Posted inPhilosophy Sports

Pac-12 championship game shows how sports imitates life

Yesterday the Oregon football team defeated USC 31-24 in the Pac-12 championship game. The win was satisfying for me in many regards, some of them philosophical. Not that philosophy was on my mind as I watched the game with rapt attention. I got so nervous in the fourth quarter I was shivering with excitement and worry, so had to put on a sweater to make it through the final minutes. There's something about a well-played close football game like this one that resonates for reasons well beyond the obvious. Sure, Oregon was the underdog, a 3-2 team that was in…
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Posted inHome life

Our 2020 Christmas letter finds some humor in Covid

This year it wasn't easy for me to write our 2020 Holiday Greetings. Usually it is. But 2020 was such a depressing year, with 300,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States, at first I wondered if a Christmas letter from Laurel and me was even appropriate. Laurel convinced me that it was, after seeing a serious first draft of the letter. She argued that looking on the light side of disturbing situations helps us get through those tough times.  OK. That was convincing. So I started over. Here's the result in both PDF and JPEG formats.Download 2020 Christmas Letter PDF
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Posted inLiving with a catheter

SpeediCath Flex Coude Pro is the best male catheter

Since May 2017 I've used a catheter after having a urinary retention episode that showed my bladder had become atonic, a fancy word for not working any more as it should, likely due to my lengthy history of an enlarged prostate. I haven't written a whole lot about my experiences with a catheter. Recently I decided I should, starting with a post that has a rather plaintive title, "I've learned a lot about using a catheter. But does anyone care?" In that post I listed some questions that I wanted to address in other blog posts, regardless of whether anyone…
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Posted inLiving with a catheter

I’ve learned a lot about using a catheter. But does anyone care?

In May 2017 I had a urinary retention episode while on vacation in central Oregon that kicked off my life with a catheter at age 68. Now I'm 72 -- still doing the intermittent catheterization thing five times a day. It took me about three months before I was able to first write about my situation in "Given my peeing problem, be warned about asking 'How are things going?"" Since, I've written fifteen other posts about my life with a catheter. That's a thin (thankfully) plastic tube that is inserted into the urethra and thence into the bladder to remove…
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Posted inHealth Home life

Monkii 360 is my favorite Covid-era home workout device

Here in Oregon health clubs have been closed for most of the pandemic. I'd been working out three days a week at Courthouse Club Fitness, so needed to find an alternative way of getting in my usual dose of aerobic exercise and weight training. I've bought five devices that seemed promising. Three of them currently are sitting unused. I'll mention them briefly, then share what I like about the #1 and #2 favorite home workout devices. (I walk two miles a day with our dog up and down some fairly steep hills, so my device focus has been on strength…
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Posted inWeb/Tech

How to get MacOS Big Sur to show a flag next to emails

After installing the MacOS Big Sur upgrade, I was dismayed to find that the beloved red flags in the left column of Mail, which I'd used a lot to indicate messages I needed to do something with, had disappeared.  When I clicked on "Flag" in the menu bar, a flag would appear in the email message itself, but not next to it as was the case before Big Sur. Thankfully, a bit of Googling revealed a simple fix. Just right-click the "Subject" box near the top of the screen and make sure "Flags" has a check mark next to it. …
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Posted inEntertainment

Here’s why I loved The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix

At first I doubted Jim Ramsey, a friend who I have coffee with most Sundays, when he said I should watch The Queen's Gambit -- a seven-episode Netflix mini-series about, yawn, a girl who plays chess.  That unduly confident "yawn" was the reason it took me a week or two to say to my wife one evening, let's take a look at The Queen's Gambit to see if we might like it. Well, we sure did.  Every night after that we watched another hour-long episode. Yesterday we reached the end of our immersion into the ever-so-fascinating story of Beth Harmon,…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate. I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried.  And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously…
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Posted inHome life Philosophy

If you can’t be with the life you love, love the life you’re with

It's Thanksgiving today. I feel like I should put a one-day hold on my usual inclination to write something snarky, critical, or in my better moments, only mildly negative. So here goes with my modification to a song lyric that popped into my head when I woke up this morning and realized what day it was. And if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with. Stephen Stills performed the song, "Love the One You're With," in 1970. I turned 22 that year. Now I'm 72. The general sentiment still rings true to me,…
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Posted inGrowing older Home life

My wife thinks I’m crazy. This is normal, right?

