Hello, Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way, Washington

by   •   Tourism
 

There’s been another heat wave in the Seattle Metropolitan Area lately, but the weather finally eased up today, so I seized the opportunity to go outside and explore the Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way, Washing­ton, down by the intersection of Interstate 5 and the western starting point of Washing­ton State Route 18.

This has been a recurring sentiment every time I go to a specialty museum, but I did not realize that bonsai was so intense and involved. Prior to today, I just thought that bonsai was a method of tying up tree trunks to make them grow in unnatural ways. However, after going through the museum and read­ing a lot of the placards explaining the art of bonsai, I realized that it’s far more complex.

Usually, when you see bonsai trees, they are all the same very small trees with trunks and branches that are warped in strange ways. However, because this museum was a specialty museum, I was able to see a wide variety of bonsai trees, including some that seem like normal trees… but are a miniscule fraction of the size of the actual specie of tree.

My biggest takeaway from visiting this museum is that the art of bonsai is all about pa­tience, foresight, and forethought. Working with trees is far dif­fer­ent than other art forms or working with other living things. In many other art forms, you can generally get to your desired result with enough prac­tice and strategy, and other living things tend to be much more trainable and moldable. However, because trees grow at their own, very slow pace, it’s very difficult to get immediate feedback on changes you make to the tree, so it can take years or decades before you realize that you might have made a mistake.

The Pacific Bonsai Museum also had a lot of bonsai trees on display with extremely interesting backstories. My favorite one was a tree that had been sto­len, but because of the immense media coverage and pressure from the community, was magically found back in its place—presumably because the thief caved in and decided to return it.

If you’re ever in the area and have about an hour or so to spare, I recommend checking it out. Not only were the trees interesting to just look at, but if you also read the corresponding informational cards posted by each of the trees, it will be a fun learning experience. I wouldn’t say they’re particularly text-heavy compared to other museums, and they’re written in a way that will pique the interest of even non-enthusiasts.

As of my visit, admission was free, though there is a recommended donation of US$12.00 at the end of the exhibits, if you’re able to afford and are will­ing to contribute.

 

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Hello, Bellevue Botanical Garden in Washington

by   •   Tourism
 

Bellevue is a pretty nice city, and probably one of my favorite areas in the Seattle Metropolitan Area. I generally don’t like downtown areas of cities, but Bellevue has managed to keep their downtown clean, under control, inviting, and not overly congested.

The Seattle Metropolitan Area is fairly large, and while I was driving from one end of Lake Washington to the other, I decided to take a stop in between in Bellevue to check out some of the Marriott resorts and be a tourist.

One of the places I stopped by was the Bellevue Botanical Garden, a short distance east of Washington Interstate 405. There’s another heat wave that was expected to hit (and is here now), so I managed to squeeze in this trip right before when the weather was still tolerable.

For some reason, it was a bit tricky to keep track of where I was going—the trails weren’t actually that long, so only a short duration of walking would make me end up in a completely different area.

I believe I started near the Courtyard and Tapestry Hedge, went over to the Perennial Border, walked through the Fuchsia Garden, then started walking south on the Tateuchi Loop Trail. I connected onto Lost Meadow Trail, went over to The Ravine Experience Bridge, completed the Ravine Experience Trail, then circled back around and reconnected back to Tateuchi Loop Trail. I tried visiting the Native Discovery Garden and Bellville Arboretum, but I wasn’t quite sure whether I was actually there, or if the markings on the map were misplaced, as it just looked like the rest of the garden. For the last por­tion of my visit, I did a loop around the Yao Garden on the Yao Garden Trail, then went back to the parking lot.

 

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I spent another week surrounded by two dogs and a cat

by   •   Cats, Dogs
 

Around this time last month, I spent a week petsitting Bullet, Kaya, and Drake. Erin had another trip that she had to go on, so I came back to her house to take care of the dogs and cat again for another week.

Although I wouldn’t say the dogs have separation anxiety, Kaya still gets pretty sad when her parents leave. For the first several hours, she insists on sit­ting by the door awaiting their return.

Drake, on the other hand, as a fairly normal and independent cat, has full faith that they will eventually return. He instead decided to use the cat door to go out onto the covered balcony and take a nap outdoors.

