Even in Kyoto

I will say that two things are memorable from the recent novel about trees. One is the comment about how the word bewilderment has that other word, wild, right in the middle of it.

The other is where a character at one point essentially blurts out, "If you're going to sacrifice the life of a tree, at least make something even better out of it!" (badly paraphrased here)

On Sunday morning, while waiting for annikusrex to arrive for our bike ride, I sat at the end of the driveway, beneath one of the trees.

These are the driveway trees, as best I can show you from underneath them.



I couldn't quite remember what kind they all are, so I took another photo, closer up, and used the app Seek to remind me:



Western redcedar.

I used to know my Pacific Northwest trees far better than I do now.

I also counted trunks, and I think there are 11 redcedar in total, of various sizes. For many years, 3 of them supported a 3-story treehouse.

Behind the redcedar, there are also 3 Douglas fir trees, although by now one is a snag. For a time, there was also a treehouse platform suspended from cables on one of the Doug firs, plus two suspended ramps connecting the platform to the 3-story unit. The more elaborate treehouse elements were all constructed as part of a youth activity program called Coyote Junior High. We had some of the coolest treehouses you'd see anywhere.

I am reading from Wikipedia that Western redcedar can live to be over 1000 years old, and have trunks up to 7 m in diameter. They are considered a climax species because they are shade-tolerant to the point where they can become established and grow even in mature forests.



So the driveway trees may still be somewhat young, or middle-aged. If the next occupants of the house recognize the importance of the trees, they could continue to live and grow for a long while yet.



If I'm remembering correctly, the tree that fell on our house when I was in high school was also a western redcedar, a larger one.

The tree wasn't on our property. It was on the property of the neighbors behind our house, up above our house near the edge of a 2.5-foot cement retaining wall. The retaining wall was badly cracked near the base of the tree, so during inclement weather there was a constant worry that the tree might fall down onto our house.

As it turned out, the father of those neighbors came over and did some yardwork at one point, and severed a bunch of the roots, which are relatively shallow for these big trees. So it didn't actually take all that much extra wind to knock the tree over, after all. We were fortunate that it landed on a solid corner of the house, not the corner with a big, glass greenhouse window. I was reading a book in the living room one evening when it hit, and the whole house SHOOK. The shaking was different from the way earthquakes shake a house. Eventually we figured out it was the tree.

For a while, we didn't really have a backyard because it was completely full of tree. Eventually, my parents found a company that would come and harvest the lumber, and after that it became possible for my mom to have a vegetable garden in the backyard because there was finally enough sun back there.

--

At some point, my dad developed the habit of noticing when the driveway redcedars successfully produced offspring. He would extract them from the soil and grow them in pots. Once he had some certainty that they would survive, he would take them over to nearby Interlaken Park and would plant them. In fact, when he died, there were still several trees remaining to be planted, so we did, in a part of the park near where there is a grove of introduced California redwoods, but also some sunny and more open spots.

Over the years, my parents spent a lot of time volunteering in Interlaken Park, with a group that set out to tear down as much viney clematis and English ivy as they could.

--

George Pocock, the master boatbuilder who contributed to the 1936 victory of the American Boys in the Boat at the Berlin Olympics by building them an excellent rowing shell, credited some of his success to the fact that he was working with western redcedar for the skin of the shells.

This is written about more extensively on this website on rowing history: https://heartheboatsing.com/2015/01/07/where-boats-grow-on-trees/

--

Even evergreen trees shed leaves sometimes. Right now the redcedar are busy doing exactly that.



--

Hopefully the boat I am building, which is NOT made of redcedar but instead mostly of plantation wood grown in other parts of the globe, will sufficiently honor the trees harvested to make it. I will not make light of my use of wood.

--

I was grateful to get to see multiple examples of Makah traditional canoes when we visited the Museum and Cultural Center. Everything I've ever learned about Northwest Coast native boatbuilding says that a lot of work goes into finding and selecting the right tree. The dugout canoes the Makah made needed to be fully seaworthy to enable them to go out and successfully hunt whales. They are typically made of redcedar. That's how Pocock got the idea. Redcedar bark is also used extensively for making woven goods - waterproof hats, mats, bags, and baskets.

--

There is a man carrying out a long-term demonstration project at the Center for Wooden Boats, of the construction of a dugout canoe.

My family seems to want me to be more of a multisport athlete. Evidence:

Sporting attempt 1: bowling for my aunt L's 73rd birthday on December 26. L is mentally disabled, and her all-time favorite sport is bowling. How could she be denied? My family goes every year. We played not one, not two, but three games. Some family members are more strategic than others about their bowling. I think I managed to get over 100 points in 2 out of the 3 games? Not bad for a sport I practice approximately once every 3 years nowadays. I could tell that strength training has benefited my bowling arm, but my right butt was sore this morning. I probably needed to do it as a form of cross-body activity.

