Posted inBicycling Salem

Sign my petition to support protected bike lanes in Salem

Yesterday I started a petition that asks the Salem, Oregon City Council to support a proposal by Salem Bike Vision to build a network of protected bike lanes in our city. You can sign it by clicking this link. Here's what the petition says. Riding a bicycle in Salem should be much safer and more fun than it is now. Sign this petition to urge the City Council to add protected bike lanes to the projects in a $300 million community improvement bond measure.I'm excited about this Salem Bike Vision proposal. A "bike lane" consisting of white lines on the…
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Posted inEntertainment

The shows I love to stream tell a lot about me

After writing the title to this blog post, I had a strong feeling of obviousness wash over me. OK, so be it. I plead guilty to stating the obvious. What people like to watch on TV says a lot about them. So does the music they like to listen to. So do the books and magazines they like to read.  Still, I find it fascinating how our personality gets projected into those sorts of activities. It's almost as if we don't need to meditate, engage in psychotherapy, or stare into the darkness of a coffee house expresso to know our…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Don’t feed the ground squirrels in Bush Park. They can bite.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, took our dog Mooka for a walk in Salem's Bush Park. Mooka loves going to the park because she finds the California ground squirrels there endlessly fascinating. Partly because they're so tame. Partly because Mooka hugely enjoys chasing squirrels on our rural south Salem property, though I don't think she's ever caught one. (Dogs suck at climbing trees; good news for squirrels.) Laurel got into a conversation with a man who told her that a child had been bitten at Bush Park by a ground squirrel, probably while feeding one of the cute little critters. He…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Right-wing extremism responsible for 10 mass shooting deaths

Yesterday thirteen people were shot and ten killed at a Buffalo supermarket by an 18-year-old white man armed with an assault rifle and high capacity magazines. A day after one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history, law enforcement officials in New York descended on the home of the accused gunman and probed disturbing hints into his behavior, as Gov. Kathy Hochul promised action on hate speech that she said spreads “like a virus.” The suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, shot 13 people on Saturday afternoon at a Tops supermarket in east Buffalo, killing 10, officials said. Almost…
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Posted inSalem

Statesman Journal eliminates opinion section. I’m irked.

I've been a subscriber to Salem's Statesman Journal newspaper for 45 years. The paper has always had an opinion section.  It's been my favorite part of the Statesman Journal. I enjoy reading letters to the editor. I like to peruse guest opinions by local people. Syndicated columns interest me. So do editorials written by newspaper staff, even when I disagreed with them -- which was frequent over the years. But yesterday Cherrill Crosby, the executive editor, wrote a piece saying that the Statesman Journal is doing away with the opinion section. The reasons were lousy.  Crosby claimed "this content does…
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Posted inBooks

Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series is so good, I’m marrying it

At the (very real) risk of sounding like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, I'm announcing some Breaking News, Happening Now. After my many years of passionate dalliances with other writers of spy novels -- notably the Gray Man and Mitch Rapp series -- I've decided to commit to a literary marriage to Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. I discovered Silva in 2018 after making the mistake of buying the book Bill Clinton wrote with novelist James Patterson, "The President Is Missing."  The book was bad. Not the worst I've ever read, but poorly written with shallow characters. After buying it, I read…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Young folks, here’s a tale of the not-so-good old days

Gather around the blog post kitchen table, young'uns. (Which means just about everyone, since I'm 73, older than all but a few people reading this, but, hey, if you're a sentient Giant Sequoia, I'm a baby compared to you.) I realize that hearing senior citizens talk about the good old days is just about the most boring thing imaginable. Not wanting to inflict that on you, I'm going to do something different. Talk about the bad old days.  I feel the need to do this because it wasn't all that long ago when I was a youngster just out of…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Covid cases rising in Oregon and Marion County with fewer people wearing masks

I've never stopped wearing a mask in indoor public spaces, even though masks are no longer required. When I see most people maskless, sometimes I wonder if I should join them. But since wearing a mask is no big deal, and I'd much rather do that instead of getting Covid and running a significant risk, about 30% I believe, of having nasty Long Covid symptoms persist for months or even years, I always end up putting my mask on. That decision is looking even wiser given the recent rise in Covid cases both statewide in Oregon and here in Marion…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

I’d like to trade Joe Biden for Volodymyr Zelensky

I'm a Democrat who is ever so thankful that Joe Biden is president rather than Donald Trump. But if I could trade Biden for President Zelensky of Ukraine, I'd make that deal without a second thought. Zelensky is a fighter. He's rallied the Ukrainian people behind him in their battle against Russia's invasion of their country. More: Zelensky has inspired the entire freedom-loving world by refusing to bow to the demands of Putin, an authoritarian ruler who is committing horrific war crimes in Ukraine, if not outright genocide. Biden, by contrast, is doing OK in supporting Ukraine, but not nearly…
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Posted inDogs Home life

How our dog drives me crazy: Example 1 of 1,000

I keep reading about how modern dogs are evolved from wolves who became domesticated when people realized that they could be useful, and stopped chasing them away from their prehistoric camps. That's probably true. But now the dog-human relationship seems to have swung almost totally in the direction of dogs benefitting from living with us.  Sure, I enjoy the company of our Husky mix canine, Mooka. However, she doesn't contribute very much around our house. The most useful thing she does is occasionally catch a mole or vole that's burrowing in our yard. Meanwhile, she regularly drives my wife and…
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Posted inBicycling Salem

