Category: My Photos

It was a busy day of getting water restarted, cleaning things up, getting resettled. Not helpful that my head-cold, seemingly on the mend, reasserted itself. Of course, I could attribute that to the airplane – there’s a strong correlation in my experience between head-cold symptoms and airplane travel.
Well anyway here I am. I didn’t take a picture of a tree, exactly. Here is Sunnahae at dawn – it has trees.

[daily log: walking, 3km]

I was traveling all day. I don’t have a tree picture. But I took this picture of boats in Ketchikan. Maybe there’s a tree in the far distance to the right behind the boats you could select? Or imagine the masts of the boats are trees.

[daily log: walking: 6km]

This is a tree up at the tree farm.

Today, we went to the VA hospital again with Arthur. This time, it was a one-year follow-up with the polytrauma team. They lauded his recovery, but expressed concern about the possibility of ongoing “mini strokes” as some post-accident MRI’s seem to indicate – but VA internal documentation doesn’t seem well enough organized for them to be sure what’s going on (problems in communication between “Alaska division” and “Portland division”, etc.). Arthur remains quite resistant to even the idea of the initial stroke, much less the idea of mini-strokes that don’t necessarily feel like or seem like what we normally think of as a stroke. So it all seems like just talk, at some level, if it’s not going to impact behavior or self-concept.
For dinner I went to my cousin’s son’s pub in Forest Grove and talked with my cousin and her husband for a few hours – mostly about what it means when one’s elders become senescent and you have to deal with that.
[daily log: walking, 2km]

We drove into the Portland VA this morning for a specialist appointment for Arthur. It was like “old times,” when Juli and I drove in there so regularly last summer.
Here is a tree.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

Being at Juli and Keith’s here in Oregon, of course we took a walk up to the tree farm. There are trees to be seen.

[daily log: walking, 3.5km]

As seen from the ferry crossing over to Ketchikan: the tree is a bit hard to make out – it’s on the bit of land in the lower left of the picture. There is a tugboat towing a fishing boat in front of that bit of land, and in the upper right, a floatplane. So it all seemed very Southeast Alaskan.

[daily log: walking, 3km]

I haven’t been very productive lately. I’ve been bit “under the weather,” as is said – actually I haven’t had many colds/flus coming to Alaska, I think, but it’s definitely been impacting my focus and productivity. I did get out on the hillside for about an hour today. I don’t suppose standing or tromping or working outside in the rain is good for me if I have a cold, but I have never believed the commonplace that being out in cold or rain increases one’s susceptibility to head colds or increases their impact. That just never made sense to me. I think any such risk is offset or mitigated by being active and getting fresh air.
Here is a tree from the archives, just for a change of pace. I hope I haven’t posted it before. It’s a tree along a street in my neighborhood in Ilsan (Goyang City), with my apartment building (the yuckier one in Juyeop neighborhood) in the background. I think the picture is from 2012 – I hope I haven’t posted it before.

[daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 500m]

Before our Thursday shopping routine, Arthur had an appointment this morning at the medical center in Klawock. I took a short walk down to the bridge over the Klawock River while he was in his appointment, and saw a tree.

[daily log: walking, 2.5km]

I recorded this tree before removing it. I am clearing a path on the direct uphill-downhill between the “middle stake” (lot marker) on the southern property line between lots 73 and 74. It’s damp and slippery but it’s actually easier clearing paths once the fall has removed most of the leaves from the underbrush.

[daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 1000m]

Arthur and I went into town shopping – it’s shopping Thursday, one of our fixed traditions these days.
It rained continuously. We stopped by Jan’s office at the VFW – which we often do. She used an adjective to describe her husband Richard’s efforts in adding a carport to their house, which we’d seen driving past: “Trojanesque” (this is derived from their last name). I laughed quite a bit – Richard’s construction efforts do, indeed, have a quite distinct style, and I felt the adjective captured this quite well. I’ll have to see if I can come up with some kind of objective definition for this word, which has an obvious, intuitive meaning to anyone who is familiar with Richard’s work. Perhaps related to a kind of grandiose disregard for the conventions of design, without being for that at all incompetent?
The small tree grows on the hump of the log of a long-dead big tree.

[daily log: walking, 2km]