Caveat: Tree #1575 “A challenge”

This tree confronted overcast skies.

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My mental association with me yelling is that I’m angry. Or terrified of something. Of course, this makes sense. I’m not a person to raise his voice without good reason.

The “emotional” problem I have in dealing with Arthur is that – in the context of his increasing deafness – the only way to get through to him in answer to whatever banal, day-to-day questions he asks of me (and always without his hearing aids, because he “forgets” to put in his hearing aids, of course), is to yell: much louder than my accustomed tone of voice. And the mental trick my mind plays, that I can’t seem to overcome, is that by yelling, I become angry – whether or not I really am. And I just can’t seem to bypass this gut-level, emotional reaction.

Arthur asks me “What’s for dinner?”

I answer, in a regular tone, “I thought we’d have a salad.”

“What? Who?”

Louder, I repeat, “I thought we’d have a salad.”

“A palace?”

Louder still, I yell, “No. A salad!” Now I’m angry. My gut is churning.

Meanwhile, “Oh, a salad. I thought you said palace. I was very confused. Why would we have a palace for dinner?”

“Just a @#$% salad!”

Repeat, on different banal topics, 10-20 times a day.

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 1.5km;]

Caveat: Catorce eran de Lope

El primer soneto

Una vez... ¡ah!, figúrome que ahora
Respiro aún su delicioso aliento
Y enardecido por sus labios siento
El corazón que la suspira y llora...

"Hazme versos así," dijo leonora,
(¡Catorce eran de Lope, y un portento!)
"Y lo que pides te daré al momento,
Con la vida y el alma que te adora"

Después... Más nunca demandó cantares,
Porque tan cerca palpitar se oían
¡Mi corazón y el suyo!... Y luminares

Del alama aquellos ojos que ventían
Bajo mis besos luz y lloro ardiente,
¡Fuego inmortal dejaron en mi mente!

- Jorge Isaacs (poeta colombiano, 1837-1895)

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Caveat: Tree #1569 “Not far from home”

This tree was along a winding road; I was out for a morning walk with the dog, a quarter mile from our house.

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I finally got around to installing a door on my little shed/greenhouse thingy. I really need to get this shed done so I can use it, so I can begin work on my treehouse again.
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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; dogwalking, 3km]

Caveat: Irhoborin

[This is a cross-post from my other blog]

My low-effort bragpost for this week was created around 6 years ago. It is a bit more dystopian than usual. For the most part, my geofictions are neither dystopian nor utopian – rather, they just represent an alternate reality which is much like our own, full of both good and bad. This was an effort to create something a bit darker. It’s a refugee camp, in a poorly-defined (quite incomplete) war-torn country with serious social problems and poverty and a negligent government. Perhaps somewhat inspired by Somalia or 1970’s southeast Asia.

The Irhoborin refugee camp is vast: it has a population of tens of thousands, all in these tents in grids with additional tens of thousands in improvised shacks between and among and surrounding the gridded tent areas. I actually wrote up a fairly detailed “lore” for this place, at one time, and have an archived copy of it here.

Here’s a screenshot of the location.

Screenshot of the map window on the OpenGeofiction website, showing the patchworked grids of the Irhoborin refugee camp and some surrounding, chaotically-laid-out communities

The link to the slippy map is here: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=15/-15.1153/146.7819&layers=B

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Caveat: Tree #1565 “An outing for fuel”

This tree bore witness to my journey to the metropolis of Klawock, where I purchased fuel. We no longer have a gas station in Craig, so fuel purchases require a 7 mile trip to the next town up the road. You can see there’s still a lot of snow on the mountains to the east.

A gas-station pump in the foreground, with semi-desolate a parking lot in the middle ground and highway and trees and snowy mountains in the receding farther distance

CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 8hr]

Caveat: Tree #1564 “Rock-catcher”

This tree (which has been decapitated) has caught a rock. It’s a bit hard to see how it fits in, but there is a fairly large rock wedged between two of the cut-off, upthrust branches. I’m wondering how it got there – it’s a few feet off the ground.

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CaveatDumpTruck Logo[daily log: walking, 5km; retailing, 8hr]

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