Posted inDogs

Trying to keep up with the border collie

I have to assume that Laurel is trying to keep our dog up with Rico, the really smart German border collie who knows the names of 200 objects and has language skills comparable to a young child. Otherwise, why would she suddenly engage in a frenzy of obedience training today with Serena, the most recent (and still very much ringing in my ears) example being a 45-minute walk in the Metolius River countryside punctuated by virtually non-stop calls of “Serena, closer!” “Serena, no!” “Serena, heel!” “Serena, stay!”—depending on what out of control behavior Serena was exhibiting at the moment. Laurel…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Four hours talking about groundwater

I bet you think that sitting in a Marion County Board of Commissioners meeting room for almost four hours listening to people talk about Sensitive Groundwater Overlay (SGO) zone policies would be boring. Well, if you think this, you’d be absolutely right. But there we were at 10 a.m. yesterday, Laurel and me, along with a half dozen other Spring Lake Estates residents who wanted to let the Commissioners know what we think about the current loose and lax county system that almost allowed a lot to be partitioned here, and an extra well drilled, when it was proven that…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Some religious common sense on C-Span

This is why C-Span is so great, even though it is so boring much of the time. Once in a while I channel-surf through the Dish network news channels, pause on C-Span, and listen to someone making so much sense I want to bottle what he or she is saying and pour it, forcefully if necessary, into every federal and state legislator’s brain. No, why stop there? Into the brain of every person in the United States. Even the world if I could find enough bottles. Melissa Rogers was testifying today before a Congressional hearing on “Religious Expression in Public…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Home life

How Reagan almost broke up our relationship

On Air America today (“the left side of the dial”) I heard the super liberal Randi Rhodes admit that she had voted for Ronald Reagan. “Once,” she said, noting that Reagan was appealing because he was so positive in a time of negativity. This reminded me of how Reagan almost broke up the nascent relationship between Laurel and me. Nascent, because this was just our second date, so there wouldn’t have been much to break up at that time. But looking back at our fourteen years of marriage, it would have been a shame if a little thing like voting…
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Posted inHome life

Amazing what a big stud can make my wife like

Okay, a potential stud, according to Thoroughbred Times.com. Regardless, Smarty Jones got Laurel to do some things I never believed I’d see her do. Like, ask “Where is the sports page?” this past week and then actually read the section that heretofore had as much interest to her as the classifieds. Also, sit down in front in the TV this afternoon and watch a sporting event, the Belmont Stakes. Of course, today there is no joy in Hinesville, for Smarty Jones pooped out on the backstretch. But we enjoyed our brief excursion into the land of horseracing, which probably was…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Why Jesus couldn’t have been married to Mary

Today I experienced within my consciousness one of those supernova bursts of enlightened understanding that dazzle me with my own brilliance (though not, it must be admitted, with my own humility). For I have discovered an unarguable answer to the controversial question posed by Dan Brown in his “Da Vinci Code”: Was Jesus married? Specifically, to Mary Magdalene. No. This is an impossibility. For in the time Jesus spent on this earthly plane he came to be considered as the perfect Son of God by those who knew him most intimately. Hence, ergo, thusly, Jesus could not have been married,…
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Posted inPhilosophy Writing/Weblogs

Eccentrics make the world go unround

When you attend a meeting of 500 aspiring mystics of both Eastern and Western persuasions, as I did last weekend, you’re bound to run into some interesting people. But there is “interesting” and there is “eccentric,” the latter being a pearl of greater price. For eccentrics, by definition, make the world go unround. They remind us that neat and tidy isn’t nature’s way. Rivers don’t take a straight course to the sea. Trees sprout branches in every direction. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing some wonderful eccentrics. Eric was a friend of my youth. A few years older than me,…
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Posted inPhilosophy

Not lost in translation

This morning I gave a 45 minute talk to the 500 or so National Satsang Weekend attendees at the Science of the Soul Center here in Petaluma, California. No, I’m not a member of a cult, no matter what my wife says (jokingly, I should emphasize, just as I fondly call her “infidel” with a smile on my face). Aside from my talks, Laurel chooses not to attend meetings of my spiritual group, for reasons I can completely sympathize with. I look upon spirituality as a science that investigates whatever may lie beyond the physical reality with which we are…
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Posted inRecreation

Recipe for a fun time

Here’s a recipe for a fun time. (1) Fly to Oakland on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend starts. (2) Rent a car at the airport and get on the freeway in the middle of the afternoon, just as every single person who works in the East Bay decides to take off work a few hours early and get a head start on the holiday. (3) For maximum enjoyment, head to Petaluma, as this way you will get to fully experience, in excruciating slow vehicle motion, what happens when three lanes of holiday traffic on 580W merge into one lane…
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Posted inSustainability

Aren’t the dinosaurs dead?

