Posted inCars Home life Uncategorized

With Tesla easing out of the car-making business, the BMW ix3 electric SUV looks appealing

My wife and I were early electric car buyers. Too early. Because we only kept the 2011 Nissan Leaf we bought for about eight months. Even though it just had a range of about 100 miles, there were other reasons why we sold it and bought a Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. Now I'm driving a gas-powered Subaru Crosstrek, while my wife has a Toyota RAV 4 plug-in hybrid. It has enough electric range that she has to worry about its gasoline going bad if the car hasn't been driven out of town for a while. For my next car, I'd…
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Posted inHealth Living with a catheter

I’m irritated with this Salem doctor, and pleased with this Eugene doctor

There's a lot I could say about the prostate surgery (TURP) I had two months ago at the PeaceHealth Riverbend hospital in Springfield. But in this blog post I'm going to try to follow my adage, "The only people who want to hear about an old man's prostate surgery are other old men, or the man's closest family and friends." So my goal here is to mainly talk about a bigger issue, one that almost everyone who interacts with doctors faces at some point: how is it that some M.D.s are so uncaring toward patients, while other M.D.s are so…
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Posted inHome life

Yay! We qualify for solar panels, even though our house is surrounded by tall trees

Today I got some good news. After seeing an ad in the Oregonian by Energy Trust of Oregon, I took them up on an offer to have reputable solar companies contact me, rather than taking a chance on the many posts I see on Facebook by firms making grandiose claims about how much a homeowner can save by installing their solar panels. Soon after I filled out an Energy Trust form with my address and contact information, I heard from someone who grew up in our rural south Salem neighborhood, and still lives nearby. Miles Henderson works in sales with…
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Posted inFamily Home life

I just learned about placeholder relationships. Sure didn’t apply to me and my wife.

Thanks to an article in TIME magazine by Meehika Barua, "The Rise of the Placeholder Partner," recently I learned about placeholder relationships. Barua explains what this means in her opening paragraphs. A friend of mine got out of a six year relationship, only to have her ex marry someone new within six months. Another woman I met at a networking event recently has been with her boyfriend for a decade, waiting on a ring. Every time they go on a vacation, she wonders if this holiday will be the one where he will propose, only to be dejected on the…
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Posted inInvesting

I was surprised how good I felt selling a crude oil fund and buying a sustainability fund

Gasoline prices have been on peoples' minds lately, given how the war with Iran that Trump started for some dubious reasons has caused the price of Brent Crude Oil to shoot up markedly, as shown in this 10 year chart provided by the Trading Economics site. Our neighborhood gas station here in Salem, Oregon is charging $4.25 a gallon, last time I looked. While I'm an environmentalist, a number of years ago our financial advisor thought that my wife and I needed a commodities fund in our investment portfolio, which otherwise largely consists of index mutual funds and a balanced…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Making daylight saving time permanent would save lives — of people and deer

I've found that whether changing our clocks twice a year is a good thing or bad thing, and whether it would be best to make daylight saving time or standard time permanent, are subjects that arouse more extreme opinionating in a group than religion or politics. Almost everyone has a firmly held view on this. Mine is that daylight saving time should be made permanent, as I've argued in these previous blog posts: Making daylight saving time permanent is a must, Congress Daylight saving time should be permanent -- no more "fall back" time change Let's make daylight saving time…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

If your iPassword extension for Safari disappeared, this worked for me to get it back

Recently the 1Password extension for Safari disappeared on my MacBook Pro. The extension wasn't showing in Safari settings, so most of the tips for getting it back that I found via some Googling didn't apply. Nothing else worked either. I was down to the tip of uninstalling 1Password on my computer, then installing it again. I was reluctant to do that, because I didn't want to risk screwing up my much-beloved 1Password, which I use a lot and had been workin fine until the extension disappeared. So I asked 1Password support for help. Soon I got an email from a…
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