This tree was up along the hillside.
Category: My Photos
Caveat: Tree #1764 “Tree, river”
Caveat: Tree #1763 “Backdrop”
This tree was a backdrop for some people being photographed at the Oregon Zoo today.
That’s me on the left. Beside me are Rita – a woman who was my 3rd grade and 6th grade teacher, among other things. Beside her is Jeannine, Rita’s daughter, one of my closest childhood friends, who I haven’t seen since high school graduation, maybe. And Jeannine’s child, River, who is recovering from Covid right now. So it was a kind of little reunion at the Oregon Zoo, which was sunny, not too crowded, but quite chilly, down in its little canyon west of downtown Portland.
Caveat: Tree #1762 “A tall yellow tree”
This tree is down by the gate to the road that goes up along the Tualatin river.
Juli and I and the dog took a long walk along the valley today. Then a bunch of Canadians showed up, including Wayne (the annual visitor to Rockpit, Alaska – a close friend of Arthur’s), who are Keith’s relatives, so we had a kind of pre-Thanksgiving. We’ll do the main Thanksgiving on Saturday, which is Juli and Keith’s tradition.
Caveat: Tree #1761 “There for the rising sun”
Caveat: Tree #1760 “Southwest Portland”
This tree was in a neighborhood in Portland, southwest of downtown.
Arthur spent about 5 hours receiving a “cognitive evaluation” with some psychological specialists at the VA. I had a pretty boring time just waiting around for the whole thing to finish, so I walked around outside.
Caveat: Tree #1759 “The donut-thief’s magnetic donut”
This tree is a small lego tree, in front of a lego police station my grandson Parker built. He showed me many things, including a donut-thief who had a magnetic donut, apparently.
Caveat: Tree #1758 “The persimmon tree”
This tree is a persimmon tree in my aunt Janet’s yard in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. I visited them today.
I always have lots of wonderfully philosophical conversations with Janet and Bob.
Caveat: Tree #1757 “The fake lake”
This tree was out next to a fake lake, which was lacking in water. It’s called Hagg Lake, or Scoggins Valley Reservoir. The Reservoir was quite low. We drove there, but it’s really not that far – a few miles. We went there and walked around, Juli and Keith and Arthur and I, and their dog.
Caveat: Tree #1756 “The patio”
Caveat: Tree #1755 “Have a heart”
This tree is in front of Arthur’s infamous yurt, his bedroom-away-from-home since times immemorial (about 20 years).
Before the yurt, he had an ancient school bus converted to an RV, parked in a similar location in Juli and Keith’s yard. So Arthur calls the yurt “the bus.” Keith worries about Arthur being in the yurt, but I think he’s better off there than in some location (e.g. the guest room here) which is less familiar to him. Since he himself built the yurt, it’s quite to his liking and very familiar.
Art and I did another appointment at the VA hospital and clinics this morning. This time, he got an echocardiogram. The tech was very chatty and explained to me what he was doing and seeing as he did it, which made it pretty interesting for me. Art’s arhythmias were quite noticeable.
Caveat: Tree #1754 “Orange and yellow under the sun”
This tree was along the road just up above Juli and Keith’s. Apparently, it is Autumn.
I took Art to the VA hospital and clinics in downtown Portland, today. We saw doctor Kim, who is a very personable doctor and who is one of the few doctors I’ve interacted with, with Arthur, who seems to “get” Art’s mental style. It was a bit intense, as Dr Kim used the word “dementia” with Arthur directly for the first time. I really haven’t ever dared to use that word – Art has always been of the clear and firm opinion that that is something that happens to other people, not to him. So I guess I was relieved to let Dr Kim bring it up, in a medical setting. It could be between him and a doctor, and I wasn’t implicated except as a witness.
Next step is the comprehensive cognitive function evaluation, scheduled for next week.
Caveat: Tree #1753 “Peering out”
Caveat: Tree #1752 “Upper Tualatin Valley”
This tree was down by the upper Tualatin River in the hills about an hour west of Portland, just a short walk (maybe 1km) down the slope from Juli and Keith’s house, where I’m staying. We didn’t see any salmon jumping, which we often do this time of year, here.