Since we own a 45 mpg (in real life) 2004 Toyota Prius, we’ve been taking a smug, holier-than-thou attitude toward rising gas prices and the anguished cries of those who get 15 mpg in their way-over-sized SUV. Every time I drive back home from the store with my four bags of groceries neatly stowed away in the back compartment of the Prius, and pull alongside someone in an Expedition with their own four bags of groceries rattling around in the cavernous interior, I look over with a smile that hopefully communicates, “Now, don’t you feel silly in all that unnecessary…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

An author’s scariest moment

An author’s scariest moment is when the first advance copies of a book arrive from the printer. Also, this is an author’s most wonderful moment. But scariness precedes the wonderfulness. “Are the pages printed all screwy? Is the cover color wrong? What major typo did we miss?” Yesterday Laurel yelled from the front door at me: “A box just came. It looks like books.” Oh, God, I thought. This is it. My writing life is over. And it is just beginning. Both. Neither. I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t want to go up and open the box. I dearly wanted…
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Posted inEntertainment Science

“What the #$*! Do We Know?!”

Great question. Great movie. Short answer: not much. Made in Portland, and starring the wonderfully expressive actress Marlee Matlin (an Oscar winner for “Children of a Lesser God”), “What the #$*! Do We Know?!” mixes together a fictional storyline with non-fictional expositions of quantum physics, neuroscience, and other findings from the cutting edge of science. Having written a book about the relation of the new physics and old mystics (“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which I’ve revised and am working to get back-in-print), this was a movie that I couldn’t miss. Unfortunately, lots of other people will. I only found two…
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Posted inDogs

Serena, our Tai Chi Zen dog

Last weekend we saw more evidence of the marvelous powers of Serena, who, in addition to being astoundingly beautiful and amazingly intelligent, has canine Tai Chi and Zen down to a “T” (bone, she could only wish, if she wasn’t the animal companion of strict vegetarians). Just as an outdoor fire is called Kentucky TV (as we were told by real live Kentuckians), so is Serena’s view out of a living room window of our Camp Sherman cabin Dog TV. For it faces a wood platform by the fire pit, under which live a flourishing family of chipmunks. Laurel leaves…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

How everyone can write for a living, guaranteed

From an essay in “Writers and their Craft” by novelist Frederick Busch: “I write for a living. I write, that is to say, for my life—for my life’s sake. Which is to say: when I write, I consider my life to be at stake; the values that help me to measure it, and the moments, memories, and emotions of it that I cherish—the people, therefore, whose presence in it makes me want to keep experiencing my life—all are at risk when I work. It feels that way to me. I believe the feeling to be true, and I write from…
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Posted inSustainability

Power to the weblog, right on!

OK, I’m showing my age in the title of this posting. But I don’t care. I’m excited that my $80 a year HinesSight weblog has stimulated some change in the $300,000,000 (eventually, perhaps) Sustainable Fairview development. This is the power of the weblog: truth. Not absolute unarguable Platonic truth—I don’t make a claim to that—but truth-as-I-see-it truth, which is what we deal with in the Blogosphere. Today I got a group email from the management of Sustainable Fairview Associates and read the minutes of some recent member/investor meetings that I no longer go to (see “Sustainability” category to the right…
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Posted inMiscellany

My inner child and Camp Sherman

Bicycling around Camp Sherman today, it hit me: my inner child wants to return to the days when people bought gas at the town store from pumps with a shell/Shell on top, and when going to the post office meant you’d catch up on the town gossip and get a chance to sit a spell on the bench outside. This was the sort of town I grew up in, Three Rivers, California. Just a few hundred people back in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. A tourist/ranching town with, yes, three forks of the Kaweah River. My mother and I lived within…
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Posted inRecreation

How to pack heavy for a weekend trip

You paid good money for a full-sized SUV or, as in our case, a station wagon. You need to make use of it! Fill it up! Learn to pack heavy for a weekend trip! Hey, gasoline is over $2 a gallon. If your rig is almost empty you’re going to burn almost as much expensive irreplaceable fossil fuel as if it were full. So why not load it up with as much stuff as possible? (click to enlarge) This is our packing philosophy, as evidenced by this photo I took just before we left for Camp Sherman yesterday afternoon. You…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Choking on communion

Looking back, I believe it was a sign from God that I almost choked on the wafer that was put in my mouth at my Catholic first communion. When you’re eight or nine years old this is embarrassing stuff, gagging after the priest put the wafer on my tongue. It stuck to the roof of my mouth when I tried to swallow it and wouldn’t go down. I remember hoping to God (still on my knees, of course) that I wouldn’t spit out the wafer and have it end up on the floor, an inglorious way to treat the body…
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Posted inNeighborhood Philosophy

There is no boat in this photo

I snapped this picture of Spring Lake about half an hour ago during my evening dog walk with Serena. There is no boat in this photo. Yesterday there would have been: a shiny aluminum rowboat upside down at the far end, barely visible, but irritatingly present. Boats left at our communal (common property) lake here in Spring Lake Estates are supposed to be locked to a cable near the picnic area. That rowboat wasn’t. Every time I walked around the lake it bothered me to see it beached in a place it shouldn’t have been. In my eyes it was…
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Posted inWriting/Weblogs

Writer’s revenge: reject the rejection slip

James Alexander Thom has a great piece in the Spring 2004 Author’s Guild Bulletin: “Rejection Flip.” I sometimes wonder whether forking out $90 a year to belong to the Author’s Guild makes sense, but articles like this one are priceless. Plus, I get a certain satisfaction in turning to the last page of each issue of the Bulletin and reading the names of some fellow members who serve on the Guild Council: Judy Blume, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, Erica Jong, Scott Turow. Writing fame and fortune have evaded me so far, but hope springs eternal that someday I can…
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