Posted inHome life

Been married for 31 years today. But I’m not great at proposing.

In 1990 Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. Great decision. I've never forgotten our anniversary, not even once in the past 31 years, because an image of green beer always makes me think, "Time to get flowers and a card!" Shock (not). We looked much younger when we were much younger. Our wedding was at the house we'd bought a few months before in Spring Lake Estates, where we're still living. My only regret about our wedding was how I'd botched my marriage proposal. On the plus side, it was spontaneous, though I'd been thinking…
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Posted inHome life

There’s tricks to chainsawing that I don’t know

I'm a chainsaw middle schooler, I suppose. Meaning, I've learned quite a bit over the 25 years or so I've occasionally used a small Stihl chainsaw on our property in rural south Salem. But in no way do I feel totally comfortable with a chainsaw. A feeling that I was reminded of today when I tackled a challenging tangle of logs that had fallen during the recent ice storm on a common property trail that runs behind our property to Spring Lake. Yesterday I had the good fortune to stop by Ace Hardware and discover that they finally had some…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Tree cleanup guys are the new Salem-area heroes

Ah, what a difference it made to my mood having tree debris from the recent ice storm cleaned up from our rural south Salem yard. We'd done a lot of picking up small branches ourselves. And I'd been able to cut some larger limbs with my small 16-inch chainsaw. But there was no way I could handle the big limbs from a giant oak that fell on our lawn. That required a bigger chainsaw and younger muscles than I possess. So for almost three weeks my wife and I have been staring at a mass of tangled branches whenever we…
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Posted inHome life Salem

PGE tree clearing crew were artists at what they do

Yesterday a Portland General Electric (PGE) tree clearing crew was working in our neighborhood prior to the restoration of power following a massive ice storm. We and our neighbors had been without electricity for 11 days at this point. So it was a joy to finally see PGE repair activity occurring. Laurel, my wife, had noticed a PGE truck in the driveway of our neighbor to the south on Lake Drive in rural south Salem, where a tree was in contact with an electrical line. She walked over to talk to the crew to make sure that they knew about…
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Posted inHome life Salem

PGE getting well-deserved ice storm criticism

First off, I want to say that I'm as thankful as anyone for the PGE crews that are working to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who are without electricity after the recent massive ice and snow storm.  But I'm a believer in the middle way: give credit where credit is due, and assign blame where blame is due. PGE deserves some of each. (PGE stands for Portland General Electric, not to be confused with PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric, a Calfornia utility.) My main gripe with PGE is their decision to stop giving estimates for when…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Our dog is enjoying no electricity. Me, not so much.

Out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, we've been without electricity for two days after a big ice storm caused trees to topple and electrical lines to crumple. My wife and I sleep in different bedrooms. We have a wood stove, but the heat from it doesn't reach to where I sleep. I toughed out the first night without electricity, though naturally my room was much colder than usual, Last night I decided that I'd sleep on a blow-up bed. I put it in the living room, which is close to the wood stove in our open-plan house. Our Husky…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Photos of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021

l've lived in Oregon for 50 years. I've seen plenty of freezing rain. But I've never experienced anything like the ice storm that struck northwest Oregon yesterday.  Here's photos that I took this morning as my wife and I surveyed the damage to our property in rural south Salem, which was considerable. The ice was amazingly thick. Up near Lake Drive this twig had ice the width of my index finger, about 5/8 of an inch.  The walkway outside our front door was littered with fir branches. Trees and shrubs were bending over from the weight of the ice. There…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

USA broadband sucks. In rural south Salem, it sucks more.

Having fast internet no longer is a luxury, if it ever was. A year into the Covid crisis, it's clear that access to genuine broadband -- defined by the FCC as at least 25 megabits per second download (25 Mbps) and three megabits per second (3 Mbps) upload -- is a necessity.  Distance learning can't happen without it. Working from home can't happen without it. Keeping in touch with friends and family can't happen without it. Streaming entertainment can't happen without it. OK, I've exaggerated a bit.  Those things can happen with slower internet. However, I speak from experience when…
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Posted inHome life

Honey-Do is a great Salem handyman service

Today I was impressed again by the quality work that Laine Larson did for us via his Honey-Do Handyman Service. Laine is a neighbor, so during a dog walk this afternoon I took this photo of the back of his trailer so I could share it in this laudatory blog post. For many years Laine was a State Farm Insurance agent. Now he's into the handyman thing, and doing it very well. My wife and I have used him for several projects that exceeded my decidedly minimal husbandly handyman capability. Laine is very easy to work with. Honest, straightforward, pleasant,…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection

Yesterday the long-awaited box from Starlink arrived after I'd been notified that I was able to be part of the public beta test for this groundbreaking effort to bring broadband to underserved areas via thousands of low-altitude satellites. I happily paid for the equipment. Naturally I was eager to open it up. At first glance, I wondered if somehow they'd forgotten to put the equipment inside. But no, the goodies were under the cleverly fashioned plastic cover: satellite dish, tripod, router,, and cables. Showing how old I am (72), I looked around for an installation manual. Then I realized that…
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Posted inHome life

