Posted inHome life

Buy our 2007 Prius! Just 36,500 miles on it!

[Our car has been sold. Sorry, would-be Prius buyers. Disappointingly, the couple who bought the car learned about it via an AutoTrader listing, not this blog post. We ended up selling it for $16,000, which is about what I expected to get -- once I realized that nobody was going to pay $1 million for a 2007 Prius Touring, unless it was made of gold.] I've never wanted to be a real-life car salesman, but it's kind of fun to play one in a blog post... BUY, BUY, BUY! -- THIS CAR WON'T BE IN OUR DRIVEWAY FOR LONG!Wow, a…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Why we didn’t buy our Leaf from Salem Nissan

Us bloggers believe in giving businesses praise when praise is due, and also publicizing buying turn-offs. So here's how I just replied to an email from Salem (Oregon) Nissan. I'd gotten a message from Salem Nissan asking if we were still in the market for a car that included this request: If you are no longer looking or would like to be removed from my follow-up list, please send a quick note to let me know. I did just that, saying "We're buying a Leaf from the Corvallis Nissan dealer, so you can take us off your follow-up list." When…
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Posted inHome life Sustainability

We test drive a Nissan Leaf. How dog friendly is it?

So there we are today, looking over a blue 2011 Nissan Leaf, all 100% electric and high techy, wondering if we should go ahead and buy the car after putting down a $500 deposit on it upon learning from Russ Goodyear at Corvallis' Jack Scoville Nissan that a Leaf could be ours much sooner than expected, owing, I believe, to someone cancelling an order for this car. Russ is ready to show us its technological marvels, and let us take our first test drive, but first Laurel needed to closely inspect the car's dog friendliness. How comfortably and safely would…
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Posted inHome life

Warning: corn is more dangerous than it looks

Ears of corn. They seem so natural, so innocent, all wrapped up in their tight green leafy kimonos, begging to be stripped naked and devoured with lustful buttery zeal. (Guess I've been watching too much Stephen Colbert "cornography.") But when you get them home... watch out. Yesterday I found out how dangerous corn can be. I don't want anyone else to suffer needlessly like I did, so I'm getting my story out onto the Internet in hopes of saving other innocent victims from what I've gone through. I stopped at a farm stand where I've been buying fruit all summer.…
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Posted inHome life

In praise of a certain insanity

"This is insane... this is insane... this is insane." That was my mental mantra in the early afternoon today, after I'd been using my DR Field Mower for about an hour on our toughest patch of untamed tall grass, brush, and an ungodly number of trees that Laurel and I planted years ago in the midst of the grass and brush, each of which requires maneuvering the heavy walk-behind mower around it. Like I've said before, it's hell. Also, heaven. There’s a point when my mowing hell turns to heaven. It’s when my shirt is soaked through with sweat, the…
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Posted inHome life

My wife rescues a gopher snake caught in netting

I don't like snakes. So when I saw my wife standing outside on our deck, knocking excitedly on our locked sliding glass door, yelling "I need some manicure scissors to save a snake," I was pretty damn impressed with her animal-compassion. I rushed to a bathroom drawer and found the scissors. Later I heard another knock. And saw... Wow. Now I was super-impressed. I've never even touched a snake, much less held a large one up in the air. This iPhone photo doesn't do justice to the size of the gopher snake. Here's how Laurel described her snake adventure in…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

Apple solves my half-disappeared Arial “p” problem

A few days ago my MacBook Pro lost half of it's Arial "p." I've got no idea how this happened. All I know is that certain web sites which use the Arial font (Google, for one) suddenly were weird to read. Picture a "p" that's missing it's straight vertical line. What's left is a backward "c." Well, if I looked closely I could discern a faint shadow of the missing "p" line. It was very hard to see, though. When I phoned Apple support the first guy I talked to was mystified. He checked on his computer to see if…
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Posted inHome life

What I like most about my 2011 Mini Cooper S

About three months ago, after my Mini Cooper S hardtop (pepper white with black roof) arrived from England and I drove it home for the first time, I predicted that the car would bring me perfect happiness. Since so far I've only been able to drive the Mini from Portland to Salem, then around town here a bit, I can't be 100% confident that this car-of-my-dreams will bring me the unalloyed happiness that I so richly deserve after having postponed the consummation of my Mini love affair for eight freaking years. First impressions matter a lot, though. And after spending…
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Posted inHome life

Ethical struggle: how to order coffee in my own mug

Readers of this blog post likely will have two common reactions to it: "Brian, you have too much time on your hands" and "Brian, you think too much." I disagree. To both notions. Ordering coffee is a subject of great importance to me. Ditto with using my brain to ponder matters of Great Importance (the thought just came to me that those words deserve capital letters). So I've decided that it's time to bare my caffeinated soul. I need to talk about the ethical quandary that arises almost every time I go into a coffee house and ask the barista…
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Posted inHome life

Video tour of our Oregon garden, when it was — shock! — sunny

We have non-easy care landscaping. Our home's garden isn't a "mow it and forget about it" sort of place. It's filled with plantings that require a lot of attention from the two of us. So I decided to take advantage of some sunshine this Memorial Day (annoyingly brief; it started raining again late in the afternoon) and conduct a video tour of our rural south Salem garden. My thought was that if more people see it, we'd be able to divide all the time, money, and energy we pour into our yard by a greater number of eyeballs -- thereby…
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Posted inHome life

