I worked on my firewood collection for a while in the morning.
I saw some lettuces growing nicely in my greenhouse.
I created a really messed-up topo map on my server. Something went wrong with the algorithm. I later learned it had to do with not deleting some temporary files left over from a previous run of the same program.
Another day in my moss-covered, misanthrope’s paradise.
Category: Life in Alaska
Caveat: Cursing his name (what’s his name?)
Arthur was really mad at my brother Andrew earlier today. But he couldn’t remember his name. It was funny, because the target of his anger floated from “person to person”: “damn Aaron” … “what was Jeffrey thinking!” …
The reason he was angry was because we were putting the boat railings back in the water after their winter hiatus.
Last year when he was here, my brother Andrew had ambitiously taken on the task of trying to improve the safety of how the boat trolley is mounted on its cables. Andrew had added these extra U-bolts and changed the configuration of how the cable attaches to the trolley. Arthur hadn’t been opposed in principle to this improved safety, but we were now finding that we’d increased safety at the expense of reducing the flexibility of the system, such that it had become essentially impossible to get enough slack in the cable to re-attach it to the rail-brace down at the bottom in the water
So I spent more than an hour removing one of the supplemental U-bolts at the base of the trolley so that we could increase the slack in the cable. Once there was some slack, we were able to re-attach the cable, and we could tighten things back up.
But now the U-bolt is gone. Andrew would not approve. Arthur thought it had been overkill anyway. We know what Arthur thinks of safety: “Better to be lucky than smart!” is his operating motto.
Meanwhile, a second radish appeared in my garden. The greenhouse was actually hot today, for the first time, I think: a combination of a sunny day and warming temperatures. Here is the second radish, on the right, with the first radish, on left and more in the foreground and out-of-focus.
And the patch of lettuce is doing well.
Caveat: Tree #464
This tree has seen its optimism challenged.
[daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing, 1hr]
Caveat: Lettuce #1
And then there was an itty bitty lettuce leaf.
A joke seen on the internet:
“My snail was losing in races, so I tried taking his shell off. But it just made him more sluggish.”
Caveat: Radish #1
I went out to my greenhouse this morning, just after dawn. It was snowing outside. But inside the greenhouse, I think I detected a radish rising.
Caveat: A day like others
The morning dawned with a bit of fresh snow having fallen, and cold and clear. Winter’s not done yet.
I used some rocks to build a “planter” outside the door of my greenhouse. My thinking is that I will grow only local things in this “planter” but in a controlled way. I’ll stick in an alder sapling or some moss on a piece of wood, or see what emerges. Not for food or anything like that, but just out of curiosity. A kind of mini zen garden.
Caveat: Poem #1343 “Unfinished business”
ㅁ The winter had unfinished business here. It tossed out falling flakes of snow with wind.
– a couplet in blank verse (iambic pentameter)
Caveat: Oh well, and someone’s mobile home
Yesterday, I decided to solve something that had been bothering me.
The new well, drilled last year, seems to have developed an artesian character. It’s not clear whether this is a new permanent feature or just a temporary or seasonal development. It is constantly pushing out water, overflowing its sleeve, at about a gallon a minute. That’s substantial flow. It’s not necessarily undesirable – if it’s a permanent feature, it’s another “backup” aspect of having a well, in that we will not run out of water even in the event of long dry season combined with a lack of electricity to pump water.
But it does create a problem: the overflowing water flows down the outside of the well-sleeve, and was actually creating some erosion in the gravel of the driveway pad where the well was placed. So I wanted to get the overflow routed to the hillside, away from the top of the driveway pad. My idea was to tap the side of the well-head and attach a simple hose faucet, to which a hose could be attached to re-route the overflowing water.
This is what I did, with Arthur’s “technical assistance” – he actually does know more about which drill bits were appropriate, and such. So we got it done.
Earlier today, we drove into town for our Thursday shopping. I saw this house on a tracked vehicle. I thought to myself, “that looks like something my brother Andrew would drive.” I don’t know if that’s an accurate thought, but it was amusing.
