Posted inGrowing older Home life

When it comes to friends, quality is more important than quantity

It's been a while since I've heard the proverb, two's company, three's a crowd.  But it fits with an important conclusion in a story I came across in the May 11, 2026 issue of TIME magazine, "The Myth of the Adult Friend Group." Here's a PDF version of the story in case that link doesn't work for you. The Myth of the Adult Friend Group The author, Meehika Barua, speaks of chasing the fantasy of TV shows like Friends and Sex and the City where a tight-knit group of close friends hang out daily, sharing the ups and downs of…
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Posted inCars

I’m one step closer to having a 2027 BMW iX3. Sadly, it’s a small step.

In late March of this year I wrote, "With Tesla easing out of the car-making business, the BMW iX3 looks appealing." Excerpt: For my next car, I’d like to either get a plug-in hybrid or an all-electric vehicle. Rumor has it that the 2027 Hyundai Tucson PHEV will have 62 miles of electric range, up from 33 miles in the current model. That would beat the RAV 4 PHEV. So I’m keeping my eyes open for news about the 2027 Tucson, which will feature a major redesign. As long as I’m car window-shopping, the recently released (in Europe) BMW iX3…
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Posted inDogs Home life

Our rural south Salem property is looking good in its Spring greenness

We don't get a lot of visitors to our home in rural south Salem, Oregon. I like to share photos on my blog, so all the work we put into our property -- either hired, which we're doing more of as we age, or directly by my wife and I -- gets more views than it otherwise would. This is my favorite view of our yard. Our house is barely visible on the far left. Trees abound. The large old oak in the center of the photo, at the end of the lawn, lost a huge limb in the Great…
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Posted inHealth Philosophy

Treat life like a science experiment: embrace trial and error

Many years ago, a female massage therapist said, while we were chatting during the session, "I make more mistakes than my sister because I try more new things." I've never forgotten that line. It often comes to mind when I make a mistake, which is frequently. Mistakes bother me, especially when I should know better and simply screw up because of a lack of concentration, my mind having drifted off to another time and place instead of focusing on the task at hand. Yet if I make a mistake while trying something new, I do my best to look kindly…
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Posted inGrowing older Retirement community

We need more ways for seniors to live in their community, not in an institution

My wife and I aren't super old. We're just old. Of course, our age limit for "super old" keeps increasing as our birthdays add up. I've had 77 so far. Laurel is a bit younger. What hasn't changed over the years is our reluctance to move from the non-easy-care house on ten rural acres that we've lived in since 1990. I've tried to explain the reasons for this in various blog posts. Here's a sampling: I'm 65. Where's my "Aging Hippie" retirement community? Musings on the problem of where to live after retiring Why it makes sense for seniors to…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Artemis II return to Earth was inspiring. Iran war negotiations not so much.

Today was a yin and yang news day for me. I was deeply moved watching the Artemis II crew splash down in the Pacific after becoming the humans who have traveled furthest from Earth in the course of their journey around the dark side of the moon. I continued to be disgusted and disturbed by the state of the supposed cease fire in the Iran war, which is mired in confusion, mixed messages, and general incoherence. So I saw the best of what science and technology can achieve in the United States' inspiring return to the moon -- or at…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

Claude is my new best friend. Google should be jealous.

It wasn't that long ago when "Googling" became synonymous with searching for something on the internet. Sure, there were other search engines, but Google was so dominant, few people used them. These days a search engine is coming to sound archaic, like a VHS recorder or a floppy disk. There are a couple of reasons for this, both of which should worry Google, especially the second one. First, I rarely look at the usual search results after I type in something in the Google search bar. The AI Overview that typically pops up at the top of the search results…
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Posted inCars Home life Uncategorized

With Tesla easing out of the car-making business, the BMW ix3 electric SUV looks appealing

My wife and I were early electric car buyers. Too early. Because we only kept the 2011 Nissan Leaf we bought for about eight months. Even though it just had a range of about 100 miles, there were other reasons why we sold it and bought a Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. Now I'm driving a gas-powered Subaru Crosstrek, while my wife has a Toyota RAV 4 plug-in hybrid. It has enough electric range that she has to worry about its gasoline going bad if the car hasn't been driven out of town for a while. For my next car, I'd…
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Posted inHealth Living with a catheter

I’m irritated with this Salem doctor, and pleased with this Eugene doctor

There's a lot I could say about the prostate surgery (TURP) I had two months ago at the PeaceHealth Riverbend hospital in Springfield. But in this blog post I'm going to try to follow my adage, "The only people who want to hear about an old man's prostate surgery are other old men, or the man's closest family and friends." So my goal here is to mainly talk about a bigger issue, one that almost everyone who interacts with doctors faces at some point: how is it that some M.D.s are so uncaring toward patients, while other M.D.s are so…
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Posted inHome life

Yay! We qualify for solar panels, even though our house is surrounded by tall trees

Today I got some good news. After seeing an ad in the Oregonian by Energy Trust of Oregon, I took them up on an offer to have reputable solar companies contact me, rather than taking a chance on the many posts I see on Facebook by firms making grandiose claims about how much a homeowner can save by installing their solar panels. Soon after I filled out an Energy Trust form with my address and contact information, I heard from someone who grew up in our rural south Salem neighborhood, and still lives nearby. Miles Henderson works in sales with…
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Posted inFamily Home life

I just learned about placeholder relationships. Sure didn’t apply to me and my wife.

