Posted inNeighborhood Sustainability

Laurel makes waves at Water Resources Commission

Friday, Laurel testified during the public comment period at a meeting of the state Water Resources Commission. I played a part also, by looking on admiringly from the audience as she spoke. Laurel spouted out terms such as “recharge rates” and “sensitive groundwater overlay areas” with wonderful fluidity. I also contributed as Laurel’s faithful and obedient secretary by making up labels for the packets she handed on to the Commission. Basically she appealed to the commissioners to step in and do something about Marion County’s longstanding apathy about groundwater problems. Laurel cited several instances in which obvious well problems were…
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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 inCurrent affairs

Sad Iraq fact, #… of how many?

Today the New York Times web site reports that the National Museum of Iraq, which once boasted the greatest collection of artifacts in the Middle East (some 7,000 years old), has been completely looted. Big deal, Rumsfeld would say. This is what happens when a tyrannical government is overthrown. People celebrate, and go a little bit crazy. Except, Mr. Rumsfeld, this isn’t a matter of looters taking some office chairs from the Information Ministry. It is people taking priceless irreplaceable treasures, which by rights belong to all humanity, while U.S. troops stood by and did almost nothing to stop this…
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Posted inNeighborhood

War against partitioning continues

Recently Laurel learned that the Nielsens have asked the Marion County board of commissioners to hear an appeal of their proposed lot partitioning in Spring Lake Estates that was denied by a hearings officer. We’ve gotten a copy of the appeal request letter that was written by Nick Coffey, the Nielsen’s hydrologist. There don’t appear to be any new facts presented in the letter, just arguments that the old facts were misinterpreted by the hearings officer. This is good news, because our understanding is that the commissioners usually won’t even consider an appeal of a denied partitioning unless new facts…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Philosophy

Pit of Vipers

That’s an uplifting image, isn’t it? I can barely watch the previews for Fear Factor, where they show contestants lying down in a box, covered with a mass of creepy-crawly snakes slithering every which way over them. I’d last, oh, about one second before I screamed, “get me out of here!” I’ve been thinking about a pit of vipers ever since my martial arts instructor, Warren, spoke about this concept last week. With the war in Iraq taking the turns it has, the Saddam statue falling today being a dramatic capstone to a pretty darn successful week for the Anglo-American…
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Posted inPhilosophy

The Power of Don’t-Know

Laurel has started attending a “Power of Now” group here in Salem, which discusses, and tries to put into practice, Eckhart Tolle’s philosophy. In his book, "The Power of Now," Tolle speaks of the wisdom of living in the present moment, which, really, is the only moment in which we can live anyway. Unarguably, most of life’s anxieties, fears, and problems vanish when we either forget about those that have already occurred in the past, or stop ruminating about those that might occur in the future. Laurel likes the people who participate in the Power of Now sessions, and I’m…
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Posted inEntertainment

Femme Fatale…fabulous

Another unexpectedly delicious DVD find, "Femme Fatale," a 2002 Brian de Palma film with a Hitchcockian flavor. I can’t even remember it in the theatres. It must have had a short run, probably because it is more artsy than mainstream films, and less artsy than art house films. “Tweeners” like Femme Fatale often get overlooked, which is too bad. Any movie with Rebecca-Romjin-Stamos in it deserves to be looked at, particularly the scene in the second half where she does a highly seductive bad-girl strip tease in the basement of what looks like a biker bar. Except…we theorized that any…
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Posted inDogs

Human training with Chuck-It

We often hear, "be careful of what you want, for you may get it." The summer after we got Serena the Wonder Dog I took her down to the dog exercise field at Minto Brown park, where I admired the tennis ball hurling gadget that a woman was using. While I was throwing Serena's ball just a little way down the field, plus running the risk of throwing my shoulder out with every not-so-mighty hurl, she was effortlessly catapulting her dog's ball far past my distance, and with much less effort. To top it off, she didn't have to bend…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