Caveat: seeds
I put some seeds in one of my planters.
Later in the day Arthur asked what I was doing. I told him, “Checking my seeds. Nothing yet.”
“Nothing?” he asked.
“Right. I think to grow a garden, I need to be more patient.”
Arthur found this amusing.
Caveat: dirtbound
I spent part of the day watching Arthur climb a ladder. Again. The guy loves ladders. I guess it is as close as he can get, these days, to his time as a pilot. I think he has the opposite of acrophobia (fear of heights) – let’s call it acrophilia. I have to accept with equanimity that he can’t really be controlled – I have no power of persuasion with respect to this issue, as far as I can figure out. So what can I say or do? He knows how I feel about it, but seems determined that this will be his means of exit from the world. Or maybe not. He’s got luck on his side, anyway – this is in fact his “reason” why it’s not dangerous. So that was that.
But another part of the day, I spent making dirt. I want to plant things in my greenhouse. There isn’t much quality dirt just lying around. Buying planting soil is super expensive. So… I have to make some dirt. Find some dark loamy stuff from an excavator-turned-up stump. Add some sand, some ash from the fireplace, some sawdust. Maybe this will be adequate planting soil. I don’t know. I guess I will find out.
Caveat: bye Andrew
My brother left today at dawn. Here he is strolling out to the aircraft at Klawock airport, chatting with one of the crew. Note the slush on the apron – it was snowing pretty continuously as we drove to the airport.
Caveat: Housier but not yet greener
The greenhouse has taken shape. There’s not much left to be done now on the structure. This picture is before we attached the door and roof-hatch (vent).
I have to start working on how and what I will plant in it. Andrew, Arthur and I went to Mike and Penny’s down the road for an early dinner, and Penny gave me a seed catalog and discussed some about her successes and failures with Southeast Alaska gardening.
I haven’t gardened much in my life, but I’m going to try this summer.
Caveat: Surprisingly Square
We finished the “foundation” for the greenhouse, this morning, despite chill, pouring rain and sleet. It’s really just a frame of cedar 4x4s laid at ground level on some concrete piers, but it should provide a level anchor for the greenhouse.
Once we’d got it in place, Andrew declared it “surprisingly square.” We then started to put up the pre-fab aluminum frame before giving up due to cold and wet.
Caveat: greenhouse rising
My brother Andrew is visiting. I have a certain project I’ve decided to ask his assistance with – he has a much wider Alaska-appropriate skillset than I do, and is able to build things.
I bought a kit greenhouse a while back, because I want to have a greenhouse, here. The main building issue with setting it up is that it needs a kind of “foundation” to rest on – not a full structural foundation, but at least something to anchor it to the ground. That’s what Andrew and I are working on.
Caveat: The storm like people
The Storm Like people emerging from a steambath, bending over, steaming from their heads and shoulders, the ring of the mountains from the Chilkat Range to the Juneau ice field as if in steambath towels of snow flurries; at their feet are foaming white caps of sea like water thrown on rocks steaming from the heat. - Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit poet, 1927-2017)
Caveat: worth doing four times
I installed and uninstalled the new water pump (see yesterday’s blog entry) four times today, troubleshooting various leaks. On the forth install, it seems to be relatively leak-free, so Arthur and I decided to call it functional.
I enjoyed feeling competent to finally get it working.
But it was quite difficult and tiring, too. Out there in 32° weather banging on pipes:
1. Carry pump up to cistern shed.
2. Place pump on shelf. Attach hose, tighten clamps, repeat x 3 hoses. Bolt down pump. Test pump. Identify leaks.
3. Unbolt pump. Loosen clamps, remove hose, repeat x 3 hoses. Carry pump back down to workshop. Clean out threads, mess with fittings, reline all threads with teflon tape.
4. Go to step one.
Each loop takes about 2 hours.
