminating all the leaks – I’m too inexperienced a plumber.
Today, with sporadic rain, I decided to work indoors instead, and have been doing “academic stuff” related to my efforts to enroll in the University of Alaska Southeast’s teacher certification program – a much more overwhelming and bureaucratic process than I had hoped for. Sigh. Life goes on.
Here is a tree over on lot 73.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Our friend and neighbor Joe from down the road joined us and we went out on a singularly unsuccessful fishing trip today. We went seeking halibut at Roller Bay, then “Shipwreck” (off San Fernando Island), then the northwest side of Balandra Island. We caught exactly one smallish lingcod. Then we tried for salmon along Cemetery Island and the Coronados, trolling into the south entrance of Port Saint Nicholas. Nothing – a few black bass that were smaller than some of the bait.
Here is a tree, also struggling.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
As many of you already know, I have acquired an RV. It is known as “the GDC,” per its previous owners Mark and Amy.
I installed its new Alaska license plates today. I now have a legal license to practice my art, whereas up until now my artwork was unlicensed. This artistic license was included for free as part of my vehicle license plates:
In case the above is unclear, it is a joke based on the slogan on the new license plates.
Art and I dropped my friend Peter off at the ferry this morning. It’s back to just us chickens, now.
Peter and I went on a hike in the morning, up the trail that runs up the side of Sunnahae mountain – but we didn’t intend to go to the top, which would have been an all-day hike. We went about 2 miles up and turned around a came back down.
Here is a tree we saw along the trail.
Here is me looking like a sinister Korean right-wing ajeossi of the sort you’d meet on a mountainside in Korea.
I’m wearing a hat that Peter gave to me that says “외국인” [oegugin = “alien, foreigner”]. This is funny.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
Arthur and I took Peter out fishing. From a fishing standpoint, it was somewhat disappointing – we caught no salmon, and when trying for halibut we only caught ugly bottomfish. But I think Peter enjoyed himself, and anyway he got to see an aspect of life here that many don’t.
Here is a tree seen on an island.
[daily log: walking, 6km]
One reason I enjoy my friend Peter’s company is that we both have a rather geeky, quasi-philological approach to the Korean language. This is not necessarily the best approach to language learning, but it is what it is.
Our neighbor Jeri brought by some home-made kimchi that had been given to her by another friend of hers. Just imagine: Alaska-made kimchi – such is globalization. To taste-test the kimchi, I broke out my stash of Korean style spicy ramen, of the famous brand 신라면 [sinramyeon]. As Peter and I ate kimchi with spicy instant ramen for lunch, we ended up speculating on the Chinese character, 辛, prominently displayed as the brand mark for the product, as in this picture below.
We both assumed it meant “new” – the most common stand-alone meaning for the Korean syllable 신 [sin]. I also speculated it might be a family name. But neither of those are the case. After a bit of searching on the online naver.com dictionary (the best online Korean dictionary) we found that in fact the definition is given as follows:
1. 맵다 2. 독하다(毒–) 3. 괴롭다, 고생하다 4. 슬프다 5. 살생하다(殺生–) 6. 매운 맛 7. 여덟째 천간(天干) 8. 허물, 큰 죄(罪) 9. 새, 새 것(=新)
That definition #1? “Spicy.”
So in fact sinramyeon means exactly what the English label says: “spicy ramen.”
The kimchi, by the way, was quite acceptable.
Later, Peter and I drove down to Hydaburg, to look at totems and witness the isolated, mostly-native Haida village. We saw bilingual street signs.
It rained all day.
After that, on the way back home, we stopped and saw the totems in Klawock, too. Peter gave a stump speech in the Klawock city park.
At 6 this morning, I drove my friends Mark and Amy to catch the ferry. They left their RV here (per the plan) – so now I have another project.
During the day, I worked on finally finishing the move of the storage tent – which I jokingly call my “studio” – to it’s new spot on the western lot. Here it is.
Then I drove back to the ferry terminal and met my friend Peter, coming in. Here he comes…
Believe it or not, after all of last night, we decided to go out fishing today. Mark wanted to go again, and is only here for two more days.
Tired as we were, we boated all the way out to Ulitka (“Tree”), at the north end of Noyes Island. We caught a rather humongous lingcod, but only one pink salmon and no coho or halibut, which are Arthur’s preferred catches.
Here is a daily tree, from last night – taken by Amy.
[daily log: walking, 3km; catching, 1 lingcod, 1 salmon]