Our electric car cup is full with a Leaf and i MiEV

OK, we don't actually have a Nissan Leaf or Mitsubishi i yet. But I've finally been able to reserve a place in line to buy one of these cool electric cars, something that wasn't possible until recently. While we were on a Maui vacation last month I read in the Honolulu paper about how Hawaii was going to be one of the first states where the Mitsubishi i MiEV would be introduced. (This car is just called the "i," a strike against it. Anything that costs almost $30,000 should have more than one letter in its name. Plus, "i" doesn't…
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Posted inHome life

How we stopped a robin’s pecking at window glass

My wife and I have been battling robins at our rural Salem, Oregon home for many years. Almost every spring some crazed robin will obsessively peck at our bedroom windows, which are conveniently (for the bird) located next to a large oak tree. The robin will sit on a branch, seemingly getting more and more irritated at another robin which has the gall to invade his territory during mating season. Of course, the other robin is his reflection in the glass, which makes it pretty damn difficult to chase the intruder away. Back in 2003, I wrote about my frustrations…
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Posted inHealth Home life

I’m saving money with a Canadian pharmacy

As a U.S. citizen, here's my bottom-line experience with ordering a prescription drug from a Canadian pharmacy: I'm saving hundreds of dollars a year, and the quality of the generic drug seems just as good. So, what's not to like? Well, only one thing so far. The drug I'm getting is Dutasteride, the generic version of GlaxoSmithKline's Avodart, a prostate shrinking medication. (Like I said before, a prostate exam is the only time a man doesn’t want to hear from a female who is inspecting his genital area that he's larger than average.) The Canadian pharmacy I'm using is called…
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Posted inHome life Salem

“Salemia” video starts shooting in Oregon’s capital

Hah! Deal with this, Portland, you snooty we're-so-much-better neighbor city to our north. You may have super greenness, nightlife, great restaurants, a thriving music scene, and Mt. Hood in your backyard, but as of today Salem -- yes, boring Salem -- has its own cinematic rival of the much-admired (also, reviled) "Portlandia." Well, more accurately "Salemia" is on its way, filming having started today. (If you're not familiar with the fascinating history of Salemia, all two months of it, I've bloggishly recorded it here, here, here, and here.) Having landed my dream role in this production, the Crusty Transient character,…
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Posted inHome life

No lavatory on plane — pretzels favored over beer

Oh yeah, flying is so much fun nowadays. Last Friday our Horizon flight from Portland to Burbank was delayed an hour while "a maintenance problem" was dealt with. That's all the explanation we were given by the gate announcer. But given what happened on our return flight, there's reason to suspect that the problem lay behind the door of the all-important tiny compartment at the back of the plane. Namely, the lavatory. For several reasons I'm a big fan of airplane lavatories. One, I'm 62. And even though I've reported that my age-related urge to pee has been reduced quite…
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Posted inHome life

My 2011 Mini Cooper S should bring perfect happiness

You might think that my expectations are too high, but I'm anticipating that the 2011 Mini Cooper S hardtop which just manifested in my driveway will bring me perfect happiness for the rest of my motoring life. (Those in the Cult of Mini, which now includes moi, don't drive; they motor.) Unfortunately for our pocketbook, when I said "manifested" I wasn't referring to a miraculous appearance of the Mini Cooper S. Via several blog posts I've been lobbying God for this to happen since my Mini lust began in 2003. (See here and here; each prayerful plea was roundly ignored…
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Posted inHome life

One option to deal with New York Times online fees

I love the New York Times web site. So it was disturbing to learn that soon unlimited access to the site is going to cost from $15 to $35 a month. At first I thought, "I'll head elsewhere in cyberspace to get my news." But then I realized that (1) there's nothing like the New York Times, and (2) the NYT could go out of business if people aren't willing to pay for online content. Reading comments on a story about the digital subscription plan, I saw a response from corporate communications staffer Eileen Murphy that generated an aha! in…
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Posted inHome life

My timings off with iPad 2 and potassium iodide

Well, I guess sometimes the early bird really does get the worm. And us late birds get the worm several weeks later. I happened to be awake at 1:00 am last Friday morning, when the iPad 2 went on sale via Apple's web site. Since we'd planned to get one for my wife, I hauled my MacBook up to the bathroom and checked out the Apple store while I brushed my teeth. I configured an iPad 2 and was about ready to click "buy." Then I realized that I didn't know what color cover my wife would like, and I…
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Posted inHome life

I sell my mother’s silver in a hotel room

So what do you do with a cardboard box full of silver stuff -- teapot, candle holders, serving dishes, trophies -- that's been sitting in the garage for over twenty years, tarnished beyond belief, when you have no idea what it's worth or who might want to buy it? That was my problem when my wife, who's been doing most of our pre-spring garage cleaning, told me "You've got to do something with your mother's silver. It's been taking up space for too long." Dutiful husband that I am, I picked up the box from the floor of the garage,…
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Posted inHealth Home life

Regence BlueCross of Oregon: incompetent beyond belief

Yesterday my wife had another frustrating encounter with the Regence BlueCross of Oregon bureaucracy. (Previous ones have been blogged about here, here, here, here, here, and here.) This further convinced us that people who claim government-run health care would be more inefficient and mistake-prone than the current mostly private system never have had much to do with an insurance company. There is no way, absolutely no way, that any public organization could be more difficult, irritating, and time-consuming to deal with than Regence Blue Cross of Oregon is. And here's the scary thing: Regence likely is better than truly malevolent…
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