Birthday girl and my Uncle D:


Mom and R hurling some bowling balls in the general direction of the pins:


R had a series of fantastic bowls in her last game - I believe it was something like 2 strikes in a row and then a spare, plus another strike in there somewhere.

I had one bowl where somehow, the ball veered towards the gutter just as it got near the pins, then bounced into the gutter, then came back out again (!!), and knocked over a good 4-5 pins! Favorite play of the night.

Sporting attempt 2: annikusrex and I have been suffering from a Scrabble deficit. We tried to make up for lost time last night with a Scrabble bender of 3 back-to-back games. AKW won the first two games, with some great plays that included some stellar bingo's. In the final game, I had an almost-bingo in my rack for my last turn, but then AKW blocked that play, so I had to content myself with barely edging out my mother for the win.

We played game #2 on a Giant Scrabble Board, which I can now tell you I Do Not Recommend. It is ridiculous and pointlessly big. It should be sent to Texas. We reverted back to a regularly-sized board for game #3.



Sporting attempt 3: Cross-country skiing at the Stevens Pass Nordic Center.



I don't think I've ever been over Stevens Pass before. It was beautiful! But I can see why most people would use Snoqualmie Pass to get out to Eastern Washington. The roads over Snoqualmie Pass are wider and maybe less steep overall.

I made it almost all the way to the end of the trail, but then the trail grooming stopped and the snow was so deep I couldn't stay upright on the skis anymore and decided that was a sign I should turn around. Plus the trail had gotten steeper, so that was enough downhill for me at the moment.





We rented skis from REI, which was really helpful because now I know exactly what size of skis and boots I want to buy for myself.

I have been missing the mountains in Washington.

My cousin came to town for a visit yesterday! We went to the farmer's market, which we also did last year. I'd forgotten, but it was still great to go. Originally we were going to go to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, but it would have been another hour of driving for A, so instead we went to a history/art museum in Albany. The Albany museum was...hmm. I'm not going to say 'interesting.' "Troubling" might be a better descriptor. Don't bring any native American friends to it because there are dead people out on display, and from cultural, personal, and religious standpoints, they will have a very hard time if they encounter the dead people. The dead people are 2 mummies, apparently purchased from a Cairo museum in the early 20th century, with the intention of having them in the museum on display to showcase the fact that Albany is a world-class city.

Ahem.

There was also an extensive collection of Hudson River School landscapes. I mean, it's pretty amazing to see that many grouped together, to fully appreciate the aesthetic.

More than what is in the museum, what stands out to me is what was NOT in the museum. It was very much an Old Dead White Guy (and occasional White Woman) museum.

And then today, the NYT has has an article about how local museums are having to change with the times. If this local museum does, maybe I'll visit it again someday. But my general feeling is that I don't need to ever go back again to this one.

That's really saying something.

-

After A left, taking S to the train station so he can venture back west, I read the internet for maybe 15 minutes and then fell fast asleep.

This morning I baked cookies for my bicycling students, and prepared a lemon rhubarb buttermilk bundt cake for that bake-off on Tuesday. Also, pancakes. I've decided that the bicycle cookie cutter is too fussy, so it will have to go. The bike seat portion often breaks off, and it leaves a weak point in the center of the cookie. Plus, decorating them is too fussy.

Got the house all vacuumed and the litterboxes emptied, then lost at Scrabble. Most of the afternoon was once again devoted to rowing-related tasks. I will say again, have some appreciation for the people who design flyers and posters. That business takes a lot of time.

Got some Burrito Factory done, and now I'm finishing grading my Animal Phys students' lab practical exams. Then shower, bed, and the last day of classes tomorrow. Lather, rinse, repeat?

Yesterday was an all-boathouse day for me.

Practice in the morning, where it was too cold to row, so we had a big line of ergs going:


After coffee at our usual haunt, I went back over to the boathouse at 10 am to deliver maple syrup to one of the runners who won his event for the IceBreaker, and to meet with the club's Coxbox Fairy, who is retiring from Coxbox Fairy duties. Lots of batteries and finicky bits, to add to the existing collection of batteries and finicky bits.

Based on the tides, we scheduled this year's Docks-In to get underway at 2 pm. Given the timing, it seemed simpler to hang out at the boathouse and work on boathouse projects instead of trying to go home and then come back again.

The boathouse projects are endless. I got all of the towels, watering cans, and spray bottles of Simple Green organized. I also dug out the signs advertising the club's summer camps, and returned some miscellaneous items to the storage shed or other storage locations. Pretty soon, other people started arriving, including the company delivering our new dock ramps. My teammate L, pictured below, spearheaded the grant application to fund the ramps and has shepherded the project. She was very thrilled and relieved to see the ramps finally arrive.



