Posted inSports

Oregon pulls out a nail-biter over North Carolina in Holiday Bowl

After Oregon lost to Oregon State in the last game of the regular season, dooming Oregon's chance to play USC for the Pac-12 championship and potentially earn a Rose Bowl berth, going to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego struck me as a crappy consolation prize. And for most of today's game against North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl, that assessment seemed right-on. I was totally prepared for Oregon to lose, end up 9-4 on the season, and look forward to better times next year, since this season would have ended in a disappointing fashion. Then the fourth quarter happened.…
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Posted inLiving with a catheter

I’m now quite confident that diet affects how easily I can insert a urinary catheter

A bit over six months ago I theorized in a blog post, "Diet could play a role when having a problem inserting a urinary catheter."  I asked my urologist if he thought diet could play a role in the difficulty I sometimes have inserting a catheter. His answer: "Maybe." Not very helpful, as that left it to me to figure out my own answer.  After a lot of experimenting with different foods (I'm a health-minded 73 year old vegetarian), I'm pretty confident that yes, at least for me, diet does affect how easy it is for me to insert a…
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Posted inHome life Salem

After Oregon’s great ice storm of 2021, I’m glad the 2022 version was milder

If I didn't know what post-traumatic stress felt like before, I sure do now. Because as soon as I heard that a significant freezing rain event was headed our way, I couldn't get thoughts and feelings of the Great Ice Storm of February 2021 out of my mind. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, our home got about 5/8 of an inch of ice in that horrendous weather disaster. We lost lots of trees, including two big branches from an ancient white oak. And our electricity was out for 12 days. Not fun, obviously.  It's difficult to forecast…
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Posted inHome life

Our 2022 Christmas Letter has a theme of falling (not in love, on the ground)

Given our age, somewhere between 40 and 100, like almost equidistant, it becomes more difficult with every passing year to find a Christmas Letter theme that doesn't sound like it was written by a couple as old as we are. So in 2022 I embraced my inner geezer and chose to write about our unexciting senior citizen lives. A central theme is falling. But there's also a paragraph about our dog, Mooka. Something for everyone! Well, assuming you're somehow interested in the things we are. If this Christmas letter doesn't push a Wow button for you, click here for a…
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Posted inSports

Oregon State football, thanks for a great season

It felt wonderful to watch Oregon State play Florida in today's Las Vegas Bowl and have the most worrisome part of the game be whether the Beavers would hold the Gators scoreless, thereby ending Florida's NCAA-record 435 game scoring streak. I was rooting for this to happen, but Florida kicked a 40 yard field goal with 37 seconds left. Oh, well, that was about the only thing that didn't go right in Oregon State's 30-3 victory. A missed extra point was no big deal. I've got to admit that early in this year's football season I was more of an…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Elon Musk’s Twitter antics are hurting Tesla’s image

Until Elon Musk bought Twitter and started acting like a right-wing maniac, I had a favorable opinion of Musk. Sure, he had some annoying quirks. That comes with being one of the richest people on the planet. But overall I viewed Musk as an eccentric genius who was doing good things for the world. He made Tesla into a great company, jumpstarting the electric car revolution sorely needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  And his SpaceX company has made great strides in developing innovative advances in rockets, including booster stages that can land themselves and be reused. SpaceX also is…
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Posted inSalem

Salem City Club examines struggles of local journalism

Today's Salem City Club program featured two local journalists, Les Zaitz, editor of the Salem Reporter, and Dick Hughes, who used to be the editorial page editor for the Statesman Journal and now is a freelance journalist. The title of the program was "The Truth -- An Endangered Species?" But since journalists deal in the truth, and local journalism is struggling, Zaitz and Hughes made clear that the question really is whether local newspapers and other news sources are endangered. Hughes started off by sharing some disturbing statistics. (Hopefully I've got them mostly right, since I'm just a blogger with…
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Posted inSalem

Saffron Supply Company lives on in new location

A few days ago the Salem Reporter had a story about demolition beginning on the building that used to house the Saffron Supply Company and Union Gospel Mission.  That saddened me. At the time I'd forgotten that Saffron Supply wasn't going out of business, but had moved to 1450 Front Street NE. Indeed, the Saffron Supply web site now shows their new location.  That makes me happy.  I first started going to Saffron Supply after my wife and I moved in 1990 to a house in rural south Salem. It needed a lot of work, including drainage from the gutter…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Web/Tech

I love Twitter. Elon Musk, not so much.

When people ask if I'm going to cancel my Twitter account now that Elon Musk is in charge of the company, I say, Absolutely not. Then I explain why. I love Twitter. It's one of the first things I check on my iPhone when I wake up in the morning. It's one of the last things I check before I go to bed.  But I rarely use Twitter directly. I use a third-party app (Tweetbot) that collects tweets from the individuals and organizations that I follow, then presents them in a clean easy-to-use format. I never see tweets from anyone…
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