This tree happens to be located at the northwest surveyed corner of lot 73.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Category: My Photos
Caveat: Tree #1023
This tree (a bit hard to see at the bottom) had its roots soaked in seawater, due to a very high high tide.
This is looking down from the deck of the treehouse.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Tree #1022
This tree hung over water.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #1021
This tree witnessed a bit of rainbow.
Having been here for 3 years now, I can say with some confidence that Fall on Prince of Wales Island is “Rainbow Season.”
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1020
This tree is in a treehouse. It’s my young coast redwood tree (sequoia sempervirens) planted in a bucket.
Meanwhile, here is my garden’s entire seasonal production of potatoes, with a few late carrots included.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1019
This tree was near a deer in the middle of the road (lower center).
[daily log: walking, 2.5km; stapling and climbing, 3hr]
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: Tree #1017
This tree oversaw the attachment of the first of the south-side roof panels on the treehouse. I’ve now completed 6 out of 10 roof panels.
Here is a nice view of treehouse from down on the beach – I’m standing right at the high-tide line, looking up. I’ve put plastic over the north-side windows to help actually rain-proof the interior, somewhat.
[daily log: walking, 3km; banging and lifting, 5hr]
Caveat: Tree #1016
This tree was still mostly in the dark.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1015
This tree was beside water that showed a reflection of the boatsat boat.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Tree #1014
This tree failed to stand out from the crowd.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr = inventorying, 1244 matting and framing supply items]
Caveat: Tree #1013
This tree (in the foreground) is all scraggly.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1012
This tree saw me working hard, very high up, attaching more roof panels to enclose it. Now it and its younger sibling is growing up through holes in the floor and ceiling of the treehouse.
Here is an expanse of roof: I’ve now attached 4.5 out 10 panels. I count as half a panel the one I had to cut for the tree – I’ll get the upslope portion of that panel later.
Here is a not-very-good view up the north eaves, now complete.
[daily log: walking, 2km; lifting and attaching things, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1011
This tree was present as I attached my first roof panel (1st of 10) to my treehouse.
I got a view of the roof panel from above – yes, I was very high up, standing on my temporary scaffolding.
Here’s another view of the roof panel.
A lot of my work in the treehouse feels like a kind of live-action tetris game – I spend a lot of time rearranging building materials in limited space as I try to work around it, and with the rafters and cross-braces in place, it’s hard to get large pieces of things moved – I have to solve a puzzle each time I want to move a large piece around, as the space is littered with obstacles.
[daily log: walking, 2km; lifting and attaching, 5hr]
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: Tree #1010
This tree is towering.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #1009
This tree has more to show, higher up, out of the picture’s frame.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: A jellyfishpocalypse
I don’t quite get what these jellyfish are up to. They are all dying on our rocky beach.
Caveat: Tree #1008
This tree collected tiny droplets of frozen water, one recent morning.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #1007
This tree is one I saw in Korea – I’m really not sure where or when.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1006
This tree saw a strong southeast wind pushing heavy gray clouds through the sky.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #1005
This tree was nearby when Fred and Pat parked their boat at our dock again. A storm is scheduled, but more crucially, they will out of town for a few weeks, and given the gale-force storms that seem to be popping through regularly this fall, they decided to avail themselves of our sheltered moorage while they were gone off to Arizona.
Meanwhile, I made an apple-huckleberry-raspberry cobbler. I hope it’s delicious.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; cobblering, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #1004
This tree was there when I completed my rafters for my treehouse.
Here is a view from down below.
Next for the treehouse, I want to put in small stretches of exterior wall covering above the windows, before adding the roofing material.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
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: Tree #1003
This tree was near some water.
I worked on the treehouse a lot today. But it was small things, and in the end the only visible change was the addition of a 4th rafter, and a sort of temporary scaffolding to enable me to more easily reach the top of the south wall. It was a hard day with a lot of reversals and frustrations and acrophobic delights.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; banging and lifting, 6hr]
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: Tree #1001
This tree was there (with its peers), while I gazed at the luminous clouds and pumped gas.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #1000
This tree is from my past. I took this picture at Jeongbalsan Park near my apartment, walking home from the cancer center, in September 2013.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #999
This tree resolutely refuses to be anthropomorphized.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Tree #998
This tree saw me finally finish my wall sections (10 of 10!) on my treehouse over the last two days.
Here is an inside view of the south wall.
I realized I need to buy more brackets before I can proceed to more work on the rafters.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #997
This tree was there when an eagle (on the dock arch) supervised a rainbow.
[daily log: walking, 2km; sawing and assembling, 3hr]
Caveat: Tree #996
This tree took a short break from the rain to witness a colorful sunrise.
[daily log: walking, 2km; banging and lifting, 4hr]