This tree was wet.
Category: My Photos
Caveat: Tree #1798 “Continuing precipitation”
This tree experienced continuing precipitation, while a quite high tide brought the sea closer.
Art had a doctor’s appointment today. Just follow-up and getting all the various specialists in sync with the local doctor, mostly – nothing new or revelatory, though he got a new CT scan of his head, to confirm no new major changes in his brain.
Caveat: Tree #1797 “광주 나무”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture near Gwangju City, South Korea, in April, 2010. I was about to start my new job in rural Hongnong (Yeonggwang-eup).
Caveat: Tree #1796 “Some snow”
This tree saw snow stick to the ground this morning – that’s first snowfall of the winter, here. But then the snow turned to rain later in the day. Just rain.
Roy the rain-gauge-guy came in the store today, crowing that it was certain we were going to set an annual rainfall total record this year.
Caveat: Tree #1795 “The 7-mile bridge”
This tree stood alongside the bridge at 7-Mile during my morning commute.
Caveat: Tree #1794 “The pie”
This tree was on a pie I attempted. Actually, it wasn’t too bad. It was a raspberry-blueberry pie – the blueberries harvested from right around the house here and the raspberries from Wayne who lives in Klawock. So local produce.
Arthur and I went over to our neighbor Penny and Mike’s house for a Christmas brunch. Also there were neighbors Greg and Sue and Brant and Kim.
This picture shows them all, minus me (the photographer).
Clockwise from leftmost: Sue, Penny, Mike, Arthur, Kim, Brandt, Greg.
Caveat: Tree #1793 “After the storm, or before the next one”
Caveat: Tree #1792 “Christmas Adam”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I do these guest tree pictures when I’m too busy to have taken a picture in a given day.
I took this picture in February, 2010, at 금산사 [Geumsan-sa = Geumsan Temple], in Jeollabuk Province, South Korea. I was doing a “templestay” – where you live for a very short time (a long weekend) at a Buddhist monastery, doing the monk lifestyle thing.
We had a record sales day at the gift store – based on my and Jan’s memories of working with Wayne and Donna when they ran the store, combined with more accurate records over the last few years, our gross sales today were the highest ever. It’s actually typical that it’s December 23rd – that’s the “last minute shopping” day for Christmas. I think we combined that with doing well with stocking good inventory, and the fact that today was the day that Santa visited the store (a tradition at Alaska Gifts for a given Saturday before Christmas).
Here is a picture of Santa with some elves he met at the store (i.e. store staff: Kim, Jan, myself):
We also had one of those typical “gale force” rainstorms in Craig today. So as I went to head home from work, a tree (two trees) had blown down on Port Saint Nicholas Road, meaning that work crews had to get out there and clear the tree – so I was delayed getting home until almost 8. And I got home to darkness, because the power was out. That’s been a quite frequent occurrence this damp Fall.
I learned recently that today is called “Christmas Adam” (meaning, December 23rd). The reasoning: “Christmas Eve” is December 24th. We all know that Adam came before Eve, so… December 23rd is “Christmas Adam.” Call it Patriarchy Remembrance Day.
Caveat: Tree #1791 “Flamingo & treehouse”
This tree was near a treehouse and a yard flamingo under steady rain.
I feel bad for my neglected treehouse. I basically did no work on it this year.
Caveat: Tree #1790 “Christmas lights”
This tree (at the neighbor’s driveway) has acquired some (faintly visible) Christmas lights.
Caveat: Tree #1789 “City of Rockpit”
This tree helped to frame a view of Rockpit, Alaska – my home. The City of Rockpit is a cluster of buildings just faintly visible near the water in the lower left distant shore as seen through the trees. This picture was taken from the top of 6-Mile Hill.
Caveat: Tree #1788 “Stale schtick”
This tree was by a pile of rocks – I believe I’ve featured these trees and rocks several times before, as seen from different angles. I’m running out of unique viewpoints within short walking distance of my house. The “daily tree” schtick is feeling stale.
Caveat: Tree #1787 “The living clouds”
This tree (I guess one of those silhouettes on yonder ridge) was witness to a spectacular sky – picture taken from my apartment window in Goyang, Gyeonggi, South Korea in January, 2018.
Caveat: Tree #1786 “Outside”
This tree was outside, with others of its kind.
