Lest my incessant postings of trees and poetry bore you, there are other options on the internet.
There’s a guy who has a blog of nothing but hats.
Category: Banalities & Journaling
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n + 29)
We left the dock at 7:30.
The sea was calm when we started out. Based on the marine forecasts, I was trying to hit a “hole” between two fronts of the storms we’ve been having, and it seems like I did it right. Tomorrow is supposed to see “gale” conditions on Bucarelli Bay.
We went out and started trolling along Cemetery Island, just outside the north entrance to Port Saint Nicholas.
In fact, it felt like Arthur’s heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to go out farther, so we turned around and trolled southward, back past the north entrance, along the Coronados to the south entrance. And having caught nothing, Arthur started pulling in the lines without even commenting. It was like the whole fishing trip was just “going through the motions.”
We returned to the dock at around 9:45.
“Skunked” – though I’d call this a self-goal, to a certain extent.
With so much of the day still remaining, I decided it was a good time to check the running condition of the GDC (my RV camper). Its battery was dead. So I’ve been charging it.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 15
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 10
- Muy Grande Halibut (> 50lbs): 2
- Other: 3
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 28
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: noisier
The first thing Arthur said to me, this morning:
“It has come to my attention that the world is a lot noisier than I thought it was.”
This is a remarkable sign. I take it to mean that his hearing aids seem to have been adjusted properly.
Caveat: Tree #959
This tree (an abstraction, admittedly) represents the status of the apache (webserver) services on my main server for the new website.
Today was not normal not just because of software woes.
Arthur went to see the VA audiologist in Ketchikan. Mid-day appointments in Ketchikan are possible, but involve a full-day’s journey. I drove Art to the ferry this morning, leaving the house as 5:45 AM. His ferry trip embarked at 8, he arrived in Ketchikan at 11, he had his appointment at 12, he got on the return ferry at 3:30, I picked him up at 6:30, and we got back to the house at 8 PM.
Arthur was tired but, he said, they had finally helped him to adjust his hearing aids better. This is amazingly good news! We’ll see how it pans out. They also told him that his hearing had worsened quite a bit – which wasn’t news to me, but was, of course, news to him. But now maybe, hopefully, he’ll wear his now better-working hearing aids more often.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; driving, 135km]
Caveat: Unscheduled Maintenance
Today has been stressful. But stress “of my own creation,” for a change – since it has been about this volunteer systems administrator role I’ve taken on for this new version of the old website.
The website crashed this morning. In a way where I didn’t understand what was going on, where we had to take it offline and study the problem with limited resources, where we had to deal with all the customers (users – these are not paying customers, it’s a free site) who wanted to know what was going on.
We made progress on diagnosing the problem, but the site is still offline. Tomorrow I’ll work on trying to get it back up and available again.
Caveat: Every Penny Counts
While Jan was cleaning a small corner of the store yesterday, I looked down and said, “Oh, look, a penny!”
There had been a penny lying on the floor there, under a merchandise display. I picked it up and looked at the penny. I was surprised.
“I think we need to clean the store more often,” I said to Jan.
“What do you mean?” She asked.
I showed her the penny. The mint date on the penny was “1925.”
“That penny’s been lying there for a long time, maybe.” We laughed about it.
I mean, the store’s building is at most 40 years old. I think younger than that, even. And the gift store has only occupied the space for about 10 years, I think. Maybe 12. So someone must have dropped the penny there more recently than 1925. It was just amusing to imagine it lying there for 96 years.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n + 28)
Joe and Arthur and I went out fishing today. Joe’s stepson had intended to accompany us, but bowed out.
We got a very late start. That’s because the batteries were dead in the boat. And then, even when we charged them up, the big motor wouldn’t start. It was an electrical problem. Troubleshooting revealed that one of the connectors to the battery was so corroded it had broken through (picture).
We had to repair the electrical connectors to the battery.
We finally left the dock at 9:15. We went to Black Beach, at the north end of San Juan, and trolled for salmon. Nothing.
We went to the north end of San Ignacio and trolled southward along the eastern side. We saw my boss Wayne in another boat. Maybe he was catching a fish – it was hard to tell from the distance. But we caught nothing.
We were skunked for salmon for the day. At about 12:30 we put in for halibut on the southwest corner of San Ignacio (Cocos Point).
Joe caught one humongous halibut. About 70 pounds, 56 inches long.
It didn’t fit in the fish-holding tank at the back of the boat – its tail stuck out.
Arthur and I were satisfied to have assisted, and we headed back. The sea, that had been flat in the morning, was whipped into a frenzy by increasing wind, going home, and we were slapping 3-4 foot waves all the way until we got inside Port Saint Nicholas.