Caveat: Unpumped
Early this morning, it seems, our water pump failed. This is the water pump that supplies the house with water pressure from the cistern, which catches rainwater from the hillside stream.
It’s not clear how or why it failed. It simply seems to have stopped being able to turn – the electric motor is only able to produce a kind of whining sounds as it attempts to spin its internal moving parts. Perhaps the motor itself is “frozen up” (i.e. not from cold – the temperatures are above freezing at the moment – but unable to move), perhaps there was some mechanical problem in the pump mechanism.
Regardless, this is a big issue.
Not as big as it could be, though. Firstly, Arthur has had, on hand, a “spare” pump.
So we spent the day first trying to diagnose the old pump’s problems, and subsequently trying to switch in the new pump. Both tasks proved frustrating.
The problem with the old pump is not clear. We were unable to even fully disassemble it. The pump housing is “stuck” to the motor, in some way we can’t figure out.
The new pump has its input and output holes positioned differently than on the old pump, which has the consequence that the pipe connections leading to it in the cistern shed need to be slightly rearranged. We ended up driving to town to the hardware store and getting some pieces, but even then, we weren’t really well-prepared for what we might need, and so we ended up improvising a bit to get all the pipes connected to the new pump. And then, the new pump was leaking. A lot. And it was getting dark.
Personally, taking the side of optimism, I think the problem is that we didn’t hook up our improvised pipe connections tightly enough, and we need take the new pump out, re-improvise, and reattach things more securely.
Arthur, for his part, taking the side of pessimism (of course), believes the pump housing on the new pump is cracked.
I’m going to try tackling my solution this morning. If that fails, and Arthur’s view prevails, we’re going to need a new pump. Updates will be forthcoming.
Here is the old pump, already removed from the cistern shed and waiting on the workbench in the shop for us to take on the challenge of disassembling it – which we have so far failed at.
Here is the new pump, already in place but not yet fully connected, while we sought out the pieces needed to get the pipes connected to it.
Meanwhile, we have improvised an alternate way to get water into the house. As was discussed on this blog last summer, we had a well put in (ostensibly for the western lot, #73, though there is some debate as to which side of the property line it ended up on). The well is not hooked up to Arthur’s house, on lot #74. But it’s there, and works, with a jury-rigged electrical supply going to the well controller hut (what we call the “doghouse” because of its size). So I ran a garden hose from the faucet I put in the western driveway across to a faucet in Arthur’s driveway. The well pressure comes through the hose, with both faucets open, and provides water pressure and well water to Arthur’s house. This temporary arrangement will work as long as the temperatures remain above freezing – which they currently have been.
Here is the hose off the well faucet. The “doghouse” is on the left, the western driveway’s faucet (which I installed last summer) is on the right.
Here is the hose connected to the faucet in Arthur’s driveway. I had to make a customized “female-female” length of hose to connect the hose to both faucets.
Caveat: v-truck
Our nearest neighbors, Mike and Penny, are down the road about a half a mile.
Penny has a hobby of making three-dimensional pop-up greeting cards. She uses colored cardstock paper and some kind of computer-controlled cutting device. The last time we visited there, she was showing off her hobby. She’d said, “I’ll send you guys one, sometime.”
She sent us a Valentine’s Card. It is a red “Valentine’s truck.” Only in Alaska.
Caveat: Tree #396
The sun appeared.
This was unprecedented, so I decided to take a walk down the road. Arthur came along.
This tree has appeared before, here. But now it’s been winterized.
Walking along the road, we ran into our neighbor Mike, out walking the dog. He’s a little bit hard to see: center of the road, a bit behind the dog.
Caveat: Tree #389
This tree stands in the rain. It’s hard to see the rain, though.
Arthur’s friend and fishing companion, Wayne, a frequent guest here at Rockpit Resort, was apparently inspired by my frequent tree pictures on this here blog to share with me a picture he took during a visit to Prince of Wales Island – a bear on a tree. I like this picture.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Smooth as ice…
I had another distressing but ultimately non-catastrophic vehicular experience this morning, interacting with an effort to go into town.
