Posted inHome life Salem

Yellow jackets and forecasts say weekend will be HOT

Before sharing how damn HOT several weather forecasts are saying the coming weekend in Salem will be, this sign my wife put up yesterday speaks to how yellow jackets are viewing our highly unusual weather. We're used to yellow jackets causing problems on our rural property during the summer. But we rarely, if ever, see them acting aggressively before late July or August. That's when I wrote "Killing yellow jackets in their hidey-holes," my detailed description of how Laurel and I normally deal with yellow jackets. Yet here we are in late June with Laurel getting stung as she walked…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

Is 94 degrees hot? Ask your inner child.

I just got back from a 2-mile hilly walk around a road loop in our rural south Salem neighborhood. The thermometer tells me it's about 94 degrees.  But it can't tell me if that's hot.  Hot is subjective. Temperature is objective. The difference explains why I'm often asked by a Starbucks employee, when the temperature gets over 80 in our part of Oregon, if I want my grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte iced or hot. I try not to sound too heat-superior when I reply, "Why, hot of course. I don't believe in drinking an iced coffee no matter what…
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Posted inHome life

Happiness in this dry spring is 2.6 inches in our rain gauge

This is what happiness looks like when, as my wife and I do, you live in a groundwater limited area in the south Salem hills and this has been the driest spring ever in our part of Oregon. I turned off our sprinkler system last week when substantial rain finally was forecasted. Then I dumped out the small amount of water in the rain gauge.  So we got about 2.6 inches of rain during the recent wet weather period. That's more than I expected, thanks in part to some intense showers that passed over us periodically. The past three years…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

“In the Heights” shows joy of belonging to a community

Today I praised the In the Heights movie to someone who hadn't heard of it. They pulled out their phone and told me the film's Rotten Tomatoes ratings: 96% positive for critics, 95% positive for viewers. I said, "I'm surprised it wasn't 100%."  In the Heights is that good. My wife and I watched it at home via our HBO Max subscription. It's showing at Regal Willamette Town Center and Regal Santiam here in Salem, plus the Independence Theater. It looked and sounded fine on our TV. I'm sure it would look and sound even better on a really big screen.…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

How to get voice recognition working on LG TV

I'm enjoying our new LG television, which we got about two weeks ago. So far there's only been one glitch, and one annoyance. The glitch was the voice recognition button on the remote for our OLED55C1PUB model stopping working, after it functioned fine initially.  I kept getting the error message, "A temporary issue has occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please try again later. (200)" But after later arrived, the voice recognition button still didn't work.  A phone call to LG customer support led to a solution, though it took quite a while (three transfers) before I finally…
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Posted inHome life

Californians are one reason Oregon lumber costs so much

Having moved to Oregon from California 48 years ago, the statute of limitations, non-native variety, seems to have absolved me of criticism for where I came from before living in what obviously is the best state in the nation. So now when I hear that those damn Californians are to blame for some Oregon problem, I feel totally comfortable chiming in with criticism of those misguided neighbors to our south. Today Laurel, my wife, and I headed off to Parr Lumber in Salem to check out samples of composite decking from Trex and TimberTech.  Our large cedar deck needs work,…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sports

Baseball as metaphor for politics: why OSU’s loss bothers me

Today the Oregon State baseball team failed to win a regional series in the NCAA tournament. After leading 5-0 in the deciding game against Dallas Baptist, Dallas Baptist scored eight unanswered runs and won 8-5. After watching the loss on ESPN, I found myself more disturbed than seemed reasonable. After all, it was just a baseball game. But sometimes I find deep philosophical meanings in sports events, as evidenced by "Deep thoughts about Arkansas' missed pop-up that cost a World Series championship." In this case, it was the first pitch thrown by OSU reliever Joey Mundt in the seventh inning…
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