Kaya noticed Drake and wanted to join him, so she went outside as well. She wanted to sunbathe, but managed to only get half her body in the sun, prob­a­bly because she got blinded by the sun and couldn’t see where she was.

I set up my computer workstation upstairs on a table near the living room, and Bullet decided to set up shop there as well. He spent a lot of time laying next to my chair and at my feet, making sure that I wouldn’t go anywhere without him.

On one of the days, I went into the guest room to change into my exercise shorts so I could take the dogs for a walk. Apparently Drake was sleeping on the bed, and he did not appreciate the interruption.

Hello Bullet.

While Drake was away using the litter box, Bullet swept in and took his spot at the base of the bed in the guest room. Drake was not very happy when he returned.

One of Drake’s favorite activities is sunbathing. However, when he is upstairs and far away from the balcony, but needs sun now, we have to make do with what’s available. Here is Drake using some of the natural light shining in during the morning and sticking his head into the sun strip.

Because this is my second time petsitting, the dogs are much more comfortable with me now than they were last time. They like to spend a lot of time around the guest room where I sleep, and when I got out of the shower one day, I noticed that they had repossessed my pillow.

Hello Drake.

I went to snap a photo of Kaya out on the patio, but when I kneeled down, she got up to walk over to me; I captured the photograph as she was getting up, and found it hilarious that she looks like an alpaca in this picture.

We have tentative plans for me to petsit again in September, so more photos to come soon…

 

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Hello, Upper Bristlecone Trail at Mt. Charleston, and Zumo the Keeshond

by   •   Dogs, Hiking, Las Vegas
 

During my routine once-every-two-months one-week-long air trip to Las Vegas to take care of all my errands all at once while road tripping across the country, I met up with two of my friends to go hiking at Mount Charleston, northwest of the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada. Also joining me this time around was Zumo, their Keeshond.

Before heading up to Mt. Charleston for our hike, we stopped by a gas station to get some beverages and snacks. Apparently there was a dog treat for sale at the gas station, so Zumo got a snack as well; if you look closely, you can see the small mess he left behind below his mouth.

As we got closer to the trailhead, we came across what appeared to be a wild horse. I’ve seen a ton of horses throughout my road trip, and even went to the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville to learn more about horses, but this is the first time that I saw a wild horse just roaming around out in the open.

Our trail of choice was Upper Bristlecone. We made it to the trailhead, which was right next to the Lee Canyon ski resort.

Near the trailhead was a large helicopter landing area. I walked over to the edge of the landing zone and snapped a photo of the mountains to the north­east.

The trail itself wasn’t too special for a majority of the hike—it was basically just a well-formed path cutting through forest. I did come across a few wild­flowers, like this red one.

Being a breed with a double-layer coat, Zumo got very warm very fast, and he had to take a lot of breaks to cool down.

In a sparse area of the forest, we found a little hut made out of branches and tree trunks. One of them even had a little entryway, so I climbed inside with Zumo for one of our breaks.

Eventually, we made it to the lookout point of the trail, which I guess you could consider the summit (there was no true “summit” because the trail con­tinued to an intersecting point of Upper and Lower Bristlecone, before turning into the regular Lower Bristlecone Trail). Immediately upon arrival, Zu­mo found some nice, cool rocks on which to lay down and cool down.

By this point, a thunderstorm had started to roll in. There was a decent amount of cloud coverage over by The Sisters…

… and clouds had completely engulfed Mummy Mountain.

The lookout point had a tree that was blossoming flowers with a very unique scent.

The storm clouds were rapidly approaching and it started drizzling, so we started making our way back down the mountain.

We arrived back at our vehicle just in time—with literally about half a minute to spare, it started pouring rain right as we got Zumo cleaned up and back in the car.

Unfortunately, my Fitbit activity tracker refuses to start tracking if I don’t have a data connection at the beginning of the hike (even if it can catch a GPS connection), so I wasn’t able to map this hike. However, based on other people’s maps on All Trails, it looks like our round-trip total was 3.2 miles (5.15 kilometers), with an elevation gain from base to lookout of 626 feet (191 meters).