We tied up at the dock at 2:45.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 15
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 10
- Mongo Halibut (> 50lbs): 2
- Other: 3
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 28
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Local Bus Odyssey Across Britain
Mostly I don’t like it when people attempt “essays” or long-form journalism on twitter. It just doesn’t work, jumping from short little message to short little message. It’s a very constrained medium to develop any kind of narrative. But this morning I ran across what I felt was very good use of the medium.
Some guy in Britain decided to see how far he could go in 24 hours traveling by only city / local buses. No coaches, no trains, no anything but local bus routes. He started at Charing Cross, in the center of London, at 3 AM, and made his way, local bus by local bus, up the Island of Great Britain, tweeting all the way. Mostly it reads as a kind of “city and town bus stations of England” travelogue. I’m waiting for the coffee-table book.
He made it as far as Morecambe (a beach town just outside Lancaster) in the middle of the following night. The people following the story had been hoping he’d make it to Scotland – but he fell quite a ways short of that.
Caveat: Tree #947
This tree has been chopped up and turned into parts of a sort of pre-fab modular section of treehouse wall. This is my first try for my plan, but I ran into an issue so I didn’t install it. I think I’m on the right track, though. It got windy in the afternoon so I stopped.
[daily log: walking, 2km; hammering and sawing, 3hr]
Caveat: Tree #942
This tree is in front of the clinic in Klawock.
I went to the dentist today, there.
Just to be clear, as I’ve said before, in general, I preferred having cancer to certain dentist visits I’ve experienced, and would make the same choice again. That said, this visit was relatively harmless – just a checkup and xrays and exam, preliminary to cleaning. I was also pleased to hear that I have no evident problems (i.e. caries). The dentist agreed that with my complex medical history in and around my mouth, dental work would be arduous.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Corporate Epistemological Crisis (Why AT&T, Why?)
I took this screenshot on my phone a few weeks back, but I just now remembered I’d taken it with the intent to share it. AT&T is convinced that my phone is a “3G” phone, and they are trying very, very hard to get me to “upgrade.” The thing is… I don’t think their belief is accurate. See the screenshot from my phone, for clarification.
I’ve dealt with various people in their customer service multiple times, but they are unconvinceable.
Caveat: Tree #938
This tree is from my past. I took this picture not far from Hongnong, South Korea (where I was living at that time), in December, 2010.
Today was a bit of a milestone in Arthur’s post-stroke evolution / recovery. Lately he’s been becoming increasingly self-aware that some of the limitations he’s lived with are, in a sense, self-imposed: a kind of affective inertia. He had a consultation / annual follow-up with the headshrinkers at the Portland VA, the other day (via video call), while I was at work. And they planted in his mind the idea that he could or should be doing more – staying more active.
Of course, this has been suggested before. But this time, for whatever reason, the advice stuck. I suspect that it being someone new and different making the suggestion, and not the same old voices, helped.
One thing that came up as Arthur and I discussed the call later was that he wanted to drive to town. That, in turn, brought us around to what I’ve told him many times before: his driving, specifically, makes me feel unsafe. This is not because of lack of skill, but rather because of his seemingly stroke-related attentional issues: twice that I remember, when I let him drive a few times two years ago, he got distracted while attempting to multi-task and essentially forgot that he was driving. Once, he was trying to adjust his iPod that he was using for listening to an audiobook, and another time, he was trying to break off a piece of chocolate that he was trying to eat. And those times were scary. So my point being: it’s not his driving that makes me feel unsafe, it’s his refusal to avoid trying to multi-task while driving that makes me feel unsafe, because these days, his ability to multi-task frankly sucks.
But I don’t want to limit him. So I said that while I wouldn’t ride with him, I wasn’t going to prevent him from driving somewhere if he wanted to. It’s the same thing I’ve said about his going out in the boat: while it makes me somewhat worried or uncomfortable, I’m not going to try to prevent him. I’ve essentially given up on my supposed role as “safety officer.”
I really don’t want to be a “control freak” – Arthur actually used that term about my behavior, which wounded me pretty deeply. And that’s not to say the term is entirely inaccurate. But then, he’s been wounding me a lot, lately. I suppose that’s his way of taking back control of his own life to a greater degree. It is not my intent or desire to begrudge him that.
So all of this, above, is preamble to the following: he drove to town today on his own, and did his weekly shopping and library visit by himself.
And apparently he survived that. That’s good.
I had the somewhat depressing insight that it made me feel useless. I’m not the safety officer anymore, having abrogated that job in protest, so what, exactly, is my role here, now?
I wish I had more financial independence. I could move out.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+27)
We went fishing again today. This is because Joe wanted to maximize his friend Jim’s chances to fish, before Jim goes back to Idaho.
