This tree had blobs of snow like blossoms.
The dog was happy on her dogwalk.
[daily log: walking, 3km; dogwalking, 4km; snowshoveling, 0.5hr]
Category: Banalities & Journaling
Caveat: Dogwalking #9 and other studly pursuits
Art and I had a busy day today. We had lots to do in town. But first, I walked the neighbors’ dog.
The dog always runs down to our dock when we get to our house. I think she likes the smells of sea-creatures and such. We saw the morning sun touch Sunnahae mountain.
Maya likes to climb over the big snow embankments generated by Pat’s road-grader-as-snowplow. Of course, she sometimes gets stuck.
Eventually, she liberates herself, and then takes a moment to slow down and reflect. Maybe.
Art and I drove to town and first we went to the doctor, at SEARHC. After that, I dropped Art at the library and I took the Blueberry (Chevy Tahoe) to the mechanic shop. The Blueberry got brand-new snow-tires with studs. This does wonders for my peace-of-mind and confidence driving our road-as-bobsled-track back and forth to town.
You can’t really see the snow studs in the picture – but they’re there. You can see the tire’s brand name, though: “Snow Claw.” A reassuring name.
While the car was in the shop, I did walking errands in town. I went to the sporting-goods store and bought some new gloves of the sort I like to wear when working. I went to the bank. I went to the post-office. And I even stopped by work and helped a random customer looking at some of the factory-made picture frames.
Then I fetched the car, fetched Art from the library, and he and I did the Thursday grocery shopping and got a pre-made, bake-at-home pizza from the local pizza establishment. This last was our “normal” Thursday in-town routine.
Then we got home as the sun was setting, and had our pizza.
Caveat: Tree #1060
This tree was near a dog at play in the snow on the beach. Can you see the dog? She’s a black speck on the distant beach on the neighbor’s lot. I took this picture standing on the dock.
We received so much snow.
The power came back on this evening at around 7-something. That’s good – I was feeling anxiety about our water-system’s ability to survive sub-freezing temperatures without electricity – we have thermostat-driven heating mechanisms on the pump and pipes.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 4km; snowshovelling, 3hr]
Caveat: Dogwalking #8 amid the snowpocalypse
We have been without electricity since last night. I walked the dog today and shovelled inappropriate amounts of snow. And read a book – a paper book.
This blog-post will lack pictures for now, as I’m posting this from my phone.
We’re warm but off our routines. Fire burning, car’s launch path cleared. Pat plowed the road, but only our road, and I’ve heard the stretch from 5 mile into town is quite bad. Not sure if I’ll go to work tomorrow.
Caveat: Tree #1058
This tree was over a dog – the dog is quite far in the distance down the road, but she’s there a black speck of hyperactive doggedness.
We got a lot of rain last night, on top of the snow. It didn’t really melt the snow – rather, the rain landed on the snow and froze.
Then the weather added some more snow on top of the ice layered on the snow, making a delicious layer cake of bad driving conditions. I was glad not to have to drive today. Here is a picture of a rain-sculpted chunk of snow on top of a post.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 4km]
Caveat: A printer to call my own
Arthur has struggled, recently, with issues with his old printer that he has set up down in the kitchen. Several times I tried to figure it out, but at least once he reset things such that whatever I had done failed again.
Rather than make a battle over “printer configuration” I decided to proactively buy my own printer. It came in the mail a few days ago, and today, Arthur wanted to print something. So I set the new printer up, upstairs in the main room, but made sure it worked from his computer too. It took a bit of finagling to get the printer to connect to the wifi network – the instructions that came with the printer were quite opaque and atrocious. But once that was accomplished, it worked quite beautifully. Both Arthur and I successfully printed things to the new printer from our respective computers.
So now we can print this blog post, for example.
Caveat: Tree #1057
This tree (excuse me, what tree? – the one on that island way in the distance, which you take on faith) saw the sun set at the “62 pit” turnout on the Port Saint Nicholas Road.
