HinesSight

A real man will call a plumber

So, what does a guy do when his wife says, "The kitchen faucet is dripping. Can you fix it?"

I took a look at it. Yup. It was dripping, no matter how I turned the Kohler single handle faucet.

I vaguely remembered that the faucet used a cartridge. And that the last time I'd tried to replace a Kohler cartridge, I ended up having to call a plumber to bail me out.

With increasing age (occasionally) comes increased wisdom. Grabbing the Salem phone book, I called a plumber right off the bat.

When he arrived, after having told his scheduler that we had three other minor plumbing problems that needed fixing, the first words out of my mouth after "hello" were...

We've got some small jobs that shouldn't take you too long. I called you because my handyman skills are such, I can turn a small problem into a big one with amazing ease.

I felt better right away, having deflated my macho resistance to another man coming into our house and fulfilling my wife's plumbing desire. We ended up having a good conversation as I watched the plumber, whom I'll call "Joe," take a pleasingly long time replacing the Kohler cartridge.

Pleasingly, because I told Joe that my biggest fear -- and also my greatest hope, given his hourly rate -- was that he'd come out and fix everything in ten minutes, making it look disgustingly easy.

Which reminded Joe of a story.

He said that once someone else had called him about a Kohler faucet. The guy had taken it apart as far as he could, then had spent half an afternoon trying to finish the job.

Joe told him, "I'll come out and help you. On one condition: that you don't get mad when you see what I'm going to do." The guy reluctantly agreed.

Joe said that he walked up to the faucet, took out some pliers, and pulled out a copper retaining clip. Then handed the guy a $68 bill for the trip charge, or whatever it was he was charging at the time.

The customer was upset, but kept his cool as much as he could.

While he was telling me this story, I was encouraged to see that Joe was having some trouble disassembling our own Kohler single handle faucet. He told me that every model is different, requiring different tricks to disassemble so a new cartridge can be inserted.

I liked how Joe muttered under his breath and cursed frequently (mildly, probably for my benefit). That reminded me of me when I attempt a plumbing repair. However, Joe succeeded in finishing the job, so that's where our resemblance ended.

Figuring that I might as well bare my soul to get more therapeutic bang out of the bucks that I was going to end up paying Joe, I told him that long ago I decided I wouldn't let my manly self-esteem be determined by my fix-it skills.

Which are minimal, albeit greater than my wife's.

Talking with Joe about this was akin, I guess, to walking into an AA meeting and immediately telling everyone "Hi, I'm Brian. And I've got a drinking problem." Admitting my plumbing incompetence openly felt better than slinking into my office and playing with my laptop until Joe was finished and presented me with a bill.

Plus, I wanted to look over his shoulder and try to learn something.

The main thing I learned was that even for a highly skilled plumber, things don't go smoothly. It took Joe several hours to deal with the four seemingly minor problems, several of which ended up being fairly complicated.

I kept thinking, "Boy, if I'd attempted these on my own, I'd really have screwed things up."

For example: the pressure switch on our well pump was leaking slightly. I'd taken a look at it, noticed that various wires would have to be disconnected to unscrew the switch and put more wrapping tape around the stem, and decided to pass on a repair attempt.

When Joe worked on it, the stem broke off. He didn't have the right size replacement in his truck, so his son had to drive out and bring him a part.

We would have been without water for quite a while if I'd tried to fix the pressure switch leak. So I told myself, "Real men don't unnecessarily risk leaving their wife (and dog) without water."

While Joe was working on a toilet that wouldn't flush right (I learned that this model required a specific flapper, not the generic replacement that I''d unknowingly bought), I told him my favorite cautionary story about guys who believe they're more competent handymen than they really are.

"We bought our house from a man who did the finishing work himself. For years after that, whenever we had professionals come in to fix something, they'd take a look and say with amazement, Wow! Who put this in?!

I told Joe that we had an electrician out to fix a problem. He opened our circuit breaker box, took a quick glance, and immediately yelled to his partner, "Hey, come down and see this. You won't believe it."

Then he turned to me and said, "Do you ever smell smoke?" The electricians ended up doing a lot of re-wiring.

Moral of this story for me: I don't want to be a guy who's responsible for a plumber coming into our house after we've sold it and asking the new owner, "Jeez, who did this work?"

MotionX-GPS Drive: another reason I love my iPhone

My love affair with the iPhone is still passionate, continually renewed by the marvelous apps that I keep discovering and downloading.

MotionX-GPS Drive came into my iPhone life yesterday. We're getting along great. This is a terrific GPS application that cost me $2.99 -- a far cry dollar-wise from the Garmin Nuvi that I also adore. (Laudatory review here.)

Yet GPS Drive accomplishes most of what the Nuvi can do, and goes beyond it in some respects.

 
I like the clean and simple GPS Drive interface. The left screen is the home page.

There you can search for various needs/desires, like nearby coffee houses, gasoline stations, parking, medical attention, and such. Plus, of course, you can input an address and GPS Drive will guide you there whether you're driving or walking.

For the first 30 days Motion-X throws in free turn by turn spoken directions.

After that, I believe the cost is $25 a year, or thereabouts. A bargain, compared to what other iPhone GPS apps charge for turn by turn directions.

I tested GPS Drive out on a scooter ride to The Grind Coffee House in south Salem. I've been wondering how I could use a GPS device on my Suzuki Burgman 650, and I quickly realized that GPS Drive is well-suited for scootering.

I started the app up, clicked on the "Coffee" symbol, and found The Grind Coffee House.

(Actually Bad Ass Coffee, which used to be in that location. GPS Drive has a feature that lets you send in corrections to driving instructions, so I've let them know that Bad Ass has become The Grind -- which has a nicely erotic tone to it.)

After clicking on "Navigate," I attached earbuds to the iPhone, stuck them in my ears, then zipped the iPhone into a chest pocket on my scootering jacket. My full-face helmet slipped on nicely, leaving the earbuds in place.

Because I ride a quiet big scooter, not a noisy Harley, I could hear the turn by turn instructions -- which were right on target.

In fact, I was taken to The Grind on a way that I hadn't thought of before. Shorter, more scenic, less traffic. When I got to the coffee house I praised GPS Drive to the young'ish owner/barrista. (Of course, now that I'm 61, just about everyone looks young to me.)

She was an iPhone aficionado also and said that she'd probably get this app. No reason not to at $2.99.

And I'm confident it's only going to get better and better, based on my experience with MotionX-GPS Sport, which has been part of my iPhone app library for almost a year.

Using GPS Drive on a dog walk this afternoon, I found that it worked as well for getting around on two legs as on two wheels.

Halfway around a neighborhood street loop, I asked GPS Drive to guide me to our house. It started navigating correctly, offering up estimates for how far dog and man had to go, and when we'd arrive at our destination.

I was curious to see what would happen if I took an off-road trail for a while. GPS Drive dutifully tracked our progress across a shortcut, then updated its distance and arrival time info once we got back onto a road that it recognized.

Pretty impressive.

One of the few drawbacks to an iPhone based GPS device is that when cell phone service is lost, as happened a couple of times on our walk, maps can't be updated (but the GPS capability remains, so progress still is shown on a static map).

This is because GPS Drive maps are downloaded on demand, rather than residing on the device, as is the case with my Garmin Nuvi. So no cell phone service, no maps.

On the plus side, information is going to be more up to date with GPS Drive, since it is as current as the Internet is (GPS Drive uses Bing as its search engine). So if a new restaurant opens up, my iPhone will know about it long before the Garmin Nuvi database is updated.

I'm regularly blown away by how many creative and useful apps there are for the iPhone.

I rarely use it to make phone calls. But many times a day I'm checking email, looking up a weather report, seeing what's new with the news, Twittering, and -- without fail -- playing another round of Ragdoll Blaster. 

Hugely addicting. Who knew that shooting ragdolls out of a cannon in order to solve increasingly complex target-hitting puzzles could be so much fun? 

Not me. Until now.

Just as I've come to realize that it's possible to buy a first class GPS device for $2.99 (leaving aside the not-insignificant cost of an iPhone, which, however, has come to seem cheap at any price to me).

I embrace my inner Anguished Artist

Anguished artist. Or tortured genius?

I'll go with either one, though if I went full-bore with my inner Tortured Genius there's a risk I'd end up doing a Van Gogh and cutting off my ear.

I did just get a haircut, though, so let's look on that gesture as a sort of performance art -- pointing to the pain my sensitive artistic soul has been suffering every morning this week when I get the newspaper, turn to a certain page, and feel like tearing my hair out.

That page shows the results of the Salem Statesman Journal State Fair photo contest. I've been dutifully entering one of my photos each day since I visited the fair last Monday.

So far I'm batting .000 in the winning department.

Not that I care about winning, not at all, not that this blog post has anything to do with me wanting to win one of the daily contests, because the root of my artistry isn't grounded in such crass considerations as winning and losing.

No, I merely seek recognition of my art for art's sake.

I've been entering the State Fair photo contest, submitting a new image each day, only so my unique vision will be more widely known to a humanity hungry to be fed the sort of point-and-shoot camera'ific genius that me and my Sony DSC-HX1 produce.

Thus when I scream "No, no, no! Unfair!" as I unfold the Local section and discover that one more time, one goddamn more time, a photo of a cute kid has gotten more votes than my photo, my Anguished Artist is protesting in the name of art, not my ego -- no matter how it may appear to those less attuned to how we Tortured Genius'es feel (such as my wife).

The past winners, and I bear them no ill will (aside from wanting to cast them into the depths of hell), are distinguished by one obvious characteristic: four of the six winning photos have featured a cute kid.

My photographic vision of the State Fair did not include a cute kid in the foreground. Mainly, I have to admit, because I didn't come to the fair with one, and I was worried that if I latched onto a child so I could get him or her into a photo, I'd be charged with kidnapping.

Anyway, like I said my Art (I capitalize that word to show how serious I am about it) is far beyond everyday notions of gain or loss.

My photos were taken for Art's sake, and my entering the State Fair Photo Contest daily is for Art's sake, as is the anguished suffering I feel when, once again, someone's cute kid photo beats me out.

Given all this, I am utterly uninterested in anyone clicking THIS LINK and voting for the photo I entered in today's contest. It is not something that I want anyone to do -- though as an Artist, I realize that when inspiration strikes, such as a desire to follow a web link, that intuition must be honored.

I also am not going to be so crass as to make it easy for someone to recognize my photo on today's State Fair Photo Contest page, which would have been easy to do using words such as "horse/ rider silhouette" and "a true patriot would vote for a photo of the American flag." 

Or, "top row on right."

I won't do that. Because we anguished artists are committed to art for art's sake. Not winning a silly newspaper photo contest.

I become a fearsome (ground squirrel) killer

Hopefully the California ground squirrels who have been driving us nutty have an Internet connection and read my blog.

Because if they do, they'll realize that this mild-mannered PETA-applauding animal-loving long-time vegetarian has been driven over the "aren't they cute?" edge into a kill the bastards! dark hole.

Squirrels, notice: I am not smiling.

This is a photo of a non-natural born killer who has been reluctant to send your furry little souls to squirrel heaven, but was driven to this extreme by all the destructive digging you've been doing around the foundation of our house and garage.

Yesterday, thanks to Amazon, my GAMO Varmint Hunter Air Rifle arrived. A gun-savvy friend gave me some advice about what kind of killing machine to purchase.

This model could be overkill for our needs, so to speak, but I decided to spend a few extra bucks in order to get...

-- An air rifle called "Varmint Hunter." Scary name, isn't it squirrels? (if you're still reading this post and haven't high-tailed it back south to Malibu)

-- A scope that features an attached laser and flashlight. I have no idea why I need these things, since I don't plan to shoot at night, but they give the rifle an added dose of deadly coolness.

-- A 1200 feet per second pellet velocity with GAMO's PBA pellets, 50 of which came with the rifle. The side of the box indicates "supersonic" at this speed. Sounds desirable, though I doubt a squirrel could hear a pellet coming and duck at a lower pellet velocity.

I only have a couple of problems to deal with before squirrel bodies litter our south Salem yard.

One, I'm not a great shot, since I haven't ever owned a real rifle -- just had a pellet and BB gun back when I was a kid, but that (obviously) was a long time ago.

We're trying to find some bales of hay to serve as back-up for practicing purposes. I just ordered a pleasingly realistic target that, when the California ground squirrels see it in use, should further quicken their exodus back to the Sunshine State. 

Two, for some reason we aren't seeing any ground squirrels at the moment.

As soon as I clicked the Amazon "order" button for the air rifle, I figured this would happen, just as annoying noises in a new car always have gone away as soon as I drove it to the dealer's service department to complain.

Laurel trapped a ground squirrel a few days ago, so this is part of the explanation. We've been assuming that there were lots of squirrels doing the digging, since there were so many holes.

But maybe we got the Public Enemy #1 ground squirrel. Regardless, I'm darn confident that this isn't the last we've seen of the pests.

Indeed, I'm almost hoping that this is true, now that the Varmint Rifle is leaning in a corner of our entryway, ready for use now that a neighbor sighted-in the scope for me, which had a decided right-leaning tendency (disturbing, given my progressive tendencies).

Speaking of liberal warmth and fuzziness, I gave up shooting at sentient animal creatures in my pre-teen years when I aimed at a bird in a bush with my pellet gun and, shockingly, killed it.

It fell down, dead. And I felt terrible.

It was a song bird. Not a nuisance. Just a living thing that my kid-brain had decided was fine to convert into a non-living thing. The moment it hit the ground, I'd intuitively realized, not fine. 

This helps explain why it's taken me so long to decide that killing the ground squirrels, rather than live-trapping them (which is difficult to do, though we've gotten eight or so), is the way to go.

Hypocrisy is what caused the Varmint Hunter Air Rifle to be delivered by UPS. My hypocrisy.

We've been urging our dog to chase the squirrels and kill them. When we were out of town for a while, we invited a friend who hunts to come over with his own air rifle and knock some off. He said he got one. We were pleased.

I've been happy to have the squirrels killed. I just didn't want to do it myself, so I could continue to tell myself, "I don't kill animals." That's hypocritical.

Here's a video about the Varmint Hunter rifle. It seems to be a quality product, based on my one day's use. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to "plink" at a target, even (or especially) when it isn't alive.

Ground squirrels, be warned: move out before my shooting skills improve.

Our new well silts up 60 feet. Here's why.

We're always learning something new about country living. Today, it was that our 440 foot new well, just three months old, can quickly accumulate 60 feet of silt.

Who knew?

It surprised even our well driller, Troy, who said that in his experience he's only had a couple of ten inch wells manifest this odd behavior. Unfortunately, it was our well and the next one he drilled.

Unlucky us. But at least now we know what's going on, and how to fix the problem, thanks to some down-the-well diagnosing with a submersible camera.

When Oregon Pump came by a few weeks ago to install a pump in the new well, they found that a probe couldn't get anywhere near the bottom. Since the well has a liner all the way down, that surprised us.

The slots in the liner where water flows in are only 1/8 of an inch wide. We couldn't understand how so much debris could get into the liner from the sides of the well, especially since we hadn't been using it, so no water was moving up and down.

Since there was a possibility that the liner had collapsed, we decided to take a look down the well. It was interesting to watch the viewing screen as the camera slowly descended down the liner.

When it got to about 380 feet, we hit pay dirt. Or rather, dirt that we'd paid to have removed, but was still in the well. This wasn't Troy's fault -- just one of those things that happens in well drilling, and thankfully it's fixable.

The camera's probe descended into the muck a bit, showing that it was very fine, not at all solid. When the camera came out of the well, the operator honored my finger with some of the silt.

It was slimy rather than rocky or dirty. Tiny particles were evident in it. Troy explained that this is probably what happened:

After he enlarged the well to ten inches (we started with a six inch well), he let the water settle for a day. Then he put the liner in -- 20 foot lengths of perforated PVC pipe, glued together.