Our 2020 Christmas letter finds some humor in Covid

This year it wasn't easy for me to write our 2020 Holiday Greetings. Usually it is. But 2020 was such a depressing year, with 300,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, at first I wondered if a Christmas letter from Laurel and me was even appropriate. Laurel convinced me that it was, after seeing a serious first draft of the letter. She argued that looking on the light side of disturbing situations helps us get through those tough times.  OK. That was convincing. So I started over. Here's the result in both PDF and JPEG formats.Download 2020 Christmas Letter PDF
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Posted inHealth Home life

Monkii 360 is my favorite Covid-era home workout device

Here in Oregon health clubs have been closed for most of the pandemic. I'd been working out three days a week at Courthouse Club Fitness, so needed to find an alternative way of getting in my usual dose of aerobic exercise and weight training. I've bought five devices that seemed promising. Three of them currently are sitting unused. I'll mention them briefly, then share what I like about the #1 and #2 favorite home workout devices. (I walk two miles a day with our dog up and down some fairly steep hills, so my device focus has been on strength…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate. I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried.  And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

If you can’t be with the life you love, love the life you’re with

It's Thanksgiving today. I feel like I should put a one-day hold on my usual inclination to write something snarky, critical, or in my better moments, only mildly negative. So here goes with my modification to a song lyric that popped into my head when I woke up this morning and realized what day it was. And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with. Stephen Stills performed the song, "Love the One You're With," in 1970. I turned 22 that year. Now I'm 72. The general sentiment still rings true to me,…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

My wife thinks I’m crazy. This is normal, right?

I have direct experience of being married to only two women, Susan and Laurel. In between Susan and Laurel I got divorced, to set aside any conjecture about polygamy.  So I'm having to extrapolate from this small sample size to the much larger universe of wives. Both Susan and Laurel thought I was crazy. Not clinically, but in the sense that sometimes, and maybe often, the way I looked upon the world baffled them. My strong suspicion is that this is normal. Meaning, almost all wives look upon their husbands as crazy. I hope so, because otherwise I'm a husbandly…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

Starlink app shows how good my view of the northern sky is

I live in a rural area near Salem with crappy CenturyLink DSL the only broadband option -- if you can call about 7 mbps download and 1 mbps upload "broadband." CenturyLink has told me that they are going to bring fiber optic broadband to our neighborhood exactly never.  And fast 5G wireless likely will be available in our area in the wilds of Oregon (six miles from the Salem city limits, the state capital, but it might as well be six hundred miles) at about the same time -- almost never. So Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network is my best…
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Posted inHome life

My geeky search for the perfect winter tire

OK, "perfect" isn't a word that goes with "tire," so probably I shouldn't have used it in the title of this blog post. But my quest today was to find the nearest thing to perfect in a winter tire. I enjoy browsing the internet for tire information almost as much as I enjoy browsing for car information. It took me months of perusing automobile web sites and watching You Tube videos of car reviews before I settled on getting a 2020 Subaru Crosstrek Limited to replace my VW GTI.  Since the VW's winter tires won't fit on the Crosstrek I've…
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Posted inHome life

How I won my PayPal dispute against Peppermint Berri

Peppermint Berri is a disgusting company. Their 38 Trust Pilot reviews are all one star, the lowest possible, though somehow they end up with a 1.4 rating. I made a big mistake when I ordered a weed remover tool from them on May 14, 2020, having seen a Facebook ad for the device. I then filed a complaint with PayPal on July 22, where I said this. After ordering a weed remover on May 14 and not receiving it, I emailed Peppermint Berri three times on June 5, June 30, and July 20 asking why my order hadn't been received.…
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Posted inHealth Home life

Getting a high dose senior flu vaccine isn’t easy in 2020

Being 72 and a believer in vaccines (everybody should be, since they work), every October I've been heading off to Walgreens on south Liberty to get my annual high dose flu shot.  (Since us old folks have weaker immune systems, a high dose flu shot offers more protection, though a regular flu shot is better than nothing, for sure.) That's what I did last Tuesday, only to be met with a sign on the pharmacy window saying that they didn't have any high dose vaccine. Which was the same sign I saw last week. So I decided to check with…
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Posted inHome life Neighborhood

Evacuation checklist a good way to relieve wildfire anxiety

Right now Oregon is suffering though a wildfire perfect storm of longstanding drought, high winds, and many fires burning across our state.  My wife and I lost electricity in the early evening yesterday, along with about thirty of our neighbors. Apparently the windy conditions caused a utility pole to catch fire, with electrical lines lying in the road.  I fired up our generator, so we had a fairly normal night -- aside from the fact that because of the smoke from wildfires in the area we didn't want to open any windows, and our air conditioning wasn't working because of…
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