When Art and I were in town this afternoon, I stopped by the gift shop, and Arthur actually came in and was sociable for a while. Jan took this picture of him as he came behind the counter at my frame-shop work area.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 4km; snow shovelling, 2hr; slip-sliding in a giant Chevy Tahoe, 1.5hr]
Caveat: Dogwalking #5 and other adventures in foot-deep, very wet snow
Since I didn’t have to go in to work this morning, I went to take the neighbor-dog-down-the-road, Maya, on a walk. We took a long walk, and I let her run off the leash (well, not holding the leash) some.
We were almost back to her house, when we met Pat, the road-grading lady. She was clearing some of the slush from the road. This gave me some optimism about the intended mid-day trip-to-town that Arthur and I always do on Thursday.
After dropping Maya back at her house, walking back to my house, I saw Pat had stopped. She was having problems with chains, too (like I did yesterday – see last night’s blog-post).
I spent about 2 hours trying to help her and her husband Fred, who drove up the road to help, while we tried to repair the chain problem – it had broken. I ended up dragging the chain (very heavy – these are chains for big tires) down into Arthur’s shop and we used a bench-mounted heavy-duty vice and a sledge hammer to knock a few of the links in the tire chain back into the right alignment. Then we took the chain back up to the road-grader and re-installed it on the tire.
Pat was then able to finish grading the road out to the 5-mile bridge, which made Arthur’s and my commute into town somewhat easier, though we still went very slow, taking almost 45 minutes each way, instead of the more typical 25 minute drive.
Caveat: Tree #1056
This tree, beneath glowering, snow-laden clouds, saw that I had tried to put chains on the Blueberry (the Chevy Tahoe).
I say “tried” because not once, but twice, the chain on the right rear wheel came off, and I had to get down in the snow and readjust it. After the second time it came loose, I gave up and removed the chains. In all, it took me more than an hour to drive to town with these delays, and so I was late to work. I came home without the chains installed, too, although honestly I really would rather have had the chains – it’s pretty difficult managing the Blueberry’s momentum on the ups and downs of the road when it’s buried in foot of slush.
It was a very stressful day because of this issue.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 6hr; crawling in snow, 1hr]
Caveat: oblivious popularity
The single most-visited page in my blog this year is an obscure blog-post I made in August, 2008, about a Japanese pop song I discovered by seeing its name on the screen of a stranger’s cellphone on the Seoul subway.
That’s weird. Such are the vagaries of the google search engine.
So here is the winner in the 2021 caveatdumptruck.com popularity sweepstakes. I’ve cleaned up the page a bit and added a link to the actual song, since I suspect most googlers are arriving on the page hoping to find the song.
Caveat: Dogwalking #2
In my neverending quest to enumerate all of life’s sundry banalities, I will share some pictures from a second dogwalk, this morning, after having written up the first dogwalk yesterday. The world is being exceptionally photogenic lately, anyway.
Caveat: Dogwalking
Our neighbors-down-the-road, Mike and Penny, have a dog named Maya. Maya is a very energetic young malamute. Yesterday when I was at work, Penny came into the gift shop and reported that Mike had had an incident while walking the dog, and had fallen down and because of that, was now unable to walk the dog. Penny described a dog desperate for dogwalking.
Now that I am not working so much on my treehouse project – which was a lot of physical labor and excellent exercise – I think I need to start walking more. So I volunteered to walk down to Mike and Penny’s house and take the dog on a walk. What better morning for a neighborly dogwalk than one coated in fresh-fallen snow? I walked down to their house, collected the dog, walked with her back up to our house and back down to their house again, then walked back home. Total, about 5km just for that.
Here are some pictures from my long dogwalk.
Caveat: Tree #1049
This tree was by the road.
I went and got Arthur at the airport after leaving work today. He arrived safely back among the trees and precipitation.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: can it be fixed?
I spent way too much time this morning trying to fix my coffee maker. I feel like maybe my role at the gift shop, this past year, as “Jared can fix anything,” is spilling over to my home life.
One of two little plastic pegs had broken off inside my coffee maker. The pegs support the hot plate that is at the bottom of the unit.
And the household supply of superglue was superannuated and entirely solidified – not useful.
So I improvised. I made some wooden shims which I attached with well-folded strips of duct tape.
It seems to work.
Caveat: Tree #1043
This tree failed to express gratitude.
