Home life

Days like today, I feel so superior to most of my fellow Oregonians. I grew up in central California, where for much of the year a temperature under 100 degrees is considered a cool day. So here I am on May 16 in Salem, Oregon – enjoying a record breaking heat wave for this date. The thermometer in my car read "100" when I was downtown this afternoon. Ooh! Wow! One single freaking day with a three digit temperature and the local news is filled with tips about how to survive. Hydration. Sunscreen. Wear a hat. Don't exert yourself. Oregonians…

SNAFU is both a deeply philosophic acronym, and a pleasingly profane one. It's meaning, "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up" reflects the Buddhist reality that life is suffering. Traveling from snowy Salem, Oregon to sunny Napili Bay, Hawaii yesterday, we can testify that SNAFU is fully operative in the cosmos. Not that we needed any confirmation of that. It's just good to be reminded (albeit as infrequently as possible) that when everything is going right with life, that's an anomaly. Laurel and I started off fine, waking up bright and early for a planned 6:45 am departure from home so we'd…

For a moment I was ready to turn around and head back to the Fred Meyer photo counter with an angry demand that I be given my digital camera printouts, not the ones belonging to some old geezer who seemed vaguely familiar, but clearly wasn't me. Except, after the moment passed and my mind jumped back to aging reality, I realized that he was. Me. This is a new experience – looking at a photo of myself, or seeing myself in a mirror, and thinking, "Who the hell is that?" Previously, I've thought "That doesn't look like me." But now…

In Buddhism and Hinduism there's always been a big debate about whether the life of the renuniciate or the householder is a surer road to enlightenment. Do you find truth in a bare cave or a richly furnished living room?After the past month of remodeling our bathroom and, now, kitchen, I can testify that the Buddha would have been a lot better off staying home with his wife rather than sitting under the Bodhi Tree. Sooner rather than later, Mrs. Buddha would have talked him into redoing their home. And that, for sure, would have provided him with all the…

There's something delicious in those four words: I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. Humility. Truthfulness. Acceptance. It took me three "wrong's" because that's how many times I can recall being wrong recently. Actually, I'm sure the number is much more. Like most people, I much prefer being right than wrong. So I tend to focus on experiences that affirm the correctness of my view of the world, and put out of mind the oops moments. Still, sometimes even I can't ignore how amazingly wrong I can be. And how confident I am that I'm right until the curtain rises on the fantastic…

Oooh! Scary! The flyer for tonight's Valentine Sweetheart Dance at the RJ Dance Studio said "Dress Red, Semi-Formal." I have a burgundy shirt that's close enough to red to count. But the Semi-Formal…that sent a chill up my causal Oregon spine. I fretted and worried. I emailed Lora, one of the RJ Dance head honchos, and asked her what semi-formal meant. She didn't respond. I got chillier. Turning to Wikipedia, I was told that semi-formal is synonymous with black tie. A dinner jacket would be most appropriate for evening wear. Yeah, right. Hey, Wikipedia, I live in the northwest. Your…

Hopefully I won't need therapy after what just happened to me. But I'm married to a (retired) psychotherapist, so it'll be easy to get treatment for Post Fairy Disillusionment Disorder if the shock of last week doesn't fade away. The interesting thing is, my potential therapist is closely connected with my trauma. This could produce some sort of transference issues, but that's the least of my worries right now. Because what I'm trying to deal with is a wholesale upsetting of my world view – as it pertains to our household, at least. I've having to adjust to losing a…

Who says money can't buy happiness? Not me, for sure. Because $179.99 just bought me some considerable gadget-fueled joy in the person (or rather, plastic and metal) of a Flip Video Ultra. My good karma was kicked off by a recent Mark Morford column. He started off his rant about a bizarre Tom Cruise video with: Here is something you can do. Set up that nifty little Flip Video camera you got for Christmas just over there next to your couch. I didn't read the rest of the column. Instead I thought, "Hey! I didn't get a nifty little Flip…

Thank God, or Tao, for Oregon's "Buyer's Right to Cancel" law. It just saved us from a pushy Penguin Windows salesman, who somehow talked us into signing a contract for some vastly overpriced (though seemingly high-quality) replacement windows. I wasn't going to mention the company's name in this buyer beware post. But after reading a bunch of comments from people who had remarkably similar bad sales experiences, I decided to say it like it is: Penguin Windows engages in annoyingly high-pressure sales tactics. Which, unfortunately, are pretty damn effective. Laurel and I generally are resistant to salesman B.S. But the…

Step aside, Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm the new king of the world – unashamed to appropriate one of the cheesiest movie lines ever. Because I deserve it. I, me, myself, Brian the Hines, was responsible for bringing Qwest DSL to our rural south Salem neighborhood after many would-be kings (including moi ) had tried and failed for years. At this very moment I am praising myself in a blog post that will be uploaded via wireless DSL, a vast improvement over our dreadfully unreliable Wild Blue broadband satellite service, which never saw a raindrop that it wasn't afraid to send a…

