Posted inFamily

My granddaughter bonds with a baggage cart

Today I saw my two year old granddaughter, Evelyn, for the first time in a year. Proud granddad that I am, I'm pleased to report that within a few minutes of meeting up with her at the Maui airport I could tell that her good looks, charm, and intelligence are going to qualify her for a terrific career as an ... Airport baggage handler. Well, they get pretty good tips, so she could do worse in life.But I think Evelyn would be willing to work for free, given how much fun she had pushing the cart around. She took off…
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Posted inHealth

Time to panic about swine (H1N1) flu?

I'm trying to decide how concerned I should be about the potential swine flu (officially called H1N1) pandemic. There's so many things to panic about -- the economy, global climate change, whether Jack Bauer is going to survive his exposure to a lethal bio agent and come back for another season of "24."I've got to prioritize my anxieties. So where should swine flu reasonably place on a holy shit! list of potential freakouts? I'd say, about halfway. Nearer the bottom at the moment; could rise considerably higher this fall and winter if H1N1 returns in a more virulent form.Back in…
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Posted inHumor Science

Dancing cockatoo shows that birds can boogie

Browsing through some news web sites this morning, it was nice to come across a story that made me smile rather than frown (as swine flu and economic headlines do).For the first time, apparently, scientists have proven that an animal can dance to music. Snowball, a cockatoo, performs to various tunes. This video of him grooving to the Backstreet Boys was the first one I watched. Loved it! I wish our dog could do half (heck, a tenth) as well. And that I could put a video of her on You Tube that would get over 2,150,000 views.Unfortunately for our…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Live with coyotes, don’t kill them

Excellent story in the Portland Oregonian today, "Coping with neighborhood coyotes." It makes the same points that my wife and I have shared with some coyote-hating neighbors of ours recently.(Since the Oregonian eventually archives its online stories, I scanned the piece by Jacques Von Lunen so it will be permanently available.)Download Oregonian coyote story 4-28-09Coyotes are part of nature's balance. Von Lunen says they weren't in western Oregon until wolves were eradicated and clear-cutting of forests enabled them to cross the Cascades.Laurel and I wish we had more of them here in semi-rural south Salem. Ground squirrels are a problem…
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Posted inHome life

Drilling a new well: lessons from our muddy experience

If you have city water, you turn a tap and water comes out. Pretty simple. Out here in the south Salem (Oregon) countryside, each house has an individual well. And that's where things get complicated.Especially if you have super-crappy water, as we do. It takes four large tanks in our garage -- an ozonator, softener, iron filter, and ph adjuster -- to treat our current well water and make it suitable for indoor use (outside, the plants love the raw water with its iron, magnesium, and such).The equipment is sensitive, prone to breakdowns, and fairly expensive to maintain. So we've…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Don’t mess with Oregon’s strip clubs

They're going to have to pry nude dancers out of Oregonians' sweaty, dollar bill-clenching (or is it a five spot these days?) hands.At least, I hope so. I haven't been in a strip club for a long time. But it bothers me when prudes in Tualatin want to amend the Oregon constitution so local governments could regulate where the clubs are located. We're #1 in free speech. And strip clubs. Why surrender our top positions?Oregon's constitution and rulings by the Oregon Supreme Court have protected nude dancing, adult bookstores -- even live sex shows -- through the free-speech clause. Those…
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Posted inBooks

My review of “The Ego Tunnel”– 5 stars

I buy lots of books from Amazon. I don't post many reviews about them. Just four, something I'm not proud of.Because I love to peruse the Amazon reader reviews when I'm trying to decide whether to purchase a book. Often what someone has said determines if I click the buy button. So it's sort of strange that I usually don't take the time to offer up my own impressions of a book.Guess I figure that all of my blogging, which frequently includes a mention of books I've been reading, fulfills my review-karma. But once in a while I'm drawn to…
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Posted inUncategorized

Homeless obvious in Portland, Oregon — not Munich

A friend recently got back from a trip to Munich, Germany, where she attended a week-long conference. When I asked what struck her about Munich, compared to this country, she said: "You don't see any homeless people there." But here in Oregon, as elsewhere in the United States -- supposedly the Greatest Country on Earth (according to Fox News) -- homelessness is painfully obvious. As hugely talented Oregonian cartoonist Jack Ohman showed in the Sunday paper today. (click to enlarge...and maybe weep)We need to stop this "greatest country" crap. Fortunately, Obama is restoring some much needed reality to our sense…
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Posted inUncategorized

Fox News tries to make tea party news

Today some friends and I were talking about how Fox News was in the business of making news, not reporting it -- when it came to promoting the ridiculous pseudo-tax protests called "tea parties."I say pseudo, because the sparsely attended tea parties clearly were much more Obama-bashing events than anti-tax efforts. After all, Obama has reduced taxes for 95% of working Americans, not raised them.Here's proof.As Media Matters has extensively documented, Fox "News," the most popular cable news network in America, aggressively pushed these tea parties on air and on line for weeks on end. It billed them as "FNC…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Some April ’09 Oregon land use news

Like I said earlier this month, things have been pretty quiet on the Oregon land use front since Measure 49 was passed by voters in November 2007, restoring some much-needed protections to this state's vaunted livability.But there's been some action recently.Closest to home, a Marion County hearings officer issued her recommendation on the Laack subdivision vested rights application. (It's a 3.2 MB file.)Download Laack vested rights recommendationMy wife and I have been leading our neighborhood's fight against the proposed subdivision, which the county's own groundwater experts say threatens neighboring wells and nearby Spring Lake. The vested rights "recommendation" really isn't…
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Posted inUncategorized

Less God, more porn

Pat Buchanan says America "is being systematically de-Christianized and secularized," while pornography is promoted.And the problem with this is...? Sure sounds to me like this country is on the right track. My fellow citizens are steadily coming to the same conclusion also.
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Posted inUncategorized

I love taxes! They do so much good.

