Posted inHome life Humor

I wore socks with sandals and…survived!

As the saying goes, I felt the fear and did it anyway. No, I didn't climb Everest. Nor did I surf a 50 foot wave. My action was way more courageous.  Two days in a row, I wore socks with sandals out in public.  And not just any old socks and any old sandals. I went for the gusto, the full enchilada, the maximum shock. I paired the colorful limited edition version of Teva's Hurricane sandal that's a collaboration with Outdoor Voices, and equally colorful Darn Tough socks that I found at the Salem Summit Company. Voila! Socks with sandals. …
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Posted inHome life

Sirius XM on Toyota’s Entune 3.0 disappoints

I'm a big fan of Sirius XM. That's all I listen to when I'm driving around in my 2017 VW GTI, even though my car offers Apple CarPlay.  Here's how Sirius XM looks on my GTI's screen. In short, beautiful. My Sirius XM favorites show up as large icons with the names of the stations clearly visible. I can easily reach out and touch an icon to change channels, which I do frequently since I abhor advertisements. News and political junkie that I am, I'll listen to MSNBC until an ad comes on, then shift to CNN until an ad…
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Posted inDogs Home life

2019 WillaMutt Strut photos

Today's WillaMutt Strut at Salem's Riverfront Park (put on by the Willamette Humane Society) was a poignant dog event for me. Our dog, ZuZu, is in the late stages of chronic liver disease. Her vet has told us that likely she will live weeks or months, not years. So this probably was ZuZu's last Mutt Strut -- which she and I have gone to quite a few times. We had a good time, though. I was grateful for that. I'm also grateful that while we humans can grasp impending death, dogs can't.
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Posted inHome life Salem

Why we sold our Highlander to Carmax rather than Capitol Toyota

Buying and selling cars isn't my favorite thing to do. Usually there's some degree of frustration involved. Yesterday was no exception. My wife and I did our best to trade-in our low mileage 2014 Highlander XLE as part of our purchase of a 2019 RAV4 Hybrid, but Capitol Toyota engaged in some tactics that were irritating enough to cause us to decline the purchase offer and head to Beaverton's Carmax instead -- where today we sold our Highlander for $600 more than Capitol Toyota offered, and with much less aggravation. Our Highlander in the final stage of the CarMax process…
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Posted inHome life Marijuana

Why SelectCBD.com isn’t accepting VISA

I'm a believer in CBD, the non-psychoactive component of cannabis/hemp. I've read enough about CBD to decide that taking it for general health promotion makes sense, since I take quite a few supplements for the same reason.  SelectCBD.com has been my main source for CBD drops, which I take twice a day. But around ten days ago I saw that the site wasn't accepting VISA, just MasterCard, due to "technical issues" with their payment processor. ------------------------------NEXT DAY UPDATE: This is either a bit of synchronicity, or this blog post has magical powers (my favored explanation!), since today I got this…
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Posted inHome life

My (not so) secret shame: car lust

They, whoever they are, say that confession is good for the soul. Even though I'm an atheist who doesn't believe I have a soul, I like the idea of confessing -- perhaps because I was Catholic for a short while as a child, and found the idea of being forgiven your sins for the small price of saying a few Our Father's and Hail Mary's to be way cool. So here's my confession: I spend a lot of time on the Internet lusting after hot models... of cars. Yet I'm happily married to my 2017 VW GTI, who I love…
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Posted inHome life Salem

Battery X-Change guys made me feel like less of a fool

I give two thumbs up to Battery X-Change on the corner of 17th and Center Street. One thumb is for selling me two hard-to-find batteries for my mower at a good price. The other thumb is for making me feel like less of a fool after I managed to fry the first battery they sold me within a matter of hours. My battery saga is a good illustration of why small locally-owned stores need to be patronized, because without them Salem would be much diminished. It began when I turned off my DR Field Mower, a walk-behind mower with a 16.5…
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Posted inHome life

Toyota’s special order process for cars is irritating

Don't get me wrong -- I love Toyota cars. But I'm not loving what's happened since February 5 of this year, when my wife and I thought we were putting in a special order for a 2019 RAV4 Hybrid in Limited Trim -- Blizzard Pearl color with black interior, plus several option packages. Based on my experience with special ordering several other cars fairly recently, a Mini Cooper S and a Chevy Volt, I expected that after we told a salesman at Capitol Toyota here in Salem, Oregon exactly what we wanted in a 2019 RAV4 Hybrid, that information would…
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Posted inHome life

Open letter to the robin pecking on my GTI’s mirrors

Dear Mr. or Ms. Robin (likely Mr.), I'm sorry to address you in such an impersonal manner, but I don't know your name. Also, I don't know if you're able to read blog posts. If not, I sympathize, because we live in a rural area with crappy slow-speed DSL "broadband" (not!) for us humans, so I can only imagine how poor Internet access is for you birds. Regardless, I wanted to thank you for your dedication in bringing some challenges, along with bird poop, to my generally serene retired existence. You are not the first robin to come into the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

Trump’s tariff threat on foreign cars irks VW GTI loving me

Just when I think I can't get more irritated at Donald Trump, our (hopefully) one-term president does something that causes my Irritation Index to jump to a new high. In this case -- imposing a tariff on imported cars that could reach 25% -- it's a threatened something that's raising my ire. But given Trump's oft-stated love of tariffs, even when they're a spectacularly bad idea, it sure seems like there's a good chance he'll go ahead with an imported car tariff.  At my age, 70, obviously I've owned a lot of different cars. More have been foreign than domestic.…
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Posted inHome life

I’m a big fan of winter tires. Here’s why.

