Category: My Photos

Today we had our neighbor-from-down-the-road, Aaron, stop by and I paid him to help us clean the gutters. Just like last year, Arthur was ready and eager to simply do it himself: go up on the 32′ ladders, all the rest. Fearless. Last year, for gutter cleaning, Arthur fell from a ladder and was briefly unconscious, and it was a truly horrible day. Yet he emerged from that experience without apparent long-term injury, which thus left him confirmed in his own belief in his indestructibleness.
This gutter-cleaning is an utterly winless situation for me. If I let Arthur clean the gutters, at best I deal with the excruciating anxiety of him falling from a ladder. At worst, he falls and breaks his neck or dies – a more real possibility than he’s willing to admit, given his vertigo, his stability issues, etc. And in what happened instead, where I insist that he NOT clean the gutters, well, he glowers with obvious resentment of my overcautiousness, of my “supervising” him, all the rest. He grits his teeth and lurks judgmentally on the margin, unimpressed with my presumed incompetence and displeased with my own evident anxieties around heights. It’s emotionally painful.
I simply can’t win. Therefore this new tradition emerges, as I move into my second year here: The Worst Day of the Year: Gutter-Cleaning Day.
Aaron did a good job.
Here is a picture of a cleaned gutter, with a tree, so that I can meet the tree-picture criterion.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

I made good progress with dirt and insulation today.
Here is a tree.

[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2hours]

We went to town for Thursday shopping, and when we got back, I shoveled some dirt.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km; shoveling, 1hour]

I moved dirt.
I saw a tree.

[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2hours]

The rain returned. I tried moving dirt for a while, but in the rain that’s less fun.
Here is a tree.

[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 1hour]

Arthur once again tried to catch a halibut. He actually caught one! It was very, very small: a “baby halibut.” Not much bigger than the bait we were using. We threw it back. Sadness ensued.
I took this picture of the hillside at Caldera Bay reflected in the calm, smooth sea. You can see some leaves and other things floating… Pick a tree, any tree. That’s your daily tree.

[daily log: walking, 1km; shoveling, 2 hours]

Another day working hard moving dirt around, burying the pipes around the well-head.
A tree seen from the boat, from the last time we went out in the boat.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km; shoveling, a lot]

I spent the day working very hard, putting insulation in the “dog house” at the well-head, and burying some pipe that I placed.
Here is a tree from my archives. It is a tree inside Bukhansan Park in Seoul, beside a stairway up to a Buddha in a cliff-face. I took this picture in October, 2013.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km; digging, alot]

With the rain in remission, I undertook a mission to work on project to winterize the well. That went well, but I lost momentum in the afternoon. I’ll resume tomorrow. Meanwhile I studied some, in my CLEP book.
This tree was along the road.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

I got my CLEP textbook yesterday. Now I can take my studying to a new level. CLEP is a formalized “exams for college credit” system. Since UAS is requiring me to fill in some holes in my undergraduate transcript of 30 years ago, taking a few CLEP exams seems the most efficient approach. We’ll see how it goes.
Here is a tree.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

Work proceeded apace on my effort to complete my application to UAS. I have just two remaining things to complete – one more essay and an old college transcript request.
Meanwhile, outdoors, the rain proceeded apace.
Arthur is doing his annual “re-paint the boat rails” project. These are the rails that sit down in the water, that underlie the trolley that pulls the boat out of the water and into the boatshed. This project fills the house with petrochemical fumes. I have a theory that Arthur either cannot smell petrochemical fumes, or actively enjoys them – every time he fills his kerosene heater that lies in the boatshed, the house also fills with a similar smell. Today he did that, too. So I sit in the attic on my computer bundled up with both windows wide open, to get a cross breeze and ventilate the space.
Here is a picture of a tree from the archives. The picture was taken in August, 2007, in Mexico City. There are actually two trees, I admit. But the building (although there are two facades, in fact it is a single building inside) is notable: that is the building I lived in, in 1986. The second floor window near the center is onto the hallway in front of my bedroom.