We left right before 7 AM. Joe rejected even the possibility of trolling for salmon. My impression is that Joe finds trolling boring, and his fishing dreams focus on catching great big halibuts, battling them with his fishing rod silhouetted against the horizon.
Arthur, on the other hand, seems to find fishing for halibut frustrating and boring. It’s mostly waiting around. There is much more to be done when trolling. The downriggers have to be deployed, depths monitored, and the whole thing takes place while in motion. So Arthur was visibly disconsolate when Joe declared his desire to focus on halibut, but, since Joe and Jim were guests, he hunkered down and decided to just mess with rigging up new hook assemblies for some future trolling excursion.
We motored straight out to Diamond Point and parked there, and fished for halibut. Joe’s instincts worked out, this time, and we caught quite a few. Importantly, Joe got to hook a 60 pound halibut, much bigger than the other small ones, and hauled it in. It was actually impressive.
Arthur actually rejected fishing at all, except a very brief stint at the end. Earlier, I took a third rod and fished instead. I even caught a halibut. I’d never caught one before. It was small. Mostly Jim and Joe did the catching. We did it all at Diamond Point, so from a navigational standpoint, the day was straightforward. The weather started quite calm but it was getting blowy by the time we decided to head in, around noon.
We caught a total of 10 halibut. Here they are, laid out on the deck, with Jim and Joe admiring them.
I have had another depressing insight about why communication with Arthur breaks down for me (and I mean for me, specifically) so frequently.
It goes like this. Arthur’s default belief is that I’m incompetent. This isn’t precisely that he thinks badly of me, but rather, in his mind I’m frozen, developmentally, at around age 11 or so – at least as far as I can figure out. So then when I ask Arthur something, or make a statement, and he misunderstands me (which is the most common result, these days, either because of his hearing loss or his cognitive processing issues), he always misunderstands me in the direction of assuming that my question or statement is coming from the position of incompetence. I am not a particularly thick-skinned person. So of course my feelings get hurt by this insinuation of incompetence, which is further offensive because it’s based on a failure to understand what I’ve said.
It might help to give an example. Arthur prefers to dump the fish carcasses from a big haul far away from the dock, off in the middle of the bay somewhere. This is an established procedure, in which I’ve participated many times. I went to ask Arthur about if he wanted me to take the scraps out in the boat and dump them in the middle of the bay right away, or if he wanted to supervise that undertaking. He didn’t fully hear me, and of course he doesn’t remember ever doing that with me before (I’m still 11 years old, right?), so he immediately gets upset, because he’d already said that the fish carcasses needed to be dumped in the middle of the bay, and he starts explaining, defensively, in excessive detail, why he believes this to be important. All the while, becoming increasingly agitated by what he clearly perceived to be an obvious question that he’d answered before. But remember – I wasn’t questioning the procedure, I was merely trying to take initiative and see if he simply wanted me to do it, or if he didn’t trust me to do it.
Anyway, I walked away. And I did it.
Here is a rather large boat that passed us while we fished.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 15
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 11
- Other: 3
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 27
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+26)
Art and I went out fishing today, accompanied by Joe and his friend Jim. It was a very long day, but quite mediocre in terms of results.
We launched a little before 7 AM.
We trolled from Tranquil point to Port Estrella, and tried for some halibut there. We moved northwestward to the center of Bucareli Bay, to a spot over a shallower underwater plateau there, and tried for halibut again. Jim caught the bottom and there was lots of spinning the boat around and yelling while we tried to get him loose – in the end, we broke the line and left his hook and weight at the bottom.
Then we crossed increasingly rough and windswept waters to the southwest corner of San Igancio Island, where we again tried for halibut, drifting northward with the wind, motoring south again, and drifting northward again.
That having proved fairly fruitless, we trolled through the passage on the west side of San Ignacio to that island’s north end. Nothing at all bit our hooks. We proceeded southeastward from there to Diamond Point (the southwest corner of San Juan Island), where Jim had had much luck with halibut a few days earlier. But nothing – though Joe hooked what he and I both believed was a “big one” that seemed to get away.
Then we gave up and went home.
I didn’t keep a very good mental record of where we caught our fishes, but in total Art got one “pink” salmon. I got one silver (coho) – which I caught, much to my own surprise, using a halibut hook. Joe got one smallish halibut and one healthy-sized ling-cod. Jim caught a tiny black bass that didn’t seem much larger than the bait it had swallowed. Art and I sent all the caught fish home with Joe and Jim.