Thanks to an article in TIME magazine by Meehika Barua, "The Rise of the Placeholder Partner," recently I learned about placeholder relationships. Barua explains what this means in her opening paragraphs. A friend of mine got out of a six year relationship, only to have her ex marry someone new within six months. Another woman I met at a networking event recently has been with her boyfriend for a decade, waiting on a ring. Every time they go on a vacation, she wonders if this holiday will be the one where he will propose, only to be dejected on the…
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Posted inInvesting

I was surprised how good I felt selling a crude oil fund and buying a sustainability fund

Gasoline prices have been on peoples' minds lately, given how the war with Iran that Trump started for some dubious reasons has caused the price of Brent Crude Oil to shoot up markedly, as shown in this 10 year chart provided by the Trading Economics site. Our neighborhood gas station here in Salem, Oregon is charging $4.25 a gallon, last time I looked. While I'm an environmentalist, a number of years ago our financial advisor thought that my wife and I needed a commodities fund in our investment portfolio, which otherwise largely consists of index mutual funds and a balanced…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Making daylight saving time permanent would save lives — of people and deer

I've found that whether changing our clocks twice a year is a good thing or bad thing, and whether it would be best to make daylight saving time or standard time permanent, are subjects that arouse more extreme opinionating in a group than religion or politics. Almost everyone has a firmly held view on this. Mine is that daylight saving time should be made permanent, as I've argued in these previous blog posts: Making daylight saving time permanent is a must, Congress Daylight saving time should be permanent -- no more "fall back" time change Let's make daylight saving time…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

If your iPassword extension for Safari disappeared, this worked for me to get it back

Recently the 1Password extension for Safari disappeared on my MacBook Pro. The extension wasn't showing in Safari settings, so most of the tips for getting it back that I found via some Googling didn't apply. Nothing else worked either. I was down to the tip of uninstalling 1Password on my computer, then installing it again. I was reluctant to do that, because I didn't want to risk screwing up my much-beloved 1Password, which I use a lot and had been workin fine until the extension disappeared. So I asked 1Password support for help. Soon I got an email from a…
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Posted inSports

Ilia Malinin lost an Olympic ice skating medal, but he won the heart of people who also have screwed-up big time

For me the most tragic moment in this year's Winter Olympics was Ilia Malinin, a hugely talented American figure skater, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory when he bungled a seemingly certain gold medal by falling twice in a performance where Malinin was so far ahead of his competition, all he needed to do was skate a clean program and the medal was his. As his stood on the ice, unable to comprehend what had befallen him, there was still a lot of cheering from the audience. They recognized his brilliance, and how uncharacteristic his deeply flawed skating was…
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Posted inSports

2026 Pac-12 football schedule shows the conference has recovered from nearly dying

It warms my heart to behold the recently released Pac-12 football schedule for the 2026 season. Back in November 2023 I wrote about how sad it was to watch the last Pac-12 Oregon vs. Oregon State game, as back then Oregon, Washington, Stanford, California, UCLA, USC, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State had announced they would flee the Pac-12 conference for greener (as in more media money) pastures. That left Oregon State and Washington State as the sole remaining members of what had become the Pac-2. Things looked dark for OSU and WSU. But in December 2023 they got $255…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Sports

In Super Bowl, Bad Bunny was terrific. So were the Seahawks.

I felt a bit embarrassed yesterday when I left a voice mail message for someone that ended with "Have a good weekend; not sure if you're a football fan, but I'm rooting for Seattle since they're closer to Oregon than the Rams." Oops. After I hung up I realized that I'd just demonstrated how little I follow the NFL (not at all, basically), since the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Los Angeles Rams for the NFC championship a few weeks ago, and Seattle played the New England Patriots in today's Super Bowl. Which I did watch, this being the first NFL…
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Posted inHome life

We’re loving our Daikin heat pumps that we bought from Advantage Heating & Air Conditioning in Salem

I enjoy giving praise to local businesses who provide a great product and excellent service. So this is my shout-out to Advantage Heating & Air Conditioning, who installed two Daikin Fit heat pumps at our house after our previous heat pumps reached the end of their useful life. We've used Judson's for most of the thirty-five years we've lived here in rural south Salem. They're also a fine company, but in the past few years we've noticed a decline in the quality of their maintenance and repair work on our American Standard heat pumps. Won't go into the details, as…
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Posted inHome life

I just ordered six months of emergency food in case the Big One earthquake hits

The Big One earthquake is a matter of when, not if, for us here in the Pacific Northwest. In 2015 an article in the New Yorker brought a lot of attention to the massive Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes that periodically strike our area of the world. I quoted from the article in "People of Pacific Northwest: Be scared, very scared. The Big One is coming." By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating…
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Posted inTelevision

Apple TV’s Tehran is a great series to watch anytime, but especially now

Iran, once again, has been convulsed by massive protests against the country's totalitarian rulers by citizens fed up with hyper-inflation, cruel repression, and lack of basic human rights. A disturbing Political story, "You Might Not Like What Comes Next in Iran: Chances of a democratic transition are slim," says: Iran’s repressive, clerical regime is fighting for its life. There are lots of reasons to hope that it collapses. The Islamic Republic is violent, corrupt and theocratic. It systematically discriminates against women and minorities, and its policies have led to economic disaster. When Iranians take to the streets to protest, the…
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