God Bless the Troops

Somehow Laurel had made it through her, um, 39 years of living on this Earth plane without ever being exposed to the Fox News Channel. So yesterday I served as her Right Wing Television Pimp and hooked her up with channel 205 on the Dish network. We managed to watch Fox News for about two minutes before we started to gag on the ever-present American flag logo in the upper left corner of the screen, and the hyper Got-To-Kill-Those-Damn-Iraqis-Before-They-Destroy-America (but how?) rhetoric from the so-called "news" anchors, all of whom seem to be angry white men with deep inferiority complexes…
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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 inEntertainment

Roger Dodger

This was an unexpected pleasurable DVD find, made possible by the usually-reliable "two thumbs up" notice on the front cover. I don't think this movie got much notice when it was first released, which figures: it is quirky and full of great dialogue, but not much sex or violence (lots of talk about sex--little explicit action). Roger is an advertising executive who, not surprisingly, has a way with words, and a way of using words to seduce women. The only problem is that he falls prey to his own bullshit and can't separate his malarkey from his real self--assuming he…
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Posted inEntertainment Family

Academy Awards reprise

I knew it! As I surmised in my last post, I knew there was no way that Laurel and I, who go to movies at real theatres regularly, could have only gotten 10 Oscar winners right, while my sister and brother-in-law, who spend about half the year in St. Lucia, where movie-going plays a second (or nineteeth) fiddle to margarita drinking and lying in the hammocking, could have gotten 16 and 17 Oscars right. Today Carol Ann fessed up in a revealing email message: "Anyway, you were right on our internet use for winning the annual first prize. Bob actually…
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Posted inMiscellany

Laugh when it hurts too much to cry

With all the serious insanity flying around the front page of the newspaper and CNN nowadays, it is great to be put in touch with someone who can laugh at it all. One of the (two or three) HinesSight readers, Randy Smith, told me about Neal Pollack's weblog, and I became an instant fan. Sucked into Pollack's web by his shameless self-promotion, I even bought both of his books via Amazon, where I learned that his first book was the inaugural title of McSweeney's Book, Dave Egger's (author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius") publishing arm. And that's all…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Keep those coyote control ideas coming

[Update: I've observed that some people find this post via a "coyote control" Google search. What you'll read below is , obviously, a tongue-in-cheek approach to coyote control. If you want to know the truth about coyote control, take a look at some other posts I've written on the subject of controlling predators: "Is killing cougars a wildlife service?" and "Coyote debates."] I've heard from a fellow Spring Lake Estates resident who has got his shotgun facing in the right direction when it comes to controlling the coyotes around here. It's refreshing to find someone who cuts through the B.S.…
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Posted inEntertainment

Academy Awards impressions

Should have gone with my heart, "Bowling for Columbine," rather than calculating, "they'd never vote for Michael Moore"...would have won with 11 picks, rather than tying with Laurel and one other person who also had 10 at Jim Ramsey's traditional vegetarian AA potluck...regardless, 10 or 11 is still pretty pathetic; my sister and brother-in-law report they got 16 and 17 respectively, ending up the top two at their AA get-together...congratulations! though don't I recall you saying, Carol Ann, that you do advance research on the Internet, checking out the projected winners from various sources, and then averaging them all together?...doesn't…
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Posted inNeighborhood

Victory! (but the war may not be over yet)

No, we're not talking about Iraq, but about Laurel's fight to stop further partitioning (a.k.a. subdividing) of lots in Spring Lake Estates. The report from the Marion County hearings officer arrived in the mail today. She denied the Nielsen's application to partition their Oak Drive lot. We're still digesting her findings, but clearly all of Laurel's hard work researching well deepenings and replacements, plus the competent hydrogeology reviews by Malia Kapillis, paid off. The hearings officer cited numerous errors and omissions in the original hydrogeology report prepared by Nick Coffey for the Nielsens, most of which were pointed out by…
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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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