After about 2 weeks of snow, ice, and well below freezing temperatures, the last few days have seen… rain. But it’s not warm enough to really melt the snow and ice fully; rather, it seems to just lubricate it. The road into town is just a continuous sheet of ice.
I was intending to go into town this morning. I had the chains on the car, yet nevertheless the vehicle’s grip on the icy road was tenuous at best. Creeping at 5mph, in 4 wheel drive, with chains on the rear tires, I still slid down the small hill at the 7.5 mile bridge, ending up sideways in the road at the bottom. Taking that as a frightening preview of the the much, much worse and steeper 6 mile hill, I decided that caution was the better part of valor, and accepted that my vehicle was already mostly turned around, and decided to head back home. Total travel distance: 2 miles. Total travel time: 40 minutes.
I know that Arthur would have insisted on soldiering forward. I’m glad he wasn’t along. This is not a new, stroke-related personality trait – it’s how he’s always been: he relishes risk. So I have feelings of failure, guilt, or inadequacy surrounding my more cautious processes. Anyway, maybe with more rain, the ice will finally give way to the underlying gravel, and the road will be easier to drive.
Caveat: Unchained
It turns out that my adventure last Friday with the Blueberry in the driveway involved one of the snow chains (on the tires) actually breaking. So today, having decided to re-attempt my journey to town, I ended up having to do an emergency repair to the tire chains. I used a hammer and the bench vice in the shop.
The tire chains seem to be of low quality, frankly. I like the old-fashioned kind that have actual chain links. Our neighbor-down-the-road Joe came by as I was working on this, and assured me I was smart to be intending to use chains to get into town. He had chains on his much heavier-duty truck, and he’s an experienced truck driver. Indeed, as I later headed into town, the road at the 6 mile hill was like an ice rink but tilted 10°. It felt quite treacherous.
I had very little confidence in my repair job. I decided to ask around and see if anyone was selling chains in town – with the recent weather, they’d be making a killing. I got lucky – it turned out the single gas station / auto shop in town, Schaub-Ellison, in fact was not only selling chains but had the Tahoe’s wheel size in stock. I shelled out 150 bucks and got a new set of chains. Hopefully they will be of better quality.
Caveat: Kerosene
One of my periodic tasks here is to keep the kerosene heater in the boathouse (the lowest level of the house – it’s integrated to the “shop” which is the house’s basement) filled so that it can keep the boathouse’s interior temperature above freezing. This is important because the house’s water supply (and the main filters for it) run through the boathouse, given it’s the oldest part of the house. It is also uninsulated and has metal siding, meaning it loses heat rapidly when unheated and is likely quite inefficient to keep warm.
The kerosene heater has a 1 or 2 gallon tank, that needs to be removed and filled once a day when it’s not too cold. But as it gets colder (it’s 15° F / -10° C as I write this) this needs to be refilled more frequently. There is a 5 gallon plastic container for the kerosene, stored near the heater in the shop, which is in turn filled from the large outdoor storage tank. So I sometimes go to the storage tank and get a refill.
The kerosene heater is efficient, but it strikes me as impractical in this setting because although it burns kerosene, it has an electrical control that renders it useless if there is no power. In an extended power outage, it could not be used to heat the boathouse.
If I were to propose any single major project to Arthur to improve his house, it would be to figure out how to get the boathouse insulated. The spray-on insulation he used on the similar “kitchen shed” works well, but it was a nightmare to apply originally and for many years it was outgassing hazardous chemicals. The latter is not something Arthur ever cared about, but I’d rather not repeat that. I reckon the best insulation strategy for the boathouse would be some kind if inner frame (of wood or plastic) built within the boathouse walls, which could hold foam insulation or fiberglass and have some kind of outside layer – plywood or sheetrock, etc.
Caveat: adventures not even leaving the driveway
I had a quite difficult and disappointing day. No major disaster. But a lot of work, and farther behind than when the day started.
