Posted inHome life

We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma

The memory is still sharp in my mind of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021. Twelve days without electricity. Lots of tree damage. Many trips into town to get more gasoline to keep our Honda generator functioning. Having to keep our wood stove going to keep the house warm. In short, not fun. So when some friends in our rural south Salem neighborhood told my wife and I that they were getting a Generac whole house generator, our ears perked up. Turns on automatically when the power goes out. Capable of running a heat pump, hot water heater, well…
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Posted inFood and drink Home life Salem

LifeSource dumps my favorite veggie burger. I’m crushed.

It was the cheese that first set off the alarm bells in my brain. Up until then, my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods had gone as it usually does.  Uneventfully. I had no clue that my vegetarian life would be upended before I reached the dairy aisle, my habitual final stop before heading to a checkout register. Glancing at my list to see what my wife and I needed there, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that something had changed in the alternatives-to-meat section. Cheese had taken over several feet of that section,…
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Posted inDogs Health Home life

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear: While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home. Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless. Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple: Life can be tough, no matter…
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Posted inHome life Salem

We find that Best Buy sucks and Kelly’s rocks

My wife has been going through Best Buy hell after an incompetent salesperson ordered the wrong cooktop. Laurel had taken a Consumer Reports rating of induction cooktops into the Salem Best Buy store, pointed to the General Electric model that she wanted, and trusted that the paperwork she got was correct. Sure, she should have double-checked the model number. Or I could have. We admit that we weren't completely blameless in the mixup that led to Best Buy taking out our current radiant cooktop and installing what turned out to be a newer model GE radiant cooktop. We simply assumed…
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Posted inHome life

Schools should meet needs of both visual and verbal thinkers

Today our monthly Salon discussion group talked about a bunch of interesting topics, including the difference between verbal and visual ways of thinking. I brought this subject up, saying that I've started to read a story in The New Yorker about Temple Grandin and how she uses her visual skills to come up with more humane ways of designing slaughterhouses.  (As a vegetarian, I don't think slaughterhouses can be humane, but if there's ways to reduce the suffering of animals, that's a good thing.) Here's an excerpt from Thought Process, the story title in the print edition, which became How…
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Posted inHome life

Our dog’s hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child. So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing. But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease.  What shocked my…
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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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