He had no problem getting the liner all the way down to the bottom, so the well obviously hadn't silted up right away.

Troy figures that the large ten inch well must have contained a lot of fine particles that were still floating around in the water (about 1800 gallons worth) even after a day of settling. Water was both inside and outside of the liner.

So most of the silt, or sediment, was already inside the liner, and simply settled to the bottom eventually. Likely there also is sediment outside the liner also, between the pipe and and the walls of the well.

Troy is going to rent a sediment pump, take out the liner, and then remove the silt. He explained how the pump works, but I'm incapable of re-stating the mildly erotic details of the suction process.

This should restore our well to close to 440 feet deep. Certainly much closer than we are now. The pump will be installed 20 or so feet from the bottom, in case some silting reoccurs.

I wanted to tell our story in case someone else has a similar problem, and finds this blog post via a Google search. This amount of silting isn't common in a new well. Doing my own Googling, I couldn't find any obvious references to what happened to us.

But not many residential wells are ten inches in diameter. There's three times as much water in a ten inch well as in a six inch well, so seemingly there also would be three times as many floating particles.

It's still difficult to picture how those particles could end up silting up 60 feet of a six inch liner. Yet the camera showed that this is what we've got.

(If you are a city dweller who reads this post, out of boredom or some other reason, be thankful that all you need to do is turn a faucet and water comes out. We love living in the country, but at times, like today, a condo with a couple of potted plants on the deck sounds pretty appealing.)

When to start getting Social Security benefits? I say, ASAP

It's hard to believe, but my gray hair (and driver's license) testifies to the fact: in a bit over a year I'll be 62 and eligible to start getting Social Security benefits.

So a New York Times article caught my eye this morning. Reading "Collect Now or Later? Timing Your Social Security Benefits" I realized that no matter what the experts say, I'm strongly inclined to stick with my current inclination:

Give me my freaking benefits As Soon As Possible -- ASAP!

Now, I realize that others will decide differently. And that's understandable. I just wanted to share my philosophical take on this subject, for what it's worth.

That's what it comes down for me: philosophy...of life.

The article focuses on how much total money someone will get from Social Security if they start taking benefits at 62, versus waiting until 65 or 70. If you live long enough, waiting brings in more bucks.

For people who choose to defer benefits until age 66, it generally takes about 12 more years to collect as much as if you started getting checks at 62. So you break even, so to speak, about age 78, according to Avram Sacks, a Social Security law analyst for CCH, a tax and accounting information service. “If you are in good health, and you expect to live to 78 or longer, then the advantage goes to the person who waits,” he says. “But that’s assuming we’re all prophets and we know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t all know.”

I don't understand this way of looking at "advantage." Life is about a lot more than dollars and cents, or the quantity of living we do.

Mr. Sacks points to the financial advantage of waiting to start getting checks from Social Security, if you end up living longer than 78. However, what about the quality of life disadvantage of foregoing what you could have done with the money from age 62 to 78?

Traveling. Buying stuff you've always wanted. Gifts for grandchildren. Fixing up your home. Charity. Whatever you want. Including, naturally, simply living: paying for groceries, gasoline, and such.

I'm not saying that my life at 78, if I get that far, isn't going to be worth living. However, I know what life at 60 is like, and it's pretty damn enjoyable.

I'm healthy, energetic, and enthusiastic, of sound body and mind (aside from my usual psychological quirks and minor ailments). So I want my Social Security benefits ASAP, because I don't like the idea of having extra money when I can't enjoy it as much as I can now.

Makes sense to me. And to other people I've talked with who are leaning in a similar now, now, now direction when they turn 62. We don't see any reason to wait.

But like I said earlier, I can understand why someone else would choose to. The decision as to when to start getting benefits isn't entirely philosophical -- this is just how I look at the question:

What will bring me the most satisfaction? Using the Social Security money from now until I'm 78, or after that age?

Qwest technical support produces gripes...then grins

I've had an interesting relationship with my off-and-on friend, Qwest.

Back in August 2007 I was writing an irritated blog post, "Qwest, I'm waiting for DSL...still waiting...," about how the communications company was stiffing my efforts to get broadband to our neighborhood.

Then in January 2008, after writing a pleading letter to the Qwest CEO, I got all ecstatic in "I'm the DSL King of the World!" I'd managed to get DSL installed in our rural south Salem area, freeing myself -- and many others -- from the frustrations of dial-up and satellite Internet.

I'm still going through Qwest ups and downs.

A few months ago I started seeing a lot of Qwest service truck activity going on along Liberty Road, our automotive and utility connection with Salem. Ever the optimist, I hoped that this pointed to improvements in our DSL service, which had been limited to 1.5 mbps.

My wife, ever the pessimist, thought that Qwest was just trying to keep its sometimes creaky phone service working. Turned out I was right.

One day in late April the phone rang. Someone from Qwest asked if I was interested in signing up for broadband. I told her that I already had it, but would sure be interested in faster DSL service.

"It's available in your area," I was told. "Sign me up," I said. For seven bucks more a month, I could go from fast to faster, 1.5 mbps to 7 mbps. Whooee!

More ecstasy. But after the upgrade was activated, agony. Intermittent, yet still seriously frustrating. The wireless connection to my MacBook would drop unpredictably, something that had never happened at the 1.5 mbps speed.

After trying the obvious -- unplugging the 2Wire modem, then firing it back up again -- the problem kept occurring. My Internet life would speed along much faster than before, then come to a complete stop for a minute or two.

Time for a call to Qwest customer service.

Predictably, the first thing I was told to do was unplug and replug the modem. "Been there, done that," I told the person I was talking to. But I did it again anyway.

DIdn't make any difference, naturally. Another call to Qwest had me being walked through a process that supposedly led to more power being supplied to the modem. Again, no difference.

This was all that Qwest technical support had in their bag of DSL dropped connection problem bag of tricks. I was told, "If this keeps happening, call Apple."

Ah, the familiar customer service brush-off.

Can't be a phone company problem; must be something wrong with your computer. Except, the dropped broadband connections hadn't occurred at the 1.5 mbps speed, only after the upgrade. 

Still, I dutifully used my AppleCare contract and phoned Apple after a few more days of being afflicted with Internet interruptus.

No suggestions at all.

Which didn't really surprise me, since I was pretty sure the problem lay with Qwest, not my MacBook. Realizing that I needed more ammunition to fire at Qwest technical support, I started running up some stairs to stare at the modem whenever my laptop's wireless connection stopped working.

In addition to burning calories, I learned some things. About half the time, the normally solid green DSL light would be blinking. Hah! Proof! No DSL, no wireless connection. Seemed like a smoking tech support gun.

But I didn't want to risk hearing "It's Apple's problem, not ours" again. So I turned on my wife's PC laptop and confirmed that when the MacBook Internet connection was down, so was her ThinkPad's, running Windows XP.

Time for a gotcha call to Qwest. I was looking forward to throwing my "It's your fault!" evidence at technical support.

However, it took me three phone calls, each time having to wander through a lengthy automated "press 1 for..." before I could talk to a real person. The first two calls, I was disconnected from the Qwest phone system.

Now, it doesn't inspire confidence in a communications company when they aren't able to keep their own customer service phone system working. The second time this happened I began to harbor conspiracy theory thoughts.

"Maybe Qwest does this on purpose, to weed out customers who have a nagging, but not serious, problem. If they keep calling back after being disconnected, Qwest rewards them with a repair ticket -- sort of like a Zen master who only accepts students after they've waited by the monastery gate in the snow for several days."

My third phone call to technical support, once I got a real human being, started with me saying as quickly as possible, "I've been cut off twice; if this happens again, you need to call me back. Right away, before I kill myself. Which wouldn't be good for Qwest public relations, when the news gets out that a customer committed suicide after being disconnected from tech support three times in a row."

(Or words to that effect. Sometimes I embellish my memories a bit, remembering what I wish I'd said.)

I then zeroed in on the blinking DSL light, repeating that fact over and over.

Must have made a difference, because for the first time I heard, "When you signed up for the upgrade, didn't someone tell you that your current modem might not be able to handle the higher speed?"

"No," I replied. "It would have been nice to know that, though."

From that point on, my Qwest customer support experiences turned from gripes to all grins. I was told that a new Motorola modem would be sent to me, how to return the old one, and the basics about how to get the new modem up and running.

The next day a UPS guy appeared in our driveway. Carrying a box. Which held the Motorola modem. Nice! Qwest had sent it overnight from Colorado. Maybe I should threaten suicide every time I call technical support about some problem.

I was worried that the installation process would be complicated. It wasn't. However, I'm more computer savvy that most people.

A lot of Qwest customers wouldn't have been able to follow the rather cryptic instructions I was given over the phone. Having a step by step guide in the new modem box describing how to get a secure wireless network up and running would save most customers quite a bit of head scratching.

Anyway, the Motorola modem gets along great with the faster DSL connection, which I've measured at about 6.0 mbps down and .740 mbps up. Qwest and me are on friendly terms again.

I just wish that on my first call to technical support, rather than my fifth, I'd been told that the 2Wire modem is known to not be able to handle the higher DSL speed I'd signed up for.

Jet lagging my way through post-vacation blues

I realize that life can't be arithmetic'ized. Still, every time we come home from a vacation I mentally calculate the value of a numberless equation:

All the rushing around to get ready to leave + dealing with all that has to be done when we get back - the relaxation of the vacation = how much reduction in stress?

I'm pretty sure the value to the right of the equals sign is positive. Meaning, the psychological benefit of a vacation is worth all the work involved in the pre- and post- days. But leaving Maui and returning to Oregon last Wednesday made me wonder, a bit at least, if that's true.

It was sort of a premonition -- approaching the west coast and seeing a once-tropical sun setting below a bank of dense clouds.

My gustatory brightness had started to fade quite a bit earlier in the flight. Hawaiian Airlines, to its credit, still serves free meals in coach. So I was pleased to see the meal cart heading my way a few hours into a flight that up to that time had featured a tiny bag of pretzels for sustenance.

"Turkey sandwich or pasta?" we were asked.

"Oh, pasta," I said with a smile. Quickly adding, with an intuition born from long meatless experience, "We're vegetarians."

"It's chicken pasta. Sorry."

Hey, Mr. Flight Attendant, you couldn't have been as sorry as I was. A fact you would have become well aware of if you'd hung around to hear the conversation between the two lunch-less vegetarians in 13 A and B.

"Good god, can't Hawaiian offer a vegetarian option on a five hour flight? The other passengers wouldn't suffer from not having meat for one meal. In fact, it'd be good for them. Whereas we pure-stomached souls would incur grievously hurtful dietary karma from the turkey or chicken Hawaiian was offering."

All the energy I used in griping made me even hungrier. Luckily, we'd made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before we left our Napili Kai room. Looking around the plane, we were the only ones I could see eating our own food.

Such is the cross we vegetarians have to bear. We live longer than carnivores (especially red meat eaters) but spend a good part of life staring glumly at menus that pretend we don't exist.

After getting home at 1:30 in the morning, and waking up earlier than I wanted due to my brain believing it was time to rise and curse the screeching birds that had greeted me the past ten sunrises, one of my first daytime sights was way more plant material than even a vegetarian wants to see.

The good news was that it must have been cool and rainy in Oregon most of the time we were gone (the rain gauge showed 4 inches of wet stuff had fallen). The bad news was that grass loves that sort of climate.

I'd mowed extra short before we left. Today I had to mow extra long, not wanting to traumatize the grass that had just spent two weeks growing the good life.

I gave the lawn a sign that the Big Bad Mower Man was back in charge by cutting it to about half of the extravagant height it reached while we were gone. Sunday I'll chop it down to regular size and do the trails that I didn't have time to mow today.

Two mowings in three days. A huge stack of saved-up mail, including a bunch of bills. Suitcases to unpack, wrinkled and dirty clothes to deal with, a pet rescued from "dog jail" to fawn over (that's her term: the Shaggy Dog Kennel calls it a Pampered Dog program, which, given the boarding bill, is a lot closer to the truth).

We also have a bunch of TV programs recorded on our DVR to get through as quickly as possible. Yes, coming back from a vacation can be hell.

Already, I couldn't help but see a news blurb about who got kicked off Dancing With the Stars on one of the episodes we missed. If we don't watch the Survivor shows soon, we'll learn what happened on those also.

[Note to potential commenters on this post: if you reveal what happened on Dancing With the Stars, Survivor, Lost, or 24 the past two weeks, you will incur horribly bad karma that will ruin the rest of your life. It'll be even worse than eating meat. Trust me -- though I admit that philosophically and theologically there's no reason to. But still, trust me.]

Drilling a new well: lessons from our muddy experience

If you have city water, you turn a tap and water comes out. Pretty simple.

Out here in the south Salem (Oregon) countryside, each house has an individual well. And that's where things get complicated.

Especially if you have super-crappy water, as we do.

It takes four large tanks in our garage -- an ozonator, softener, iron filter, and ph adjuster -- to treat our current well water and make it suitable for indoor use (outside, the plants love the raw water with its iron, magnesium, and such).

The equipment is sensitive, prone to breakdowns, and fairly expensive to maintain. So we've harbored fantasies of drilling a new well that would (A) supply us with a greater flow than the 10-12 gallons a minute we've got now, and (B) have higher quality water.

Here's the fantasy, fulfilled. Sort of. We got (B) but not (A). Well, you can't always have everything you want with a well.

Our driller, Troy, of All Seasons Well Drilling, reminded us that sometimes people get a dry hole for the thousands of dollars they fork out for a well. So we're thankful that our 445 foot hole turned out as well as it did (hard not to use "well" a lot when you're thinking about wells).

This is the first well drilling experience for my wife and me. We've learned quite a bit. And gotten to play in muddy flowing water like we were kids again.

A well looks so neat and clean when it's all finished, like in the first photo. But the process of drilling a well -- messy! No way to avoid it, especially with a well that was widened to 10 inches.

Troy started with a 6 inch hole, which is standard in our neighborhood. He told us that he likes to do this, drilling down all the way without casing the top part of the well, because it lessens the cost if water isn't found.

Some drillers, he said, case (meaning, seal) the upper part -- 53 feet in our instance -- before knowing whether the well is productive. So people can be left with an expensive underground concrete or bentonite "flag pole" that has to be abandoned.

After we got down to 445 feet with seven gpm of better quality, but still fairly iron'y, water, we had to decide whether to widen the well to 10 inches. In various areas of life, including well drilling, there's a valid question: "is bigger better?"

We pondered the pros and cons of a six versus 10 inch well. And decided to go with bigger.

Troy educated us with some geometry. Each foot of a six inch well holds 1.5 gallons of water. Each foot of a 10 inch well holds 4.5 gallons, three times as much.

There's about 400 feet of standing water in the new well. So in our case a 10 inch well essentially serves as an extra 1200 gallon holding tank (a six inch well would hold 600 gallons; a 10 inch well, 1800 gallons).

Yes, it cost us more to widen the hole to 10 inches. Everything is more expensive when you go bigger: the drive shoe, the casing, the perforated liner (which extends from the upper casing all the way to the bottom of the well).

But we figured that if our water flow drops for whatever reason -- global warming, over-development, well problem -- it'd be nice to have a maintenance-free "holding tank" with plenty of storage for our household use.

(We'll probably end up using our old well for outside watering, in part because our garden plants love the mineral-rich water so much).

I'll attach a copy of our well log, which is public information, for any well geeks who enjoy looking at the detailed information.
Download Well log

Our current well, which was drilled in the early 1970s, doesn't have a liner. We like the idea of having a six inch perforated plastic liner from five to 445 feet down. The way we understand it, this keeps rocks and other debris from caving in and messing with the pump, or making the well unusable.

Here's a prime piece of advice for anyone who is having a well drilled: be aware that lots of muddy water, gravel, and such is going to flow from the drill rig and go...somewhere.

