I have been having a craving for borscht for a while. When I lived in Korea, I could satisfy this craving by going to a Russian restaurant (or Ukrainian, or Kazakh, etc.). Before that, I used to make it. I haven’t made it in a very long time, but I tried. My hands turned purple cutting beets.
It came out okay. I’ll give my efforts a B-.
Category: My Photos
Caveat: Tree #306
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]
Caveat: Tree #305
The tree cowers behind its deceased brethren.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #304
Fog and rain nourish the tree.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #303
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]
Caveat: Tree #302
Tree. Eagle.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Tree #301
Down below the surface of reality there are still trees to be found.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #300
Some trees come with titles that seem numerologically significant. Yet they remain agnostic.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #299
Here is a tree from my archives. It is a tree in the front yard of the house where I spent the majority of my first 17 years. I took the picture in 2009, I think.
That tree almost entirely post-dates my years there – it was planted in my childhood but was just a small tree as I grew up. Now it looks more substantial.
Here is another picture I found of the same house, from a different angle, and taken many, many years ago, when there was a different tree in front of the house. That’s my dad’s car. I would guess mid-to-late 1960’s for when the picture was taken.
Continuing that theme, this is the same house again, but with no tree at all. This is my own ink drawing, but done from a photograph of the house that I suspect predates my parents’ ownership by a few decades.
[daily log: walking, 2km; chainsawing, 1hr]
Caveat: Tree #298
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]
Caveat: Tree #297
The tree could be seen via reflection.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Tree #296
Arthur and I went to a kind of “community meeting” this evening. Apparently the City of Craig has imperial ambitions with respect to the denizens of Port Saint Nicholas Road (“PSN”). The denizens, however, are quite ambivalent about this. I would myself be inclined to agree that the city offers little of value in terms of improved services, given their fire department’s poor showing during the house fire next door in August (which currently they are legally obligated to provide despite being outside their tax base, but which they receive state monies to do, too, so it’s not like they are losing money on it).
Right now, the battle is about who really controls, owns, and is obligated to maintain the road. This is taking the form of the city’s “Ordinance 719,” which appears to be an unconstitutional “taxation without representation” proposition, wherein the city is allocating to itself the “extraterritorial” right to tax property owners along the road despite their not being voting residents of the city, in exchange for road maintenance – which the city is already legally obligated to do because of where they chose to site their water treatment plant. There are a number of dramatis personae: there’s the city (and specifically its hapless yet hubristic water department), there’s the tribal association (nominally non-profit), there’s the tribal corporation (for-profit, that owns all the non-parcelled land around Craig and PSN, and that originally built the road – it’s not, in fact, “public” in origin), and there are the helpless denizens themselves. At stake: the gobs of state and federal grant money lurking out there for whoever can control the road.
But the City of Craig’s long game is pretty obvious – they hope to undertake an expansive regional annexation into their taxable territory a la Ketchikan (which took over its entire island) or Juneau (which took over several large islands as well as the mainland and became the single largest city in the US in land area). Arthur finds the prospect sufficiently alarming that he was motivated to dislodge himself from his hidey-hole and go find out what was going on. There is a grassroots, community-initiated “legal defense fund” that has hired some lawyers to battle the city and their plans in the courts. So we attended the meeting and became better informed. Arthur donated money (“…pay voluntarily now to avoid paying [taxes] involuntarily later”).
My own opinion is slightly more ambivalent. I don’t share the majority of my neighbors’ instinctual distrust of government and visceral resentment of taxation. I can see that the city has, in this instance, been poorly managed and ham-handed with respect to their treatment of the PSN community, but I refuse to generalize this behavior to the potential of governments in general. My own instinct would be to counter Craig’s ambitions with a move toward a greater degree of counterbalancing self-government: at the least, one or more legally-empowered and -chartered homeowners’ association(s); at the most extreme, pre-emptive incorporation of Port Saint Nicholas as its own “city” (village, but “city” in the legal sense) to effectively “block” Craig’s expansion.
And on that note, I provide this photo of a member Port Saint Nicholas’ silent majority: the trees.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: Tree #295
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.