I went to Wayne and Donna’s (the gift shop owners) for an unconventional thanksgiving dinner of ribs and potatoes. They are in a stressful time – they are leaving for Seattle in the next few days, where Donna is scheduled for tumor-removing surgery. Which is something I can sympathize with.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Time-traveling logistics
Yesterday at work, I got an email notification announcing the delivery of a package to the store (as one does). The thing is, no package had been delivered, and one wasn’t delivered later that day, either. Actually, this isn’t uncommon – when UPS “delivers” a package to our store, they are actually delivering it to a third-party company that covers the last 30 miles from Ketchikan to the island, because UPS doesn’t actually deliver to the island. They let the floatplane company, Taquan Air, handle those last miles. All well and good.
What was disturbing (or interesting?) about the email announcement in this case was, rather, the fact that although the email was delivered at 10:16 AM, the package was allegedly delivered (past tense, was) at 3:42 PM. That means that somehow, the notification had arrived via email from the future! “Wow, if UPS has solved that one, they can’t be stopped,” I mused.
Caveat: Definitely take the tram
I found this story hugely amusing, and thought-provoking too.
There’s a lot of context required to make sense of this story. The author, John Holbo, a philosopher whose bloggings I frequently read on the group-blog Crooked Timber, explains much of that context in a supplemental webpage – so I’ll not make any major duplicative effort here.
The minimal context: the story is a parody of (or extension/sequel to) Ursula Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. Without knowing that story, you will be hard put to begin to make sense of Holbo’s creation. Unfortunately, as he points out too, there is no freely accessible web version of her story – it’s still under copyright and requires purchasing a version of the text (ebook, paper book, audiobook). Anyway, wikipedia has a good summary.
I am tempted to add a town called Omelas to my fictional maps – and it should definitely be accessible by tram. Actually, my geofictions are full of such “easter eggs” (as they’re called in the realm of modern electronic-domain creative works, such as computer games and websites): references to other works of fiction and tributes to other authors’ geofictions.
Caveat: Tree #1038
This tree was there as the rain turned to snow turned to rain turned to snow ↻ ↻ ↻ …
This morning I watched Art board a plane on his way to Portland for Thanksgiving. “Bye, Art.”
Then I worked at the giftshop all day. “Buy art.”
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 8hr]
Caveat: Boost or bust
Art and I went to SEARHC (the local clinic in Klawock) this morning and got Moderna boosters (3rd doses) vs Covid. This is partly because Art is traveling down to Portland for Thanksgiving, and Juli (at his destination) requested that he do it if at all possible. But I wanted to do it too. I feel strongly that it’s the right thing to do, having faith in the scientific “establishment” – such as it is. With so much cynicism and anti-vax attitude about (especially up here), I wanted to “vote with my feet” on this issue.
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #12
I don’t post these frame shop journals very often. There has been a slackening of demand for framing projects, but I still have done quite a few since my last entry in this series, two and a half months ago. I have been somewhat negligent in taking pictures of all these, however. Here are a few from the last 9 weeks, in no particular order.
This last frame is “kinda weird.” I had the framed picture (part of the store’s stock of prints and artworks) but a customer wanted the frame. Wanting to keep the customer happy, I cannibalized the frame from this picture. But now I had a picture, with matting and glass, but no frame. I decided to improvise a temporary frame using cardboard – this was because something was needed to hold the glass in place. If the work gets bought, the customer can order a nicer frame, or just take the artwork and leave the glass and matting.
Today I struggled with a poor-quality frame received from our increasingly-poor-quality supplier. The wooden slots cut at the supplier to place the wedges to hold the frame together were in several cases partly broken, or broke immediately upon attempting to connect things. The wood was too soft and the frame was too large to work with so few and such small slots.
I had to improvise, using metal fasteners and glue. I can’t say it was a super high-quality frame as an outcome. Anyway at least the outcome was better than the last time I tried to improvise a solution to a badly-wrought frame from our suppliers.
Caveat: The piano speaks
I found this online.
This guy used data from a voice recording of a person speaking to figure out which combination of piano keys (i.e. complex “chords”) would best reproduce each point in the wave form of the speech. Generally these are too many keys, needing to be pressed too rapidly in sequence, for a human pianist to do this. So he used a mechanical piano-playing device to reproduce the speech. It’s just on the edge of comprehensibility. Quite eerie.