Water is injected into the hole as it is being bored. Then it is blasted out. Quite a scene, as the water/rock/dirt mix sprays out 15-20 feet or so. Think ahead about where it is going to end up.

We ended up digging a series of trenches to divert the muddy gravel/water mix away from our landscaping. Had to do it by hand, since there were too many trees and brushy vegetation to use a machine.

Troy, who worked by himself most of the time, handled the bigger trenching up near the drill rig. Laurel and I kept the water flowing in the right direction the rest of the way.

It wasn't a hugely horrible task, once we got it figured out. Gushes of muddy, gravel'y water would come flowing down the trenches when a new section of the well was drilled out.

We'd shovel out the gravel from areas that came close to overflowing. Mostly, the downhill topography kept the muddy mix moving along nicely into natural areas of our property.

After the well was finished, Troy scooped up a lot of muck with his tractor and buried it in an open grassy area. Believe me, you don't want this stuff hanging around any place you'll be walking. Or where you want vegetation to grow.

I don't know whether this is always the case, but what came out of our sandstone well was a lot like watery clay. Or quicksand, in the deeper areas. It stuck to our rubber boots like the mud that it was.

Anyway, that's a description of our first -- and hopefully last -- well-drilling experience. Now that it's over, I can almost say that it was fun. Almost.

While the drilling is going on, expect noise, mess, and a prodigious amount of muddy water. Remember the 1.5 and 4.5 gallons per foot rule for six inch and 10 inch wells, respectively.

With a 445 foot well, we had about 2000 gallons of mucky soil and rock that came from underground, and became part of our overground. Dealing with that stuff was the main thing we had to cope with. 

Aside from writing some pretty large checks.

Well drilling ups and downs

These well-drilling photos are a good reflection of our emotional state the past few days.

Drilling a new well has its ups.

It was a kick to see Troy, of All Seasons Well Drilling here in Salem/Keizer, making his rig do sit-up tricks as he maneuvered the hugely heavy truck into place over the gravel that we'd put down in front of the new well location.

Next day he was ready to go.

Amazingly, given the stories I've heard about how long it used to take someone to dig a well by hand, or with crude equipment, he was down to 445 feet by late in the afternoon.

Our expectations were as high as the top of his rig.

Sure, we knew that drilling a well is a chancy affair, but we'd used a VLF water finding service (Water Finders, based in Gladstone) that claims to be able to locate water-bearing fractures and faults (sample equipment shown here).

The well we use now has pretty good quantity -- about 12 gallons per minute -- but the quality is super-crappy. It takes an ozonator, softener, iron filter, and ph adjuster to transform the raw well water into usable house water.

So we weren't horribly disappointed when Troy told us that he was getting about 7 gallons a minute from the new well (hard to tell exactly, apparently, until a pump is installed).

We could live with that. But our home test kit indicated that the iron level was about the same as our current water. Iron is our biggest water treatment bugaboo.

Hardness and other issues can be dealt with fairly easily. Iron, though part of the hardness problem, is the nastiest stuff. It clogs treatment equipment and is a pain to handle if it sneaks into our house.

(For much of my karate training career, we were figuring out how to treat our water effectively, so I stood out as the student in the decidedly non-bright "white" gi.)

However, at the moment we're on an upswing. Laurel re-tested the new well water this morning and got a considerably lower iron reading. Plus, after sitting overnight there was no sign of the scum that forms on our current raw water.

Additionally, Troy phoned a few hours ago with results from a water sample: 2 ppm of iron, 25 grains of hardness.

Not great. But for us, reason for hope.

That iron reading is at least half of what we have to deal with now, and maybe considerably less -- depending on the date of our old well water testing.

Tomorrow we'll get results of an even more definitive new well water test. Hopefully our emotions will keep going up -- if iron is down.

Mint is a great personal finance site

I hate watching our investments decline in value. And worrying about whether we're spending more than we should. But I love Mint, a free money management web service.

After reading about Mint in a news magazine, I fired up my MacBook this morning and decided to see how good it looked.

First impression: nice. And that carried over to the entire hour or two I spent on the Mint web site.

Sign-up was simple. Then came the part I was worried about, giving Mint access to our checking account, investment portfolio, and IRAs.

I've used Quicken for many years, and have had quite a few problems with its melding of financial data from various sources. Recently I tried to get Quicken Online to log into our checking account. It didn't even recognize West Coast Bank, much less our account.

So I was prepared to enter into some lengthy hassles with Mint after I signed up and the site started asking if I wanted to register various sorts of accounts: cash, investment, savings, and such.

Pleasant surprise. Everything went smoothly. No problems at all.

My experience was similar to that of a New York Times reporter, who said in "Where's It All Going? Find Out Online" that Mint worked better for him than competitors such as Wesabe.

But he quoted Mint's founder, Aaron Patzer, as saying that only 50% of users have a glitch-free experience getting their financial accounts registered. Lucky me, I guess.

I then explored the wonderful world of Mint's analysis and reporting tools. My wife and I aren't big on budgeting, but the financial meltdown has spurred me to study what we spend our money on.

Mint makes it easy. All of our recent credit card and checking transactions were listed, with a suggested category for most items (handwritten checks were an exception; I had to add those categories on my own).

Mint knew that Netflix was "DVDs," Shell was "gasoline," and Fred Meyer was "groceries." With other unfamiliar local businesses, it took me a while to edit mistakes in categorizing transactions.

I also had to figure out how I wanted to treat items like bird seed ("garden" or "pets"? I went with pets, even though the animals we're feeding are wild). Mint has a good built-in categorization scheme and allows modifications to fit individual circumstances.

When I was done cleaning up the credit card and checking transactions I rushed on to "Trends" to see where our money was going. Some remodeling work made the "Home" category stand out in February.

I was surprised that "Health and Fitness" comprised such a big chunk of the pie chart. Clicking on that slice opened up the details. Since our Blue Cross premium is on autopay, it's easy to lose track of how much we're paying for private health insurance. (Obama, help! Reform health care!)

On the "Investments" page I saw that Mint had retrieved data for our portfolio holdings back to September 2008 and presented me with a downward sloping graph of the total value.

That was depressing. But I was encouraged by how Mint also showed a trend line for the S&P 500, and currently we were 14% above it (mostly due to the mix of bonds we own in addition to equities).

I was eager to show Mint off to Laurel when she got home. Wifely worrier that she is, her first thought was "Is our information secure?"

After reviewing some privacy FAQs and watching a video of Patzer telling us how safe his web site is, we were reassured. The way I understand it, Mint doesn't store login names and passwords on its servers. Instead, they are kept on the sites of the financial institutions.

So if someone was able to hack into Mint, all they would find is information about the spending patterns of people. There isn't any way to get into the actual accounts.

Mint has an impressive collection of awards and positive reviews. Well-deserved, based on my one-day experience with what seems to be a very nicely designed money management site.

Quicken is worried. As it should be.

A few months ago I got a letter from Quicken telling me that my 2006 version of my program soon won't support online access to our financial accounts, so I should fork out $50 or whatever for an upgrade.

I don't think so. Mint looks like it will fill our needs just fine. For free. Goodbye Quicken.

Spikes-Spiders and the Tao of tire traction devices

Finding a way to safely drive around on snow and ice needs to be based on a basic Taoist principle of the universe: everything has an opposite.

Put otherwise, there's no free lunch. Both personal experience with traction devices and considerable Internet browsing on this subject has convinced me of that fact.

Example: I used to have a front wheel drive Volvo 850 wagon. Great car, but not super in our Oregon snow until I put Blizzak winter tires on it. They're made of a special rubber that stays flexible in cold temperatures and have a mud/snow tread design.

One day I'd driven to Portland in a heavy rain. I was cruising along the freeway at 55 or 60 and realized that I was no longer in contact with the pavement. Super scary feeling.

My brain remembered, "If you start to hydroplane, don't do anything sudden. Just gently reduce pressure on the gas pedal and slow down until you're back in control."

Which I did.

That lesson taught me that winter tires are excellent on snow or ice, but they suck big time when it comes to wet or dry traction. Tire reviews I've read in Consumer Reports support that conclusion.

So here my wife and I are in Oregon's Willamette Valley, where we usually get snow/ice no more than several times a year. It generally doesn't last long, though recently we had over a week of wintry weather.

What to do, traction device-wise? We live about six miles out in the country from the Salem city limits. Getting to town means driving up and over the south Salem hills.

Often our local roads are covered with ice, while in town the streets have been plowed and sanded -- another traction device complication, because I don't like to put tire chains on and off (who does?).

So last December I found myself driving around Salem on mostly clear pavement with chains on our all wheel drive Toyota Highlander. I needed the chains only for the first couple of miles, yet I didn't want to go through the trouble of removing them and putting them back on for the trip home.

And returning to the Blizzak (or similar winter tire) option didn't thrill me either, given my bad experience with hydroplaning.

Since most winter driving in our part of Oregon is on wet or, less frequently, dry roads, why give up so much tire safety for a few days a year of snow tire convenience? And on a hill covered with ice, even all wheel drive and snow tires isn't going to cut it.

Unless you use studs, which are legal in this state. But they're noisy, damage pavement, and aren't a good tire choice for wet or dry braking/handling.

Which gets me to Spikes-Spider. These are a type of chain that, once a drive wheel adapter is fitted, can be put on or taken off a tire in about a minute. (Check out these videos to see how it's done.)

After considerable Taoist tire traction pondering, I concluded that a set of Spikes-Spiders would be a nice fit for our Toyota Prius Touring, which I mostly drive.

It's front wheel drive with traction control. All it needs is better tire traction, and I should be able to get around great on snow or ice. I didn't drive it all in our recent wintry weather, because I only wanted to put chains on our all wheel drive Highlander.

I finished installing the Spikes-Spiders a few days ago.

As noted above, you have to put an hub assembly on each drive wheel. A locking ring then fits on the adapter. This keeps the chains secured without any need to get down on the ground or reach around the back of a tire (as is necessary even with top of the line easy-fit chains).

With Spikes-Spiders, the time-consuming part comes at the beginning, in the comfort of your garage, car port, or driveway.

This needs to be remembered by a buyer of the product, because the installation directions aren't crystal clear and it may take some experimenting to get the right spacers added to the hub assembly so the chains fit properly on the tire.

In addition, the chains themselves can be adjusted, as they have outer and inner links that allow fine-tuning of their tightness.

Spikes-Spiders aren't designed to be put on for the first time by the side of a road as the snow is falling. This positive review describes what can happen if you don't test the fit of the chains before you need them.

Now that they're (seemingly) properly installed on our Prius, I'm ready for some snow or ice. They appear to be a great traction device option, offering the advantages of chains without the on-and-off hassle, and letting regular tires do their thing in wet and dry conditions.

The reviewer gets it right, from the way I see Spikes-Spiders so far.

Of course, the real test is how they performed as snow chains. The Spike-Spiders were extremely effective. The Swiss-made contraptions bit well on the snow and ice. In fact, in test panic stops, the SRX came to a halt nearly as well as it does on dry pavement. We climbed steep hills without slipping, with better control than the four wheel-drive vehicle we followed up one particularly steep snowy road.

When properly installed, the Spike-Spiders are a well-designed product that provide an effective solution for tough winter driving. The only negatives are the price, the lame-ass instructions, and the major geek factor the mounting plates project. Otherwise, you're good to snow.

They're manufactured in Switzerland and have a European feel of quality to them. You can see a British-accented commercial here, but I found a German version more enticing. (The video shows the Compact style; I got the Sport style, which have actual chains and are billed as better in deep snow and on hills.)

Reasons to love a 3G, GPS'ized iPhone

After extolling in a quasi-philosophical manner why spending money on an iPhone brings legitimate happiness, a commenter on my other blog asked me to explain why I'm so enamored of this piece of technology.

Glad to oblige.

Tonight I got around to recording my voice mail greeting in which I used the phrase "dearly beloved iPhone."

So just as I was eager to tell people about how wonderful my wife-to-be Laurel was after I met her, it's a pleasure to share what -- after five days of togetherness -- I find so enticing about the 3G iPhone.

(Note: obviously I'm an iPhone newbie. My technical knowledge of the gadget is limited. And I haven't explored all it can do yet. So take this as one man's first impressions of his new love.)

I'll begin with a bit of additional philosophy...

Today I discussed my now consummated lust for the iPhone with some friends. We agreed that only one reason is needed for getting one. Or anything else for that matter.

Pleasure. If it feels good, buy it. No explanation required.

Most of us tend toward Protestant ethics sorts of explanations for stuff that we want. That's socially acceptable, especially in these tough economic times. "I need it to get my work emails." "It'll keep us in touch if an emergency arises." And such.

Well, the iPhone is a useful tool. But for me, it's akin to the Mini Cooper. When I see and touch it, I want it.

Badly. The reasons come later, explanatory add-ons intended to justify my instant non-rational intuitive Oh, baby, you're so beautiful!

OK. With that out of the way, let's move on to some specifics -- what the iPhone does that makes me adore her so much.

This CNET video of the top 5 reasons to love the iPhone gets it mostly right for me (though since I don't access a Microsoft Exchange server, that reason is moot).

#1 on the list was the GPS capability. Right on.

I've been obsessed with firing up the Maps feature, clicking on the button that locates my current position, and then watching satellite images (from Google Earth, I believe) fill the screen as I drive along.

I took a one-mile walk with our dog around a nearby lake yesterday.

The blue current position dot on the iPhone faithfully followed my every step with great accuracy. When I was standing in front of the dock the satellite image showed a blue dot in front of that very place.

You also can have the map show only roads, or a hybrid of satellite image and roads. So the iPhone is a reasonable subsitute for a dedicated GPS device such as the Garmin Nuvi that I also own and love.

Except you need a cell phone signal to use the iPhone GPS capabilities, and it doesn't speak turn by turn directions; but in most cases it'll get you to where you want to go.

Next love reason: all the applications that can be downloaded.

Some are free, some cost 99 cents or more. Many make use of GPS, such as Urbanspoon (which finds nearby restaurants of various types) and AccuWeather (which offers up detailed forecasts and current conditions for your present location).

My overall all-encompassing maxi-reason for getting an iPhone is that it connects you via the Internet, email, text messaging, and (naturally) phone to the big wide world wherever you have an AT&T cellular connection.

Or, for Internet and email wherever you have a wi-fi connection (that's what my iPhone connects to at home, since it is much faster than AT&T wireless).

So basically you've got a mini-featured computer in your pocket or purse. In most areas you'll be able to access the Internet wherever you are, rather than having to find a coffee shop with wi-fi.

Lastly, the iPhone simply works. In a fun fashion.

In the same way as my Apple MacBook laptop is hugely more enjoyable to use than my IBM ThinkPad, so the iPhone is vastly more user-friendly than the LG flip phones that my wife and I have been using.

Whether it's selecting a ringtone, accessing voice mail, adding in new contact info, or simply making a phone call, the iPhone makes it easy to do whatever you want without having to search for a manual to figure out where, in a maze of incomprehensible menus, a particular function resides.

I used to assume that when someone was hunched over a cell phone, fingers tapping away, they were communicating with friends, family, or business associates via text messages or email, or were playing a game.

With the iPhone, though, people like me (retirees who aren't hugely sociable) can sit down, turn the thing on, and have the whole world of the Internet open up through the Safari web browser and cool iPhone applications.

Like a technologically turned-on and tuned-in relative told me recently, "Brian, the iPhone isn't only about making phone calls; it's so much more."

So true.

(Here's another guy's five reasons to love the iPhone.)

iPhone shows money can buy happiness

Jeez, here I am, sixty years old, and only now realizing that I've had it wrong for most of my philosophically-inclined life: notwithstanding the oft-heard adage, money really can buy happiness.

I know this, because I've become increasingly blissful the more dollars I send in Apple's direction.

Like a drug dealer that gets you hooked on cheap highs before bringing out the expensive good stuff, my first taste of the modern Apple offerings was the iPod Touch.