Caveat: Tree #294
More trees than ever before! Plus there’s an eagle at the top of the dead one.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #293
The crescent moon behind thin clouds illuminates trees.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #292
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]
Caveat: Tree #291
I didn’t have a very good day. I tried to do some work outside, since it wasn’t raining. But I felt low energy, got really tired without getting much done, and came inside and did almost nothing useful the rest of the day: reading blogs and messing around with small, unnecessary and goal-less tweaks to my server and its plethora of not-quite-functional applications.
Perhaps I’m coming down with something. I can’t even tell.
[daily log: walking, 1km; tromping, 500m]
Caveat: Tree #290
This tree awaits the rising sun.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: Tree #289
Some trees are more attention-seeking than others.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #288
This tree is from the tree archive. It is a tree I saw in southern Utah in 2009.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #287
Arthur surprised me today. He wanted to go out on the roof of the boatshed to fix his raingauge, today – it occasionally gets full of debris and needs to be cleaned out. In the past when he’s decided to do this, he will, without warning or discussion, walk out on the deck over the boatshed, climb over the railing and simply go do it. This approach is difficult for me and stresses me out. His record of falling and issues with stability and vertigo mean that I am constantly worried he will slip and fall off the roof of the boatshed. Anyway, this time, instead of just doing it, he consulted with me beforehand. He said he wanted to do it, and asked what we could do so I was comfortable with it. This type of consultation with Arthur feels almost unprecedented, so I was very pleased. In the event, he looped a rope around his belt and I held onto it while he walked out there. It’s not really that much of a safety factor, I’ll be the first to concede, but it meant that if he lost his balance, there would at least be a bit of a break on him slipping all the way down the roof/side of the boatshed (it’s a continuous curve of metal, quonset hut style).
After sending off my Professional Objectives essay, I also made some good progress on a little database programming project I’ve been working on, related to my geofiction server.
All in all, it was a very positive day. I needed one of those.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #286
I saw the two hundred and eighty-sixth tree. It had three leaves, hanging on for dear life.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: Tree #285
We stored our vehicles just in time, yesterday. Today the rain came hard and continuously.
I worked on my final application essay for the teaching certification program at UAS. Also, I procrastinated on that.
Here is a damp tree.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Tree #284
This is a tree from my archives: in front of my apartment where I lived 1995-96, in West Philadelphia, on South 43rd Street.
The apartment was a dump. But I really loved that neighborhood.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: GDC enters chrysalis
I finished cleaning the GDC (RV) today. To the extent I’m going to get that done, anyway – not perfectly pristine, but the best I can manage for now.
The vehicle was placed in what is to be its medium-term parking spot, down on the house-pad Richard helped create.
An aside: I suppose that that picture above could have been my daily tree picture, too. But that particular tall tree has been featured as a daily tree before, so I decided not to do that.
And then I wrapped the GDC in a giant tarp.
Meanwhile Arthur got his boat rinsed off and stored into the boatshed. So we had a productive day of vehicle-storing.
Caveat: Tree #283
Arthur and I got the boat out of the water, up the ramp, but parked outside the boathouse for now – Arthur wants to clean it off, debarnaclize it. And it started raining quite hard in the afternoon, so we both became demotivated with respect to outdoor activity.
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Tree #282
Below is a tree from the archives. It is a tree in front of the house in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where Michelle took her own life in June of 2000. The picture was taken in 2009, when I stopped by there at the behest of Michelle’s ghost, who sometimes makes requests.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Tree #281
Still, there are trees…
… and rainbows.
Fall seems to be rainbow season in Craig. I recall a goodly number of them last fall, too, and none during the intervening three seasons.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Cake for Cake’s Sake
Arthur, on his own initiative, ordered a birthday cake for Juli. The thing is, Juli isn’t here – she’s down in Portland. I believe Arthur was mostly looking for an excuse to have some more chocolate cake, in the wake of the one we bought and ordered for our respective birthdays last month.
Anyway, in fact, Juli’s birthday not until two weeks from now. But we celebrated anyway.
Earlier we went into town for our Thursday shopping day. And we picked up the boat from where it was being serviced at the boat shop. Arthur surprised me, because as we were going to the boat launch area to put the boat in the water, out of the blue he said, so do you want to drive the boat back, or the car?
