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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Posted inHome life

Goodbye DR Field Mower, hello John Deere X394

It was a bittersweet moment when I sold the DR Field Mower with lawnmower attachment that I'd bought in 2016. Over the past 25 years or so I've owned maybe five versions of the DR Field Mower, each better than the last. They've been put to a lot of work mowing grassy natural fields on our ten acres in rural south Salem, along with our lawn. I've written about my field mowing experiences in a number of blog posts: here, here, here, here, here, here. But as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. Hopefully so better things…
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Posted inHome life

Hey, Salemians, start a Salon discussion group

Do you enjoy intelligent talks with friends? Does embracing the art of conversation appeal to you? If so, consider starting a Salon discussion group.  That's what my wife, Laurel, and I did back in the early 1990s. Since, a group of about a dozen people has met each month in someone's home for three hours of so of pleasant conversing. Here's a photo of us in December 2017. Our Salon membership has changed some in the past four years. But everybody in the photo is still part of our group, even though Jim (front row on left) has moved to…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Yellow jackets and forecasts say weekend will be HOT

Before sharing how damn HOT several weather forecasts are saying the coming weekend in Salem will be, this sign my wife put up yesterday speaks to how yellow jackets are viewing our highly unusual weather. We're used to yellow jackets causing problems on our rural property during the summer. But we rarely, if ever, see them acting aggressively before late July or August. That's when I wrote "Killing yellow jackets in their hidey-holes," my detailed description of how Laurel and I normally deal with yellow jackets. Yet here we are in late June with Laurel getting stung as she walked…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

Is 94 degrees hot? Ask your inner child.

I just got back from a 2-mile hilly walk around a road loop in our rural south Salem neighborhood. The thermometer tells me it's about 94 degrees.  But it can't tell me if that's hot.  Hot is subjective. Temperature is objective. The difference explains why I'm often asked by a Starbucks employee, when the temperature gets over 80 in our part of Oregon, if I want my grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte iced or hot. I try not to sound too heat-superior when I reply, "Why, hot of course. I don't believe in drinking an iced coffee no matter what…
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Posted inHome life

Happiness in this dry spring is 2.6 inches in our rain gauge

This is what happiness looks like when, as my wife and I do, you live in a groundwater limited area in the south Salem hills and this has been the driest spring ever in our part of Oregon. I turned off our sprinkler system last week when substantial rain finally was forecasted. Then I dumped out the small amount of water in the rain gauge.  So we got about 2.6 inches of rain during the recent wet weather period. That's more than I expected, thanks in part to some intense showers that passed over us periodically. The past three years…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

How to get voice recognition working on LG TV

I'm enjoying our new LG television, which we got about two weeks ago. So far there's only been one glitch, and one annoyance. The glitch was the voice recognition button on the remote for our OLED55C1PUB model stopping working, after it functioned fine initially.  I kept getting the error message, "A temporary issue has occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please try again later. (200)" But after later arrived, the voice recognition button still didn't work.  A phone call to LG customer support led to a solution, though it took quite a while (three transfers) before I finally…
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Posted inHome life

Californians are one reason Oregon lumber costs so much

Having moved to Oregon from California 48 years ago, the statute of limitations, non-native variety, seems to have absolved me of criticism for where I came from before living in what obviously is the best state in the nation. So now when I hear that those damn Californians are to blame for some Oregon problem, I feel totally comfortable chiming in with criticism of those misguided neighbors to our south. Today Laurel, my wife, and I headed off to Parr Lumber in Salem to check out samples of composite decking from Trex and TimberTech.  Our large cedar deck needs work,…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

Our new LG TV has artificial intelligence. But I hold the remote.

Jim Ramsey, a long-time friend, deserves a commission from Salem's Video Only store.  When I told Jim that I'd just bought the newly released Apple TV device that streams Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a whole lot more in 4K, he said, "But now you need a 4K television." Well, damn. I hadn't thought of that.  We had a Samsung television that was working fine, though it had started to seem a bit dated. But until we ditched our crappy CenturyLink DSL, the only so-called "broadband" option out here in rural south Salem, for the hugely faster Starlink satellite internet (thank…
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Posted inHome life

DirecTV wireless setup on Genie DVR overly confusing

It's been a while since I've bashed AT&T's DirecTV. This doesn't mean that I like the crappy satellite television service any more than I did before, just that nothing additional that I detest about DirecTV has come to mind. My previous frustrations still hold true. Local channels disappear regularly. The user interface sucks. DirecTV still doesn't carry the PAC-12 Networks.  Today I was able to add a fresh irritation: how astoundingly difficult it was to get back the internet connection on our Genie HR44 receiver.  I don't even know why we need an internet connection, since so far as I…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

Memo to future self: Why our ten acres captures me

I'm 72. For thirty-one years, since 1990, my wife and I have lived on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. Well, for the first few years we had five acres. But when the lot next to us became available, we bought it -- not wanting to run the risk of someone cutting down beautiful large firs and building a house there. I've been the one in our marriage who has been more eager to move to a house in town as we've gotten older and our property feels increasingly like a pain to maintain. However... that one word…
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Posted inHealth Home life

My robotic hernia surgery goes well. Behold one incision.

At the age of 72, I'm no longer an adult surgery virgin.  Up until today my only surgery was a tonsillectomy that was so long ago, I had to say "I don't know" when asked about the date of previous surgeries. Probably I was four or five. All I remember about it was ether being poured on some sort of cloth, then put over my nose and mouth.  But now I have a blog! (three, in fact) So I can go beyond the usual verbal "let me tell you about my surgery" -- a sure-fire conversation stopper, especially if an…
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Posted inHome life

My office looks more Zen after painting forced it on me

I wish I could say that my many years of daily meditation led to an enlightenment experience that caused me to drastically simplify the office where I hang out in our house. (By "hang out,"  I mean that this is the one room where I get to decide how it is furnished and decorated. Elsewhere, my wife calls the decor shots, mostly because she is better at this than I am.) However, what actually happened is that last week we had three rooms painted by Apex Paint and Remodel, who did a great job.  One of those rooms was my…
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Posted inHome life Writing/Weblogs

Blog blast from the 2005 Statesman Journal past

Tonight Laurel, my wife, found a clipping from the August 12, 2005 Statesman Journal. Wow, there I was in the "Got Blogs?" story by Angela Yeager, looking 16 years younger than I do now. Naturally my first thought was, I've got to write a blog post about how blogs were looked upon back in 2005.  Yeager did an excellent job at capturing the excitement of the Dawn of Blogging. Below you can read her entire story, which I was pleased to capture with my halfway decent touch typing skill. My second thought was, I wonder if Google still looks kindly…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Goodbye, print Statesman Journal and Oregonian. We went digital.

Today was a day that I never thought would arrive -- the day my wife and I decided to stop getting home delivery of the Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian. Given our age, early 70s, we grew up reading newspapers printed on dead trees that crinkled when you turned the pages. Laurel and I both like print newspapers.  But we also like seeing the Statesman Journal and Oregonian in the paper box at the end of our driveway. And increasingly, that wasn't happening. Our neighbors reported the same thing was happening to them. So even though I registered a…
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