Last year we slowed down the Christmas machine, but it still had quite a bit of leftover energy. Now we're going to further unplug this monster. No Christmas tree for us. This is a pretty big decision, given that our extra-large artificial tree has been a dominating feature of our living room for quite a few years. Too dominating, we've decided. It's a pain to set up. Just about as big a pain as driving to a real tree lot, agreeing on a suitable choice, tying it to the roof rack so it has a minimal chance of falling off…

Thanks to a visitor on my other blog I learned about the Gratitude Dance. It's super easy to do. And perfect for today. But maybe not advised after eating a big Thanksgiving dinner. The Gratitude Dance is considerably kinder and gentler than the haka -- a traditional Polynesian dance that the Jefferson High School football team in Portland has taken up before each game. YouTube, naturally, has many haka videos. I especially liked this one, a Hakan vs. Tongan face off at a rugby match.

My wife is being driven crazy by a male. Par for the course, but this time he isn't me. It's a male deer, a buck. Or bucks. She doesn't know how many are doing what comes naturally to them this time of year. Marking their territory. Which, unfortunately for Laurel, includes our ten acres in rural Oregon. She's planted countless native trees on our property, protectively watering them during dry spells, netting them when they're young, spraying Deer Off in the fall in an effort to divert bucks' attention away from the enticing trunks. After all, the bucks should have…

I always figured that I'd be the last human on Earth to own an iPod. But here I am, two days into an increasingly intimate relationship with an iPod Touch, and I'm wondering: Baby, what kept us apart for so long? The strange thing is, I hardly ever listen to music. Mostly I tune to talk radio and OPB/PBS when I'm driving around. At home, the Internet has been my closest inanimate communicative companion. Yet I was drawn to the Touch as soon as it was released. It's got the look and feel of an iPhone without the expensive AT&T…

I took ten years off of my age today. To be precise, 10.3 years. So says RealAge, which offers a nifty calculation of the difference between your calendar age and your "real" age. Like a lot of baby boomers, I've never felt that I really was 58 years old. Physically, I'm just about in as good a shape as I've ever been. Mentally, I'm still an adolescent in many ways. But, hey, that's par for the course if you're a man. I decided to look for a real age online test after I came across a story on CNN called…

This cartoon reveals how it all began. How men became hunters and women gatherers. Naturally, the guy was told to do it by his woman. I don't know which sex ended up with the better deal. However, I do know that this goes a long way toward explaining why Laurel, my wife, was bewildered when my Garmin GPSMap 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator arrived in its Amazon box. "Don't you already have a GPS receiver?," she asked. "Sure I do," I told her. "But it's ancient. This one has a color display and does a lot more than the old one."…

I should frame my March 18 Fred Meyer receipt in case I ever doubt my insanity. That was the day I impulsively decided to grow strawberries on our deck. We've lived in rural south Salem for seventeen years. We've always gotten all of our food from grocery stores, not our property. That's worked just fine. But a strawberry pot displayed in the garden center caught my eye. I pictured myself going out and picking handfuls of super-sweet Oregon berries every day. I'd slice them for my cereal. I'd savor my strawberry self-sufficiency. If I couldn't eat them all myself, I'd…

Two days ago I had no idea that the Toyota Prius came in a "Touring" model. Now one sits in our driveway, a replacement for our 2004 Prius. We were early adopters, ordering Prius 1 in September 2003 and getting her in November. It's been a great car, virtually glitch free and a steady 45 mpg performer. But Prius 1 had some downsides that were beginning to seriously bug me. We also have a Toyota Highlander Hybrid, a midsize SUV. This more macho car was supposed to be my main ride. However, Laurel commandeered it about six months ago because…

A month ago I never would have believed that I'd ever blog enthusiastically about our remodeled kitchen. Yet here I am, posting before and after photos with caffeine-fueled delight. Here's an "after" that doesn't have a matching "before." We've got an open house, early '70s vintage, completely woodified—no white walls. We wanted to stay as natural as possible. Bisque appliances, not stainless steel, retro though it may be. Granite countertops, because after considering various possibilities we realized that nothing looks as stone-like as real stone. You couldn't call our tastes sophisticated. Hey, we live on ten acres in the south…

At 3:30 pm Laurel and I got home from her LASIK surgery. For five and a half hours, and counting, I have been her compassionate care giver as she lies quietly in bed or a recliner, dark goggles on, popping her pain pills, listening to PBS and CNN (no TV watching until tomorrow, so says the Casey Eye Institute post-operation patient instructions). So, yes, I'm looking forward to being nominated for sainthood. Or better, Buddha-hood. Already I have brought her several glasses of juice, set up a radio by her bed, cooked a Gardenburger, made a salad, and fetched some…