The company that built them for us also helped with some of the installation work. Normally, we carry the ramps by hand, so this spared us some of the usual heavy lifting.



We still did a lot of hand-carrying of the dock sections, though.


There were a couple of snafus this year, partly my fault. I'd managed to forget that in the fall, the people who took the sections apart disassembled them incorrectly. That made fitting things back together much more challenging, because it added a lot of extra lifting and placing.

We were also low on people with previous experience with how the sections fit together, and I hadn't made all that many extra copies of the assembly schematic, so there were multiple points with confusion where we had to take sections apart and move them around and reassemble them. Even worse, there were some hinge connector misalignment problems. I barely caught a major one in time to address it on shore.

Even with the hinges in the correct places, we still had some trouble attaching the dock sections together. I suspect part of this is because we've been replacing old, worn-out float sections with brand-new sections that are shaped just differently enough to affect the overall shape of the dock, throwing the hinges out of alignment.

The best that everyone could come up with to try and get things together was an interesting form of tug-of-war:



But by now, almost everything is together. We still have one smaller section to add on to the end of the dock, but we'll need to dig up and attach hinges to that section first, and we probably need to order a bunch more spare hinge bolts before that happens, too. We managed to burn through the stockpile of hinge bolts, nuts, and washers pretty fast this year.

-

Last night I woke up at around 1 am, unable to sleep, with a flare-up of this horrible jaw pain. Unfortunately, this indicates that bourbon isn't a cure-all, because I'd had some before bed, and clearly, it hadn't worked. But it could still be the case that allergies are a contributing factor, because I forgot to take loratadine on Saturday. So I spent the second half of the night trying to find a comfortable position to sleep, and am groggy today. Bleah.

Since I put the word out regarding my sister, I've also been fielding some of the inquiries and replies from people. It kind of seems to me like one of the bigger things I could do on her behalf at this time is take on some of the emotional burden associated with this kind of health situation. With situations such as this one, a person comes to appreciate people who DON'T ask, "let me know if there's anything I can do" but instead just determine for themselves what they can do that is helpful, and do those things, including just being patient and standing by. I mean, none of the rest of us is in a good position to help her figure out how to get things squared away with her work (one of her priorities), and if anything, having to communicate with even more people just makes that worse for her.

With my dad, my mom and dad eventually got fairly good about providing periodic email updates to friends and family members. Perhaps eventually I can do something similar to that for R. Admittedly, right now, I'm kind of underwater, myself. But it isn't as though there's much to say yet, anyway.

Apparently, today is International Googly Eye Day.

https://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=31730

https://www.facebook.com/events/global/international-googly-eye-day/800007403792727/

I'm glad to see this show up: https://www.instagram.com/googlyeyesoftheworld/?hl=en

Heh heh heh heh...

















Heh heh heh...

My dad grew up in Montana, so when I was growing up our family would make annual pilgrimages from Seattle out to visit our extended family and spend time out in the Montana landscape. I have so many vivid memories of all kinds of adventures in Montana from over the years. Hiking trips in the mountains are among the most precious, but that was far from everything we ever did. Western Montana will forever hold a piece of my heart.

One year, we stopped in Butte to visit the Butte Pit - actually the Berkeley Pit, but I remember it as the Butte Pit.

The landscape of Western Montana is pockmarked and deeply disturbed by the legacy of mining. My dad grew up in Ennis, which is a short distance from two gold mining ghost towns-cum-tourist traps that we would routinely visit on our trips. Virginia City was large enough to have an old-timey Main Street with a candy shop, multiple gift shops, restaurants, bars, and a small musical theater. I'll never forget the year when, during a vaudeville act sung by a scantily-clad woman wearing a black feather boa, one of my younger cousins excitedly shouted, "It's an eagle!!" I tended to like Nevada City slightly better, because it consisted of more spread-out house displays one could wander among, sticking one's beak through doorways to admire the humble homes and workplaces. Nevada City would go quiet at night. Virginia City hosted the regional Fourth of July Fireworks show.

It was years before I came to understand one of the landscapes we'd pass by when visiting Virginia City and Nevada City. You'll have to forgive me my description, for I am neither a mining nor a geology expert. It was a relatively flat landscape that consisted of furrows of small to mid-size rubble, with shallow ponds of water interspersed. It was relatively nondescript, overgrown with grasses and small shrubs. Peaceful and quiet. I think it might have been a Roadside Geology book entry where we learned that this was the site of a mining practice that involved scooping up the surface material, hunting through it for valuable substances, then dumping out the tailings behind, moving inexorably forward to the next patch, leaving behind massive furrows of rock.