Caveat: …dreamin’ is becomin’ a reality
What I’m listening to right now.
The Mamas and The Papas, “Creeque Alley.” Although this song was not part of my childhood soundtrack, its zeitgeist was. I feel like I could have been one of the small children in the video. The look and feel of it all, and the Dylanesque lyrics, all are profoundly nostalgic.
Lyrics.
John and Mitchy were gettin' kind of itchy Just to leave the folk music behind Zal and Denny workin' for a penny Tryin' to get a fish on the line In a coffee house Sebastian sat And after every number they'd pass the hat McGuinn and McGuire just a-gettin' higher In L.A., you know where that's at And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass Zally said "Denny, you know there aren't many Who can sing a song the way that you do, let's go south" Denny said "Zally, golly, don't you think that I wish I could play guitar like you" Zal, Denny and Sebastian sat (At the Night Owl) And after every number they'd pass the hat McGuinn and McGuire still a-gettin higher In L.A., you know where that's at And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass When Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore But she changed her mind one day Standin' on the turnpike, thumb out to hitchhike "Take me to New York right away" When Denny met Cass he gave her love bumps Called John and Zal and that was the Mugwumps McGuinn and McGuire couldn't get no higher But that's what they were aimin' at And no one's gettin' fat except Mama Cass Mugwumps, high jumps, low slumps, big bumps Don't you work as hard as you play Make up, break up, everything is shake up Guess it had to be that way Sebastian and Zal formed the Spoonful Michelle, John, and Denny gettin' very tuneful McGuinn and McGuire just a-catchin' fire In L.A., you know where that's at And everybody's gettin' fat except Mama Cass Di-di-di-dit dit dit di-di-di-dit, whoa Broke, busted, disgusted, agents can't be trusted And Mitchy wants to go to the sea Cass can't make it, she says we'll have to fake it We knew she'd come eventually Greasin' on American Express cards It's low rent, but keeping out the heat's hard Duffy's good vibrations and our imaginations Can't go on indefinitely And California dreamin' is becomin' a reality
Caveat: tough
At the store today things were moving very, very slow. Wayne (the owner) came in and we stood around talking for almost 30 minutes. He said something memorable, which he attributed to an old logger he used to know down in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. “Anybody can get old, but you have to be tough to stay old.”
Albert (an old Native American guy) came in at a different time and told some of his never-ending and entirely implausible stories about Sasquatches, the “Waterfall Mafia” (Waterfall is a major resort down the island a way), and the Murkoswki family’s criminal empire.
Caveat: Tree #1018
This tree was there as a single lonesome blueberry leaf continued to hang on despite October’s impending end.
Meanwhile, Arthur had a burst of productivity, today – he got the boat’s bottom washed off, and installed the boat into the barn for the winter.
[daily log: walking, 2km; banging and hoisting and screwing things down, 6hr]
Caveat: On doing difficult things…
I was recently asked why I am so focused on this treehouse project of mine. Especially given my well-established discomfort with heights (acrophobia), and its undeniable costs in money and energy.
I think I do it simply because it’s difficult, but not too difficult. It’s a challenge, but one with a good chance of success, especially if I learn to accept imperfections in its implementation – which is one of the lessons life keeps wanting to teach me, anyway.
It’s also a kind of architectural “folly,” such as suits my eccentricities.
And perhaps it’s a weirdly quite literal interpretation of certain vague late-middle-age nesting instincts I have.
I have plenty of projects that are similar. The online world of the opengeofiction.net – its servers, its coding work, its maintenence – is really just the same thing as the treehouse but in a different domain. In summary, it’s another hobby-type-project that challenges me enough to be hard, but not impossible.
My life has been full of these types of things. Sometimes they’ve ended with failure (my sojourn in the military, my efforts to start my own IT consulting business). Sometimes they’ve ended with success (my work as a database administrator, my teaching career in South Korea).
The treehouse or the geofiction webserver project are exactly the same kind of thing. The fact that they aren’t remunerated is just an accident of what’s available to be done up here in rural Alaska. The options are limited, so I had to find “jobs” even if they weren’t the paid kind of jobs.