As background – we have received a great deal of snow over the past week.
I had decided to go to town this morning. Somehow since coming back up here after Thanksgiving, I moved “go to town day” from Thursday to Friday. The reason Arthur goes on Thursday is because there is a senior discount at the grocery on Thursdays. The store is often a bit crowded. Since I’m not eligible for the discount, I don’t feel constrained to Thursday. Thus Friday became the day.
I was out the door early, by 8 AM. But that’s because a lot of snow has fallen since I last drove to town. At least a foot, perhaps more.
I spent time shoveling the stairs to the driveway and parts of the driveway.
I felt smart, because I decided to just go ahead and put the chains on. That’s a big hassle, but the road hadn’t been well plowed. I shoveled some of the way in front of the car. But I figured with the chains and a running start I could make it up the rest of the driveway through the snow to the road.
That might have worked, except apparently I did a lousy job putting on the chains – they both got off the tires and next thing I know I was going sideways.
Arthur has a pile of scrap sheet metal (really leftover steel siding from his quonset-style sheds he built) piled alongside the east side of the driveway. And the car ended up more or less on top of that. I was good and stuck.
I had to jack up the car to take off the chains – they were trapped under the tires.
I had to dig out and move all the sheet metal from under the car, as well as some plastic culvert – which fortunately wasn’t damaged.
And I was working on how to get the chains back on when an angel driving a road grader (to plow the road) came by. Pat, who lives at around 10.5 mile, in every way an archetypal sweet grandma, happens to drive a road grader, and does so of her own sweet goodwill to support the south-of-the-inlet community.
Pat had some chains on the grader, which we attached to the front of the Blueberry to extract it from its dilemma. It took a few tries to get the right angle to pull it onto the road rather than throw it down Dean’s driveway – the snow was very slippery and the driveway is steeper than it looks.
Once the Blueberry was on the road – now just graded (plowed) – Pat went on her way and I made the decision to not try to clear the driveway to Art’s place – it was steep with mud and snow now pushed up in banks by the spinning wheels. It was a mess. Instead, I went over to the west lot (73) – the new driveway Richard made last spring – and shoveled out a nice, flat, road-level parking space for the Blueberry. And there she will stay, until I get super ambitious and shovel out the existing driveway, or until some of the snow melts. But at the moment, it’s snowing more.
It was almost noon by the time I got the Blueberry parked in its new spot. I decided not to go into town. Pat was grading the road, but it was still snowing. I expected the road to be treacherous at points into town. And I’m not in dire straights.
An adventure. But not good for my sense of self-confidence or self-sufficiency.
Some pictures.
Stuck against the pile of sheet metal.
Chains trapped under the tire.
Retrieving the chains using the jack.
Angel with a road grader.
The aftermath.
A new parking spot excavated on the west lot.
Caveat: Sitting Among the Snowdrifts
I need to talk about procrastination.
It’s easy to do, in this hermetic space on the edge of civilization, encased in fresh-fallen snow and betrayed by the bureaucracies that lurk just over the horizon.
I had been highly motivated in the fall to become a full-time student in the University of Alaska’s online teacher certification program. That fell apart, as I’ve noted before, due to the stringent, two-year basis of the state’s concept of “residency.” I would be subject to exhorbitant out-of-state tuition, and decided to forgo the privilege. Hopefully I can try again next year.
Meanwhile, I had already registered for a set of tests-for-credit to fulfill some outstanding prerequisites. Two parts of US History, and Intro to Psychology. I had scheduled the tests for the 13th of January, because given the online classes would have been starting the week before, it seemed the best way to maximize study time and still not end up overwhelmed once classes started.
So I told myself, after I decided to delay starting the online program for a year, that I would just take the scheduled tests anyway. It’d keep me busy during this hiatus while Art was still down south.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work. When the pressure is off, I tend to procrastinate. And the pressure was definitely off. There was no way to trick my mind into thinking these tests were important, when their “due date” was now more than a year off.