I've had winter tires on quite a few of the cars my wife and I have owned over the years. They make a lot of sense, even here in western Oregon where sometimes it never snows all winter.  I can't recall exactly what led me to start putting winter tires on in mid-November and off in mid-March, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with an experience I had driving our Volvo 850 station wagon to a cabin in Camp Sherman, Oregon that we were part owners of. I'd just pulled off the main highway that leads to…
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Posted inHome life

If you have slower broadband than 6.25 Mbps, let me know

Misery likes company, as the saying goes. So if you have a "broadband" Internet download connection that's slower than my crappy 6.25 Mbps, leave a comment on this post.  My wife and I live five miles from the city limits of Salem, the freaking capital city of Oregon. But I have little doubt that people living in Outer Mongolia have a faster Internet connection than we do, since our DSL comes courtesy of the same copper wire that probably was used by the first telephones. I'm especially irritated at the moment because I made the mistake of joking with some…
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Posted inHome life

Consumer Reports needs to investigate itself after subscription “glitch”

I'm a big fan of Consumer Reports. I've been a subscriber to their magazine for as long as I can remember. And in recent years I've been an "All Access" subscriber so I could also peruse their digital information via ConsumerReports.org But today Consumer Reports screwed up by sending me, and who knows how many other subscribers, a false email message saying that I'd changed my membership from All Access to Digital -- which meant I wouldn't be getting the magazine anymore. When I read the message (shown above), I was perplexed. I was almost completely sure that I hadn't…
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Posted inHome life

Subaru Forester or Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, that is our question

I'm an automobile aficionado. I love reading car reviews and pouring over comparative specs. But at the moment I'm (almost) overdosing on a question my wife and I are pondering: Which vehicle would best meet our needs, wants, and desires? A 2019 Subaru Forester or a 2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid?  We know we want a smaller SUV to replace our semi-beloved 2014 Toyota Highlander. I say "semi," because we now are a three-car family, with Laurel mostly driving her truly-beloved Chevy Volt, and me mostly driving my truly-beloved VW GTI. Both of those cars are much more pleasant to drive…
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Posted inHome life

Damn you, GM. I wanted more plug-in hybrids, not none.

General Motors has announced that it won't be making any more plug-in hybrids. It has killed off the Chevy Volt as of March 2019. Our 2018 Chevy Volt My wife and I have owned (well, leased) three Chevy Volts, as described in these blog posts I wrote about them:  a 2012 model, a 2015 model (which our dog bought!), and a 2018 model.   So we're disappointed that General Motors is only going to have pure electric and pure gasoline cars/trucks -- no more plug-in hybrids. Here's an excerpt from a Green Car Reports story, "GM president dashes hope of…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

Old photos make me realize life is way more complicated than photos show

Today, December 25, I decided to use my free time (since my wife and I no longer celebrate Christmas, or accept presents) by going through a box of photos that's been sitting on a shelf in a mostly unused closet for, I don't know, forever. Or close to it.  At first it was bittersweet to pull out old photos from the envelopes that contained prints and negatives, which, young'uns, was how people got what their camera had taken back in the distant days when rolls of film had to be developed. Having turned 70 a few months ago, it was…
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Posted inHome life

Today someone told me they are going to kill themselves

It's a first. And not a pleasant first. About three hours ago I got an email from someone I've never met, but who I've communicated with via email about topics on one of my blogs.  He said he's decided to kill himself. He told me that he wasn't sure why he was writing me, but he wanted to thank me for sharing his ideas and participating in some interesting discussions. Early on in our correspondence this person told me that he has a genetic condition that leaves him in constant pain. He told me that his illness is getting worse,…
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Posted inHome life Humor

Behold! Laurel and Brian’s 2018 Christmas Letter

Once again, we defy the trends of the times by writing a Christmas letter that -- gasp! -- gets printed out and inserted into Christmas cards that are -- double gasp! -- mailed. Well, that "we" really means me, Brian. But after I cobble together a letter, Laurel reads it and has the opportunity to change it. This year she said, "Should we really talk about our health problems?"  To which I replied, sure. The problems are as much a part of our life as is our joy at the Democrats taking back the House in the midterms, which is…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

Printers are the Achilles heel of personal computers

I love my MacBook Pro. Like most Apple products, almost all of the time it works great. I no longer fear major operating system upgrades, like I did when I was a Windows user many years ago.  The "blue screen of death" is an almost forgotten memory. I trust Apple software to do its thing without fuss or bother, and usually that trust is rewarded. But Apple stopped making its own printers decades ago. The apparent reason is that no one makes much money selling printers. The big bucks is in selling the cartridges needed to keep the printer functioning. Which…
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Posted inHome life Science Sustainability

Brown Oregon grass in October — climate change is very real

Yesterday I learned of a dire climate change report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Today I spread organic lawn fertilizer on parts of our rural yard where the grass is almost always greened up after fall rains. Not this year. And that's really weird.  I'm a creature of habit when it comes to fertilizing our yard. Twice a year, spring and fall, I spread organic fertilizer that I buy at Lowe's on both our shrubs/trees and our lawn. Some of the grass around our house is watered with a sprinkler system. Some isn't. We've lived on our…
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