I finished the treehouse’s roof today – more or less. There are some screws missing, because I ran out of screws. I engineered a trapdoor type thing in the middle of one section of roof panel, to enable me to reach and attach the last roof panel. I’ll want to create some kind of more permanent and water-proofed arrangement for this “hole-in-the-roof” at a later point in time. Maybe I’ll make a skylight?
Here is the roof trapdoor, ready to be pulled down over my head.
Here is a view of the south side, now with the roof complete.
I’ll want to put some plastic across the south windows, as I did across the north windows. Then the next project will be to fill in the non-load-bearing east and west walls. These walls will be inset at each end, since the trees go up through the floor at the east and west ends.
Caveat: Just going on record, here…
I want to record this, so that at some point in the future (years hence) I can see if I was right or not.
Facebook’s recent announcement of its corporate name-change to “Meta” – its shift to Zuckerberg’s (next) fantasy – is Facebook’s “AOL-buys-out-TimeWarner” moment. Which is to say, it’s the apex before the fall. I would say I’m not super confident about this. Let’s say… 65% or so. Not confident enough to start shorting Facebook shares – I couldn’t afford the risk.
Caveat: That’s A Wrap
After spending most of the summer unwrapped, I decided to re-wrap the GDC (RV camper). First I had to start it. I think its battery has permanently died, so I borrowed Arthur’s spare marine battery. It’s the same voltage, but it doesn’t fit very well under the hood – so it was just a temporary solution.
The vehicle started fine with that battery. I ran it for a while, but as I rolled down the driver’s side window to let it air out some, I think some peripheral fuse blew out – the main electrical stuff still was working fine (headlights, motor, etc), but the extras (fan, cabin light, electric windows) stopped working. Instead of putting time into trying to solve that, I taped a garbage bag over the driver’s side window and Arthur helped me pull the giant white tarp over the vehicle.
Here is a picture of it all wrapped up. Note that this was at noon, and the sun was no longer successfully clearing the treeline to the south (the direction I’m facing to take this picture). Midday, no sun. Welcome to winter.
Caveat: Boat Unlaunched
We pulled the boat out of the water today, because there was a nice high-tide mid-day. We’ve decided to close the fishing season on ourselves. Here is Arthur, amazed at the low barnacle-count – I’d expected more.
The high today was 39° F. There was frost on the dock that persisted while we pulled out the boat. I found this fish skeleton, likely abandoned by a raven or regurgitated by an eagle, lying in the frost.
Caveat: Applied Trolleyology
Between the raindrops this morning (we had about 4 hours without rain), I decided to finally do a small project I’d been procrastinating on for a long time – all summer, in fact.
I did some work on the boat trolley, preliminary to pulling the boat out of the water as is our plan in the next week or so. I replaced a turnbuckle at one end, and added a new turnbuckle at the other. The winch-driven cable that pulls the boat trolley had developed so much slack that I no longer felt safe operating it, because the cable itself had to be held, in gloved hands, when lowering or raising the trolley, to maintain sufficient tension for the winch to work. And that just plain felt unsafe.
The old turnbuckle, that my brother Andrew had helped install a few years ago during one of his visits, had no more room left to take up more slack, so the cable was going to have to be detached regardless. So I detached both ends, installed new, bigger and better turnbuckles, with lots of new slack now. I took out 6 inches of net slack in the cable (though the actual cable was shortened by almost 18 inches, accounting for the length of the new turnbuckle).
Here are before and after pictures.
Before, uphill side (you can see the fully tightened turnbuckle):
Before, downhill side (you can see it utterly lacks a turnbuckle):
After, uphill side (with a new, wide-open turnbuckle):
After, downhill side (with a new, wide-open turnbuckle):
Caveat: Struogony
Struogony is the “mathematical universe hypothesis“: the idea that the universe is first and foremost a complex mathematical object and that that which we experience in it as its physicality, its qualia, its immediacy… these are just immanent from that underlying mathematical reality.
I read that it is a “radical Platonist view” which I find legible – and yet despite my supposed strongly anti-Platonist stance, I find the concept weirdly compelling. Is it possible to be an Aristotelian struogonist? If not, would I consider renouncing my allegiance to Aristotle because I have accepted the struogonist claim?