I decided to enjoy an uneventful day, and just hung out. Sorta officially “on vacation.”
Caveat: Tree #1751 “Chocolate and Flashlights and other very important things”
This tree is in Juli and Keith’s yard in western Oregon, where I’m visiting. The Fall weather is milder here than in Southeast Alaska.
I went to town to do shopping errands today. Into the giant Fred Meyer store (like a Walmart or Target, for those unfamiliar with Pacific Northwest). After all the time living and working in a tiny town on a Southeast Alaskan island, it’s a bit overwhelming, but not in a bad way, at least for me. You have the thought: this store feels bigger than the whole town!
There was an amusing incident. Arthur insisted on coming along on the shopping trip. He’s been quite anxious, since leaving home, about his lack of a certain brand of chocolate that we’ve been planning to “refresh his supply” on this trip. It’s a kind of separation anxiety, almost. We had run out of his brand back in August or so (we keep a lot on hand, and refresh once a year shopping down south, or order online), and we’d been unable to re-order online: vendors were “out of stock.” It was a distressing situation for him.
So he wanted to come along, so we could stop at the big stores and look for his brand of chocolate. We found it at Fred Meyer, and we bought 24 “giant size” bars of chocolate – maybe (only maybe) good for a year back up in Alaska. But it was all they had in stock.
The thing that was so striking: the moment we put the chocolate bars in the shopping cart, Arthur’s anxiety melted away. You could see him visibly relax. And then he announced he was tired, and he went and sat down at the front of the store to wait for me to finish the rest of my shopping.
So I got to spend a few hours with Arthur in a less anxious state. Of course, within a few hours, he’d found himself a new thing to worry about: flashlights! He wanted to make sure all the flashlights worked, that he could find in his yurt (his room-away-from-home at Juli’s, since time immemorial).
Caveat: Tree #1750 “NASA휴먼어드벤처展”
This tree is another guest tree from my past – I traveled all day and was offline. I took this picture in December, 2014, while walking to work one day in Ilsan (Goyang), South Korea. I wanted to show the banner on the footbridge, advertising a NASA exhibition at the local convention center, but the tree bore witness.
[daily log: walking, 5km; driving, 6hr; ferrying, 3hr; airplaning, 2hr]
Caveat: Tree #1749 “Fukushima”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture in Fukushima, Japan, in March 2010. I was killing time waiting for a new work visa for Korea. The cherry blossoms were out along the river.
Caveat: Tree #1748 “Things done by wind”
This tree was forced to oversee the wanton destruction, by wind, of yet another tarp-based storage structure on lot 73 (tarp-based storage structures have suffered terrible fates on lot 73, in past years – this most recent iteration was something that neighbor Brandt had put up, ancillary to his construction project on my shed thingy).
Caveat: Tree #1747 “The shed thingy’s advancement”
This tree saw a new floor-deck appear for my shed thingy, under construction. I’ve employed the carpentry-competent neighbor to build the structure, and he made progress.
Caveat: Tree #1746 “Caw”
Caveat: Tree #1745 “Raindroplets like pearls”
This tree was along the road to town – much like other trees.
I spend way too much time at work at the store trying to comprehend hard-to-understand quasi-invoices from vendors.
Caveat: Tree #1744 “Mossy witness”
This tree bore witness to the loitering sea. I like the twisted, mossy branches.
I worked on putting the dirt back in the hole at the well. It is very tiring. This is a fairly long-term project, which would be done in 10 minutes with an excavator but I was stubborn when Richard was here with his excavator in August, about an aspect of the project at that time, so now I have to fill the hole with my shovel.
Quite unrelated, I like this quote:
"The unconscious is a machine for operating an animal." - Cormac McCarthy
Caveat: Tree #1743 “Almost”
Caveat: Tree #1742 “Dailier than ever”
This tree is dailier than others, along the road to town.
