Posted inGrowing older Home life

Our 2023 Christmas letter is about cars that act like old bodies

Here's our 2023 Christmas letter, hot off the press of my mind this afternoon after I decided that I really wanted to write it, notwithstanding my wife having said that we shouldn't send one out this year, because there's nothing interesting to report on in our lives. To which I thought, What?! How could that be, given all that happened with us in 2023? What she meant, I think, is that we haven't gone on any exciting trips or done anything noteworthy. That may be true, but exciting and noteworthy is in the eye of the beholder. Plus, that's not the…
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Posted inGrowing older

Hearing “Hey, Old Man!” got me thinking about people treated as an object

Above is the short version of what happened to me yesterday in downtown Salem (Oregon). But since I'm a wordy Old Man, I'm going to share a longer version.  As background, I am indeed old, 75. And a man.  So it doesn't bother me when my Tai Chi instructor, whom I've known for about 22 years, beginning with his instruction in a hard style martial art, refers to me in class as Old Man. For I'm the oldest man in the class, though my instructor is 70, just five years behind me. But it did bother me when I was…
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Posted inSalem

CASA of Marion County helps children in an inspiring way

Last Thursday CASA of Marion County had their annual luncheon in downtown Salem's Reed Ballroom. Vanessa Nordyke, CASA Executive Director, invited my wife and me to the event, which is both a fundraiser and an opportunity to showcase what CASA does. I was somewhat familiar with CASAs (Court Appointed Special Advocates) because my daughter, Celeste, had served as one in Orange County, California. But I didn't even know what CASA stood for until the luncheon. I came away highly impressed. A page in the event handout describes how CASA of Marion County helps foster children. A You Tube video I…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

A kitchen faucet problem reminds me of the wisdom in “I could be wrong”

I don't like to be wrong. But I dislike problems that defy fixing even more, whether these be personal, political, or any other sort. And what I've learned from painful experience is that when I believe I'm absolutely right, yet that rightness isn't resulting in progress at resolving a problem, the best thing I could do is tell myself, "I could be wrong." This morning, when I emerged from a separate bedroom where I sleep, my wife told me that our kitchen faucet that we'd gotten earlier this year had stopped working. It's a Delta faucet with Touch2O technology. Meaning…
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Posted inSports

2023 Oregon football: so close, yet so far

After Oregon lost to Washington by three points earlier in the football season, with Coach Lanning inexplicably choosing to not attempt several short field goals on fourth down, followed by a field goal miss in the closing seconds that would have tied the game, I was super excited when Oregon earned a rematch with Washington in the Pac-12 championship game. After all, Oregon had been winning by large margins since the Washington loss, while Washington looked beatable in most of its games, winning by just a few points while still remaining undefeated. Oregon was favored by about ten points. Plus,…
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Posted inFood and drink

Bummer! Trader Joe’s Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast discontinued for 2023

Oh, Trader Joe's, I'm so disappointed that you have put a piece of metaphorical coal in my vegetarian stocking this 2023 holiday season by discontinuing your marvelous vegan Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast -- which is the favorite meatless alternative of its kind for my wife and me. I bought several extra last year and put them in our freezer. Here's a photo of one of the last survivors of the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast purge before I took it out of the box and put it in an oven for Thanksgiving dinner. Now we're down to zero. Sob... The roast…
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Posted inSports

Sad to see last Pac-12 Oregon-OSU game. Glad Oregon won.

I had conflicting emotions this evening as I watched the Oregon football team defeat Oregon State 31-7 in what I've always thought of as the Civil War game, but now is the more politically correct Rivalry Game. The traditional name sounds more fitting to me, because I'm so used to it. But so does the longstanding tradition of the Pac-12 conference, which has been around in one form or another since 1915. That's 108 years of athletic history about to end, thanks to every school except Oregon State and Washington State departing for other conferences. Since I moved to Oregon…
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Posted inGrowing older

I’m thankful for a 98 year old guy I barely know

With thankfulness in the air, given that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I feel a push to make this a theme of my daily blog post (I have three blogs and write something for one of them each day.) I don't want to run through a litany of all the things in my life that I'm thankful for. That's boring, and I'd end up feeling that to balance things out, I should also mention all the things in my life that I'm not thankful for. Which also would be boring. So here's one short, simple moment of thankfulness that happened to me…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

I rejected getting an Apple Watch. Now I’m a big fan.

Well, I guess this shows that I have truly joined the Cult of Apple. Before, I only had a MacBook Pro laptop, an iPhone, an iPad, Apple TV, AirPods, and HomePod speakers.  That speaks of abject devotion to all things Apple, but isn't quite cultish. However, now that I also have an Apple Watch, Series 9 variety, I believe that I qualify for membership in the Cult of Apple. (Don't need an invitation; I'm self-selected.) For a long time I looked down on people with an Apple Watch, or indeed any sort of smart watch, as being techno-snobs. I proudly…
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Posted inGrowing older Retirement community

