Posted inCoronavirus

Covid reality: thoughts are not facts

Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop: Thoughts are not facts.  She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so much a few months ago." OK. You thought that. But thoughts aren't facts, they're just thoughts. The only way…
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Posted inHealth

My hernia operation shows weirdness of hospital billing

I've been meaning to share what my May 6 hernia operation at Salem Hospital cost, because this shows how strange health care billing can be. But I'd been putting this off -- until I was spurred into blog post action by a story in today's Statesman Journal, "Salem Hospital lacks pricing transparency, new report says." Now, what I've shared below doesn't have anything directly to do with pricing transparency, but indirectly it does. I'm on Medicare. My insurance company is Regence MedAdvantage. Here's what the Medicare billing statement showed for my hernia operation. I combined the line items into categories,…
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Posted inSports

These Tokyo Olympic moments surprised me

I'm so old, it feels like I've been watching the Olympics ever since those ancient Greeks wrestled in the nude, foreshadowing gay pride for athletic muscular dudes. Thus I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics, which were supposed to be the 2020 Olympics if Covid hadn't thrown a pandemic wrench into the gears of the games. The opening ceremony bored me. I figured that Japan would put on something to surpass the ceremony in China some years ago, which was a mesmerizing spectacle. But no, I had to watch pieces of wood being shuffled around…
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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 inBooks Salem

Five reasons to buy Kelly Williams Brown’s new book

I buy and read lots of books. So many, I deserve a bookaholic diagnosis. But at first I had some reservations about getting a new book by Kelly Williams Brown, the Salem author who wrote Adulting (about becoming a grown-up) and Gracious (a modern etiquette book of sorts). Even though I admired the writing Brown did when she was a Statesman Journal reporter, I figured that regarding Adulting, I was already so grown-up I have one foot in the grave, and regarding Gracious, I'm at the age when you just feel entitled to act however you damn well please --…
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Posted inBlack Butte Ranch Salem

Black Butte Ranch roads have lessons for Salem streets

Salem, like almost all cities, isn't a pleasant place to drive around in. The exceptions are quiet residential neighborhoods where the speed limit is low, 25 mph or a bit higher, and the streets are narrow with plenty of trees. That's why the roads in central Oregon's Black Butte Ranch, where my wife and I have owned a 1/4 share in a vacation house for about four years, can teach Salem streets some valuable lessons. Wikipedia says that the permanent residents in Black Butte Ranch only numbered 366 in the 2010 census. But "During the peak tourist season, the population,…
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Posted inSalem Sustainability

Oregon is becoming a climate change hellscape

We're not quite there yet, thankfully. Oregon hasn't transitioned from a wonderful place to live into a hellscape -- "a harshly unpleasant place or environment." But the handwriting is on the global warming wall. Today my daughter, Celeste, her husband, Patrick, and my granddaughter, Evelyn, arrived to visit us at the Black Butte Ranch house that we have a 1/4 share in.  They're from southern California, though Celeste was born and raised in Oregon.  Chatting with them as we ate pizza and salad outside at the charming Lakeside Bistro, I pointed out how little snow there is on the Three…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

Summer of Soul — great movie about 1969’s Black Woodstock

Last night, via Hulu, my wife and I finished watching Summer of Soul, a hugely entertaining movie about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that featured outdoor concerts with musicians such as... Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and The Fifth Dimension. It's been called the Black Woodstock. However, a big difference is that Woodstock, which also happened in 1969, became a cultural phenomenon, with a movie about the festival coming out just a year later in 1970. By contrast, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival sat untouched for…
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Posted inDogs Sustainability

Fireworks should be shunned like cigarettes are

I'm not delusional. I don't believe fireworks are going to be banned anytime soon. Heck, here in Salem, Oregon, the City Manager ignored pleas from the public and several city councilors to ban the use of fireworks this year given a severe drought condition and recent record-breaking high temperatures. But I'm hopeful that with enough citizen education, the downside of fireworks will be understood so well, anyone setting them off on or around the Fourth of July will be viewed by most people with the same don't you know better attitude a cigarette smoker is these days. I've been familiar…
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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 Film

“In the Heights” shows joy of belonging to a community

Today I praised the In the Heights movie to someone who hadn't heard of it. They pulled out their phone and told me the film's Rotten Tomatoes ratings: 96% positive for critics, 95% positive for viewers. I said, "I'm surprised it wasn't 100%."  In the Heights is that good. My wife and I watched it at home via our HBO Max subscription. It's showing at Regal Willamette Town Center and Regal Santiam here in Salem, plus the Independence Theater. It looked and sounded fine on our TV. I'm sure it would look and sound even better on a really big screen.…
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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 inCurrent affairs Sports

Baseball as metaphor for politics: why OSU’s loss bothers me

Today the Oregon State baseball team failed to win a regional series in the NCAA tournament. After leading 5-0 in the deciding game against Dallas Baptist, Dallas Baptist scored eight unanswered runs and won 8-5. After watching the loss on ESPN, I found myself more disturbed than seemed reasonable. After all, it was just a baseball game. But sometimes I find deep philosophical meanings in sports events, as evidenced by "Deep thoughts about Arkansas' missed pop-up that cost a World Series championship." In this case, it was the first pitch thrown by OSU reliever Joey Mundt in the seventh inning…
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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 inCoronavirus Tai Chi

Maskless indoor Tai Chi class today after long Covid layoff

Last week Warren Allen, my Tai Chi instructor, said that today he was going to start having indoor classes again at his Pacific Martial Arts studio on Court Street in downtown Salem. I was worried, happy, reluctant, and eager. Which is fitting I guess, since Tai Chi is all about blending yin and yang in a harmonious combination of seeming opposites.  My feelings were natural given how long it had been since I'd been maskless indoors with people other than my wife. About fifteen months, I guess.  A Voice of America story, "Many Americans Anxious About Returning to 'Normal' After…
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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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