We spent a lot of time hiking, walking around, and riding horses in Montana. When we finally actually looked at that mined-out field and really saw it for the first time, it was immediately clear that the field was now completely hostile to anyone who might be interested in walking around. Perhaps birds, insects, and small mammals could join the scraggly plants that had quietly established a toehold, but whatever had been there previously was completely and utterly gone and upended.

This is far from the only large-scale landscape transformation in Montana. When we visited the Butte Pit, we learned that it was gradually refilling with water that contained leachate full of heavy metal residues from the rock remaining around the edges of the pit. There were concerns about migrating birds landing in the water and dying of exposure to the toxic metals. I was in high school at the time, so some of the events in the Wikipedia entry linked above hadn't yet happened.

At that time, I had a point-and-shoot film camera, so as any tourist does, I took a handful of photos. For one, I asked my parents and sister to show their reactions to what we'd observed at the Butte Pit.



I was reminded of this photo yesterday in a conversation about inheritance and family resemblances.

It still kind of boggles the mind that there's a gift shop adjacent to this mining pit overlook. The gift shop sells all kinds of beautiful copper products.

Maybe just 1-2 photos each instead of full posts since I seem to have fallen behind and with the semester about to begin, I may never catch up.

1. Foster Island walk, especially the underside of the 520 bridge, maybe also the video of the Montlake Bridge going up (because I am 5 years old and love watching drawbridges, and maybe you are 5 years old, too).







2. Mom's amazing garden. Holy zucchini, Batman!




3. Photos of photos: Mt. Rainier hike back when L was an exchange student staying with us; a favorite set of print photos. There's a lot more that could be said about these. These are the only photos I found that had Kath in them. There are more on Flickr.







4. Rowing at the Lake Washington Rowing Club:



5. Amazing weekend kayak camping trip to Schodack Island with scrottie, including new Bridge Club bridges!







We found a weather balloon!



We also watched the train bridge open up for the Captain JP III....and then have issues closing again, with a train honking somewhat impatiently. I filmed that, too, but don't have time to post it yet.

Got to get things set up for teaching next week, and we need to wrap up this leafcutter experiment, too. Busy times, but hopefully a good collection of memories to carry me through the darker days of fall and winter.

Don't you just love those episodes of "what I'd like to be doing vs. what I should actually be doing" ?

Yesterday evening I went through the photo albums I have in my possession, to see what photos, if any, I have of Kathleen. Hard copy photo albums are such a funny thing now. I believe I got my very first camera ever in around the sixth grade - at least, that's when I remember losing that camera at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (coincidentally, a trip I went on with annikusrex's family). It was a super cheap point-and-shoot that took cartridges instead of film rolls.

At this point I'm grateful for those memories of loading in the film (don't expose it!!!!!), winding the finished cartridge, bringing the cartridge to the drugstore to be developed, waiting to see how the photos all turned out. A lot of the photos were utterly terrible, but the whole process of having to wait and see is so different from the instant gratification of digital photography.

In any case, I believe that the majority of the hard-copy photos that remain from my childhood are all still at my mom's house. Not too long ago she tried to give them to us, but those old photo albums are huge and awkward, so I think I declined to schlep anything with me all the way back across the country on an airplane.

The hard-copy photos that have traveled with me all date from the end of high school through college, a timeframe when I spent some time with AKW's family, but apparently didn't see fit to photodocument much of our activities together. (in contrast, I have a ridiculous and unnecessary number of photos of rowing-related things and of certain Monty Python Society shenanigans; I no longer even remember the names of many of the people in those photos)

I did find one set of photos that goes along with a relatively simple story that I am now rather keen to scan in and share, from one small hike on Mt. Rainier. But I'm at work, and I should be working on some time-sensitive data analysis and manuscript-writing instead.

Having to compartmentalize is annoying, is all.

I know it's blurry.

My cousin A came up for a visit yesterday, since she had a 3-day weekend and wanted to get out. We paid a visit to the farmer's market, and then headed up to check out Thatcher State Park. I've been wanting to visit Thatcher for a while now, because I've heard nice things about it and it seems close enough for a future overnight bike camping expedition.

Little did I realize the trek is uphill to get there! That's not a total dealbreaker for camping, but does affect planning. As does learning they have an online campsite reservation system, and aren't open for camping until May 5 at the earliest. Another benefit of a recon mission is getting a copy of a map of the park.

I can't tell you how incredible it felt to finally go up in elevation to a place where it was possible to look out over Albany and its surroundings. I have a much better sense of place now that I understand Albany and the Hudson River are in the middle of a glacial valley.

It was also a fantastic time to visit, because the trees haven't leafed out yet to obscure the view, and the weather was sunny and clear so we could look out from the Helderberg Escarpment and see all the way up to the Adirondacks. Plus, the park's busy season appears to be May through October, so although there were people around, there weren't throngs, and parking was free.

I took approximately two million photos, which I'll put below a cut.

( Read more... )