It was cool. So easy to use. Such an elegant interface. I eagerly transferred my favorite CDs into iTunes, and thence to my new best friend, iPod'y.

After a while (just as Apple's nefarious marketing plan intended) the contrast between my eager-to-please iPod Touch and my often-cranky Windows laptop became too obvious to ignore.

So rather than indulging myself on my sixth decade birthday with a high-powered Suzuki scooter, I changed gears and found myself at Salem's Apple store handing over my VISA card in exchange for a newly released aluminum MacBook.

The past few months with Mac'y have been one long extended honeymoon.

Like iPod'y, she almost always does just what I want. And even when she doesn't, my MacBook is so cute, I don't get mad at her.

Deep in my heart, I knew what was coming next.

I'd spend time with people addicted to the really strong Apple stuff and get a contact high from them. I lusted after what they had, but tried my best to resist their entreaties.

"Come on, Brian, what's holding you back? Give it a try. You know you want to. I just love it. You wlll too. Why not feel as good as I do?"

A few days ago I surrendered to the inevitable. And a sign from Tao.

I'd been looking at iPhones on the Internet, fruitlessly trying to find a discounted rate plan. After my Tai Chi class I noticed that Dave, who didn't seem like a techno-freak, was holding one.

I asked him how he liked it. A lot, he said, just like every other iPhone owner I'd ever talked to. He showed me some favorite features. That pushed me over the edge.

And, the next day, through the door of south Salem's AT&T store, where I picked up two iPhones for my wife and me. 

Ever since -- it's been a bit over forty-eight hours now -- if I start to feel slightly down, I just think "iPhone!" and pull out my newest Apple lover, who, like iPod'y and Mac'y, treats me so fine.

Even with only two-bar reception on the basic AT&T network at our home in the south Salem hills cellular wilderness. Almost everywhere else iPhon'y connects on the higher speed 3G network.

I love the GPS capabilities. Yesterday, after going to the dentist, I pulled over when I got to downtown and pretended that I didn't know how to find my Tai Chi class.

Typing in "Pacific Martial Arts," it just took a few seconds for the iPhone to come up with driving directions for the few blocks that separated me from Court Street. Complete with Google satellite imagery of the area, in addition to the street map.

Later, as I laid in bed, playing around with iPhon'y one last time before going to sleep, I went to the App(lication) Store.

Touching "Top 25" I saw that the #1 iPhone best "seller" (many apps are free) was iFart Mobile. Knew I had to have it, just from the title.

Best 99 cents I've ever spent.

I laughed hysterically for the next five minutes, listening to various farts, realizing that while comedy comes in many guises, there's nothing as satisfying as fart humor. I felt young again, like I was back in fourth grade (where most men spend a good share of their emotional lives).

Tonight I elevated my iPhone application purchases with another wise 99 cent outlay, for Koi Pond. Another marvelous bit of software. I love to shake iPhon'y, see fish food fall into the water, and watch my koi eat it.

The only people happier than iPhone owners are iPhone application developers, who are raking in the dough even in these tough economic times. People still have 99 cents to spend on essential items like iFart.

Which reportedly brought its developers $40,000 in two days, and hugely more since then.

Like a Newsweek story says, "There's Gold in Them iPhones."

Happiness too. Forget about seeking the meaning of life. Just buy the best stuff that Apple offers and let life take care of itself.

If you ever feel like there's something more that you're missing, fire up iFart and let

loose a big one (samples here). The void in your life will be filled with childish laughter.

Leaving you...fulfilled. Especially if you're of the male persuasion.

(When you get an iPhone, as most people on Earth eventually will, get this book also. It'll help you dive into the enervating iPhone pool much more smoothly.)

Warning: Buying a new TV can be dangerous to marital health

Whew! Laurel and I got out of Salem's Video Only store with our relationship intact.

But it was touch and go for a while, as choosing a new television has become an exercise that highlights male-female differences.

It used to be that you looked at a bunch of TVs lined up at a store and picked one that had a pleasing picture and was within your price range.

On the afternoon of New Year's Eve, though, Laurel and I found ourselves taking a crash course in HDTV technology as we tried to decide on a 42 inch LCD set to buy.

The impetus to dump our ancient Phillips 32 inch tube monstrosity came mostly from me. I've been irritated over DISH network's dropping of the local ABC station, but don't want to shift to DirecTV, a competing satellite service.

So I figured I'd drown my ABC-lacking (no Rose Bowl! maybe no Lost!) sorrow by being able to watch our remaining programming in high definition on a large screen.

Tuesday I'd gone into Video Only on my own to scope out the HDTV possibilities. One glance at the crystal clear football game displayed on a couple of dozen flat panels arrayed along a Video Only wall convinced me that it was time to get out of the television stone age.

But this had to be a shared marital decision. Hence, the next day I escorted Laurel over to the 42 inch LCD section and pointed out my preferred model.

Which soon turned out to be my unpreferred model, as I hadn't realized that the LG50 lacked some desirable features that the LG70 had.

Of course, I didn't really understand much about those features.

Such as four HDMI connectors rather than three, and TruMotion 120Hz instead of 60Hz. I simply felt deeply in my male bones that the more technological bells and whistles a TV had, the better.

Laurel, though, was fixated on comparing how the LG70 picture compared to the LG50. Her intuitional female self was, literally, looking at the big picture -- not analyzing the techie details of the sets like I was.

I began to feel sorry for Teresa, the Video Only salesperson who was helping us. She did her best to remain neutral as Laurel and I aired our differences.

L: The LG 50 picture looks brighter than the LG70.
B: That's because the set is adjusted differently. We can make the LG70 picture look however we want once we get home.
L: Well, the LG50 picture still looks better to me.
B: (more exasperated now) OK, I understand that. But like I said, there's lots of adjustments that can be made, and the LG70 has more of them.
L: Another thing... the LG70 has red trim on the sides. I don't like it.
B: Jeez! Trim doesn't affect how a TV works! Just don't look at the side of the set!

And so it went, until Teresa told us that she was going to do something else and we should let her know when we'd made a decision.

I felt like sending out for a marriage counselor. But then I remembered that I was married to a retired one.

I'm not sure what led to our HDTV impasse being broken.

Probably Laurel realized that I was so attached to getting the LG70s higher-tech features, we'd be arguing in the Video Only aisle until closing time if she didn't say "Fine, go ahead and get it."

When I heard those words I rocketed off to find Teresa. She was standing by the check-out counter.

"Teresa, hurry! Write up a LG70 order before my wife changes her mind!"

As she was typing into the computer terminal I asked her if it was common for couples to have so much difficulty agreeing on a TV. "Oh, yes," Teresa told me, "It happens all the time."

I can believe it.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that men can visualize themselves playing around with a bigger and badder remote control that now not only can change channels and volume, but also manipulate intricate details of how the high-definition picture looks.

Women, on the other hand, seem to believe that watching television is the point of having a television.

No, not at all, says my remote-control obsessed mind, which has had an outrageous amount of fun the past few days playing around with the multitudinous combinations of picture-altering options offered by the LG70.

I tune in a football game. Try out "Sport," "Vivid," "Standard," and other pre-set viewing options. I also turn TruMotion to high, low, and off, observing how this changes the look of the action.

Haven't even begun to delve into the "Expert" options, which I'm assuming allow for more customized fine-tuning of the picture. Then, next week DISH will be delivering a HD DVR receiver upgrade and turning on an expanded range of HD channels.

Who needs to watch TV? I'm having a great time fiddling with the remote control. Actually watching televison is going to be kind of a let-down.

Well pump going rapidly on and off? Check pressure tank.

If humility is good for the soul, and admitting mistakes makes one humble, this blog post should get me one step further to saintliness.

I'm also writing it because I enjoy firing up Google when I have a self-inflicted household problem and finding that some other guy has done something just as stupid as I did -- and thankfully shared the solution to getting out of the ditch he dug himself into.

So here's my tale of well pump "short cycling" (turning on and off rapidly, which can burn out a pump).

First, let's define a term: when I said stupid in the paragraph above I really meant unknowing. To me, doing something stupid is when you know it's the wrong thing to do. Innocently doing the wrong thing is different.

I had the right intentions.

Our complicated house water treatment system had been acting up. We've got an ozonator, iron filter, ph adjuster, and softener all lined up in our garage, cleaning our crappy well water before it enters the house.

Ozone gets pumped into a pipe right off the bat. Excess air is supposed to bleed off via a solenoid-controlled release valve at the top of the ozanator tank.

If the valve gets plugged up, air starts accumulating in the house water pipes, causing unwanted bursts of excitement when we turn a faucet on or flush a toilet.

I've been taught how to clean the release valve by Pacific Mist Water Company staff (we love these guys -- highly recommended if you've got water problems and live in the Willamette Valley or Portland area).

The deed got done, but the ozonator tank didn't fill up with water after the air supposedly was released. I'd been told that plugging the ozonator compressor directly into an extension cord might help speed the filling process.

I tried that for a while. Tank still sounded just as empty when I banged it with a screwdriver. Then came my unknowing decision: to also plug in the ozone generator (I think that is what it's called).

What this did, not surprisingly in retrospect but definitely a Yikes! producer when I went back into the garage to check on things half an hour later, was drastically increase the pressure in the pipes.

Ozonated air was going in. None was being released because no water was flowing (usually the ozone generator and release valve are turned on by a flow switch).

The pressure gauge was pointing at its maximum: 100 psi. Who knows how high it was. Usually the well pump kicks on at 40 and off at 60. We started running water to get the pressure down.

Which worked. But later we noticed that the pointer on the pressure gauge was bouncing around, which meant that the pump was turning on and off rapidly as the pressure dropped below 40 and rose above 60.

Any sort of water use, even minimal, made the pressure gauge freak out. The freaking out quickly spread to the psyche's of Laurel and me, since we'd recently had to have a new pump installed and didn't want to wreck it.

So we turned off the pump circuit breaker.

Soon thereafter people arrived for our annual holiday potluck. When they walked in the door they got instructions about how to dump water from a pail into the toilet if they had to go to the bathroom.

Fun (not). But the potluck went fine, with paper plates and plastic forks.

This morning I turned my attention to figuring out the short cycling problem. I lucked out with my first phone call, to Darren Currier of Salem's Aquarius Pump Service.

He was out and about with his family on Sunday morning, but cheerfully took a series of calls from me as he walked me through solving our Flex-Lite pressure tank problem.

(For city water folks, here's some basic info about how a pressure tank works with a well pump: Download Well pressure tank)

Darren didn't believe that the short cycling was due to excess pressure. Usually, he said, it's a loss of pressure in the air bladder that leads to the pump rapidly turning on and off.

However, high pressure can do the same thing, as cogently described here. Darren just couldn't understand how excess air pressure in the pipes could increase pressure in the bladder.

Nor could Jeff at Pacific Mist. Nor could I (who am by far the most ignorant of the three about matters pressure tank'ish, yet knew enough to be equally perplexed).

Nevertheless, I dutifully followed Darren's instructions.

Shut off the well pump circuit breaker. Drained the small amount of water in the pressure tank using an outside hose. Popped off the cover on the top of the tank. Checked the bladder pressure using a tire gauge.

It was over 50 psi.

Don't know how much over, since the gauge only measured that high. Darren recommended 36-38 psi, a few pounds under the pump-on pressure on our 40-60 psi pressure switch.

I bled air from the bladder valve by pressing the tire gauge in partway. Got it down to 37 psi. Fired up the pump and restored the water treatment equipment to their normal states. Nervously turned on water in the house, not knowing what to expect.

Yay! Pressure switch acted normally. No bouncing around. Problem seemingly solved.

It's still a mystery how high pressure in the pipes would produce high pressure in the Flex-Lite tank. The two must be connected, since we hadn't had any problems with the tank before I stupidly unknowingly dumped ozone into the pipes with no way for it to be released.

But as anyone with a well knows, water works in mysterious ways.

Maybe someone knowledgeable about such esoterica will read this one day and leave an answer via a comment.

[Next-day update: some Googling this morning revealed some interesting facts about ozone. It degrades rubber. Expose a balloon to ozone rich air and eventually the rubber will burst. So it seems possible that concentrated ozone could penetrate the rubber bladder in the pressure tank, causing the pressure of the air inside to rise.]

Fear and trembling in our 2008 Christmas letter

It's that time of year ... when I shamelessly plug our Christmas letter: "2008 Holiday Greetings from Laurel and Brian."
Download 2008 Christmas Letter

I talk about the fear and trembling with which we approach the annual letter. By the time I get around to composing it, we've received Christmas cards from people who clearly are into way more interesting things than we are.

They travel to Machu Picchu. We manage to drive to central Oregon. They volunteer to build medical stations in central Africa. We use VISA to make charitable donations online.

So I try to make our mundanity into something special. And rely on self-deprecating humor. From this year's letter:

The only thing more boring than hearing about someoneʼs psychedelic drug experiences back in the 60s (just got an idea for next yearʼs unexciting Holiday Letter) is why they think a Mac is better than a PC. Luckily for you there isnʼt much room left on this page.

On the self-promotion front, I was pleased to find one of my past works of literary holiday art featured as a "creative Christmas letter example" on Christmas Letter Tips.com.

Our 2001 Christmas Letter is described as "a funny reflection on one family's year, as told through stories of their newest family member, a dog." It can be found in our Christmas Letter collection, here.

My favorite part of our 2008 letter is the photo of me holding my granddaughter. Old and young, yang and yin, blue and red. Thanks to my daughter for capturing the Taoist moment.

Happiness is a warm MacBook laptop

Well, correct that title: a room temperature MacBook. Because so far as I can tell, my beloved new laptop never gets hot on me, as the bottom of my old IBM ThinkPad did.

She keeps her cool, and I don't know how. No fan noise. No ventilation slots. Just elegant, sweet, no-fuss, fun computing all day long.

Yes, I'm in love, as I explained here and here, and even agonized a bit about here.

Today, obsessive possessive romantic fool that I am, I fired up my MacBook's camera with the marvelous iMovie software and defended her honor.

I'd been called an "idiot" by a commenter on my first YouTube video. He semi-appropriately criticized me for comparing a new MacBook with a several year old ThinkPad.

After that I made another video comparing my beauty with a 2008 Lenovo IdeaPad. Naturally she also surpassed her younger competition.

But it still bothered me that some out in YouTube land didn't appreciate Ms. MacBook as much as they should. Hence, today's in-your-face (or rather, my-face) video.

I've answered a deep philosophical question: Can material things make you happy?

Yes. Even more...yes, yes, yes.

More reasons why I love my Mac more than my PC

My first YouTube video and blog post on this subject -- why Macs rule and PCs drool -- received some deserved criticism.

So I'll man-up and admit that comparing the start-up time of a brand new MacBook to a several year old IBM ThinkPad isn't entirely fair.

The PC runs slower and has a bunch more start-up programs installed that, no big surprise, need to start-up before my ThinkPad is ready to go.

Fortunately, I had an almost hot-off-the-Chinese-shelf Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 sitting around. I got this Windows Vista computer in January of this year, but haven't used it much. Mainly, because I didn't have time back then to transfer all the crap (emails, documents, etc.) that I use every day.

Also, because I wasn't as wowed by Vista as I thought I'd be. In some ways it seemed better than the XP Pro operating systems I've been using; in other ways, not as good.

At any rate, a couple of days ago I set the Lenovo next to my MacBook and did some comparison tests. In the new video below you'll see that the start-up times were just about equal. But I show some other areas where the MacBook beats the PC.

In the end, though, my preference (really, love) for the Mac can't be easily tied down by saying it's because of this or that.

The whole Macintosh experience, from how the keys feel, to the look of the screen, to how program menus pop up, to how error messages are handled, to how easily unfamiliar programs can be learned -- this whole shebang flows together into a much more pleasant computing day, every day I've had my MacBook.

Back to the criticism, and a bit of defense now: someone said that my ThinkPad looked like it was sluggish.