Because the starting elevation was 8,692 feet (2,649 meters), the oxygen was sparse and it felt like much longer of a hike than it actually was. Even with the decent number of breaks we were taking to allow Zumo to rest up, I still got a little out-of-breath at times, and wished I had brought more than just a 28 fluid ounce (828 milliliter) bottle of Gatorade Zero.

There are a lot of great hikes at Mt. Charleston, and if it’s your first time, I’d recommend something like Cathedral Rock instead. Regardless, it was a good hike at Upper Bristlecone, and it was a nice opportunity to get away from the 100+°F (38+°C) heat of the Las Vegas Valley for a bit.

 

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Hello, Museum of Museums in Seattle, Washington

by   •   Tourism
 

Tempo had a small company get-together in the Seattle Metropolitan Area earlier today, so my friend and employee Ben Shumaker came to visit. Before the gathering, I showed him around downtown Seattle, then we decided to visit the Museum of Museums, an art museum in the First Hill district west of Seattle University.

It was a very strange museum. The best way that I can think of describing it is that it had an extremely progressive feel to it, and I noticed that it was try­ing to push some extremist liberal viewpoints, some subtly and some others not so subtly. It’s almost as if it was a museum dedicated to forming a col­lec­tion of art pieces that would otherwise not be accepted for display at mainstream art museums.

Funny enough, I actually found it pretty amusing. Although I personally don’t agree with a lot of the messaging of a lot of the art pieces, it was still very refreshing to see something different, bold, and unrelenting.

This was somewhat of an impromptu visit, so I didn’t bring my good camera and only had my phone for photos. They also didn’t have air conditioning, so I was dripping sweat the entire time and we wrapped up our tour quicker than anticipated so we could get out of the heat and make our way over to the company event. Admission was US$20.00 per person, which was unusually high for a museum of this size.

Overall, I don’t regret going, but it’s definitely not something that I would return to, nor is it something I’d recommend to others if you have limited time in Seattle and want to get the most out of your time and money.

 

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Re: “Why don’t you post on social media?”

by   •   Highlights, Q&A
 

Since June 1, 2021, the date on which I began my homelessness and roamed across the United States and Canada as a nomad, I’ve published 115 blog posts, 94 of which were related to my travel in some way. I like taking photographs of everything around me, not only because I want to save them as mem­o­ries, but also because I want to share them with the rest of the world so they can see what I see from my perspective, and I think blog posts are a great way to achieve this.

Naturally, one of the questions I regularly receive is why I do this on my own website and not on social media. In a broader sense, I get asked once in a while as to why I tend to just avoid using much social media in general. After getting my fair share of “you could have a cool Instagram account with all these travel pictures,” I decided to address why I have been running a personal website since 2003, blogging regularly since 2007, and avoiding social me­di­a platforms.

 
I do not want to give free content to other companies.

I’m not a particularly money-hungry person. You may have noticed that my website (at least as of today) does not have any advertisements or pro­mo­tion­al content, because I want my readers to be able to enjoy my content without interruption. I’m also willing to do things for friends without charg­ing them—for example, I’ll give them rides to places or run errands for them without an expectation of mileage reimbursement or payment, just as a way for me to have an excuse to go outside, move my body, and get some fresh air.

With that being said, I do not give anything for free to people who do not deserve it, and especially not to companies that do not deserve it.

If I upload content to social media, I perceive that as giving my content to massive social media corporations for free. A majority of social media plat­forms would not pay me for my content, and even if some of them did, the amount of money I would receive from them is so negligible that I’d rather just decline it and keep full ownership of my own content.

Sure, you could look at it as the social media plat­forms paying me with exposure by promoting my content to a wider audience, but my objective here is not to try and get famous off my content—all I want to do is leave behind a memoir of my life and share it with those who care enough to come search­ing for it on my personal website.

 
Social media doesn’t last forever.

I pretty much do not delete anything. Ever since around the middle of high school, I have obsessively kept everything that I’ve ever created from that point forward, and also went back and archived a lot of content I created as a younger kid. I believe in keeping as comprehensive of a library of my cre­a­tions as possible, so I make sure to keep backups and never put the “primary” copy of things anywhere it could be easily lost.

