Posted inFamily Home life

Pancake recipe shared with world

Celeste, my daughter, is arriving from Los Angeles in a few hours for a weekend visit. (Her husband, Patrick, comes on Saturday, to enjoy with Celeste the all-too-common November-in-May Oregon weather. Our gutters were overflowing this morning, so I climbed up on the roof with my trusty high-powered leaf blower—a great way to clean gutters, by the way, even if water is in them—and ended up getting hailed on.) In honor of Celeste’s visit, for it has been quite a while since I’ve seen my one and only offspring, I have decided to share with the world the pancake recipe…
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Posted inHome life

Ah, the ecstasy, the joy, the rapture…

Yes, my Inspiron 8200 has made its Airborned journey to the Dell repair center in Memphis, Tennessee and back, all in the space of just two days. Inspiron seems much better now with her new video card, and I almost feel like taking back all of the nasty things I’ve said and thought about Dell Computer over the past few months—or however long I have been struggling with daily freezes, screen garblings, darkened displays, and consequent loss of some of my most brilliant prose, for Inspiron always seemed to shut down just before I was about to press the “save”…
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Posted inHome life

Can eating animals be an act of kindness?

A postscript to my last posting: in discussing with Laurel whether a meat eater can legitimately call himself or herself an animal lover, she reminded me that she used to eat free range chickens and didn’t feel guilty about it. “After all,” Laurel said, “they lived a good life while they were alive, and if someone hadn’t raised them to be eaten, they wouldn’t have lived at all.” OK, I suppose this is a decent argument for eating animals that have been raised and slaughtered humanely, but such animals are by far the exception, rather than the rule. And if…
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Posted inHome life

Meet PVR, my new best friend

I’m calling him by his initials, because this is how he was introduced to me by the Dish Network technician who brought us together about a week ago. His full name is Personal Video Recorder (is there an impersonal version, for people who are afraid of intimacy?), but I prefer PVR, though that is a bit hard to pronounce, since it lacks a vowel. No matter how you say it, it starts to sound like “pervert” (which he isn’t at all, so far as I can tell by what he has recorded for me so far, but that might change…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Dozen Desperate Ducklings Dodge Death

Due to a daring damsel, animal lover par excellence, Laurel Lee Hines. This afternoon Laurel was driving on 25th Street, past K Mart (or whatever the heck it is called now), and noticed some adult ducks on the other side of the road—the airport side. Then she saw some other tiny dots in the road, desperate newly born ducklings frantically trying to climb up a high curb and get to their mothers. Laurel stops her car. She watches vehicles speeding by in both directions, some missing the ducklings by only a few inches. Finally...a slight break in the traffic. She…
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Posted inHome life

Further evidence of male idiocy

Now, there's a title for a book, a really long book. I have an item to contribute to it. Not involving me, of course. That would be ridiculous, to think that I have ever, am now, or will in the future engage in any act that could fall under the rubric of "male idiocy" (the skeptical laughter from cyberspace is already ringing in my ears). No, this is about the bird I like to affectionately call Bastard Robin, or even nicer names, depending upon how many tons of bird poop I find splashed on my Volvo wagon each day. I'm…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Good and bad of March 17

The good: its our anniversary, which we cleverly managed to make St. Patrick's Day, so whenever images of green beer and drunken Irishpeople start to run through my head I know it's time to start making romantic preparations. Which, this year (our 13th, which isn't bad because we're not superstitious, knock on wood) didn't require a lot of time. I guess a man knows he's been married a dozen plus years when the big present you decide to give your wife is finally fixing two mouse problems--in our well pump enclosure and (more disgustingly) our medicine drawer--and she is happy…
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Posted inHome life Sustainability

Week in review

God, that sounds like some sort of PBS public affairs program, "Week in Review." But that’s what it's been, more than a week since my last HinesSight entry, so duty calls me to summarize it all in a single blaze of what-we've-been-up-to-but-haven't-uttered-a-peep-about. Well, the most traumatic event, from which it took me several days to recover, was logging onto the L.L. Bean web site, ready to accomplish my bi-or tri-annual jeans buying in the usual minute or two, and making a horrifying, absolutely impossible to believe, discovery. L.L. Bean had discontinued selling black natural fit jeans, and had changed the…
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Posted inHome life