After getting back to the house at just before 5 PM, Joe had his cooler with his small haul of fish, with the tail of one fish sticking out.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 15
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 1
- Other: 3
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 22
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: On the mildly traumatizing effect of other people’s audiobooks
I had a weird breakthrough realization recently.
Someone I was chatting with asked if I listened to audiobooks. And I reacted with a visceral, emphatic, “Oh, no, I hate audiobooks.”
And then I thought to myself, now… where did that come from?
It didn’t used to be true. It’s a recent development. I used to listen to audiobooks now and then, that I downloaded from various places online. I used to listen to radio shows and podcasts, too, in a similar way. In fact I did that quite a bit in the years following my cancer surgery.
This new dislike has been brought about, I think, because of Arthur’s tendency to immerse himself in his audiobooks in ways that are both dismissive of my presence and that impair his own ability to function given the limits of his attentional capacity. And so, at some point, I started telling myself: I will never be like that.
It’s not just Arthur – but his way with them is more disruptive of his interactions with others than most people’s.
The easiest way to make sure that I won’t ever be like that is to simply convince myself that I don’t like audiobooks. So my insight, in this recent moment, was that I have, in effect, been mildly traumatized by Arthur’s audiobook habit.
Caveat: Unalanized
We put Alan on the ferry this morning.
Here are the brothers bidding each other good bye.
Alan’s retreating form can just barely be made out in the shadow of the covered ramp leading down into the ferry in the middle distance.
Caveat: OGFMirror
[The below is cross-posted from my other blog.]
I’m super bad about posting to this blog. That’s partly because I feel a strong desire to report some actual, positive progress, which I haven’t felt enabled to do.
I have been very busy with HRATE technicalities. I am building – very, very slowly – a “mirror” for opengeofiction.net (OGF). I think if this is successful, then the owner of that site, who has expressed interest in “letting go” of having to continue to maintain it, will allow the mirror to take over for the site and a transition to a new hosting environment will be complete.
Someday, I intend to write up, in elaborate, technical detail, this process of setting up a mirror. But in broad outlines, here is what it involves (has involved, will involve).
- Build a new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server. This leads to lots of incompatibilities farther down the line, because the existing OGF server is an older version. Install the basics – apache, postgresql, etc.
- Install an OSM rails port on the server.
- Migrate the OGF data to this server. This was very, very hard – because the OGF data (in either .osm.pbf format, or in pg_dump format) proved to contain inconsistencies (data corruption). Some missing current nodes and ways had to be restored manually (text-editing .osm = .xml files). This ended up a 2-weeks-long process.
- Set up incoming replication from the source apidb (OGF) to the new mirror (currently being called ogfdev).
- Set up outgoing replication for the new ogfdev instance (to drive render, overpass, etc)
- Set up a new primary render. This had some sub-parts.
- coastlines. This proved very difficult, because as far as I can figure out, the osmcoastline tool used to create the coastline shapefiles is broken on Ubuntu 20.04. An older version must be used. My current workaround: I’m actually running coastlines on an older server. I import a coastline-containing pbf file to the older server, run the osmcoastline tool, and post the shapefiles for consumption on the render server.
- I made a decision to run the renders on a different server than the apidb. I think this might involve a bit more expense, short term, but it makes the whole set of processes more scalable, long term. My experience with Arhet is that the render requires scaling sooner / more frequently than the apidb, as the user base grows. Installing the render software (mod_tile and “renderd”) proved difficult. It turns out that there are some lacunae and downright incorrect steps in the documented installation sequences on github.
- Set up incoming replication from the ogfdev database to the render database.
- There are substantial differences in recent versions of the openstreetmap-carto style – specifically, the special shapefiles are no longer stored in as datafiles in data folder in the render directory. Instead, the shapefiles are loaded to the database. Because non-standard shapefiles are used, this means rewriting the load procedures (python scripts) – the standard approach is to just grab the files for “Earth” (because who would run osm for some other planet?!). So that file-grabbing is hard-coded in the procedure.
- Set up a new topo render. The topo render was shut down on OGF, so this will be the only working version. Unfortunately, I ran into a similar problem with some of the topo pre-processing as I ran into with osmcoastline, above. I suspect for the same reason – something in one of the dependencies they both have. So the topo pre-processing (turning the .hgt files into a contour database) is also being run on a separate, Ubuntu 18.04 server (just like the coastlines).
- Set up appropriate changes and customizations for the front-facing rails port (osm website). This involves importing user data (done) but also user diaries (not done). These require ad hoc SQL coding that give me flashbacks to my job as DBA in the 2000’s. Another unfinished piece – internationalization. The current ogfmirror website looks okay, but only in English. Switch to another language, and it all reverts to OSM boilerplate. Why is internationalization done so badly on production software of this kind? I see no easy solution except manually editing each language’s .yml file in turn (OSM has a 100+ languages). Or building my own damn application to achieve that result.