I have direct experience of being married to only two women, Susan and Laurel. In between Susan and Laurel I got divorced, to set aside any conjecture about polygamy.  So I'm having to extrapolate from this small sample size to the much larger universe of wives. Both Susan and Laurel thought I was crazy. Not clinically, but in the sense that sometimes, and maybe often, the way I looked upon the world baffled them. My strong suspicion is that this is normal. Meaning, almost all wives look upon their husbands as crazy. I hope so, because otherwise I'm a husbandly…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Wake up to Covid reality, fellow Oregonians

I'll be blunt. If you're wearing a mask every time you're in a public place, are physically distancing, wash your hands regularly, and aren't socializing often with strangers or with large numbers of people you know -- good for you!  But if you're not doing some or all of these things -- shame on you!  You are either clueless about the skyrocketing Covid cases and hospitalizations both in Oregon and the United States as a whole, or you're so selfish, you don't care if you're helping prolong the suffering of this pandemic. Here's a chart of the depressing reality here…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Salem progressives go (mildly) wild for Biden’s victory

Saturday, around the country and indeed the world, people danced in the streets after our country's major news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.  A monthly discussion group my wife and I are part of had scheduled a Covid-aware outdoor meeting for yesterday afternoon in the back yard of Russ and Delana Beaton in northeast Salem. Laurel, my wife, did a little dance at one point. But mostly the nine of us stood around a fire expertly started by Russ, when we weren't sitting around it. Here's photos of the mildly wild celebrating by a bunch of progressives…
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Posted inHome life Web/Tech

Starlink app shows how good my view of the northern sky is

I live in a rural area near Salem with crappy CenturyLink DSL the only broadband option -- if you can call about 7 mbps download and 1 mbps upload "broadband." CenturyLink has told me that they are going to bring fiber optic broadband to our neighborhood exactly never.  And fast 5G wireless likely will be available in our area in the wilds of Oregon (six miles from the Salem city limits, the state capital, but it might as well be six hundred miles) at about the same time -- almost never. So Elon Musk's Starlink satellite network is my best…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Salem

Take the Salem Climate Action survey, though it is strange

I urge you to take the Community Survey that is part of the process for preparing a Salem Climate Action Plan. I believe you have until November 4. However, having just taken the survey myself, be aware that it is decidedly weird. Much of the survey has little to do with the climate, or actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or with the planning process.  For example, early on a question asked me how often I did the following: work on a community project, attend a public meeting discussing town or school affairs, attend a political meeting or rally,…
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Posted inCoronavirus

Salem, mask up in the name of freedom

Fall is here. Leaves are falling. COVID-19 isn't. Infections are rising in Marion County, in Oregon, in the United States. Not good. In fact, horrible. People have become complacent about wearing masks and physical distancing. It doesn't matter if you're inside a grocery store or the home of someone who is having a social gathering.  Wear a damn mask!  In the name of freedom. Yes, freedom. Too many people have the crazy idea that going maskless shows you're a freedom lover. Actually, it shows that you have no idea what freedom means.  If you don't believe me, read this opinion…
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Posted inHome life

My geeky search for the perfect winter tire

OK, "perfect" isn't a word that goes with "tire," so probably I shouldn't have used it in the title of this blog post. But my quest today was to find the nearest thing to perfect in a winter tire. I enjoy browsing the internet for tire information almost as much as I enjoy browsing for car information. It took me months of perusing automobile web sites and watching You Tube videos of car reviews before I settled on getting a 2020 Subaru Crosstrek Limited to replace my VW GTI.  Since the VW's winter tires won't fit on the Crosstrek I've…
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Posted inHome life

How I won my PayPal dispute against Peppermint Berri

Peppermint Berri is a disgusting company. Their 38 Trust Pilot reviews are all one star, the lowest possible, though somehow they end up with a 1.4 rating. I made a big mistake when I ordered a weed remover tool from them on May 14, 2020, having seen a Facebook ad for the device. I then filed a complaint with PayPal on July 22, where I said this. After ordering a weed remover on May 14 and not receiving it, I emailed Peppermint Berri three times on June 5, June 30, and July 20 asking why my order hadn't been received.…
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Posted inHealth Home life

Getting a high dose senior flu vaccine isn’t easy in 2020

Being 72 and a believer in vaccines (everybody should be, since they work), every October I've been heading off to Walgreens on south Liberty to get my annual high dose flu shot.  (Since us old folks have weaker immune systems, a high dose flu shot offers more protection, though a regular flu shot is better than nothing, for sure.) That's what I did last Tuesday, only to be met with a sign on the pharmacy window saying that they didn't have any high dose vaccine. Which was the same sign I saw last week. So I decided to check with…
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Posted inMarijuana

What happened to the Oregon legal marijuana horror show?

The title of this blog post came to mind while driving around this afternoon listening to Classic Vinyl on satellite radio when I heard one of the greatest rock songs of all time, Cream's Sunshine of Your Love from 1967. If you're too young to recollect the brilliance of Cream, here's a video of a 2005 performance.  I smoked a lot of marijuana during my days at San Jose State College, 1966-71. Cream was one of our go-to groups to listen to while high. So listening to the song got me thinking both about how us pot heads used marijuana back…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Wildfire good deeds need to become Covid good deeds

People here in Oregon, as elsewhere on the West Coast, have been wonderfully generous with their time, money, and effort in helping others affected by the massive wildfires burning in our forests. The nightly local news is filled with stories about meals being prepared for firefighters, livestock being cared for after homes were destroyed, donations of clothes and other household goods being used to aid the newly homeless, and other acts of kindness.  Such isn't surprising. Most people are generous. They feel empathy and concern for those in need. They want to make things better when suffering is rampant.  I've…
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