Well, yes. That comes with the Windows territory -- the need to have all kinds of extra programs and utilities to keep your PC functioning halfway reliably.

On my ThinkPad I have:

-- a virus checker, firewall, and other utilities included with SystemSuite (a nice program), because the Windows firewall sucks, and you need virus protection on a PC.
-- a real-time spyware scanner, to supplement the spyware protection in SystemSuite
-- Google Desktop, because it's hard to find files and emails using the crappy search feature in Windows
-- various other programs, such as a registry fixer-upper, that help keep Windows XP functioning
-- a back-up program that uses an external USB hard disk, because you never know when the blue screen of death might appear

Much of this stuff slows down my PC. All of it adds to its complexity.

But this is part of the Windows world for people, like me, who have learned over the years that you have to supplement Microsoft's operating system offering if you want to have a healthy computer.

It's refreshing to not have to worry about installing all of these extras on my MacBook. I've added a better password protector than Apple's web browser (Safari) offers. On the whole, though, my Mac simply works.

And that's the biggest reason I like it more than my PCs.

Can I love my MacBook too much?

I hope my wife understands. Why, of course, she will. She's a retired psychotherapist. Laurel knows what happens when a man falls head over heels in love -- all the crazy things he'll do, how his life revolves around her.

My new Macintosh laptop is a girl. That's obvious.

She's thin, sleek, responsive, and oh-so-sexy. Plus, she almost always does just what I want her to. No back talk, like the B.S. I had to put up with from a string of Windows PCs that I've had mercurial relationships with.

After a couple of weeks with my electronic sweetie I've got just one worry: that my infatuation is going over the top.

Some warning signs have popped up.

Yesterday I ran into a Tai Chi class acquaintance in the snacking room of Salem's foremost (and only) natural food store. We chatted about this and that, then somehow the conversation turned to Ms. MacBook.

I heard myself going on and on about how beautiful she was, how she'd changed my life so much for the better, how the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is turn her on and see what fresh pleasure she has to give me.

Then, when I had to take a breath and my friend was able to get a word in -- "I haven't seen the new MacBook yet" -- I excitedly exclaimed "Wait! It'll just take a second! I'll introduce her to you!"

Oh, yeah. She was in the car, waiting for me.

I grabbed my backpack and rushed back inside. For the next ten minutes I put her through her paces, letting my friend stroke her stylish touchpad and admire her glossy screen.

Eventually I realized that maybe, just maybe, I was telling her, a male acquaintance, and her mother (who'd popped up in time to see the end of my isn't-she-lovely? gabfest) more than they wanted to know about a frigging laptop.

Well, I couldn't help myself. Blame it on hormones, or whatever makes a man fall in lust with a single slab of polished aluminum packed with gorgeous electronics.

I felt a bit better about myself when I found out that I'm not alone. This clever web page documents, bluntly, the giddiness Mac owners feel toward their computers.

Ever notice how most Mac users are skinny? It's because of all the calories they burn because they can't shut the fuck up about how great their Macs are. What is it about Apple that makes its users unable to shut their mouths? Everywhere I go, there's another asshole with a Mac preaching about how much better Macs are than PCs.

OK. You nailed me.

But I won't be quiet. There's more love stories to tell. And I can use my lover to share them! Marvelous...

Why I love my MacBook more than my PC

A few weeks ago I dived back into the Macintosh world, after a long dry spell wandering in the Windows wilderness. I started with Apple back in the way old II+ days, but got tired of not being in the computer mainstream.

My new MacBook makes me wonder, "Why did I stick with PCs for so long?" I just made a You Tube video that implies an answer: "Because I didn't know what I was missing, fool that I was."

Below the video I'll expand upon my reasons for loving MacBook more than ThinkPad, and clarify some remarks I made in my unrehearsed (a.k.a. "semi-coherent") computer comparison.

This is the biggest change I found with moving to a Mac: now your computer is a friend, rather than a challenge.

From the moment I turned on the MacBook for the first time, I felt like it was trying to anticipate my needs and make whatever I wanted to do go as smoothly as possible. With a PC, no matter what version of Windows you use (I'm very familiar with XP and mildly acquainted with Vista), it's like handling a stick of dynamite.

Useful stuff, but always capable of unexpectedly blowing up.

About a year ago I seriously thought of getting a Mac. I didn't, because I felt that I'd worked out ways of dealing with the vagaries of Windows and was afraid of being thrown into a unknown operating system that wouldn't be compatible with what I needed to do everyday.

I knew that Macs were for creative types. But I wasn't planning to make an indie movie. I email; I surf the Internet; I blog; I write; I take photos and simple videos.

I've found out that my worry was unfounded. It didn't take long to be up and running on the MacBook, doing almost everything I did on my PC laptop. Here's a few tips for those thinking of making a similar switch:

-- Don't buy the Macintosh version of Office. The reviews on Amazon are terrible, and my Apple store salesman told me that people are unhappy with Word 08 for the Mac. I got the iWork package for $79. The word processor, Pages, meets my needs and reads PC Word files fine (most of the time).

-- If you're using Outlook on a PC, invest $10 in a terrific program from Little Machines that handles moving emails, contacts, and calendar entries to a Macintosh. You can try exporting the files on your own, but it seemed rather complex when I Googled the subject. This program worked like a charm.

-- One drawback of Apple's Safari web browser, which otherwise is terrific (better and faster than Firefox or Explorer in my opinion), is the lack of protection for saved passwords. I'd been using RoboForm on my PC and liked it a lot. A Mac program, 1Password, is just about as good.

And if you're using a Flip Video camera and find that it won't work with the marvelous iMovie program that comes with your Mac, check out these tips from the Flip folks. I had problems at first, but managed to use iMovie to edit and upload my You Tube video.

Where I may have left some wrong impressions, which I'll clear up here.

(1) I really like the MacBook touchpad. It's the first one that I've felt comfortable using. But it takes some getting used to. You can do quite a few different things with your fingers, depending on how you use them: one, two, three, or four finger touch; direction you move your fingers; and such.

I had some trouble getting text size to change on web pages. Usually I don't. Video finger performance anxiety, I guess. Pressure on the key pad has to be just right to adjust the text size with a finger flick.

(2) I emphasized how much I like the quick start-up on my MacBook compared to my PC. I mentioned the many programs I had on the PC that were part of the reason it takes Windows ages to get going in the morning.

What I was referring to were the essential add-ons to keep a Windows PC running halfway smoothly. A virus checker. Anti-spyware program. Google Desktop to find stuff quickly. A better firewall than XP provides.

All of this starting up makes an already cumbersome Windows even more sluggish. Since the Macintosh operating system (Leopard) is much cleaner and more tightly integrated, it does things more quickly and smoothly (plus, the MacBook hardware is more powerful than my ThinkPad).

I could go on about how much happier I am with my Mac than I was with my PC. But that'll wait for another day.

Bottom line: you'll spend more for a Mac, but it's worth it. If you're a Windows user who's wondering why all the cool people (like me now!) use Macs, head on down to an Apple store and experience a soft sell.

My sales guy just pointed me toward the new MacBook and let me play with it for as long as I wanted. When he wandered back to me after a while, my main questions were "How much is it and when can I get one?"

Falling in love doesn't take long.

Never too old for a mid-life crisis

Having turned sixty, an absurd act on my part, wholly out of character with whom I feel myself to be, I've decided to focus on throwing myself into a mid-life crisis.

Now, there's good reason to argue that every day of everyone's life should be experienced in crisis mode, following the Zen adage of whole-hearted "hair on fire" living.

But the older we get, the more we understand that our days are limited. As is the value of our investment portfolio, particularly after the past few days.

A neighbor who's in my age ballpark cruised by a few summer months ago in a silver Miata with the top down. Naturally my first words to him included the phrase mid-life crisis. He replied that his wife told him that he's too old for one, that he must be having an end-of-life crisis.

I disagreed, pointing out that sixty is the new forty. So both of us had plenty of years to cultivate our mid-life crises.

If you think too much about how to throw yourself into a mid-life crisis, you're not having one. A crisis demands fast-acting intuition, responding to the situation without hesitation.

That said, my analytical side doesn't like to be ignored.

Thus for quite a while I've been pondering what to give myself when I turned sixty. Like my neighbor, my first (and really only) thought was what sort of two- or four-wheeled transportation would best mesh with my mid-life crisis psyche.

I've lusted after a Mini Cooper ever since they came out. However, God has not answered my prayer to have one delivered to our driveway. This led me to (1) become an atheist, and (2) turn my attention to two-wheeled cheaper alternatives.

Over a decade ago I had a motorcycle. Eventually, though, my wife's frequent prediction that I was going to kill myself helped lead me to sell it and get a Honda del Sol – which offered a quasi-open air experience but wasn't nearly as much fun.

Eventually it dawned on me that if anybody is going to take physical risks, it should be older people, because they have the fewest years of life left to lose.

With this solid philosophical foundation to guide me into older age guilt-free lusting, I felt free to fire up Google and explore today's two-wheeled motorized possibilities. Soon I came upon the Suzuki Burgman 650 maxi-scooter.

Yesterday I put down a deposit on the 2009 model, choosing white for its yin-yang balance (and visibility). It likely won't arrive until February of next year or thereabouts – in time for dryer and warmer Oregon weather.

I felt great as soon as my VISA card passed over the counter of the Suzuki dealership. My mid-life crisis had taken another turn down the just do it road. Tonight we're going to our fourth Argentine Tango lesson, more turn, turn, turn.

Dancing, particularly Tango, is a two-footed version of motorcycling/scooting. You're in the moment, not trying to get anywhere particular, intimately connected with your surroundings, not thinking much. I've vowed to do more dancing and less worrying from now on.

And, come spring, more scootering. I won't get a lot of respect from the Harley folks, but they're them and I'm me. I was pleased to see on this You Tube video, though, that the two can coexist.

My favorite part is around the seven minute mark, where a guy on a Sturgis street filled with Harleys yells to the Suzuki Burgman 650 driver, "Dude, what is that?!" He's told, "It's a giant scooter."

Here's a faster moving Burgman 650 video, showing how quiet they are compared to a Harley.

Jury duty sucks, is un-American, and stupid

There's something deeply disturbing about jury duty. And I'm not saying that just because I had to be at Salem's downtown courthouse way earlier Monday morning than I'm used to functioning.

I'll get up at 6 am when I want or need to. But it ticks me off big time to get a government letter that says I'm required to do my supposedly "civic duty," and if I don't, a warrant may be issued for my arrest.

I don't understand why this isn't a bigger political issue. Just about everybody hates jury duty, yet Americans meekly put up with this affront to liberty, justice, and my ability to sleep late.

The Libertarian Party (of Michigan, at least) has called for an end to this enforced servitude. Great idea. If Ron Paul had made this a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, maybe I wouldn't have been such a strong Obama supporter:

The current practice of forced jury duty should be replaced by volunteer juries.

As I said the last time I was called for jury duty, in a sardonically titled "Well, that was fun" post, it's like going to the doctor for no good reason.

Getting there right on time and then waiting for three hours. Uncomfortable chairs. Having to fill out forms that ask personal questions. Outdated reading material. Other people being called while you sit… and sit… and sit. Why, I found that jury duty is just like going to the doctor. Except you go to the doctor because you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

With jury duty, the problem is that you are there and you want to be somewhere else. At least, this seemed to be the case with all of my fellow jury duty selectees this morning, and it certainly was with me. Notwithstanding the annoyingly cheery video that we were shown about the patriotic nature of jury duty, how our presence was assuring that the Republic Would Stand, blah, blah, blah, the mood in the jury assembly room for those three hours was seriously sullen.

Last Monday I also spent three wasted hours in that room. About 11:15 am a judge walked in and said, "The defendant has decided to plead guilty. You're excused."

Terrific! I thought.

I'd already decided that the guy was guilty, because if I ended up being picked as a juror, that seemed to be the fastest way to get the trial over: get a quick guilty verdict. I suppose a quick innocent verdict would work just as well, but I was so ticked off at the whole jury duty process, I wanted somebody to be punished.

This is why compulsory duty is so stupid. You've got irritated people, who don't want anything to do with a trial, being forced to render an important decision.

Midway through the morning we were given $1.50 coupons for the snack shop on the first floor and allowed to leave the jury room for twenty minutes. I'd studiously avoided talking with anyone else up to that point, being in a sullen mood. So I decided to say a few words to the guy next to me in line, to avoid looking like a complete jury duty hermit.

"About now is when I wish I'd committed a recent felony," I said, "or when asked about my hobbies on the form we filled out, put down tinkering with new formulations in my basement meth lab." (I assumed the guy hadn't read my blog post from four years ago where I used the same lines.)

He didn't even smile. "Jury duty is required by the Constitution," he said. "We're entitled to a jury of our peers. It's something we have to do."

I persevered. "Well, even though I'm entitled to a jury trial, that doesn't mean I should be forced to serve on a jury. I'd rather have some wise retired volunteers deciding my case who want to be in the courtroom, rather than a bunch of people whose only thought is I don't want to be here."

Permanent panels of judges manage to render verdicts competently. So why can't we have permanent juries made up of citizens selected for their intelligence, fairness, and willingness to listen to boring testimony for long hours?

Call me an elitist, but I'd just as soon not have a "jury of my peers" if that means having average Americans decide my case. Some of the people with me in the jury assembly room looked to have their wits about them, but not all.

Sherri, forgive me if somehow you happen to read this, but I've got to offer this advice: next time you're called for jury duty, make your personal cell phone calls either before or after.

I was halfway enjoying reading my book, having partially forgotten where I was, until you began having a series of conversations that weren't at all pressing. I really didn't think that Kaiser Permanente was going to assign you a doctor until you were officially enrolled, but it was sort of interesting to hear you try to talk your way into having them change their policy.

However, the lengthy discussion with your friend about baby names went way over the jury room edge for me. The miniscule amount of Buddha nature that I have prevented me from getting up and changing my seat, because I figured you'd recognize it was because of your loud cell phone conversations and I didn't want to hurt your feelings.

I wasn't worried, though, about insulting the security screener at the courthouse entrance. He told me that I couldn't take my Flip Video camera inside and would have to walk six blocks back to my car, then up three flights of stairs to the Marion Parkade roof where I was parked.

"Um, my cell phone also can take videos, and you're letting me have that," I told him. "You can't have a video camera in the courthouse," he replied robotically. "But just about every cell phone nowadays can take videos!" I repeated.

To no avail.

There's no reasoning with a clueless security screener. Or, sadly, with a justice system that considers mandatory jury duty to be a good thing.

Someday this will change, hopefully. For now I'm off the jury duty hook for two years. Maybe the Libertarians will come into power before my name is chosen again.

Firefox, forgive me. I’m in love with Chrome.

Early in 2005 I converted to Firefox. And got a Firefox cap.

Ever since, I've been faithful to my web browser, aside from the rare times I need to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer (such as to perform a Windows update).

When I heard about Google's Chrome, at first I vowed to avert my eyes. I'd remain true to Firefox no matter how pretty and enticing Chrome was.

That promise lasted just a few days. During which time Firefox did its usual memory-consuming thing after I'd opened many tabs, even though I'm using version 3.0.1.

Result: drastic computer slowdown. Or Firefox lockup. Can't remember the exact irritation.

Whatever it was, it drew me to download Chrome last week. I've been a happy Chrome camper ever since, pretty much.

Chrome copied in my Firefox bookmarks just fine. However, I use a password manager, RoboForm, and right now it won't work with Chrome. So I've been having to use Firefox to retrieve my passwords.

Plus, inexplicably Chrome doesn't have a master password feature. This is a major blunder. Who wants their passwords sitting out in the open, accessible to anyone who fires up Chrome on their computer?

Hopefully this feature omission will be fixed soon. Because otherwise I've been pleased with Chrome.