- Set up overpass and overpass-turbo. Overpass installs relatively painlessly, but I’m having trouble getting incoming replication to work correctly. overpass-turbo was quite difficult – the current version on github is flat-out broken, and so an older version (commit) must be compiled and installed. Further, the compilation and configuration process overwrites some of the parameters files, so the parameters files have to be modified after running the first steps of configuration, but before the last part. This is the step I am on right now.
- Set up nominatim? – nice to have, but not urgent. Anyway nominatim doesn’t work on the existing OGF website
- Implement some of the custom tools that are available on the OGF website: the “scale helper,” the “coastline helper,”…
- What else? This is a work in progress…
So I’ve been busy. Here is a link to the site. Bear in mind, if you are reading this in the future, the link may not show you what I’m currently writing about, but rather some future iteration of it.
I’m still working on some of those last steps. Open to hearing what else needs to be done.
What I’m listening to right now.
Caveat: Digital Anti-vaxxer
I might have just converted to a role that might be called a “digital anti-vaxxer.”
My computer crashed this morning. It was far from catastrophic – I have good back-up habits. I lost a few dozen recent pictures, and some text files I can’t even remember what was in them. I may have lost some other stuff. Further, I have a perfectly good “extra” machine, which I am now using. It’s not as comfortable in its configuration, and will take some time to get used to, but it serves my basic needs fine.
And I knew that the computer in question was sickly – it was my HP “Lemon” laptop I bought in 2018, which has always had a bad battery and long had other issues as well. I have been using it as a desktop computer (because bad battery). I had changed the windows over to Linux. It wasn’t a terrible machine.
I believe the mistake I made, yesterday, was to let alarmism seen on the internet induce me to finally look into installing some anti-virus software on my Linux machine. I did a little bit of looking around and elected something called Clamav.
As background: I have never run anti-virus software on my Linux machines. And frankly, I’ve never had problems with viruses or malware on my Linux machines. Even on my Windows computers, when I’ve had and used them, I have never installed any kind of paid anti-virus, though for Windows machines I’ve occasionally run “system scan” or system monitors of various kinds.
I had always felt that with respect to anti-virus software, the cure was worse than the disease. But with respect to the principle, I could see where people who had less comfort and familiarity with the inner-workings of computers might have a reasonable use for anti-virus software. Or, barring that, they can get Apple products, which has the anti-virus buried inside it at such a level that it’s invisible and relatively non-disruptive to the user.
Anyway, back to my narrative: I installed the Linux anti-virus software on my computer yesterday. And, having never had a major problem with my Lemon’s software (only ever with hardware, before), this morning, I found the machine was “bricked” – this is a term used to describe computers or smartphones that simply cease, utterly, to work. Black screen, no boot, that kind of thing.
The only thing that I did different was install that antivirus software. So my conclusion: the cure was indeed much, much worse than the disease. And I am an ever more committed digital anti-vaxxer than ever before.
Which feels odd, since I’m not an anti-vaxxer with respect to human vaccines – which is a big deal these days. I know lots of people who are anti-vaxxers in the human realm. Those people befuddle me. So I suppose to the typical loyal consumer of anti-virus software, I must seem equally befuddling.
Caveat: Poem #1822 “One last, pitiable beep”
ㅁ And at last it died: my always-sick computer had a bad, bad day.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+24)
Arthur, Alan and I went out fishing.
The weather was good for fishing. Mostly overcast, but only a few sprinkles of rain and the sea was utterly flat.
There were a lot of boats out fishing. I didn’t see much action on the other boats, either, though.
We did a kind of circle: Black Beach (north end of San Juan Island), San Ignacio (up and down and up again), then Tranquil Point over to Caldera Bay. We caught one fish off the middle of San Ignacio (near Silvester). We didn’t catch any at the “hot spot” from last week, off Batan Point just west of Caldera Bay.
So it was a mostly disappointing day: we seem to be back to our one-fish-a-day quota.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 11
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 1
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 14
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Tree #919
This tree is up on the hillside.
We successfully retrieved Alan from the ferry and he’s settled in here at the house. The plan is to go out fishing tomorrow.
[daily log: walking, 3km; driving to Hollis, 130km]
Caveat: Tree #918
This tree is reaching for the water.
The plan had been that Arthur’s brother Alan (my “other uncle”) was going to arrive at Klawock airport this evening, to stay for a 10 day visit.
Apparently, though, Arthur managed to forget to book the last leg of Alan’s journey, on Island Air Express, which is the airline that provides service on their little airplanes between Ketchikan and Klawock.