Yesterday, I read a novel, cooked and did laundry. Today I had been intending to go into the store, but Jan said she could handle it and I stayed home again. I’m pretty tired from store stuff. So I tried to do some work on my map servers but didn’t make much progress – I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do stuff.
Caveat: Tree #1785 “With fresh snow on the mountain”
Caveat: Tree #1784 “In front of the bank”
This tree was in front of the bank where I stopped this morning.
Caveat: Tree #1783 “Three fine potholes”
Caveat: Tree #1782 “Snowy redwoods”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. These are dawn redwoods in snow along a pedestrian way a few blocks from my home is Goyang, South Korea, as seen in January, 2017.
The power kept going out this morning at home, so I went in to work earlier than usual and worked for 10 hours at the store today. The power went out in the store for about an hour, too. But I can sit in the half-dark and put prices on new merchandise, still.
Caveat: Tree #1781 “Not that short”
This tree is a day late and a dollar short.
[This entry is back-posted – we were without power night of the 12th and morning of the 13th].
Caveat: Tree #1780 “The return of the tiny spruce”
This tree is a small live spruce tree that uprooted and put in a planter. It’s doing duty as our Christmas tree, for a second year. It’s not clear to me how the tree feels about this.
Art and I had a 90-minute telephone appointment with some of the doctors at the neuropsychology department at the Portland VA. This was follow-up on the tests that were run during our visit down south, in November.
There was a lot of detail, not least starting out with about half an hour’s worth of CYA gobbledy-gook (“cover-your-ass” medical discussion of the validity of the tests, baseline, etc) which, with its abstraction, immediately left Arthur uncomprehending, which wasn’t a very good start.
I won’t go into details – they confirmed my intuition that his dementia (since that’s what we’re officially calling it now) has progressed substantially since a similar evaluation in 2020, and my gut feeling is that he was actually much more functional directly after his accident in 2018 than he is now.
There were three salient moments.
First was when the doctors raised, off-handedly and as if it was a previously discussed thing, Arthur’s “depression.” I use quote marks because Arthur actually became visibly agitated when it was mentioned, and angrily said, “I don’t have that problem.” My personal addendum, which I was probably unable to convey to the doctors clearly with Arthur sitting right there, is that Arthur has always struggled with some degree of undiagnosed depression, but it’s something he has never been open to discussing. The mere mention of it left him much more closed off and uninterested in the rest of the talk – he spent a lot of time looking for specks of dirt to pick out of the carpet at his feet, as he does now when he’s had “enough” of whatever telephone or skype conversation we’re having.
Second was when we got into some summary of etiology (medical cause of the dementia). The verbiage was thick in the air, but what I finally gathered is that they’re most comfortable assuming multiple causes, broken into three categories. 1) He’s had repeated TBI (traumatic brain injury), due to the main fall that broke his neck in 2018, but likely other “head bonkings” (Art’s words) such as when he fell off the ladder in our first year up here, down in the road last year, or even when he modified the sheetrock in the bedroom last month; Art seems to prefer encountering hard objects with his skull rather than using his hands to catch himself, because of the severe arthritis pain in his shoulders. 2) They mentioned vascular problems in the brain, a kind of medical shorthand for stroke and stroke-like events, such as the scarring noted in CT scans at the basal ganglia; these stroke-like events are not singular, but something that seem to occur occasionally, and perhaps back in time to well before the fall/stroke in 2018. 3) They used the word Alzheimers repeatedly (and for the first time), and while observing that if it’s Alzheimers, it’s a “non-typical type” but it’s still within an Alzheimers type dementia; I could tell that Arthur recognized the word and found it alarming, by watching his reactions as we talked.
Third was that despite his extremely slow processing speed and quite limited ability to recall recently mentioned facts, stories, words, sequences, etc, his comprehension vocabulary is still amazingly high – which is to say, once you penetrate past the extremely slow processing speed, entailing multiple repetitions and a lot of patience while you see the “loading” icon spinning in his eyes, he’ll know what you’re talking about. His underlying well-educated mind is still there, but just weirdly shrouded by these processing and memory issues.
During all the interview, I did most of the talking. Arthur sometimes seemed to follow, though he did his schtick of pretending not to understand when he didn’t like what he was hearing. It’s quite difficult, with him, as he’s always done this thing of pretending not to understand, as a jokey way of getting out of certain sorts of discussion, and of course, now, he often really actually doesn’t understand. So his pretending to not understand (and not care) is a facade to conceal his actual non-understanding.