Art had a difficult night last night. He has a thing that happens sometimes, where he wakes up disoriented – much more than usual. He needs to get up to go to the toilet but he can’t find his way from the bed to the bathroom. He crashes into things. Of course it doesn’t help that he is stubborn, in persisting in the belief that he can navigate in the dark. It’s impossible to get him to adopt a habit of turning on a light to find the bathroom – he believes with his heart and soul that his excellent spatial memory can get him from on place to another in a familiar environment, in the dark. Leaving a light on is useless – he’ll grumpily turn it off the moment I go to bed. He insists on sleeping in absolute dark – to the point of closing the blinds against the moonlight.
Anyway, his excellent spatial memory is long gone. He wakes up disoriented, can’t find the door out of the bedroom, stumbles around. I awoke to a loud crash at around 11:30 PM, and went down stairs. I found him lying on the floor. There was urine all over the floor near the door. He seemed to have head-butted the wall where a small heater unit is installed, damaging the wall and the unit such that repairs will be recovered. I don’t even know how he did that.
It took us more than an hour to get him back into the bed. In his disoriented state, he couldn’t figure out how to stand up. He’s week, and with shaky balance, but when his mental faculties are more normal, he’s able to get himself up off the ground or floor. But last night it was a struggle. I kept trying to explain to him what he needed to do: “Roll sideways, get a knee under you, lever yourself up by grabbing the edge of the bed.” These instructions just made him sullen, as if I was giving impossible advice. And I’m not strong enough to lift him. So we had to wait out the lack of ability – in the end we got him close enough to the bed that I was able to kind of lever him up onto the bed, against much protestations of suffering and agony (he had bad arthritis in the shoulders).
I got the floor cleaned up. I disabled the damaged heater so it won’t be a hazard, pending repair, and later I gifted him a portable one that I have been using to heat the RV, to control mold.
In the morning, he asked me what had happened to the heater – he apparently didn’t remember anything that happened. It’s unrealistic to expect him to be grateful for the help I give him, when he can’t remember needing my help.
It was a hard night.
Caveat: Tree #1741 “Beginnings”
This tree saw the beginnings of dawn, at around 7:15 this morning.
Caveat: Tree #1740 “Still surviving”
This tree is my small cherry tree that nearly died in the deerpocalypse last year. This year, safe in its little cage, it seems to have done fine, but it’s strange how the leaves seem uninterested in changing color in the Fall.
Caveat: Tree #1739 “Trick or tree”
This tree was across the street from where I stood in front of the gift shop. A late October morning in Craig.
Some kids came by the store, trick-or-treating for Halloween. We were prepared, having candy on hand.
Caveat: Tree #1738 “Kerosene in the garden”
This tree was in the background while I performed a standard daily cold-weather chore: filling the little kerosene tank for the basement heater from the big red kerosene tank in Arthur’s mushroom-and-moss garden (front yard).
Caveat: Tree #1737 “Monotony”
This tree has probably been featured before. I’m feeling unimaginative. And the picture came out a bit blurry, too.
Caveat: Tree #1736 “The janitor’s closet”
This tree is a guest tree from my past. I took this picture looking out the window of the janitor’s closet at my place of work in Goyang City, South Korea in November, 2012.
Caveat: Tree #1735 “Not actually snow”
This tree was next to a patch of frost so heavy it looked like fallen snow.
In the morning I went to town and worked on some bookkeeping stuff at the store and sorted out a bureaucratic mess at the Power and Telephone office.
This afternoon I finally got around to building a little insulated enclosure “cabinet” for the new water filters configuration for the re-engineered house water filters set-up I built last summer. This enclosure is important because down in the boathouse (basement) it can get quite cold in winter – it’s not an insulated part of the house. So with the filter assembly positioned where it is, I wanted to enclose them in a little cabinet with insulation in it where we could place a small heater to make sure things don’t freeze up on extremely cold days.
Caveat: Tree #1734 “Observed”
This tree was observed by some waterfowl (a flock of them in the water center-right).