Actually, I think saying that Arthur “forgot” isn’t quite accurate: his cognitive issue is, as described before, not entirely a memory issue so much as a failure of what the psychologists call “executive function.” I see this manifest in the following way: in day-to-day experience, Arthur often “checks things off” his mental checklist before he’s done them. Thus he thinks he’s told me of a plan to go fishing, when all he ever did was intend to do so. Or he thinks he’s booked a flight for Alan on Island Air, when all he ever did was intend to do so. He plays out the plan in his mind, and his mind says, “oh, good, that’s done, then.” I think his episodic memory of recent actions mixes up “planned actions” with “completed actions.”
So Alan had no seat on Island Air, and got stuck in a motel in Ketchikan for the night. We’ll get him over to the island today, hopefully – worst case scenario, he can take the ferry in the afternoon.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #909
This tree (recumbent) has appeared here before. It’s the tree that was damaged by the neighbor’s house fire in August, 2019. The absent owner next door apparently isn’t completely absent – he hired people to come and cut down these fire-damaged trees, and also yesterday while I was at work, a barge came and installed pillars for a new dock (seen in background, sticking out of the water).
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 7hr]
Caveat: with the psychotic handmaiden or her florence nightingale
I often receive spam comments on my blog. Mostly I simply delete them. Sometimes, though, they seem to constitute a kind of “found poetry.” Clearly the text below is generated by one of the many text-generating engines that now exist, “trained on” data from recent news and such. It’s nonsense, but with embedded fragments weirdly compelling, unexpected juxtapositions of words, perhaps.
A month ago, when a 37-year-old unimpassioned of a Singapore boarding secondary consequential teach in charge of people with mentally miserable disorders was diagnosed with a coronavirus, the authority of the structuring did not pull together a panic. Fascinating into account the specifics of the settlement, all its shillelagh and most of the fine haleness inhabitants were vaccinated against Covid-19 as being at danger subvene in February-March. However, just in shield, the boarding devotees was closed to secure quarantine, and all employees, patients and other people who recently communicated with the psychotic handmaiden or her florence nightingale were quarantined and began to be regularly tested. In excess of the next week, the virus was detected in three dozen people, including the 30-year-old sister from the libretto persist from the Philippines, as genially as four other employees of the boarding midriff group and 26 of its changeless residents. Most of those infected were fully vaccinated against Covid-19… You can imply to another article on this point at this vinculum. There’s something to it. Thank you so much for your help on this issue. I didn’t know that..
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+22)
We went fishing today.
Arthur made more effort vis-a-vis communication than I’ve seen in awhile. Specifically, he told me yesterday, well ahead of time, that he wanted to go out fishing today.
This means a lot to me – it makes it possible for me to prepare myself mentally, to make sure I’m not in the middle of something stressful with my ongoing computer work (which is, frankly, traumatizing me lately). In fact, knowing we would go out today, I woke up extra early, did something relaxing instead of messing with the programming stuff, and even meditated for a while – something I should do more of.
So when we left at 7, I was more prepared than usual for dealing with Arthur’s laconic eccentricities. I made a lot of effort to be positive, and in fact, that helped. I’ve never wanted to deny that at least some of the issues and tension that arise between us on the boat is a result of my own shortcomings.
The water was flat and still when we left.
By the time we exited Port Saint Nicholas, however, the wind had leaped into action and the water was quite choppy. We went to San Ignacio, again, and trolled up and down the east side, twice. Nothing.
We then went to Point Tranquil. There, we hooked a salmon who got away, but shortly after, hooked another. It seems that it was the same salmon, because the second salmon had a hook in it, which we’d lost in the first (though Arthur hadn’t realized it at the time).
There were no more salmon. But there were many boats. I suspect there were more boats than fish. It was Sunday, after all – many recreational boaters out, a hefty-looking research vessel of some kind, a boat with a flag indicating divers were beneath, a commercial fishing boat anchored and a family on the shore nearby. And lots of sportfishing craft.
We trolled along the north side of that arm of Prince of Wales Island to Caldera Bay, where we gave up on catching salmon – though they were leaping out of the water all around us. We fished for halibut for a while. Nothing there, either. Then we came home. Here’s the northwest corner of Caldera Bay, a spot called Point Lomas (you can click the pic to embiggen).
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 3
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 1
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 11
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+21)
As is sometimes his custom, Arthur didn’t bother telling me that he wanted to go out fishing today until he’d already gotten everything in the boat and had decided he was ready to go. I had figured it out about fifteen minutes earlier, when I heard him start the motors – testing them. So at least I had my boots on.
And so we went.
