Category: My Photos

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]

Studying psychology for one of my exams-for-credit that I’ll take next month, I’m struck by how much of it is really just vocabulary – a certain way of talking about things.
This is an archival tree. Specifically, I saw this tree while lying on a bench at a buddhist monastery in northern Illinois, December, 2009.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

I experienced a somewhat embarrassing emotional insight this morning, as I saw that it was raining. I liked that it was raining. Not just because I have always liked rainy days – that’s just something about my formation on the coast of far northwest California. It’s that when it’s raining, I don’t have to feel guilty about not working outside.
I don’t exactly resent working outside on the various “typical Alaskan” projects, here: the path-cutting, the chainsawing, the digging, etc. But they are not necessarily always “fun” for me either. I feel an obligation to do them because it’s the only conceivable way to prevent Arthur from trying to do them and ending up hurt or something.
It’s not in fact clear to me that Arthur ever enjoyed these types of projects either, but they have always been part of how he prefers to organize his life. Really, his motivational apparatus is wholly opaque to me.
I am, I suppose, an “indoorsman” (in an oppositional sense to “outdoorsman”). I enjoy the outdoors, but I have always despised outdoor “athletics,” and these task-oriented, outdoor work activities are not inherently rewarding to me for the most part. Perhaps it’s just that I have never received positive feedback about my efforts, too. Certainly that has contributed to the current psychological aversion to them.
Well, it was raining. So I sat at my desk and read history and worked at my hobby coding projects on my server.
Meanwhile, trees asserted their ontologies. That leaning tree has been featured before, but I think its leaningness has been increasing lately. It may be headed for seashore.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

We pulled out the “rails” for the boat ramp last night at dusk – because that’s when the low tide was low enough to make that doable. I probably should have been paying attention to the tides, knowing Arthur had that project in mind, but I hadn’t been, so it came out as one of those “ambush projects” that Arthur hits me with, that stress me out so much.
In fact I don’t mind helping on Arthur’s projects, but, like a small child, I don’t manage my stress well when I don’t get advance notice about what’s expected of me. Arthur is not inclined to communicate his plans or intentions ahead of time. After dinner, without preamble, it was: “I’m going to pull out the rails now.” Of course no invitation or expectation that I would help, but I simply can’t imagine Arthur in his increasingly frail state doing this project himself – those rails are heavy, and pulling them up the ramp is awkward. So I had a choice: let him start it himself and then be there to help when he finally asked for help, or otherwise I could simply start out helping knowing it would get to that. It’s one of those “military moments” when the arbitrary “task” comes down the chain of command and one simply has to leap to action in that moment.
Lo, a tree did grow.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

Today was shopping day. It rained most of the day, but we got our errands done in town. I made my chupe de pescado (Chilean-style fish chowder) for dinner.
From the archives, this tree was seen in Manitoba, in 2009.

I am studying US History. This is because I need to fulfill a prerequisite for this teacher certification program I want to enter, and despite having actually taught US History in Korea, I have never taken a college-level history class of any kind. So I do fine with the broad, outline-y questions, the order in which events unfolded, I know my presidents. But a lot of details are not well established in my mind. I don’t know the specific names of the originators of policies or events, e.g. the name of the presidents of South Vietnam in the period leading up to the Vietnam War, or the specific act of congress that tried to get Native Americans onto reservations on the Great Plains. So I have some studying to do. I scored about 70% on practice versions of the two “tests for college credit” that I am planning to take.
Meanwhile, I saw a tree.

[daily log: walking, 2km]