I've had jillions of web page tabs open on my laptop with nary a problem. Occasionally there will be a problem with a site, but Chrome does a good job of shutting down the offending tab. As the Chrome comic book points out, this is a significant benefit of the new browser: one bad web site doesn't crash the entire program.

I like the bookmarks bar. Nine of my favorite web sites are just an easy always-visible click away.

At first I thought it was strange that Chrome wouldn't allow bookmarks to be displayed in a sidebar, like Firefox does, but now I don't miss that feature.

The lack of a search engine text box also was immediately apparent. However, typing words into the URL bar brings up Google. Some want a separate search box, along with other features, but I don't see the need.

Chrome seems faster than Firefox. I haven't done any actual speed tests – this is just my impression. I had trouble printing out an Adobe Reader file at first, but the second time it printed fine.

I'm confident Google will iron out Chrome's problems. A few days ago its web browser market share had already reached over one percent. Likely it will climb steadily.

I appreciate how Firefox became an alternative to the behemoth that is Microsoft. But Chrome is a worthy evolutionary successor to Firefox.

Chipmunk stalking, Kentucky TV, and Benzedrine

Ah, now that's a terrific blog post title.

I'm sure it will generate lots of hits on Google searches as the masses interested in these (obviously) closely related subjects will be led to this bloggish musing on the nature of focused concentration.

Such was greatly in evidence today. Not from a Homo sapiens, but from a Canis familiaris – our resident house dog, Serena.

It's often said that life should be lived to its fullest.

I thought of that adage frequently from about 12:10 to 1:30 pm this afternoon, as I spent well over an hour of my steadily shrinking remaining lifetime looking out the window of a central Oregon cabin as Serena stalked a chipmunk with astoundingly measured steps.

I started to make a video of the scene, but soon realized that with a ten minute limit my You Tube upload would basically look like a single still: a chipmunk perched on a Ponderosa stump linked eyeball to eyeball with a mixed breed dog (half Lab, half Shepherd) whose patience and ever-so-slow stalking movements would put the most advanced Tai Chi practitioner to shame.

The motions of this You Tube dog are similar, but Serena beat the canine paws down on exquisitely refined inch-by-inch sneaking toward a prey.

Which seemed to be engaging in some sort of chipmunk'y reverse stalking – not dashing for its hole when Serena got almost within leaping distance, but continuing to sit on its stump with a relaxed disdainful attitude of "Dog, what dog? Oh, that creature over there that thinks it's moving so slowly I don't notice it, ha, ha, ha!"

On the other side of the window from the stalking scene were four human beings mesmerized by the super slow motion show being put on by the two animals.

It taught me how interesting an 80 minute display of dramatic tension – with hardly anything happening – can be. The climax hardly matters, compared to what came before, but I'll share it anyway.

Apparently another chipmunk uttered an alarm call, and the being-stalked chipmunk dashed into a hole at the base of the stump (where surely it had been planning to head the whole time, just waiting for the right moment).

There's no television at our cabin. So at one point, as we stood before the large kitchen windows,  I said "This is what passes for Camp Sherman TV."

As with Camp Sherman, Oregon, so with a rural area outside of Lexington, Kentucky. In a different sense.

There I was told by my wife's relatives that watching an outdoor fire is called "Kentucky TV." This being exactly what we were doing at the moment, I understood the appeal of that absolutely free programming (aside from the cost of a few chunks of wood, newspaper, and a match).

A couple of nights ago we enjoyed the same show in Camp Sherman. As with the dog stalking, not a whole lot went on for the hour or so while the wood burned down. But it was endlessly entertaining – watching the flickering flames doing not a whole lot.

Focus. Concentration. Being in the moment, no matter how much or how little is happening.

Why is this so easy for dogs and chipmunks? And for people in altered states of consciousness, like when they're sitting around a fire on a warm summer night? Or hosing cannery pulp into drains under the influence of a post-midnight Benzedrine?

Those little white amphetamine-filled pills were what got me through an otherwise shitty job at a San Jose cannery during one of my college summers.

My night shift was cleanly divided into two halves: unhappy and happy, the demarcation being when, after a "lunch" break at 3 am or so, I'd pop a bennie into my mouth.

Ah, what a difference some amphetamine would make! Sometimes my job would be to put on a rain suit, stand under the conveyor belts on which fruit pulp was dripping, and use a high pressure hose to direct the pulp into drains.

I hated the job pre-Benzedrine. Afterwards, I loved it. It was endlessly fascinating to train the water just so, artfully directing the spray to maximum pulp-washing effect. (Others, like W.H. Auden, have applied Benzedrine toward more creative pursuits.)

I'd also use Benzedrine as a study aid for sleep-inducing classes like Statistics. I remember preparing for a test where I could have read about T-tests all night, the normal curve and levels of significance being so astoundingly interesting.

Just like inching your way toward a chipmunk for almost an hour and a half can be, if you're a prey-obsessed canine. Or like watching an outdoor fire can be, if you're with pleasant company (which can be only yourself), the air is warm, and the stars are bright.

Simple pleasures, drug aided or not, often are the most satisfying. Frequently we forget this in our quest for the next exciting thing, as we're multi-entertaining our way through the day and night.

I'm sorry I didn't get a video of Serena stalking a chipmunk. Next time.

It could easily be the basis for a mini-book: "Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned From My Dog Stalking a Chipmunk."

OK, the title could use some work. But it's probably more marketable than: "Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned by Popping Benzedrine in a San Jose Cannery."

Snakes in a pond (and pump)

Snakes creep me out. Big time. Even little garden snakes. To my mind, this is proof of evolution, because I've got an inbred distaste for creatures that used to kill my distant ancestors.

Also, I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains (California), where rattlesnakes abounded. So hearing their unmistakable sound as a kid while crawling over some rocks also serves to explain my current Yikes! whenever I see a slithery form with no legs.

Yesterday one of those forms also had almost no body – just a few inches of what obviously once was a much lengthier snake sticking out of the intake on our pond pump.

That elicited a Yuck! when I pulled the pump up, wondering why it had stopped working. I refused to touch it, making Laurel get some gloves and extract the hunk of snake from the pump.

Unfortunately, that wasn't all of the snake, since the pump still wouldn't work. There was no evident way to take it apart, so we called DeSantis Landscaping, who installed the pump, and Ben came over this morning to have a look.

Making us feel very special, he said that he'd never seen a snake in a pump. Lots of frogs, but no snakes.

He managed to extract it in bits and pieces, using his Leatherman tool. Guess I could have done that myself, but I was glad to watch Ben doing his own Yuck'ing (real men like Ben and me can be scared of snakes).

Being as fond of Google as I'm repelled by snakes, I was curious how many hits "pond pump snake" would turn up on the search engine.

I couldn't see a single reference to a snake being sucked into a pump (quite a few about snakes in a pond) so we indeed experienced a pretty unusual situation.

Somehow the snake made it through a mesh screen and another filter before ending up in the pump enclosure. Easier to understand, though, is it's motivation: fish eating.

Currently there's eight small koi and goldfish in the pond. Laurel has caught several snakes in the act.

Once she was standing by the pond and noticed a snake darting around in the water like it was hunting. Then it grabbed a fish and jumped out of the pond, right at her feet. Laurel put her foot on it and yelled "Let go!"

It did. The goldfish survived after being thrown back into the pond, with a marvelous Jonah-like tale to tell the grandkids.

Laurel hasn't killed any snakes. (We leave that to the pump.) When she finds them sneaking around the pond, she transports them a good distance away. The people who advised "don't kill" to a Yahoo Answers question on this subject will be pleased with us.

This guy went so far as to install an electric fence sort of apparatus around his koi/goldfish pond. Not a bad idea, but it wouldn't work for our more natural in-ground water feature.

Hopefully the word will spread around the snake community about poor old Joe, who met a nasty end after swimming around looking for a tasty fish meal.

I can definitely testify that the end I saw sticking out of the pump looked way nasty.

Since ten acres hasn’t killed me, a condo can wait

Many couples about our age (late 50's, early 60's) are contemplating condo life, the travails of home ownership not meshing with their view of what retirement, or semi-retirement, should be about.

Well, notwithstanding my occasional lustings for a potted plant on a deck, rather than ten acres of natural Oregon land in the lower reaches of the south Salem hills, we're following the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" adage.

And believe me, maintaining our tree, brush, and grass filled property (with enough remaining poison oak and blackberry vines to keep my wife's sprayer busy) sometimes feels like dying, one step removed.

Yet, not so strangely, delightfully so.

Because there's a joy in exerting yourself to almost your limit. This can be done at an athletic club, jogging trail, bicycle ride, or what not, but I find that hard work like field mowing – my current preoccupation – possesses a sweaty satisfaction lacking in other sorts of activities.

When people trade the complexities of a house and yard (or house and acreage) for the simplicity of a condo, they're gaining in some respects but losing in others.

One thing they're missing (and I really would miss my annual field mowing, even though I love to complain about it) is physical exercise. Whether minimal with weeding flower beds, or maximal with the exertion needed to handle my walk-behind DR Field and Brush Mower in tall grass on bumpy sloping ground, home chores help keep an aging body healthy.

I remind myself of this when I'm soaked with perspiration and covered with grass clippings after tackling the areas of our land that need mowing for fire prevention and aesthetic reasons.

Here's a before photo, a field that's on my to-do list for next week.

And here's an after photo that shows some of my weekend work (along with a dog sniffing out field mice, who, I strongly suspect, aren't big fans of my mowing).

When I finish a workout at the athletic club, I'm not able to stand back and admire what I accomplished. Because, nothing was, other than exercising. But after every field is cut, I love to put the DR mower on idle, take some sips of water, gaze at where I've been working, and think… beautiful.

There's a lot to like about a potted plant on a condo deck. It's just not the same as an acre or two of freshly cut grass. The sweat-soaked t-shirt I've got drying outside testifies to that.

Am I living with a terrorist?!

I just read about the FBI's proposed new policy of finding terrorists by using racial and ethnic profiling. Ever on the alert, I decided to take a closer look around our neighborhood for suspects.

Didn't have to go far. There she was, sitting on what I now recognize as a prayer rug, right by our front door, clad in a semblance of her native Islamic garb.

Thank you, Attorney General Mukasey. My eyes have been opened.

I'm now seeing some disturbing resemblances. That nose…that dark facial hair…

Treating our coliform infested well

Coliform bacteria! This sounds scarier than it really is. But we still were concerned when a water test showed that our well water contained these potential nasties.

Potential, because coliform bacteria are ubiquitous. Only certain types, like E. coli, can make you sick.

However, coliforms are used as "indicator organisms" for the possible presence of more dangerous bugs, as this helpful Oregon Department of Human Services bulletin discusses.

After we had our well pump pulled and replaced, we had our water tested. We do this every year. This was the first time coliform showed up. The lab only reported "present," not the estimated number, as that takes culturing (more time and expense, so not done unless you ask for it).

I did quite a bit of Googling "coliform bacteria well treatment" before concluding that we really should treat the well.

On the one hand, I read that 35% of wells in Pennsylvania were found to have coliforms, so this shows that they're usually harmless, since a third of people in that state aren't sick, so far as I know.

On the other hand, I kept seeing references to coliforms being a potential sign of much more serious (and less easily detectable) bacteria.

Not wanting to feel like I was taking my life into my hands every time I rinsed an apple (we use a reverse osmosis system for drinking water), yesterday a couple of guys from Sippel Well Drilling shocked our well. Not with electricity – with four cups of Clorox.

If you're thinking of treating your coliform infected well yourself, my advice is: Don't. Let a professional do it, the first time, at least. Once you learn the tricks of the trade, you can probably repeat the process on your own.

But there's little doubt that I would have messed something up, after watching the Sippel guys do their thing.

First, we needed to have an outflow installed on the pump housing. That's the valve on the left side of the photo. We didn't have a way to drain water directly from the well, and that's necessary (or highly desirable) for treating it.

The guys told me a story about going to a home where quite a few Clorox bottles were stacked by the well. The owners thought that more was better, which it isn't. Too much bleach can screw up your well. You need to know how much chlorine is needed, based on how much water is sitting in the well.

That's pretty easy to figure out, if you know some basic facts about your well. So step 1 is to pour bleach into the well. The guys didn't dilute it, though this often is recommended to avoid harming metal parts.

We shut off our house water, and bypassed our water treatment equipment. We didn't want to have bleach running into our septic system. Hopefully treating the coliform in the well, piping to the pressure tank, and the tank itself will take care of the problem.

Next a hose was connected in a loop from the newly installed valve back to an adapter that squeezed water back into the well, down the vent opening (on the right of the photo) where the bleach went in. The adapter was needed because the opening is so small.

This is a crucial step, because the bleach needs to be circulated in the well. Otherwise it'll just sit on top of the water. The Sippel crew ran the water until a high level of chlorine showed up on a test strip. That meant the bleach had reached the pump down at the bottom of the well.

Then we shut everything down and let the chlorine do its thing – eight hours minimum we were told; we decided to wait until the next morning, about 18 hours, partly because it was going to be easier to do the final steps in daylight.

Which were: (1) attaching a hose to the well housing valve and running water until it looked fairly clear, with no chlorine evident on the test strip, and (2) running raw water from a hose down at our house, to flush out the pressure tank and the pipe leading from the well to the tank.

There was quite a bit of magnesium (black flecks) showing up in the water at our house. So I decided to run our sprinkler system for a couple of hours, figuring that the system filter would catch most of the crud and that we might as well get some use out of the water we were flushing out of the well/pipes.

I suspect the flecks were dislodged from the piping somewhere along the line, given the strong air bursts after we started using the well again.

Things seem back to normal now. But with our complicated water treatment system and crappy well water, "normal" is always a precarious condition.

We were told to retest the water, both a raw sample and treated, in five days. This time we'll get a culture test done, so if we still have coliform bacteria we'll know how many.

It was a judgment call to not treat the house water lines. We might end up having to do this. But since it's a more complicated procedure and the chlorine could harm our septic system, we decided to start with a conservative bleach treatment – which also was the advice of the Sippel guys.

If you've got a similar problem, hope this description helps. We country homeowners have to stick together.

City folks don't realize what it takes to keep your own water and waste treatment system functioning, not to mention dealing with all the other complexities of rural life.

But a few hours ago a deer with two super-cute fawns wandered across our yard. Moments like those make memories of chorine and coliforms fade away. Fast.

Septic tank additives aren’t necessary

To add or not to add? This is one of the big questions for anyone, like us, who lives in a home with a septic tank.

For many of the eighteen years we've lived in rural Oregon, we've dutifully added enzymes to aid the tank's digestion of our waste. Whenever we've had our tank pumped or a line unclogged, the workmen have pushed an enzymatic additive, saying it'll help keep our septic system healthy.

But is this true? After some Google research today, my conclusion is…No.

Save your money and let nature do its thing. Mag Ruffman, the Tool Girl, says:

There are 1200 products on the market for use in septic tanks; some contain biological agents like bacteria, some contain enzymes, and others use chemicals as their active ingredients. Extravagant claims have been made for many of them. The truth is, there are more helpful bacteria in a single poo than you'll find in most biological septic preparations. Enzymes have not been proven effective in controlled tests.

What I found was that those selling septic enzymes are enthusiastic about them. But people without a financial ax to grind mostly said they aren't necessary, and can even be harmful (see here, here, here, and here).

The state of Washington has banned septic tank additives. Here's an excerpt from a Department of Health publication:

In 1993, the Washington State Legislature found that " most additives do not have a positive effect on the operation of on-site systems, and can contaminate groundwater aquifers, render septic drainfields dysfunctional, and result in costly repairs to homeowners. It is therefore the intent of the legislature to ban the use, sale, and distribution of additives within the state unless an additive has been specifically approved by the Department of Health."

In 1994, the legislature added, "Chemical additives do, and other types may, contribute to septic system failure and groundwater contamination. In order to determine which ingredients of non-chemically based additive products have adverse effects on public health or the environment, it is necessary to submit such products to a review procedure."