Why we’re still postponing living in a retirement community

Recently someone emailed me, saying that they'd Googled "hippie retirement community," apparently found my 2013 post, I'm 65. Where's my "Aging Hippie" retirement community?, and wondered if my wife, Laurel, and I had downsized or moved into a community. Short answer. No and no.  A bit of arithmetic, which thankfully I'm still capable of, reveals that if I was 65 on November 24, 2013 when I wrote the earlier post, and today is November 14, 2023, then I must be 75 now.  Bingo! Right on. Nobel Prize in Mathematics please. I was going to reply to the email message with…
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Posted inFamily

My daughter’s thrilled that she was employee #1 of an $80 million company

Bragging can be annoying, but I'm claiming the Father Exemption, because I can't resist sharing the news about a company being bought for a reported $80 million that my daughter was the first employee of. I learned about the acquisition of Barton Perreira, a high-end California eyewear company, by LVMH, a luxury conglomerate (Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co, and Dior, among others) from my daughter, Celeste Vos, a few days ago. She no longer works for Barton Perreira, having left to become the Vice President of Sales for Silhouette, another eyewear company. But she has fond memories of her time…
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Posted inStarlink

Starlink couldn’t recognize my Gen 3 Starlink router. Here’s the fix.

Last August Starlink, the SpaceX satellite internet service, sent me an email saying that because I was an early beta customer, I was entitled to send them $200 for a third-generation router that offered better features than our first-generation router. I accepted that offer. After an initial installation glitch caused by sometimes glitchy me, I ended up liking the Gen 3 router more than the first generation router that came with our round dish.  Recently, though, I encountered a bit of weirdness associated with the Gen 3 router. Maybe this was unique to our setup, but in case someone else…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Our job is to empathize with both Israelis and Palestinians

We live in an age of extremism. Our politics is marked by right-wing and left-wing, with little room left for moderates in the middle. "Whose side are you on?!" is said with an accusatory exclamation mark, since too often it is unthinkable for someone to be on both sides; you've got to choose one or the other. This is why I admired an essay in the November 6 issue of TIME by Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, "The world's job during the war." Harari says that while currently both Israelis and Palestinians are too filled with pain to…
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Posted inSports

Oregon State football coach made a bad decision. But don’t we all?

Oregon State football fans, of whom I'm one, along with almost everybody who watched yesterday's OSU game against Arizona, are grappling with the astoundingly bad decision Jonathan Smith, the Oregon State coach, made at the end of the first half. Jonathan Smith This is how CBS Sports described the debacle. The game was a 27-24 victory by Arizona. While the game ultimately came down to that final drive, Oregon State's fate may have been decided much earlier when coach Jonathan Smith dialed up one of the most questionable calls of the year. The Beavers had the ball at Arizona's 16-yard…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Maine mass shooting and Israel war are both result of craziness

This evening the suspect in the killing of 18 people in Lewiston, Maine and the wounding of 13 others was found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot. Robert Card had suffered from mental illness, having been hospitalized for two weeks last summer. Reportedly he had been hearing voices. Well, while Card likely had some form of schizophrenia, what he has in common with the rest of us is substantial, for we all hear voices inside our head: our own. Card's voices may have told him that other people were out to harm him, so he needed to kill as many…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy Science

I don’t believe in free will. Here’s why.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will. This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion. I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. To give you a feel for his general view…
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Posted inSalem

Ron Eachus has died. He served the world well.

Thank you, Rachel Alexander of the Salem Reporter, for writing a marvelous tribute to Ron Eachus: Ron Eachus, "incorruptible" consumer advocate and activist, dies at 76. Here's some excerpts that give a feel for this remarkable man. Ron Eachus, a steward of civic life in Salem and former utility regulator known for his “bulldog-like tenacity,” died from a heart condition on Saturday, Oct. 14, while hiking in Bhutan. He was 76. Eachus worked for over 20 years as an Oregon’s public utility commissioner, earning a reputation as a fierce consumer advocate while helping steer Oregon toward a focus on energy…
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Posted inSalem Starlink Television

Five miles from Salem city limits, our neighborhood is unserved by broadband

Our neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, is only about five miles from the city limits of Salem, Oregon's capital. So it isn't like we're in Outer Mongolia -- though when it comes to broadband access, we might as well be. For one of the things I learned by my phone conversation with a guy from the Oregon Broadband Office today, is that our neighborhood is unserved by broadband according to the federal definition:  An unserved location is defined as a broadband-serviceable location that the Broadband DATA Maps show as (a) having no access to broadband service, or (b) lacking access to…
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Posted inTai Chi

Death came too soon for Chris. So sad.

Today I heard about the death of Chris, a 46 year-old guy I came to first know during my Pacific Martial Arts karate days. Chris moved to the Portland area, but he'd return once in a while to take part in the Tai Chi classes that are now the focus of Pacific Martial Arts. He was engaging, positive, funny, and a pleasure to be around.  We were close in the way many men are: by sharing a love of a physical activity. I knew some things about Chris, but mostly I knew him through the martial arts classes we shared.…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Talking about racism in schools reduces bias

Here in blue Oregon, we're fortunate to have avoided the absurd laws in some red states, such as Florida, that make it very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to talk about racism.  Obviously this head-in-the-sand approach doesn't do anything to combat racism. It just prevents open discussion that could reduce racism. Last year I came across an article in Scientific American that cites psychological research in concluding that it's best for students to engage in honest talk about racism. The article appeared in the November 2022 issue, though apparently it was published online in August. That issue has been…
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