Category: My Photos

This tree saw the first frost of the season, on the hood of the blueberry (Chevy Tahoe).

I had a truly horrible day. It was all because of plumbing. I had a small leak in the well-house (on lot 73) which had come to light when Richard did all the installation in August. I’d been procrastinating on it, but I hoped it would be fairly easy to fix – the first frosty morning of the Fall inspired me to get busy with it. So I went to fix it. Somehow it was a kind of chain reaction – trying to fix the one leak led to the appearance of another leak. I would guess it’s related to putting strain on the manifold of pipes in the well-house. Soon I had several leaks. The whole manifold needs to be rebuilt. I am not a plumber. I shoveled dirt for a while (filling in the hole Richard left by the well), expressing my frustration, but there is still much dirt to shovel.

[daily log: walking, 3km; shoveling dirt, 1hr]

This tree saw some clouds in the morning, but fewer clouds than yesterday.

After working at the store for a bit in the morning, I drove around running errands (buying gas, which requires a special drive over to Klawock, since Craig has no gas station these days). Then I came home and since it wasn’t raining, I worked outside, on that “last six feet” of my electrical conduit on lot 73, at the top of the driveway, connecting to the little well-house there. It was brutal work, but I exposed the previous conduit (a stub I’d put in 3 years ago, determined now to be the wrong size), pulled it out, and put in a new piece of larger-diameter conduit. I now need to expose the water pipe because there’s a rather bad leak on connector to the down-the-hill line of water pipe – I never was able to test the water pipe before, since it’d just been a stub, but when Richard helped install all the downstream faucets and connectors back in August, I had a chance to test it all, and sadly, there was a leak at the uphill end of everything. So that can be a project for the next few days – when it’s not raining again next.

[daily log: walking, 4.5km; retailing, 3hr; ditch-digging, 2hr]

This tree loomed in shadows alongside a small stream.

Art and I finished the process of getting the boat fully stowed in the boathouse for the winter. So that’s done.

[daily log: walking, 2km;]

This tree existed.

Today I spent a major portion of the day scraping barnacles off the bottom of Arthur’s boat. Arthur tried to help but he didn’t really do much.

It’s not perfect, but good enough to put into storage for the winter. Here’s an effort to compare “before and after” on the debarnaclization project – it doesn’t show up very well but the right side in the picture below is already scraped.

It’s easier to see on the back of the boat.

[daily log: walking, 3km; barnacle-scraping, 5hr]

This tree remained unaware of my newly acquired junker vehicle.

I bought a junker vehicle yesterday. A Jeep. Doing so was a kind of “chess move” in my battle of wills with Arthur over his wanting to drive. By making clear that the Tahoe is his car, and that I’m borrowing it, I’m hoping he’ll back off on his ambitions. So I’ve explained I bought the jeep in order to have a “backup car” here, but it also means that if he insists, I have an alternate route to town. Anyway he can feel that I haven’t taken his car away from him. I’m somewhat confident that it will be like the situation with his boat: by telling him he’s free to take it on his own, anytime he wants, I believe he’ll feel okay about the situation and never avail himself of the “right,” so to speak.

I got a CT Scan this morning, part of the annual post-cancer wellness check. It’s the first scan I’ve gotten since returning to the US. Hopefully everything’s fine – I’ll find out results at some future point. I realized as I lay there that it was the first time I had a CT scan where the attending technician spoke to me in English. It was a bit weird. in my mind, I was expecting the instructions to be in Korean. [UPDATE, a few days later: The results came back fully negative. No new cancer.]

[daily log: walking, 3km;]