Posted inHome life Salem

After Oregon’s great ice storm of 2021, I’m glad the 2022 version was milder

If I didn't know what post-traumatic stress felt like before, I sure do now. Because as soon as I heard that a significant freezing rain event was headed our way, I couldn't get thoughts and feelings of the Great Ice Storm of February 2021 out of my mind. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, our home got about 5/8 of an inch of ice in that horrendous weather disaster. We lost lots of trees, including two big branches from an ancient white oak. And our electricity was out for 12 days. Not fun, obviously.  It's difficult to forecast…
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Posted inHome life

Our 2022 Christmas Letter has a theme of falling (not in love, on the ground)

Given our age, somewhere between 40 and 100, like almost equidistant, it becomes more difficult with every passing year to find a Christmas Letter theme that doesn't sound like it was written by a couple as old as we are. So in 2022 I embraced my inner geezer and chose to write about our unexciting senior citizen lives. A central theme is falling. But there's also a paragraph about our dog, Mooka. Something for everyone! Well, assuming you're somehow interested in the things we are. If this Christmas letter doesn't push a Wow button for you, click here for a…
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Posted inHome life Humor

How a single stink bug cost us $430 today

Bloggers like me have to choose our subjects to write about with care. Until noon today, I was pondering between a $300 million Salem bond measure, advice on who to vote for in the midterms, and the increased risk of nuclear war due to Putin's Ukraine threats. But after Tim Paquin of Precision Garage Door Service diagnosed what had caused our garage door opener to stop working, I realized that this was my chance to contribute to the accumulated store of knowledge regarding garage door opener repairs. In short, consider that a stink bug is the culprit. Here's what Paquin…
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Posted inHome life Salem

I just chose Pfeifer Roofing and Leaf Blaster for gutter protection

Like me, probably you've seen ads for gutter protection systems. There are quite a few of them: Leaf Filter, Gutter Shutter, Leaf Guard -- to name a few.  I've looked into some of them over the years. Since we moved into our non-easy care house in rural south Salem that's surrounded by large oak and fir trees, for about thirty years I've been cleaning our gutters via a leaf blower. Even though parts of our house are two level and so quite a ways off the ground, I've been comfortable with using a backpack Stihl blower, walking judiciously along the…
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Posted inHome life

Our curved railings by Outdoor Fence Co. turned out well

Our home in rural south Salem has quite a few quirks, most of them desirable. For example, we have tons (literally) of granite rock in our landscaping, courtesy of the Garden Poet redesign not long after we moved here in 1990. My wife and I love the natural look of large rocks and flat stepping stones. But when we contacted Salem's Outdoor Fence Co. for a bid on installing a metal railing along the walkway from our driveway to front door, and another railing along the stepping stones from our carport to the walkway, those rocks became a bit of…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

My email nightmare shows how hooked I am on Gmail

I've got quite a few problems in my life, as do we all. But what sets off a special fear in me is when I get a message from Apple Mail on my MacBook Pro laptop saying something like, "Unable to connect to Gmail. Username or password not recognized." Sometimes the problem is easily fixed by restarting my computer. But a few days ago it was a waking nightmare. Nothing had changed with my Gmail account. I'd simply shut the lid on my laptop, as I do every night before I go to bed, then flipped it open in the…
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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 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 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 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 inHome life

Our 2021 Christmas letter adds an asterisk to how we’re doing: Fine*

If you're a store employee, or someone else who asked us how we're doing in 2021, likely we said "Fine." But that wasn't really true. We just either felt that they really didn't want a full answer, or there wasn't time to provide one.  Thankfully, we were able to correct this through our 2021 Christmas Letter. Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF
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Posted inHome life Humor

Hot bath plus marijuana: a recipe for fainting

Since I'm always on the lookout for fresh grandiose ideas to spice up my senior citizen life, I'm putting out an alert that if someone is looking for a Poster Child, or in my case a Poster Geezer, to be a spokesperson for the danger of mixing a hot bath and marijuana, I'm available! (Especially if the gig comes with a generous expense allowance, which I can use to pay for our water heater electricity and visits to my favorite cannabis emporium.) Until last night I was blissfully unaware of what can happen when someone, like me, mixes these seemingly…
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Posted inCoronavirus Home life