In the wake of the call, Arthur was grumpy. I went to work. At dinner, when I got home, I gave him a summary of the talk – which he asked for. I skipped over the depression part, but spent a lot of time talking about etiology, and focused on the final part – the doctors’ recommendations. Most of these are quite self-evident: exercise, develop strategies for dealing with forgetfulness, adapt social interactions for dealing with very slow processing speed. But these efforts of course run up against Arthur’s return to comments like: “Wait, I don’t process things slowly” or “I don’t need routines, I do things when they need to be done”. Then other moments, he’d say “I have no brain” or “I forget everything.” It’s all provided together, a word-salad of mutually incoherent cliches that are what’s left of his self. And they all require a proactive interest in self-care, which is Arthur’s single hugest weakness, to be frank. And I can only nag so much – it’s very much a “pick your battles” thing at this point, and so I can’t always focus on these types of things.
Life goes on.
Caveat: Tree #1779 “Windless”
This tree was beside a windless sea, after several days of heavy wind. You can see lots of fresh snow on the ridge of Sunnahae Mountain, across the inlet, but the snowline never made it down to sea level. It is now quite late for “first snow” not to have arrived yet, here.
Caveat: Tree #1778 “Caught in a web of illusion”
This tree was caught in a perpetual drizzle that failed to be the expected snow.
I decided I needed a day off. I was very lazy today. I read a novel I’ve been reading: one of S.A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad books (call it “Islamic swords and sorcery fantasy”).
Caveat: Tree #1777 “Top o’ the driveway”
This tree was where I parked the jeep at the top of the driveway, as part of my preparation for expected ice and snow.
Caveat: Tree #1776 “Broken wrenches”
This tree was there while I decided it was the time of year when I needed to switch to the studded snow-tires – snow is in the forecast for the next few days (though that can be hit-or-miss, here). The lug-nuts were very tight, and I broke not one, but two lug-wrenches, before I got them all loosened.
[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 1 hr; breaker-bar-banging, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #1775 “Some ravens”
Caveat: Tree #1774 “Fake”
This tree is an artificial Christmas tree installed at the gift shop.
Caveat: Tree #1773 “강선로”
This tree is another guest-tree from my past. I took this picture on New Year’s Eve, 2011, a block north of my apartment, on 강선로 [gangseon-no], a major road in Ilsan, South Korea.
Quote of the day: “Earth is literally the worst planet I’ve ever lived on” – a meme on the internet. I don’t mean this in a bad way. Earth is also the best planet so far.
Caveat: Tree #1772 “Water over the bridge”
This tree was by the little board-bridge across the stream between lots 74 and 73 (Art’s lot and my lot). The stream was swollen by the inch of rain we got overnight, and it was running over the top of my little bridge.
Caveat: Tree #1771 “What is the name of that color?”
Caveat: Tree #1770 “At the post office”
Caveat: Tree #1769 “임진강”
This tree was in a plaza I walked to near Imjingang (임진강), South Korea, which is at the DMZ border with North Korea. This was a walk I took in October, 2007, during my first Fall living in South Korea. I was revisiting haunts from my year stationed as a soldier in the US Army in the area, back in 1991.
I have come to the realization that my 2 1/2 week long vacation down south wasn’t relaxing or recuperative at all. It was very stressful. I mean, I was glad to see all the people I saw, and I value those interactions highly, but Arthur was a pain in the butt with his constant argumentativeness over just about anything that could occur to him, any time we spent time together – which was more than usual because of the travel and such. He is constantly upset when I challenge his take on reality, but that take on reality feels increasingly detached from anything that feels objective or true. And since he rarely remembers a conversation from one minute to the next, we have the same arguments over and over and over.
Anyway, all I mean to say is that I will be quite pleased to relax and work at the store for 6 days a week for the coming month, and let Arthur stew at home with his incoherent obsessions. I can count on routine to protect him from self-damage, hopefully. There’s only so much I can do to protect him. He’ll sleep in the bed he’s made for himself – an aphorism he’s fond of citing. I am burned out.
Caveat: Tree #1768 “Ferry away”
This tree (one up far away on the hillside, I guess) witnessed our departure from Ketchikan back to Prince of Wales Island on the ferry.
Caveat: Tree #1767 “Fog”
This tree was ensconced in heavy fog at our motel parking lot in suburban Seattle. We journey today and tomorrow, return to Rockpit, Alaska.