[daily log: walking, 1km]

I went into town today and took a “proctored impromptu writing sample” test, with the help of a person at the Craig School District who was kind enough to help. This is part of my application for the Teacher Certification program at University of Alaska Southeast. Normally this type of “proctored writing sample” would be done by going into the appropriate college office, sitting down and taking the test. But because this program is an “All Online” type of program, that doesn’t really work. But they occasionally want you to prove who you are, and the way to do that is to get you to find a proctor that they approve of in your local community, and work with that person to proctor your test. I’m not sure how frequent this type of thing will be. I’m only in the application process.
Since I was busy with that (and preoccupied by the surrounding anxiety), I failed to take a picture of a tree. Here is a tree from my archives. This picture was taken in November, 2012, looking out from a window at my workplace in South Korea.

[daily log: walking, 2km]

With a supposed break in the rain, Arthur and I attempted to go out and put heat tape around the water pipes that run out of the new well-head “doghouse” (where the pump controller, etc., are).
But every time we started working, it rained. If we stopped working, it stopped raining.
After a while, we gave up that project. Typical Southeast Alaska.
I put some time in on my computer instead.
Here is a tree.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

Because of the raininess outside, I have been less inclined to pursue any of the outdoor projects I have in progress. I have been working more on computer-based projects, including messing with my programming environment (my largely unfulfilled fantasy of learning to program using Ruby/Rails), and adding some bells and whistles to a few of my server projects.
Meanwhile, on the equinox, I find attention-seeking behavior among trees. Hey! Quit goofing around!

[daily log: walking, 3km]

I spend part of the day outside working on some more aspects of the well-head “doghouse” – specifically, the outgoing pipes/conduit to connect to what I’m calling the “greenhouse” – I want to build a small greenhouse on the new upper parking pad, hopefully to be able to use next Spring.
I spent another part of the day trying to build a Ruby on Rails development environment on my server. It’s slow going, but I feel I’m making progress. So far the vscode IDE is working much better than all those times I tried to use Eclipse, so the switch over was a smart move.
Lastly, I have been writing an essay for my UAS application for the teaching certification program. I’m sure what I have already is fine, but I’m being perfectionistic. So there’s that.
I failed to take a picture of a tree today. So here is a tree from my archives. This is Gobong Hill with its distinctive radio tower, in Ilsan, Korea, as seen from near the top of Jeongbal Hill, a few blocks from my apartment there. I took it in October, 2015 – just short of 4 years ago.

[daily log: walking, 2.5km]

Today, the Ides of September, Arthur and I once again sought to catch a halibut, but alas, we returned to port having only hooked a number of ugly bottom fish of poor quality. Halibutless. The sea was flat and sunny, though. I saw some seagulls cruising on an improvised raft (hard to see, center of this picture, looking past the southern end of San Juan Island toward San Ignacio and Baker, in the distance).

Meanwhile, trees continued their efforts to touch the sky.

[daily log: walking, 1.5km]

The past few days I’ve been busy with my somewhat unsuccessful effort to remodel the plumbing in the well-head shed (“doghouse”). I’m not very good at eliminating all the leaks – I’m too inexperienced a plumber.
Today, with sporadic rain, I decided to work indoors instead, and have been doing “academic stuff” related to my efforts to enroll in the University of Alaska Southeast’s teacher certification program – a much more overwhelming and bureaucratic process than I had hoped for. Sigh. Life goes on.
Here is a tree over on lot 73.

[daily log: walking, 3km]

Our friend and neighbor Joe from down the road joined us and we went out on a singularly unsuccessful fishing trip today. We went seeking halibut at Roller Bay, then “Shipwreck” (off San Fernando Island), then the northwest side of Balandra Island. We caught exactly one smallish lingcod. Then we tried for salmon along Cemetery Island and the Coronados, trolling into the south entrance of Port Saint Nicholas. Nothing – a few black bass that were smaller than some of the bait.
Here is a tree, also struggling.

[daily log: walking, 2km]