Today is tax day. I feel happy. Giving, like they say, is better than receiving. Well, at least equal.Each year, paying our taxes is the biggest gift that my wife and I offer to other people. We help elderly and poor people get health care through Medicare and Medicaid. We help make public education available to every child in America. We help support international assistance programs that feed, clothe, and otherwise assist fellow human beings in need.Close to home, today our local newspaper here in Oregon ran a story, "Thousands more may get jobless benefits." Women with children. Young people…
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Posted inNeighborhood

California ground squirrels are driving us nutty

Maybe this is karma for a one-time Californian, moi, defying Oregon governor Tom McCall's plea in the 1970s to "come visit, but please don't live here." I stayed, and now I've got plenty of California company --  ground squirrels who have migrated into the northwest and are making a mess of our yard and crawl space.  They are super cute, which makes dealing with the critters a lot more difficult. We can't imagine killing them. But their reputation as "one of the most troublesome pests to homeowners and gardeners" seems well-deserved.For most of the nineteen years we've lived in rural south…
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Posted inHealth

Patients should question their colonoscopy preparation

Recently I wrote about my aggravation when staff at Salem Gastroenterology Associates (SGA) , the only place in town that does colonoscopies, brushed off my questions about their two day clear liquid diet preparation for the procedure.I'd emailed a mention of the post to the SGA nursing staff, saying that I hoped they'd reconsider both their colonoscopy prep protocol and how they respond to patient concerns. Yesterday I got a phone call from Zoe Wendolowski, who I believe is the nursing head honcho (probably her real job title is more formal). We had a thoroughly enjoyable lengthy conversation that likely…
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Posted inHome life

Well drilling ups and downs

These well-drilling photos are a good reflection of our emotional state the past few days. Drilling a new well has its ups. It was a kick to see Troy, of All Seasons Well Drilling here in Salem/Keizer, making his rig do sit-up tricks as he maneuvered the hugely heavy truck into place over the gravel that we'd put down in front of the new well location. Next day he was ready to go. Amazingly, given the stories I've heard about how long it used to take someone to dig a well by hand, or with crude equipment, he was down…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Ageless consciousness or perpetual immaturity?

I don't feel my age (60). But when I ponder my inner sense of self, it seems that I don't feel any age.That said, often I'll admit to having an adolescent personality. But since I'm a man, this pretty much is taken for granted. (Witness my instant infatuation with iFart.)Plus, it's obvious that if we're going to feel like we're a different age than what we are, it's going to be a younger age, since we have no experience with being older. So when people say "I don't feel my age," I suspect they're referring to what I said above:Consciousness…
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Posted inHealth

Think twice about getting a colonoscopy in Salem (Oregon)

First off, note that I said think twice. Your first thought -- "I should get a colonoscopy"-- is absolutely correct. The procedure saves lots of lives through early detection and prevention of colon cancer, though recent research shows it isn't as effective as previously thought. Now it looks like colonoscopies prevent 60-70% of cancers rather than 90%. Still darn good. Which is why I had a virtual (CT) colonoscopy in 2006. Naturally I blogged about it.Last fall an occult (hidden) blood test done as part of my annual physical exam was positive. I asked for a re-test, since I had…
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Posted inMeasure 37

Oregon Court of Appeals ruling supports Measure 49

The Oregon land use front has been pretty quiet since Measure 49 was passed by voters in 2007, negating the most obnoxious provisions of Measure 37 -- which allowed some property owners to opt out of rules that everyone else has to live by.However, legal issues relating to these measures continue to percolate in the coffee maker of state and federal courts (to use metaphorical language that I regretted as soon as the words dripped through the filter of my writing mind, but which I'm too lazy to change).One of these issues is whether Oregon's "goal post statute" -- ORS…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Twitter — my path to enlightenment

Some people consider my new found Twittering to be a useless waste of time. By "some people" I mainly mean my wife. She hasn't realized yet, as I have, that Twitter is much more than an easy means for me to cast 140 characters or less of what I'm doing into cyberspace on a whim. Clearly, it is my path to enlightenment.I say this after having pursued daily meditation, vegetarianism, and other spiritual practices for some forty years (longer, if one considers that being almost continually stoned on pot or psychedelics in college is a spiritual practice).Now, of course, I…
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Posted inDogs

Do dogs try to cover, or spread, their poop?

When I told my wife that today's blog topic was dog poop, she said, "You're lucky that this is all you have to worry about." Since at the time she was vacuuming the kitchen floor while I was perched at the counter with my laptop, sipping a cup of coffee and using Google to delve into the depths of dog poop behavior, I have a feeling that her comment had an ironic quality to it.I'm unapologetic, though. Human civilization advances by exploring the natural world. And few things are more natural than pooping. My interest in this question began a…
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