Be Covid safe at Thanksgiving, then don’t worry much

Yesterday via Zoom, my wife, Laurel, and I discussed the holidays from a Covid perspective with a dozen friends about our age -- some older, in their 80s, some younger, in their 50s and 60s, and some like us, in their 70s. So, yeah, it was a decidedly senior group. Keep that in mind as I describe both the anxiety and hope shared last night.  Since this was a meeting of our monthly Salon discussion group, we took the opportunity to talk about what to do in December: have an in-person gathering, or keep on Zoom'ing.  Two-thirds (8) were fine…
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Posted inHome life

Our new composite deck looks great, thanks to Apex Paint & Remodel

We've had wooden decks and railings for the 31 years we've lived our here in rural south Salem. When we moved to our house, that was the only choice.  So every few years I'd stain the decks and railings. When I was in my 40s, it was sort of fun. Less fun in my 50s and 60s. And in my 70s, not fun at all.  That's one reason we had Apex Paint & Remodel take out our old decks and replace them with TimberTech composite decking with metal railings by CableBullet. My wife and I are really happy with the…
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Posted inDogs Home life

Mooka, our Husky mix, is obsessed with hunting moles

All dogs are strange. Every dog owner knows this. That's part of what makes them so interesting and adorable -- their strangeness. Of course, if dogs could talk, I'm pretty sure they'd say, "Hey, you humans are even stranger!" No argument there. I wasn't a dog person until after a divorce I got married again to a woman who had a purebred German Shepherd. I had a cat. But not for long, since the dog and cat didn't get along. Fortunately, we were able to find a cat lady on the Oregon coast who was able to adopt my cat.…
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Posted inHome life

I am the Leaf Whisperer. Behold my talent.

After 31 years of living in a rural south Salem property that I at first considered Leaf Hell, I've upgraded my opinion to Leaf Purgatory, since Leaf Heaven is beyond my reach -- unless I develop a brain tumor that somehow makes me love to deal with gigantic amounts of leaves every fall. Actually, I don't mind leaves all that much. Especially on a fairly warm, sunny, calm day like this Saturday in very late October. They're undeniably beautiful. At least, when they're still on trees. Once they reach the ground, my affection for leaves diminishes.But rather than curse my…
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Posted inHome life

A big burn pile is still fun for me at 73

There's pluses and minuses that come with living on ten wooded acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. Our property is a heck of a lot of work to maintain. But some of that work is so pleasant, it's better termed fun. Especially if that word, fun, is loosely defined.  Today Laurel, my wife, and I tackled a large burn pile. Originally it consisted of a massive amount of branches that I'd hauled up to our burn area from a pile under two tall redwoods -- remnants of some tree work we'd had done after a destructive ice storm last February.…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

Life is only predictable looking backward

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. Looking back, it was meant to be. But almost certainly that's an illusion, because life only seems predictable after things already have happened. And even that is an illusion.  To understand why, let's look more closely at how Laurel and I met. The way I usually describe this is true, yet incomplete: I responded to a personals ad Laurel placed in Willamette Week back when the Portland alternative paper only came in a print edition. In a 2016 post on my Church of the Churchless blog, "Who's afraid of The Big…
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Posted inHome life

The curious case of MFS Total Return Fund (MSFRX) distribution history

I'm a long-time owner of the MFS Total Return fund. This is a well-respected mutual fund with a usual 60-40 split between stocks and bonds/cash. So the fund generates a fairly generous income stream. Many years ago a personal holding company founded by my grandfather and uncle merged with the Total Return fund. The fund got a bunch of quality stocks, and the personal holding company received Total Return Fund shares equal in value to what the stocks were worth. (The fund absorbed all of the capital gains from the stocks, a big benefit to the personal holding company.) After…
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Posted inHome life

My tip for starting a Stihl “easy start” chainsaw

I'm no chainsaw expert, but I've owned a small Stihl chainsaw for many years, needing it on our ten acre property in rural south Salem, Oregon.  This year I got a larger Stihl chainsaw after a bad February ice storm decimated many trees. They were in short supply around here for a month or so, but I finally went into Ace Hardware and saw that chainsaws were available. I ended up getting the MS 251C, an easy start Stihl model. I liked the idea of easy starting, along with being able to easily adjust the chain tension without a tool.…
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