Approved products merely are certified to not be harmful. There's no evidence they're effective. Apparently septic tank additives might be useful only in some special circumstances:

The beneficial effects of biological additives on the septic system are still being debated, but two benefits may ultimately be identified. Based on available literature, enzymatic products might have the ability to reduce the amount of oil and grease in the septic tank. Second, under septic tank bacterial "die-off" conditions, slight reductions in the amount of effluent solids have been achieved by using additives.

On the downside, this article says that additives can clog your drain field by pushing solids up to the surface of the tank and then out into the soil.

Bottom line: almost always, septic systems don't need additional enzymes or other additives. We're going to stop using them.

“Ooh, it’s hot!” Oregonians are heat wussies.

Days like today, I feel so superior to most of my fellow Oregonians. I grew up in central California, where for much of the year a temperature under 100 degrees is considered a cool day.

So here I am on May 16 in Salem, Oregon – enjoying a record breaking heat wave for this date. The thermometer in my car read "100" when I was downtown this afternoon.

Ooh! Wow! One single freaking day with a three digit temperature and the local news is filled with tips about how to survive.

Hydration. Sunscreen. Wear a hat. Don't exert yourself.

Oregonians are such wussies. Of course, I've lived here myself for 37 years. But those 15 years in California, from age seven to twenty-two, trained me to be a macho man when it comes to a bit of heat.

A few days ago, when the temperature was still in the high 70s, I walked into a Starbucks and ordered my usual nonfat vanilla latte. I never get asked this question, but that day the barista said "Do you want it iced?"

"Good god, no," I told her. "I could be crossing the Sahara Desert and I'd still have my latte hot. It's just wrong to drink it cold."

Probably she'd been making iced drinks all day long for Oregonians who worried about suffering heat exhaustion as they walked a few steps from their air conditioned office or car into the air conditioned Starbucks.

When I was a boy (ah, how I look forward to my one year old granddaughter getting a bit older, so I can use these words much more frequently), all summer long I'd ride my bike to see my friends in Three Rivers, California.

They weren't down the block. There weren't any blocks in this rural hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. I had to pedal miles to get to my best friend's house. Mostly in over 100 degree weather. Up and down those foothills. On a three speed.

No problem. So now I say to heat, "Bring it on. Show me your best stuff."

Today I stood in the sun for a while, waiting for my car to be washed at Car'l B Klean, while inferior Oregonians cowered in the shade under an umbrella. I leaned on a railing, skin blazing, feeling like Leonardo deCaprio in "Titanic."

I'm the (non-wuss) king of the world! On hot days in Oregon, at least.

From snow to sunshine with snafus

SNAFU is both a deeply philosophic acronym, and a pleasingly profane one. It's meaning, "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up" reflects the Buddhist reality that life is suffering.

Traveling from snowy Salem, Oregon to sunny Napili Bay, Hawaii yesterday, we can testify that SNAFU is fully operative in the cosmos.

Not that we needed any confirmation of that. It's just good to be reminded (albeit as infrequently as possible) that when everything is going right with life, that's an anomaly.

Laurel and I started off fine, waking up bright and early for a planned 6:45 am departure from home so we'd have time to get to the Portland airport well ahead of Hawaiian's 10:15 am flight to Maui. I'd checked the Hawaiian web site fairly late on Saturday night and saw that HA 39's schedule hadn't changed.

The thirty-six degree weather and snow worried us a bit. The white stuff wasn't sticking, though, so we had no trouble driving up I-5 in nicely sparse morning traffic.

That was the high point of our travel day. On our speedy way to the airport I'd been worrying that we'd have too much time to kill before our flight left. When we checked in, my worries proved to be justified.

Way justified.

The Hawaiian check-in guy at the first class counter (we'd splurged on an upgrade, having lots of Hawaiian Airlines miles) had been joking around with us. So when he said, "Your flight will be leaving a little late…at 2:20 pm" at first we both thought this was another attempt to be funny.

Except, it wasn't. Mechanical problems had delayed arrival of the plane until 4 am in the morning. So now the crew had to rest for eight hours, or whatever, due to some stupid FAA rule.

I thought, Hey, just give them a couple of cups of strong Kona coffee. Or some Benzedrine. Shoot them up with meth, I don't care. Just don't make me wait four more hours at the airport.

Which is what we ended up having to do, spending much of the time talking about how stupid it was (1) for us not to have phoned Hawaiian and checked if the flight was on time, and (2) for Hawaiian not to have contacted us when they knew many hours ahead of time that HA 39 was going to be significantly delayed.

Fortunately, the baggage claim area of the Portland Airport had some empty seating with no arm rests, making for a comfortable place to doze and read the Sunday paper. Also on the plus side: Hawaiian gave us two $9 vouchers for lunch, meaning we each got paid $2.25 an hour to sit around until 2:20 pm.

Since we were in first class, once we boarded I figured that our travel troubles were over and we could relax in the lap of airline luxury.

I started to tense up almost right away, however – as soon as the flight attendant handed out the meal menu. We could select three of five lunch items, only one of which was clearly composed of vegetable matter. A salad.

Before he got to us to take our orders I could hear another passenger using the "V" (vegetarian) word, and mumbled regrets/explanations from the flight attendant. All of which were repeated when he got to us.

I've never been able to understand why nice restaurants and first class airline chefs believe that every single main dish has to meatified. Not only that, in this case every single side dish aside from the salad was laced with animal flesh.

So the potatoes and rice were off limits, leaving us with a small salad and a few other dainty dishes while the peons back in coach were feasting on meatless spaghetti.

That was promised to me if any spaghettis were left over, but I ended up having to scrape up the last bits of a hummus plate to keep body and soul together while I stretched out in my expansive first class seat, feeling sorry for myself.

SNAFU'ing on, I left a half-full glass of guava juice on the platform between our seats while I napped. When I woke up, it took me quite a while to figure out why my right shoe was wet. Along with my hip bag that I'd put on the cabin floor.

Sticky sweetness offered up a clue.

Adding to my bad hip bag karma, inexplicably I left it sitting in its guava soaked splendor when we deplaned. It was only after we'd gotten halfway to baggage claim and I'd started to think of picking up the rental car when a little voice inside my head said, "Good luck, since you don't have a wallet."

Oh, fuck!

I had to wait a few more anxious moments for Laurel to come out of a restroom. Then I raced back to the gate and swam upstream against a throng of coach passengers, all of whom looked happier than first class me, stomachs being filled with meatless spaghetti and minds empty of concern about their wallets.

Luckily, my hip bag was right where I'd left it. Nothing else went wrong for a whole couple of minutes, aside from arriving at the rental car shuttle area a few seconds after the Alamo bus pulled away.

Once I finally got to the off-site Alamo center, I was directed to choose from any of the mid-size cars in their lot. Which turned out to be two identical gold PT Cruisers. This being one of those SNAFU days, I should have known that whichever one I picked, it'd be the wrong decision.

I drive to baggage claim to retrieve Laurel and our six pieces of luggage. We stuff them into the car. Then drive to the Kahului natural food store to stock up on healthy organic eats. Park. Press the "lock" button on the key fob.

And observe…nothing. Followed by more presses of the button that also result in…nothing. Laurel and I look at each other, panic bouncing back and forth between us (at least something is happening).

The Dark Ages beckon: a vacation during which each trip in the rental car begins and ends with – oh, dear god, the horror – a manual unlocking or locking of the doors.

Of all the SNAFUS we'd faced since leaving home, this clearly was the worst. I left Laurel at the store, made a U-turn, and drove back to the Alamo rental center. Pulling up on the street, I encountered an employee I'd met before having a smoke (though this is Maui, it was a cigarette) out on the lawn.

She fondled my keys, unsuccessfully attempting to open the battery compartment with her fingernail. "Often people take the battery before they return the car," she said. "Just return the car and exchange it for a full-size one."

Great.

Since the last mid-size PT Cruisers had departed the lot, now I'd be able to get a car better able to hold all of our stuff, including the countless bags of groceries Laurel was accumulating at that very moment. All I needed to do was transfer two large suitcases, two carry-ons, a boogie board, and a duffel bag with all of our beach/snorkeling paraphernalia.

No problem, if I could have pulled the old car up next to the new car. But a girl at the Alamo Returns Department waved me into the return line, even though I told her the car had just been used for a quick trip to the natural food store and back.

"You can pick out any full-sized car in that line over there," she told me. "Over there" meant halfway across the Alamo parking lot.

I asked her to watch the PT Cruiser while I started ferrying our crap to a different vehicle. She jumped onto the rear hatch compartment, where she contentedly sat during my three back and forth hauling trips.

First time over, I used what I hoped was a new-found car selecting intuition to pick a G6. I didn't know what a G6 was, but the name on the grill sounded sporty and it looked in good working order. I stuffed a couple of heavy bags into the trunk, then went to lock the car so somebody wouldn't rip me off while I made the next trip.

Shit. I'd managed to pick a replacement car that also didn't have a working remote, a fact that jumped out at me when I saw there wasn't any remote at all on the key chain.

So now I had to move bags from the G6 into a Grand Prix, which I picked solely because it was sitting right next to the G6 and I was getting way tired of playing with suitcases after a too-long SNAFU day. After a few more trips back and forth to the PT cruiser I was headed back to the natural food store.

Where Laurel had made a good start on the shopping, but it still took a while before we loaded umpteen bags into a pleasingly easily lockable car. I tore into the potato chips, a long time having passed since we feasted on those first class salads.

Check-in at the Napili Kai went smoothly, against my expectations. I was strangely pleased when the lot closest to our room was filled up and we had to hurriedly park in a handicapped space while rushing to move our luggage and groceries.

Ah, back to SNAFU normality. I felt even more at home when the first sound we heard upon approaching the door to our oceanfront room wasn't the surf, but loud country music.

It didn't go on too late, which pleased our jet-lagged souls. And so far today it's been country music quiet. I noticed this morning, though, that a guy in a room downstairs went out to the bushes adjoining the ocean, leaned over a railing, and spit an astounding spray of something into the greenery.

Then he adjusted his baseball cap, looked pleased with himself, and walked back into his room. I'm fearing that we're in the midst of some sort of redneck convention, though I haven't figured out why they'd come to Maui.

Fortunately, the island has a way of quickly erasing SNAFU memories. A few hours on the beach today, and a half hour swim in Napili Bay, got me pretty mellow.

That's what happens when one of the biggest chores of the day is framing Molokai between your knees.

How’d that old man get in my photos?!

For a moment I was ready to turn around and head back to the Fred Meyer photo counter with an angry demand that I be given my digital camera printouts, not the ones belonging to some old geezer who seemed vaguely familiar, but clearly wasn't me.

Except, after the moment passed and my mind jumped back to aging reality, I realized that he was. Me.

This is a new experience – looking at a photo of myself, or seeing myself in a mirror, and thinking, "Who the hell is that?"

Previously, I've thought "That doesn't look like me." But now it takes me a while to even recognize myself as me, the disconnect between how I believe I look and how I really look being so great.

I suppose this is normal.

Eventually, as the years go by, we pass over a mental image dividing line of some sort. On one side is the psychological person who has barely aged a bit; on the other side is the physical person who looks disturbingly old.

Like most men, and more than a few women, in many respects I'm still 18. I'm still immature and irresponsible. I still look at girls a third my age with lust in my heart (and other bodily organs).

The only difference from my teenage years is, I'm 59. Aside from that minor detail, and a bunch of lifetime experiences, most of the time I feel as young inside my head in 2008 as I did back in 1968.

That's what makes looking at photos of myself such a disconcerting experience. I try to avoid looking in mirrors, but when I want to rekindle a memory of my granddaughter's visit, and I'm in a photo with her, it's tough to avoid seeing the camera-reflected me.

All this is giving me a better understanding of why people, men naturally included, embrace plastic surgery, hair coloring, and other cosmetic improvements on what nature has wrought.

When the inner person is way out of sync with the outer person, some adjustments could be in order.

I doubt I'll go that route, though. One reason is my compassionate Buddha nature. I figure that the older I look, the younger my wife will look when we're together.

Plus, there's the tiger thing. I just read about what some people do in a part of India where man-eating tigers are around.

Since tigers prefer to attack from the rear, they wear masks with a human face on the back of their head. That way, the tiger attacks from the front, thinking it's the person's other end.

Now, it could be argued that if you're going to be jumped by a massive man-eating tiger, it might be better not to know about it until you feel the jaws clamping around your neck. That way the terror time is minimized.

However, like those Indians, I'd rather see the tiger coming, even if I couldn't do much about it.

My gray hair, wrinkles, age spots, and what-not are my tiger. The beast of aging and, eventually, death. I'd prefer that he wasn't stalking me, but he is.

So, I might as well face him head-on. Or at least, out of the corner of my eye.

Remodeling – my path to enlightenment

In Buddhism and Hinduism there's always been a big debate about whether the life of the renuniciate or the householder is a surer road to enlightenment.

Do you find truth in a bare cave or a richly furnished living room?

After the past month of remodeling our bathroom and, now, kitchen, I can testify that the Buddha would have been a lot better off staying home with his wife rather than sitting under the Bodhi Tree.

Sooner rather than later, Mrs. Buddha would have talked him into redoing their home. And that, for sure, would have provided him with all the raw experience he needed to realize some noble (or, as it seems today, ignoble) truths.

Life is change. Last summer we endured weeks of banging from hammers, nail guns, compressors, and such as our kitchen was fully remodeled. And now…it's back! After numerous attempts to fix the floor grout and tiles, the contractor said, "let's start over."

So up comes the almost-new Duraceramic tile, and down goes replacement tile, over what hopefully is a firmer underlayment. But who knows? Our kitchen died, was reborn, is now being killed again, and soon will have a fresh reincarnation.

Birth, death, rebirth. Such is the eternal wheel of remodeling.

Life is suffering. This afternoon I had to attempt my habitual afternoon nap while all the banging was going on. I'd doze off, then be startled back to wakefulness by a particularly loud boom!

Earlier, I wasn't able to get into the kitchen after cooking a vegi-burger on our auxiliary stovetop. I had to eat it without salt. Just ketchup and a bun.

Of such trials are saints made. I've been looking in the mirror to see if my martyrdom halo is showing yet. I might have caught a glimpse of it.

Detachment breeds contentment. We were told that the workmen would be doing their thing today and tomorrow. A little while ago one of the guys gave us an update on their progress. Extrapolating what's been done to what remains, Laurel said, "There's no way you're going to be finished by tomorrow, is there?"

"Nope." "So our kitchen floor is going to be torn up all weekend, right?" "Yes."

I visualized the Great God of Remodeling bringing us precisely what is needful at exactly the right moment in accord with the Tao of Construction. I took deep breaths, inhaling the blissful odor of sawdust – which has permeated the whole house, notwithstanding the plastic sheets put up in the kitchen.

Then I made a mental note to make sure we had enough wine to get me through this affront to my pleasantly retired napping and blogging life.

I'll also meditate some extra minutes tomorrow morning. But Pinot Noir seems to produce more detachment than a mantra these days.

I’m wrong, wrong, wrong

There's something delicious in those four words: I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. Humility. Truthfulness. Acceptance.

It took me three "wrong's" because that's how many times I can recall being wrong recently. Actually, I'm sure the number is much more.

Like most people, I much prefer being right than wrong. So I tend to focus on experiences that affirm the correctness of my view of the world, and put out of mind the oops moments.

Still, sometimes even I can't ignore how amazingly wrong I can be. And how confident I am that I'm right until the curtain rises on the fantastic drama, My Error.

Last Monday I rushed into my Tai Chi class, customarily late, and sat down to hurriedly put on my lightweight shoes.

What the ____? The cozy confines of my Tai Chi shoe world had shattered. I had two different shoes – two sizes, two brands.

My brain struggled to figure out what had happened.