That would resolve an argument I had many times with Michelle – but a bit late to matter.
Caveat: Multi-pronged therapeutic approach to memory loss and cognition problems
Given what I live with, with Arthur, every day, I have developed a strong, amateur-medical interest in memory loss issues and possible treatments.
This article I found was very interesting – it’s a bit jargon-dense but I have enough background in biology and biochemistry that it’s not complete gobbledy-gook for me:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4221920/
Essentially, the researchers have decided to take a full-on “lifestyle modification” approach to treating early-stage Alzheimer’s and had substantial success at the anecdotal level. They point to next steps in research. Although they often use “AD” and “Alzheimer’s” to refer to the target problem, they seem to have had plenty of success with people suffering cognitive and memory problems who have NOT been explicitly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
I considered this paragraph to be the core, best summary of the findings and direction of the research cited.
The therapeutic system described in this report derives from basic studies of the role of APP signaling and proteolysis in plasticity, and the imbalance in this receptor proteolysis that reproducibly occurs in Alzheimer’s disease. There are numerous physiological parameters that feed into this balance, such as hormones, trophic factors, glucose metabolism, inflammatory mediators, ApoE genetic status, sleep-related factors, exercise-related factors, and many others; therefore, the therapeutic system is designed to reverse the self-reinforcing (i.e., prionic) signaling imbalance that we have hypothesized to mediate Alzheimer’s disease pathophysiology.
Caveat: A weird post-cancer milestone
This morning, there was a lot of ice on the windshield of the car, which needed to be scraped off before I could proceed down the Port Saint Nicholas Expressway to work.
I reached for my oft-used but utterly improvisational ice-scraper, which sits in the center console of the car. My ice-scraper: my Korean National Cancer Center ID card.
Unfortunately, it snapped.
You might think it’s weird that I have used this as my ice-scraper for 3 years. But I have. It’s because shortly after arriving here, when I was first confronted with some ice on the windshield, I’d gone to use the one that Arthur had in the car, only to find it didn’t work well at all.
So I thought: oh, well, a credit card type object works well. I’d reached in my wallet, pulled that ID card out, and continued, to myself: Well, I’m not going to be needing this, anymore, right?
So it became my windshield ice-scraper. And lasted for 3 years of heavy use, stored in the center console of the Chevy Tahoe.
Anyway, that ID card served me well for 5 years in helping me clear bureaucratic hurdles at the cancer center, during my many visits from my first check-in in June, 2013 until my last CT and MRI scan prior to departure in July, 2018. Counting the radiation period and the “bone necrosis / dental disaster” period, probably it served for 50+ visits, total. And then it served me for 3 more years as a sturdy and reliable ice scraper. And now it shall retire.
Caveat: Storms Material and Virtual
A somewhat stressful day.
I had a crisis on the map server last night and this morning, with the tool called “certbot” – a tool we use on the server to make sure the OGF webpages are secure (“https”). And that also caused problems with our automated emailing from the server, which supports functions like new user sign up, lost password recovery, and replication monitoring (making sure data goes over to the render and to overpass correctly). I had to shut down the server without much advance notice – I was worried the problem was worse than it was, and so I was trying to solve it quickly. So that was an issue for the users.
Meanwhile, we’re having a big storm here, weather-wise. The marine forecast was calling for 40-foot swells on the open ocean here, and up to 10-foot swells right on Bucareli Bay, at the mouth of Port Saint Nick.
Our neighbors-down-the-road, Fred and Pat, were concerned about the impact of high seas and wind on their boat, so they asked Art if they could park their commercial fishing craft at our dock. Of course we are happy to help – they’ve done it before – Arthur has the most sheltered dock of all of Port Saint Nick, because we are the farthest inland, at the head of the fjord. Anyway, it’s turnabout – Pat’s the one who rescued me when I got the blueberry (Art’s Chevy Tahoe) stuck in a snowbank a while back.
So Fred and Pat parked their big boat at the dock, after we moved Art’s smaller boat off to one side.
It’s very windy and rainy and blowy, right now.
[daily log: walking, 3km]