The stuff from high school that I mentioned above? It literally still exists, live, on this very website. I have intentionally made the navigation to older con­tent pretty difficult in order to avoid people from uncovering some of my cringey content from my past, but it’s still technically all there for the par­tic­u­lar­ly dedicated detectives who want to see what I was like as a teenager.

Imagine if I had written all that content on social media instead. Back then, I guess I would’ve been writing blog posts on MySpace. After MySpace ba­si­cal­ly died, I imagine I would’ve transitioned onto Facebook. Nowadays, Facebook is sort of falling out of favor… and there isn’t really even a great plat­form to write long-form content anymore. Would I post my photos on Instagram now, then write 3,000-word captions to the photos?

Not only would this make my work spread out all over the place, but if any of these social media platforms go out of business, my work that was o­rig­i­nally published there would be lost unless I go manually transfer them over… but it wouldn’t be a one-to-one transfer, because then that would mod­ern­ize the date stamps.

There are plenty of examples of companies going out of business and nuking their users’ content along with it. In a milder-case scenario, even if your content doesn’t get deleted, these websites could force you to pay to continue using their services—which is exactly what happened to Flickr, and pre­cise­ly why I no longer use them and instead just decided to stop worrying about bandwidth and start hosting all my media in-house now.

 
I want to have full control over the presentation of my content.

If I want to write something short and make it look artistic, I want to be able to do that. If I want to post photos of varying different dimensions and wrap text around it, I want to be able to do that. If I want to do a massive personal finance breakdown with charts and tables, I want to be able to do that. If I want to publish a humongous block of text like I am today, I want to be able to do that.

Social media platforms heavily restrict the amount of personalization and customization you can implement into your publications. In the old days, I re­member social media platforms being far more liberal with the types of HTML and CSS you could integrate into your profiles—I remember going ma­jor­ly overboard on my Neopets and MySpace profiles—but with so many web exploits nowadays, it’s not really safe or practical anymore.

Instead, all I can do is type plain text or BBCode markup at most, and conform to the existing permissible structure of the social media platform. I find that to be boring and restrictive, and would prefer to have my own space where I can literally code any PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and whatever other features I want directly into the page.

For example, in the website theme I’m using today, you might think that it’s just plain black text on a white background. However, that’s not actually true—the text is a very dark charcoal, and the background is slightly off-white to resemble paper. These extremely subtle color changes are supposed to make the website subconsciously look a bit classier without a majority of readers even realizing why, and it’s something that I can do because I have the full power to do whatever I want to with my website.

 
I want to stay true to my own voice without falling into the trap of optimizing to an algorithm.

No matter how stubborn someone may be, the number of interactions on social media posts eventually gets to almost everyone’s head. Low interactions can make a creator feel like they’re doing something wrong, while high interactions can lead the creator astray from what they truly want to do.

The most dangerous kind of bias is one that you don’t know exists. I don’t want to become overconfident and assume that I’m able to ignore the peer pres­sure from social interactions, only to be betrayed by myself.

The target audience for my blog is … myself. I literally create content on my website to please myself first, and to please everyone else second. Because of this, I don’t see any reason to put myself in a situation where I may subconsciously change my core objective by trying to satisfy a social media algorithm to earn the approval of people who I consider to be less important than myself when it comes to the scope of my website.

The best part about this is that this is usually the best way to retain long-term followers and supporters. Optimizing your content just for the surge of views and interactions by conforming to the latest trend will help you in the short-term, but those people will come and go. Staying true to yourself and consistently putting out content that you think is great content will result in slower growth but more reliable retention.

In a similar vein, I have noticed that social media platforms nowadays have become dangerously liberal, as opposed to remaining neutral. I have per­son­al­ly seen instances where people who wish to debate liberal and progressive viewpoints have been shut down and removed from the platform un­der the guise of being “hateful” or “spreading misinformation.” I, as someone who is non-partisan and moderate, have opinions that lean in both di­rec­tions of the liberal-to-conservative spectrum, and I do not want to have to think twice about what I write out of fear that the social media platform may unjustly ban me and lock me out of my account.

 

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