Our standard division of labor on these ventures has always been that Arthur drives the boat, while I drive the car. I couldn’t quite figure out the motivation behind this offer, but I often have found that when Arthur offers for me to do something that is normally his remit, it’s because he wants me to. So I took it to mean that he preferred that I drive the boat. So for the first time ever, I drove the boat alone, while Arthur drove the Blueberry home.
I did OK. I’m not as good as Arthur at backing the boat up – which I had to do when departing the boat launch. So it got a bit hairy when I was trying to go around another boat parked at the boat launch. But once on open water, I made my way home without incident. It was quite windy and choppy, this afternoon, on the open bay between Craig Harbor and the entrance to Port Saint Nicholas. Perhaps that’s why Arthur wanted me to drive the boat? I even managed to land and tie up the boat alone, at the dock at home, in a quite gusty east wind.
What I’m listening to right now.
Cake, “Comfort Eagle.”
Lyrics.
We are building a religion
We are building it bigger
We are widening the corridors
And adding more lanes
We are building a religion
A limited edition
We are now accepting callers
For these pendant key chains
To resist it is useless
It is useless to resist it
His cigarette is burning
But he never seems to ash
He is grooming his poodle
He is living comfort eagle
You can meet at his location
But you’d better come with cash
Now his hat is on backwards
He can show you his tattoos
He is in the music business
He is calling you “DUDE!”
Now today is tomorrow
And tomorrow today
And yesterday is weaving in and out
And the fluffy white lines
That the airplane leaves behind
Are drifting right in front
Of the waning of the moon
He is handling the money
He is serving the food
He knows about your party
He is calling you “DUDE!”
Now do you believe
In the one big sign
The double wide shine
On the boot heels of your prime
Doesn’t matter if you’re skinny
Doesn’t matter if you’re fat
You can dress up like a sultan
In your onion head hat
We are building a religion
We are making a brand
We’re the only ones to turn to
When your castles turn to sand
Take a bite of this apple
Mr. corporate events
Take a walk through the jungle
Of cardboard shanties and tents
Some people drink Pepsi
Some people drink Coke
The wacky morning DJ
Says democracy’s a joke
He says now do you believe
In the one big song
He’s now accepting callers
Who would like to sing along
He says, do you believe
In the one true edge
By fastening your safety belts
And stepping towards the ledge
He is handling the money
He is serving the food
He is now accepting callers
He is calling me “DUDE!”
He says now do you believe
In the one big sign
The double wide shine
On the boot heels of your prime
There’s no need to ask directions
If you ever lose your mind
We’re behind you
We’re behind you
And let us please remind you
We can send a car to find you
If you ever lose your way
We are building a religion
We are building it bigger
We are building
A religion
A limited
Edition
We are now accepting callers
For these beautiful
Pendant key chains
Caveat: Tree #280
I was walking down the road and found a tree.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: GDC-wash
I have been working on winterizing the GDC. GDC is the name of the RV/camper that my friends Mark and Amy brought. It stands for “God Damn Camper.” That’s Amy’s humor. I decided to keep the name.
I got the water system flushed out, and decided to clean the vehicle before putting a tarp over it and parking it on Lot 73.
It is very dirty.
I made some progress, but it was chilly and drizzly and I lost momentum around 1:30 in the afternoon. The sun is sinking fast as the equinox recedes into the past, and it now disappears behind the mountain at around 2PM.
Caveat: Tree #279
Today, Arthur and I took the boat in for its annual service (Arthur calls it “winterizing” but that’s not quite accurate – nothing will be different about the boat once the service is complete, vis-a-vis its adaptability to the climate).
We put the boat trailer on the Blueberry (the car). I drove that into town, while Arthur drove the boat into town. Arthur took his time getting to town, this time – normally this “race” takes each of us almost the exact same amount of time, but this time Arthur took an extra 20 minutes to get there. Apparently he took a slight wrong turn at Cemetery Island.
We pulled the boat out of the water at the public boat ramp down by the fuel dock (north end of town), and drove it to the boat store for its service. I took a picture of the boat on its trailer at the boat shop, with an accompanying tree, to meet my tree-photographing obligation.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #278
Some trees.
[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 1hour]