Protected bike lane network proposed for Salem

I'm super-excited about the very real possibility that fairly soon Salem could have more than 55 miles of new protected bike lanes -- which now basically exist only in Minto Brown Park and a few blocks of downtown. This photo showing a protected bike lane elsewhere comes from a must-see web site that describes the Salem Bike Vision. At least, you must see it if, like me, you enjoy riding a bicycle but aren't wild about riding your bike in Salem on paths that are either nonexistent or consist of painted lines on the edge of a busy road. Here's…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

CenturyLink sucks when it comes to rural broadband

After we got Starlink satellite internet at our home in rural south Salem, Oregon in early 2021, I stopped complaining about CenturyLink after we dumped their crappy 6-7 Mbps DSL "broadband" and started enjoying 50-150 Mbps Starlink download speeds. But today a CenturyLink repair guy came to our house to fix an annoying buzz on our landline, which got me thinking about rural broadband again. (Yeah, we're old-fashioned, since we still have a landline, in part because the Verizon cellular connection on our iPhones is pretty poor, two bars at most, unless we take a hike up our long driveway.)…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Oscars blow it by a pitifully minor mention of Ukraine

Tonight's Oscars show was viewed around the world. It used to get hundreds of millions of watchers. Maybe that's less now. Regardless, both those who put on the Oscars and those who won awards blew it by failing to take a much stronger stand in support of Ukraine against Russia's unprovoked invasion. I watched every minute of the show. I kept waiting for someone -- a presenter, an award winner, anyone -- to make some impassioned remarks about the bravery of the Ukrainian people and the need for freedom lovers everywhere to support their battle against Russia. Instead, all we…
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Posted inHome life

My John Deere X394 lawn tractor works great on rough ground

After several decades of using a DR Field Mower (which you walk behind) to cut grass on our ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon, last summer I decided to admit that my 73 year old body needed an easier way of doing that job. So after considerable research and discussions with Ray Rodriquez at Pape Machinery, our local John Deere dealer, I bought an X394 lawn tractor.  It's taken me a few mowings to get used to the X394 (X means it is only sold through a John Deere dealer; the 94 indicates that it is at the upper…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Why I’m still wearing a mask in public indoor spaces

I readily admit that if you look at photos of me with and without a mask, there's good reason to feel that the reason I'm still wearing a mask out in public, even though it isn't required now in most places, is that I look better with my face covered up. (For sure, I look younger.) But actually I have some pretty good reasons to buck the clear maskless trend, now that Governor Brown has lifted the indoor masking order (which still remains for health care facilities and pharmacies). These reasons are based on public health advice/information I've been getting…
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Posted inHealth Living with a catheter

My first counseling session: “I feel like you heard me”

I could have saved the $40 insurance co-pay by taking the advice of this cartoon and letting our dog make me feel better, instead of going to my first Salem Health counseling session. But after seeing Wayne Halle, a MSW counselor, I'm convinced that I made the right decision to take my problems to a human, rather than a canine. I was referred to Halle in late December after I told my family physician that I found a recent glaucoma diagnosis to be more than a little disturbing, especially when layered on top of a couple of other annoying health…
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Posted inCoronavirus Home life

Scheduling group meetings is tough in the Age of Covid

For many years I've done the scheduling for a monthly Salon discussion group my wife and I are members of.  Pre-Covid, that used to be easy.  We'd meet in the homes belonging to the dozen or so people in the group. I kept track of where we met each month, doing my best to keep to a regular rotation among the various homes.  I'd ask the people who were next up in the rotation if they could host a meeting on a certain date. If they could, then I'd email everybody in the group to see if that date was…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

If democracy is worth fighting for in Ukraine, it is in the USA

It's too early to tell how Putin's invasion of Ukraine is going to turn out. Currently a 40-mile long Russian military convoy is making its way toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Tough times lie ahead for the people of Ukraine, who have been fighting bravely against the stronger Russian forces. But one thing is certain. The freedom-loving world has been inspired by the fierce determination of Ukrainians to preserve their democracy.  Strong sanctions against Russia have been supported by most European nations, even including usually neutral Switzerland, which has frozen the accounts of Russian oligarchs and others targeted by the…
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Posted inGrowing older Salem

I’m an old man who wears purple

It was a good day for me to wear purple. But I didn't know that when I chose a jacket to wear on a decidedly cold February day here in Salem, Oregon. It felt like a Patagonia jacket day. I have quite a few colors. Green, orange, black, blue, gray, and my very first Patagonia jacket, a purple one that I got for half price, probably because Patagonia had figured out that not many men wear purple. I like the jacket. I like purple. However, the first time I wore it to my Tai Chi class, someone said, "You're brave," because…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Covid is declining, but these tweets show the danger of relaxing too soon

For about a week I've been collecting Twitter tweets from people knowledgeable about the current state of the Covid crisis. Most of them deal with the danger of relaxing public health measures too soon. Denmark did away with all restrictions, and now is paying the price in deaths and cases. Below you'll find screenshots of my carefully curated tweet collection. Most recent are shown first. The top tweet from yesterday has some possible good news for those of us in Oregon. Schmidt is referring to the fact that Governor Brown has announced that the indoor mask requirement in public spaces will…
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