We went to San Igancio, again. We caught one good-sized Coho, right away. This raised Arthur’s spirits, but it wasn’t to prove a meaningful omen. We remained fishless for the subsequent hours trolling up and down along the east side of San Ignacio. Then he wanted to go to “Real Marina,” which created a lot of confusion for me, because he meant Siketi Bay – one of his favorite places. But he’d forgotten the name and he’d forgotten I’d ever been fishing with him there, so communication about his intentions was complicated.
But we went to Siketi, finally, and caught one smallish bass in the passage between Lulu Island and Cone Island. By the time we got to the east side of Noyes Island, the swells off the open sea to the south were broad, and the wind was pushing the boat around. Also, the hose with sprayer attachment that pumps seawater, that he uses to clean off the back of the boat and fill the fish holding tank, was acting up (it has leaks, and the on/off switch is unreliable). So Arthur was kicking it, and it ended up spraying the inside of the cabin of the boat. My clothes got soaked with seawater. So then I was feeling cold and grumpy too.
So we gave up and headed home over very choppy seas, reaching the dock at about 2:30. All the way back, Arthur was very angry and as restless as a foul-mouthed teenager suffering from ADHD, because he’d lost the sheath to his knife that he uses to cut up fish. He kept looking for it over and over in the same places: glove box, storage cases under the back bench seats, etc. I suspect it ended up in the water because he likes to set things down on the gunwale, and with as bumpy as the water was, it may have descended into the sea.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 2
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 1
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 10
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #10
I took almost a month to post this, since the last one. There was a very slow period, when I wasn’t making many frames, in mid-June. But since then I’ve been making a lot of frames.
During the slow period, I did an “inventory” of our filing cabinet where we store vendor information and catalogs. As part of that, I made new labels for the chaotic folders.
Before.
After.
Here are bunch of frames, in no particular order.
I had one new frame that was a bit bittersweet. A customer bought a picture on our wall, that I’d framed last November. She said, “But that frame is ugly, I want a different one.” So I had to take apart a frame I’d made last fall, and make a new one.
Before.
After.
One time, we got in a frame from our supplier that was clearly a horrible mistake. We had to re-order it.
I also spent some time teaching myself how to cut curves in glass. It’s not easy, even though Arthur claims it’s easy – although I’ll observe that Arthur didn’t bother to demonstrate this for me. I did borrow his fancy diamond-tipped glass-cutting tool, which is better than the hand-held glass cutter at the store.
Caveat: Eight Years Cancer Free
In a year largely defined by hypochondria, I remained cancer-free. My surgery to remove my tumor and lymph for my stage-3 cancer was on July 4th, 2013. I remain independent.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+20)
Well, we went out fishing this morning.
In a way, I’m surprised I went along. A part of me wanted to just tell Arthur to go ahead and go out on his own – I’m not sure that he would have, but it seems possible.
In the end, some weird welling-up of a vague, Confucian-like sense of obligation made me agree to go. The Koreans call it 효 [hyo: 孝], which is translated as “filial piety.” I don’t know where I came by it – I suppose through some kind of cultural osmosis, having lived there all those years.
We had a serious talk about trying to communicate better, first, before going out – but the talk itself was fraught with the kind of issues that have been bothering me. He denies not paying attention, if that makes any sense. He doesn’t recall ever having used sarcasm inappropriately or dismissing my concerns. To conclude: “Anyway. Whatever.”
But we went out. It went better than last time, at least. He was making a sincere effort, within the constraints of his personality. I had told him quite explicitly, I’m not angry that he’s not showing gratitude – he does, in fact, show gratitude and generosity with me regularly. But that isn’t the same as giving a damn about what I have to say, or bothering to pay attention to find out what I’m trying to communicate.
Well, we went over to San Ignacio and ran into Art’s friend and sometime fishing companion, Jeff (in another boat, trolling the other way). We had a shouted conversation with him, boat to boat. And after a while, roughly at the southeast corner of San Ignacio Island, we caught exactly one (1) fish. So we’re not skunked for the season.
There’s some terrible irony – not to say outright tragedy – that “going fishing” is the single most stressful, dreaded aspect of my life here in Alaska. For most people, including Arthur, going fishing is fun, if not the actual goal of life. I’ve always been a bit neutral with respect to the practice of going fishing – it’s never been a strong pleasure for me. But there was a time when I did enjoy going out in the boat. I enjoy boating around, I enjoy the scenery, I enjoy being out “in the world.” But at this point, the emotional and interactive aspects of the venture, functioning in my role as Arthur’s wheelman and protege, overwhelm any pleasure I could take from it.