Clearly, a message from God

What other explanation is there? I open up the newspaper this morning, and there in the Saturday “Auto” section is a glowing review of the Mini-Cooper. I got to drive one of the original Mini-Coopers exactly one time, circa 1967, when a college friend much more knowledgeable about cars than I urged me to test drive one, as an alternative to a VW bug that I was thinking of buying. That test drive is still fresh in my mind, or, at least, as fresh as any experience from the 60s can be, for reasons that should be obvious, but which…
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Posted inFamily Home life

Oh, yeah, vegetarianism is cool

I know it is true, because Time magazine tells me so. Therefore, following some sort of possibly-twisted Aristotelian logic, since Laurel and I are vegetarians, we must be cool too. The article reports that nearly 25% of adolescents polled by Teenage Research Unlimited said vegetarianism is "cool." And college students rated salad eaters more moral, virtuous, and considerate than steak eaters. Well, obviously. Who needs a poll to tell us that? Vegetarians rule! Real vegetarians, at least. Time says that in a survey of 11,000 people, 37% of those who responded "Yes, I am a vegetarian" also reported that in…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many babies are you going to kill today?”

On Laurel's instigation, we took part in the worldwide no-war! protests today, joining 1000 or more people at the state Capitol. It had been over 30 years since either of us had been in an antiwar protest march, so we were a bit out of practice. I had the LBJ chant all ready to go, realizing that some acronym substitutions had to be made, but it bothered me that GWB didn't rhyme so nicely with "hey" or "today." Fortunately, the protest was much better organized than protests were in the late 1960s. Probably the organizers weren't nearly as stoned as…
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Posted inHome life

So proud of Laurel

I'm so proud of my lovely wife, and if you could have seen her swearing like a longshoreman in front of the bathroom mirror last month, you would be as proud of her as I am. Yes, Laurel finally has learned how to put in a contact lens. Now, it is true that five year old children undoubtedly can do this without any problem, but Laurel, who is a bit older than that, had some unique problems that she had to overcome. To wit, a blink reflex that wouldn't stop. I can't begin to tell you what we (mostly her,…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

Positive postscript to hard drive hell

As mentioned in the post below, I'm desperately trying to derive some meaning from last week's attempted hard drive transfer horrors. What good is frustration? Usually we avoid it at all costs. I certainly would have sacrificed almost anything to the Great Computer in the Sky last Thursday if she could have blessed me with a benediction: "Go, Dell Inspiron 8200, and crash no more." But, what would life be like if we never ran up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles? Would we just contentedly sit on our butt, not being driven to try to crash through the barrier that divides…
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Posted inHome life

In the belly of the beast–a tale of hard drive hell

It's been a strange two days. I hardly know who I am anymore, or what I've been doing. I must seek clues in what I see around me. Empty coffee cup. Paper towel with jelly stains. Shiny anti-static wrapper. Screwdriver. PC card slot placeholders. Two tiny screws. Computer manuals. Receipt from CMS Peripherals, Inc. with "You bastards will die!!!" scrawled on it in red crayon. Hmmm. That's my handwriting. What's been going on? Ah, it all is starting to come back now...my eeensyweensy 20GB notebook hard drive had become filled to overflowing with my verbiage, and those endless Windows XP…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

AAA, and the middle way

The channel 2 evening news last night had a poll that showed the three-year income tax increase narrowly ahead. Amazing. That would be one of the great voting surprises in Oregon history, if the measure passes after all the pundits had pronounced it dead on arrival. We've mailed in our "yes" votes; everyone else, do the same. Hopefully, the normally apathetic people in our formally great state are being aroused by the painfully clear consequences of inaction--of letting state-funded education, health care, criminal justice system, and so on, go down the tubes into a morass of mediocrity. Along these lines,…
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