Last night I took a set of practice tests. Their results clearly show that my studying, such as it has been, hasn’t really been effective. Of course, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I might, indeed, be able to pass the tests. But not in the “summa cum laude” way that is my accustomed academic mode.
Further, there is no penalty in delaying the tests. I believe when I registered the only deadline is something like 8 months from registration. I have until summer to get them done without extra cost.
I have therefore elected to delay them. I specified a March date, only because I had to specify something. The test date is easily moved – the testing center in Ketchikan has several slots every week.
But I feel guilty.
I also had made a firm commitment to do something about a more generic job search once returning to the island. I made up new resumes, dropped feelers among my acquaintances, but have hardly been assiduous in follow up. It’s too easy to settle into a routine, here.
I put in some time outside: firewood, shoveling snow, maintaining the RV, checking that our water system is handling the cold, etc.
I put in time on my computer: maintaining my blog and server and websites, admin stuff on the geofiction website, trying to solve certain puzzles related to making my websites “cleaner” and more professional and better-coded.
What else? Study time happens, but not as it should (see above). I read some in various books-in-progress. I have developed a new hobby of reading a few well-written “web-comics.” This is an emergent genre – essentially graphic (i.e. pictorial) novels published online. They were extraordinarily popular among my students during my last years in Korea, and I made several efforts to get into some of the Korean ones at that time, in hopes it would inspire me to improve my Korean. I suppose it did, a bit, but the slog of reading them with dictionary in hand was hard to keep up. One English-language one that I’ve been enjoying is called Seed. It is science-fiction, essentially: a psychologically interesting set of characters dealing with a rogue Artificial Intelligence.
I admit that although I love the snow – it’s gorgeous and calming and I have no concerns about the chance of isolation or the work involved in shoveling out the stairs whatever, it does rather de-motivate me vis-a-vis any project to get out to town, whether job search or anything else. Heavy snow is about staying home and looking out the windows, not about going to town on treacherous roads in hopes of getting a dead-end job out of a sense of obligation to be “productive.”
I feel guilty about abusing my family’s generosity and Arthur’s “hospitality” (despite the notion, too, that I’m presumeably serving a genuinely useful care-taker role with him, which his disavowals of disability make difficult to maintain). I think if I was truly self-sufficient, I’d not feel guilty for being a currently “unproductive” member of society. I feel sufficiently creative in my various pursuits – my poetry, my offline writing efforts, my programming work on my websites – such that I am contributing to the world, just not for remuneration at the moment.
And that’s the news from this side of Port Saint Nicholas, here in Rockpit, Alaska.
Caveat: Changeable Weather
It can be interesting seeing the shifts in weather. These shifts seem more noticeable when it gets colder. I think it has to do with a change from the monotonic and endless fronts of Pacific rain to the colder continental airmasses that sometimes make it out this far.
Yesterday, I happened to capture this with a series of pictures from the deck looking north toward the mountain across the water.
8 AM.
10 AM.
NOON.
Caveat: One king
Wayne, Arthur, and I went out fishing today. It was the longest fishing excursion I’ve been on with Arthur – we left early and got back well after 3 pm. Arthur normally does a half-day excursion, so this was a long day. We could tell he was exhausted.
Arthur managed to catch one king salmon. We were at Ulitka Bay, on the northwest tip of Noyes Island.
There were a lot of boats there: you can see them in this picture.
Here is the fish.
Here is the view from where the fish was caught.
We also got two other smaller fish, sea bass I think. When we got back, we prepared to cut them up. Arthur was grumpy despite having caught a fish, I think because he was tired.
Later, we cooked some of the salmon and ate it.
The rest of the fish was vacuum-packed and put in the freezer.
Caveat: Too Much Noyes
Arthur and I went out seeking fish, unrequitedly.
We went out to the open ocean south of Noyes Island. Here is a picture from the boat, looking toward the beach.
The ocean was calm.
Arthur believes the lack of catching is due to the drought.