This tree on the left foregrounds a view of Gobong, a prominent hill in Ilsan, my former Korean home. You can see the distinctive radio tower on the mountain. Nestled at the foot of the radio tower is the Yeochan Temple, which I often visited. I took this picture in Jeongbalsan Park a few blocks from my apartment in October, 2015.
Category: My Photos
Caveat: Tree #483
This here tree got photo-bombed by a damp spring flower.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #482
Say hi to the nice tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #481
This is one of those tree pictures that might be more about the sky.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #480
This is a redwood tree. In fact, it is what is called metasequoia, or “dawn redwood,” a strange variety of redwood that loses its needles in winter. They are planted all over Seoul, though not native there.
I took this picture in January, 2009, in Goyang, Korea, a few blocks from my apartment.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #479
This tree resists the wind.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Tree #478
Why did the tree cross the road?
It didn’t. Quit making stuff up.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #477
This alder tree is beginning to send out some early leaves.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #476
The tree yearns to be free.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Tree #475
The tree is not alone.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #474
This tree is from my past. I took this picture at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, in November, 2009.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #473
This is a tiny pine tree. These types of trees are quite common in the muskeg, between 7 mile and 8 mile along the road out here. But on these two lots here at 8.6 mile, I have only ever found one of them, lurking gloomily up the hill a hundred feet or so among many alders and sitka spruce.
I uprooted this baby from along the road at 7.5 mile and planted it in front of my greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing and woodsplitting, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #472
This tree looms over me.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #471
This tree is from my past. I took this picture in April, 2015. I’m standing on the foot bridge that goes over Ilsan-no (Ilsan Road) in Ilsan, right in front of my place of employment, the Karma Language Academy (which is the orange and white sign on the building on the left). Spring in Korea was always kind of smoggy and horrible, but the blooming trees were sometimes beautiful.
[daily log: walking, 1km; chainsawing & woodsplitting, 1.5hr]
Caveat: on the ranch
I tend to put a lot of salad dressing on my salads.
That wasn’t always the case. But ever since my mouth surgery, I like my foods to have a more “squishy” character – easier to chew with my “handicapped” tongue (shortened, limited in range-of-motion, and without a sense of touch, due to the cancer surgery). So I pour on the salad dressing and then the salads don’t create the problems I can sometimes have, especially with pieces of lettuce adhering to the roof of my mouth where my tongue can’t find them.
Arthur, however, always looks on disapprovingly as I slather on my creamy dressings – blue cheese or ranch being my preferred ones. I suspect he just feels aware of how much money is spent on bottles of dressing, and it seems exorbitant to him. I’m really not sure why he has a right to disapprove – given his chocolate and ice cream habits. Or maybe it’s just not appealing to him, in that he would not enjoy a salad so adorned. But… anyway.
I decided to try to save some money and make my own ranch dressing. It’s not that hard – some milk, sour cream, mayo, some spices. I added some finely chopped onion.
My homemade ranch dressing was better than I had expected – better than store bought.
Meanwhile, in the morning, I did some more maintenance on our back-up heating system. So to speak. I had bought a new, bigger maul for pounding the wedge into the log-rounds to split them. The result was pleasing.
Caveat: Tree #470
Sometimes you must choose your own tree, from among many that present themselves, each with their respective merits.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: logs and lettuces and loopy isolines
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.
Caveat: Tree #468
The tree is trying to hide among other trees.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #467
The four hundred and sixty-seventh tree is one among many.
In other news, rumor has it there are now not zero, but rather two cases of covid-19 here on our isolated island.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #466
I have sometimes taken the time to make precarious piles of rocks here and there. So this tree is foregrounded by some piled rocks.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
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 #465
This tree knows nothing but optimism.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Purplish Propensities
As seems to arise on a regular basis, I developed a craving for borshch. I happened to see some beets among the vegetables at the store on Thursday, so I took a piece of beef that Dean and Pam had brought to us last summer out of the freezer and made some borshch this morning in the slow cooker.
Meanwhile I keep trying to fix the old broken links in this here blog. But I don’t have a vast amount of patience for that project, sometimes.
Caveat: Tree #464
This tree has seen its optimism challenged.
[daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #463
Sometimes I miss Korea a lot.
Here is a guest tree (or gathering of trees, with some attendant bicycles). I took this picture in December, 2017. I know exactly where it is – it’s behind the Gangseon Elementary School. I’m looking toward the southeast, so that’s the morning sun on the brick wall of the school. I was probably walking to work.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #462
This tree is just getting started.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #461
This tree looks like other trees, but it’s not.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km; tromping, 500m]
Caveat: Tree #459
Any tree can be much improved by the addition of a squawking raven.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Tree #458
A tree can be photographed from below.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
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: Tree #457
I was being impatient with my garden. Nothing has sprouted – but it’s been less than a week, so of course nothing has sprouted. But I wanted to see something growing in my greenhouse. So I uprooted two 3-inch tall saplings from outside and planted them in a corner of one of my planters. The tree on the left is a cedar, the one on the right is a western hemlock. These are extremely common trees around here, and grow like weeds in the gravel by the road. Now something green is growing in my greenhouse!
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #456
These trees (which one do you like?) are just outside the southwest entrance to the Jeongbalsan subway station in Ilsan (Goyang), South Korea. That was my “home” subway station for the majority of the time I lived in Korea, few blocks from the Urimbobo apartment building where both my first and last apartment in Korea was located (there were other apartments in between, however). I took this picture in November, 2007.
The banner on the footbridge, interestingly, is advertising a local performance of the Nutcracker Suite (호두까기 인형) at the Ilsan Cultural Center which is on the right behind the bridge.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
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.