Actually, I sometimes very much wonder what exactly Arthur finds so fulfilling about going fishing. He doesn’t really seem, to the outside observer, to be enjoying himself. His mood tends to vacillate between long stretches of transparent boredom and brief explosions of frustration and anger when things aren’t going his way – which seems like so much of the time, these days.
I believe Arthur doesn’t actually enjoy the act of fishing, but rather, he yearns for some Platonic “state of having caught fish.” Which is to say, he enjoys it only after the fact, and only if the venture has been successful. And he’s not generous with his definition of success – today, for example, was not in any way successful.
I once said that my feeling toward fishing is similar to my feeling toward gambling: it seems like putting one’s mood in hands of random fate, which is not quite the way to achieve any kind of consistent happiness. On Arthur’s approach, that is certainly true.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 1
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 0
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 10
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1
Caveat: a chord
I saw this comic. I couldn’t resist.
Caveat: real wealth
A quote for contemplation:
“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes” – John Waters
What I’m listening to right now.
TV On The Radio, “Careful You.”
Caveat: GDC Surgery
I performed surgery on my RV today. I removed a failing organ from it – namely, the roll-up canopy that comes out over the passenger side.
It was failing because one aluminum support strut had broken, and one of the extending arms was weirdly bent, too. It seemed unrepairable, at least given the tools and talents I would be able to bring to bear to it, so I decided to just remove it.
It was very difficult to remove. Several of the screws that I needed to remove were stripped out, and wouldn’t come out. I drilled them out of the aluminum. Anyway, it finally all came apart.
It was an actual hot day today – hot by Rockpit standards, anyway: almost 80° F. So I laid out my giant white tarp to dry. I thus increased the planet’s albedo by an infinitesimal amount, doing my part to fight global warming.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+19)
Still no luck catching fish.
We left at just before 7 AM. The morning was extremely foggy. We motored out of the inlet at half-speed, because visibility was probably no more than about 200 yards. We gamely attempted to start trolling along the west side of Cemetery Island, just north of the north entrance to Port Saint Nicholas Inlet. I don’t know why Arthur has fixated on that location, these days. There have been a lot of commercial boats outside the entrance, but I am wondering if they are there simply because they’re being restricted there by the authorities. Certainly despite the number of boats we’ve seen there, I’ve not once, so far, seen much activity on the rear decks hauling in lines or fish.
We trolled past the north entrance, southward along the Coronados Islands, and past the south entrance, and down into Doyle Bay, where the Kelp Farm is. The sun finally started coming out, there. When the fog lifted at the entrance to Doyle Bay, Sunnahae Mountain was revealed.
We kept trolling all the way to Caldera bay, to the southwest. We caught some tiny sea bass. Nothing else.
Giving up, we fished for halibut under bright sun and in calm waters, at Caldera. We pulled up some bottom fish, but they too were small, and we sent them back.
We headed to the fuel dock, refueled the boat, and were home at around 12:30 pm. It was our longest outing so far, but no more fruitful, for all that.
Meanwhile, I have become increasingly unhappy and uncomfortable in the boat with Arthur. He is very, very difficult to communicate with: both at the level of “hearing” and at the level of “listening.”
At the level of “hearing” – well, we all know he has some hearing loss. I basically always must repeat myself several times, with any kind of statement longer than a simple “Yes,” “No,” or “Okay.” This in itself is exhausting and frustrating.
But on top of this, he insists on sticking his audiobooks (playing loudly on earbuds connected to his iPod) in his ears at any idle moment. So any kind of talk where I initiate has to be started with getting his attention, conveying that it’s important, and then waiting for him to fiddle with the “pause” on his iPod (a fairly drawn out procedure, sometimes). So I end up deciding very little is really that important to say. And I just sit in silence, and have a little mantra, now, “Only speak when spoken to….”
But even when he asks me a direct question, half the time he still fails to turn off his iPod, which means he can’t hear my answer, and it requires multiple repetitions, followed by him finally realizing he could maybe turn off the iPod, and my repeating it yet again.
This is all just about the “hearing” part.
But he’s a poor “listener” too. He often responds to my efforts at communication with sarcasm, strange non-sequitur humor, or even a condescending tone of “Of course,” followed by a repetition of what I’d just said as if it was his own idea.
Add to this the fact that with our poor results, he gets grumpy and frustrated and well… we all know how that can go.
I know there are cognitive issues here. I try to be patient. But I’m imperfect, and it’s getting more and more difficult.
I really don’t want to go out fishing with him anymore. It’s not fun. It’s stressful and actually lonely, punctuated with moments of stressful and comically incommunicative shouting. It’s as if I’m doing it alone, for all there’s any kind of companionship or friendship or camaraderie.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 0
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 0
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 8
- Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1