Then I remembered that in the previous class we'd talked about types of Tai Chi shoes. A woman had said that she liked her shoes. They were black with a silver "Turf" on the tongue, just like the smallish shoe that I was mysteriously holding.

It all became clear.

We must have taken off our shoes after class and put them next to each other. Then one of us had grabbed two shoes without looking and went home with them. She had one shoe of mine, and I had one of hers.

I spent a good share of the Tai Chi class pondering this. I wondered if she would remember to bring my shoe with her on Thursday, the only day she comes to class. I pictured her being as surprised to find a mismatched pair as I was. I visualized where we'd been sitting to accomplish the mix-up.

Except…when I got home a little "you're wrong" bell started ringing in my mind. It kept getting louder, drawing me to look on top of the box in my closet where I keep my Tai Chi shoes.

And there, tucked behind some clothes, barely visible, was another "Turf" shoe. I'd forgotten that I'd gotten a pair, just like the woman's, a couple of years ago. They were a bit too small, so I didn't wear them much, preferring the Tiger Claw shoes.

I'd mindlessly picked up one of each shoe somehow and mindlessly never noticed until I'd sat down to put them on. So here's one wrong.

Onto the next wrongs.

Two days later I installed some backup software for an external hard drive on my new Lenovo notebook computer. The installation and first backup seemed to go fine. But I decided to click on the "Computer" button in Vista to see if anything had changed on the Lenovo Y510.

What the ____? The cozy confines of my laptop world had shattered. Now there were two hard drives on the Lenovo, a small 29 GB "C" drive and a large 188 GB logical "D" drive/partition with nothing in it.

I got anxious. Years ago I'd had a problem with an earlier version of the same backup software. It has screwed things up on the computer I was trying to protect, paradoxically. I searched the Internet for mention of my current problem. Couldn't find anything.

I still fretted, though, until I could phone Lenovo tech support. Who told me, "That's the way the hard drive is supposed to be." Relief. I hadn't paid attention to the drive layout before, the computer being new and little used.

Once again I'd jumped to conclusions, figuring that I knew the cause of a problem. Once again I was wrong. In this case, there wasn't even much of a problem (I still want to get rid of the "D" partition, but not because there's anything horribly wrong).

Finally, last night we sat down for some TV watching. I grabbed the remote control, because that's my manly sacred right. The DISH satellite receiver turned on fine. The TV didn't.

What the ____? The cozy confines of my television world had shattered.

Blank screen. Just sound. At first I thought this would be easy to fix. A video cable connection must have loosened up when something got moved.

I re-plugged in everything that makes a picture on the TV. Still blank. I played a DVD. TV was fine. I reasoned the problem must be with the DISH receiver. I reset it. And reset it again.

I found some different "RCA" cables and substituted them for the possibly malfunctioning cables. I plugged them directly into the television, rather than going through a possibly malfunctioning selector box (to switch between a DVD player and DISH network).

Screen was still blank.

I was convinced the receiver had gone bad. I lamented the likely loss of all the recorded programs we had stored on it. The Lost episodes! The ballroom dance championship episodes! All those Stephen Colbert and Daily Show episodes we hadn't watched!

I started going through the stages of digital video recorder death. Anger. Despair. Sadness. I was nowhere near acceptance.

I dug out the DISH receiver manual and started going through it for clues to what had gone wrong with their piece of shit equipment that had turned my TV watching world upside down.

And came to a mention of the S-Video input and output. Which set off another "you're wrong" ringing in my psyche.

Because I'd noticed an unattached cable lying behind the TV set amid the spaghetti-like maze of other cables that, miraculously, allows our myriad electronic gadgets to communicate with each other.

Most of the time.

But somehow the S-Video input had gotten detached from the selector box. So even though a S-Video cable was coming out of the satellite receiver, and a S-Video cable was going into the TV set, a crucial missing link was unhooked, something I'd failed to notice.

Hooking the cable back up, all was well. Except I'd missed an hour of television viewing in my life that can never be recovered. Rebirth awaits to assuage that regret.

So that's my three "I'm wrong's." Three opportunities to reflect on how I can be equally sure I'm right about much bigger things in life.

Such as the meaning, or lack thereof, of it. If I can be wrong about little things, I can be wrong about big things. We all can.

A good thing to keep in mind when certainty rules the mental roost.

What’s “semi-formal” in the northwest?

Oooh! Scary! The flyer for tonight's Valentine Sweetheart Dance at the RJ Dance Studio said "Dress Red, Semi-Formal."

I have a burgundy shirt that's close enough to red to count. But the Semi-Formal…that sent a chill up my causal Oregon spine.

I fretted and worried. I emailed Lora, one of the RJ Dance head honchos, and asked her what semi-formal meant. She didn't respond. I got chillier.

Turning to Wikipedia, I was told that semi-formal is synonymous with black tie. A dinner jacket would be most appropriate for evening wear.

Yeah, right. Hey, Wikipedia, I live in the northwest.

Your article may claim that semi-formal/black tie is similar to informal attire in European usage, but I can tell you that the same order of magnitude dressing difference (in the other direction) applies in Oregon, Washington, and other parts of Ecotopia.

So I didn't panic. Before last night's foxtrot class I asked Lora what she meant by semi-formal. "Oh, no blue jeans or t-shirts. Especially with holes in them. Otherwise, anything goes."

Yes! I'd been worrying that I'd have to dig out a suit and tie, which I haven't worn in many years – since my daughter's wedding, I'm pretty sure.

But now I had free rein to embrace a natural northwest dress code, which turns out to be virtually identical to the geek version of the rest of the world's dress code.

Namely, semi-formal means nice pants and nice shirt – not a dark suit and tie. This extended description of the geek dress code says that for women, semi-formal means a dress or skirt, maybe black in a nice fabric with a dressy top.

Here's the result of our semi-formal dressing labors tonight. RJ kindly captured us after some semi-sweaty dancing.

Chore Fairy left me in the lurch!

Hopefully I won't need therapy after what just happened to me.

But I'm married to a (retired) psychotherapist, so it'll be easy to get treatment for Post Fairy Disillusionment Disorder if the shock of last week doesn't fade away.

The interesting thing is, my potential therapist is closely connected with my trauma. This could produce some sort of transference issues, but that's the least of my worries right now.

Because what I'm trying to deal with is a wholesale upsetting of my world view – as it pertains to our household, at least. I've having to adjust to losing a deeply held faith.

In the Chore Fairy.

I'll get a head start on recovery by sharing my story. I'll imagine that we're sitting in a circle and my turn comes to talk. "Hi, I'm Brian, and I used to be addicted to my belief."

Which wasn't based on nothing. I had good reasons for it.

I've been married to Laurel for almost eighteen years. Almost every day, and you can do the math to figure out how many thousands of them there have been, I'd get out of bed in the morning and go about my business.

Sometime later, the bed would be made. I never was sure how.

I'd make coffee, let the dog out, get the newspaper, go have some meditation quiet time, eat breakfast, take a shower – and eventually when I'd walk back in the bedroom, presto, the bed would be all neat and tidy. Never caught anyone in the act of arranging the sheets and bedspread.

So I started to figure it must be the Chore Fairy.

It made me happy to visualize her under the bed, or maybe peeking out from the closet, waiting for me to leave the room so she could do her thing in private (everybody knows fairies are shy; that's why we never see them).

Eventually I began to realize that the Chore Fairy was up to more than making the bed. She was doing a whole lot of other things to make life easier for me.

Consider toilet paper. I'd buy it at the store and bring it home. But I'd never put any rolls under the bathroom sinks. Yet when I needed a fresh roll, there one would be!

Amazing. Mysterious. Marvelous. As the years went by my adoration for the Chore Fairy grew. I became more attuned to recognizing her unseen presence.

Often I'd notice that the dishwasher "clean" light was on, but I wouldn't have time to attend to it, having a lot of important items on my to-do list, like checking out my blog statistics and putting my own name into Google to see how I was stacking up with the other Brian Hines' of the world.

After a while I'd tear myself away from my laptop, walk upstairs, and oh my god thank you Chore Fairy! I'd go into the kitchen to find a snack and see that the light was off and the dishwasher was empty.

I'd grab a clean plate, pop some leftover spaghetti into the microwave, and say another silent "thank you" to the Chore Fairy, who clearly was the most dependable friend a guy could have.

When Laurel left last Friday for a weeklong trip to Florida, I was looking forward to having some alone time with the Chore Fairy. Maybe, I thought, her shyness was due to my wife, not me. This could be my chance to finally see her perform her magic.

Things didn't work out like I expected, though – right from the beginning. By Friday afternoon I figured that the Chore Fairy should have the bed made. But no, it looked just the same.

A day later, ditto. Worse, not only was the dishwasher still full of clean dishes, after I emptied it myself (muttering "Where the !@#$& are you, Chore Fairy?") it wasn't being filled with dirty dishes from the sink per usual.

Nor were spots on the kitchen floor from food that I'd dropped disappearing after a few hours, as had always happened before. I became aware that the Chore Fairy was shirking a whole lot of her duties.

And that began to piss me off. All these years I'd venerated the Chore Fairy; I'd appreciated how much she did for me. Not in words, of course not – that'd be crazy.

The Chore Fairy knew how I felt. I was sure of it. Since her magical powers could clean things up around the house without me seeing her do it, surely she was aware of how much I cared for her.

But now she'd left me. In the lurch. When I needed her most.

Because I had extra duties with Laurel being gone – taking the dog for a morning walk, feeding the birds, putting the family pet to bed with some baby talk and a couple of biscuits – yet the Chore Fairy wasn't even doing what she usually does.

It was pretty damn traumatic, to have our relationship come to such a screeching halt. And the Chore Fairy chose the exact same day Laurel left to say Sayonara to me. I hated her. For the whole week.

But now things are better again between us. Laurel got back last night. And today I noticed that the Chore Fairy was back on the job.

Guess she needed some space. Can't figure out what I did to drive her away, though. Or why she decided to return when Laurel did.

Oh, jeez. It's becoming clear now. I've been such a fool!

The Chore Fairy loves Laurel more than me. She must have snuck into Laurel's suitcase when she packed and hitched a ride to Florida.

Well, that sucks. I've got to get me a Chore Fairy trap so I can keep her here next time Laurel goes away. Must be something like that on the Internet. Off to Google…

Flip Video Ultra is my new joy toy

Who says money can't buy happiness? Not me, for sure. Because $179.99 just bought me some considerable gadget-fueled joy in the person (or rather, plastic and metal) of a Flip Video Ultra.

My good karma was kicked off by a recent Mark Morford column. He started off his rant about a bizarre Tom Cruise video with:

Here is something you can do. Set up that nifty little Flip Video camera you got for Christmas just over there next to your couch.

I didn't read the rest of the column. Instead I thought, "Hey! I didn't get a nifty little Flip Video camera for Christmas. What the heck!!??"

My next thought was: "Also, what's a Flip Video camera?"

Answer – a cool super easy to use camcorder that shoots up to 60 minutes of video and stores it on 2GB of flash memory. (The Ultra, at least.)

I've got a fancy Sony camcorder that does a lot more stuff. But it's also much more complicated to use. And it's not easy to upload videos to You Tube with it, or even to get a video onto my laptop.

By contrast, getting shots of me, Laurel, and the dog crooning "Happy Birthday" to my daughter was wonderfully simple.

It took me a bit longer to figure out how to set up an AOL Flip Video account and use the camera's built-in software to upload my work of art to a private video sharing page (accessible only through a link).

As an experiment I also uploaded the video to my You Tube account. The sound quality seemed quite a bit better on AOL.

That was important, because this is a weak spot of the camera. When I spoke while holding the camera, the sound was fine. But talking normally on the couch just a few feet away from it, you can barely hear us. (Except for the "Happy Birthday" – a mixed blessing to the non-tone deaf, given my singing ability.)

Update: My daughter said the audio sounded fine to her. When I played the video on my new Lenovo Y510, which has much better speakers than my ThinkPad, it was indeed clearly audible. So I take back my criticism of the Flip Video microphone, replacing it with criticism of ThinkPad speakers.

Otherwise, the Flip Video Ultra looks like it'll be a part of my life from now on. I've already relegated my still digital camera to a drawer in favor of carrying around the Flip Video.

You can generate JPG stills from a video, though the quality isn't great. So I'm sacrificing higher quality snapshots for the ability to make a movie anytime I want.

The day I got the Flip Video I drove around Salem, waiting expectantly for something newsworthy for happen. I figured I'd quickly make my $179.99 back by selling footage of the Worthy News to CNN.

I'm still waiting. But I'm ready…

Regarding the price, you can get the camera cheaper at Amazon and other places. I bought it direct from Flip Video central, partly because of the 90 day return policy.

And I'd noticed that some of the generally highly positive comments on Amazon about the camera had mentioned problems with a firmware upgrade. I was wary when I attempted to download the upgrade, so was happy to find that my camera already had the most recent version. That could be a benefit of buying direct from the manufacturer.

A few tips and observations:

--Video files are large. My five-minute Happy Birthday video started off at 132 MB, if I recall correctly. Not very emailable. The Flip Video software truncated my masterpiece when I checked the "email" option. It might have a size limit on email attachments. So I ended up sharing the video with my daughter via AOL and You Tube.

--Expect the AOL/You Tube uploading process to take a while, especially if your video is more than a minute or so long. The camera's built-in software reduces the size of the video file before it uploads it. That takes time, just as it does on Windows Movie Maker. So don't expect instant sharing.

--Along this line, I thought the Flip Video was stuck when it kept showing its uploading progress at "20%." I thought the program might be frozen but found that the progress bar suddenly jumped when it had finished reducing the size of the video and started the actual uploading. Again, be patient.

--When you set up an AOL Flip Video account, it isn't activated until you respond to an email that AOL sends you to validate that you're a real live emailable person. Not realizing this, I couldn't understand why the Flip Video software couldn't log into my newly created AOL account. Tip: check your email for a message from AOL and click on the link.

--The minimal (because the camera is so simple) instructions should emphasize that the camera needs to be "unloaded" from a Windows computer before detaching it from a USB port – via the Safely Remove Hardware icon. This guy's You Tube review of the camera mentions this, which redeems his cheesiness somewhat.

Bottom line: for $165-180 this is a great way to capture video. What the camera lacks in fancy features it makes up for in smallness and simplicity.

I'm getting my daughter one. She has the same Sony camcorder that I do, but says that she doesn't use it very much – even though my granddaughter is hugely cute and almost a year old. The Sony is too complicated.

Well, after a Flip Video Ultra arrives at her doorstep soon, I'm expecting to see a lot of charming child videos. I'll return the favor with what probably will be an endless series of cute dog videos.

Buyer beware with Penguin Windows

Thank God, or Tao, for Oregon's "Buyer's Right to Cancel" law.

It just saved us from a pushy Penguin Windows salesman, who somehow talked us into signing a contract for some vastly overpriced (though seemingly high-quality) replacement windows.

I wasn't going to mention the company's name in this buyer beware post. But after reading a bunch of comments from people who had remarkably similar bad sales experiences, I decided to say it like it is:

Penguin Windows engages in annoyingly high-pressure sales tactics.

Which, unfortunately, are pretty damn effective. Laurel and I generally are resistant to salesman B.S. But the guy who spent over four hours in our house last Saturday was good. Real good.

Yes, I said four hours. When Laurel called Penguin to get an estimate she was told that this would take an hour to an hour and a half.

I only wish. When Jay (not his real name) arrived promptly at 11 a.m., I figured I'd be back to my usual Saturday activities, like a nap, by early in the afternoon.

Nope. Jay had a seemingly endless series of sales pitches that he unveiled both before and after he measured our windows.

We saw frame samples from Penguin and other companies. We had the temperature in various spots in our living room measured by a nifty laser pointing device (I learned that our dog's exterior is about 80 degrees, while Laurel is considerably cooler). We watched a heat lamp experiment where Jay showed how much radiation passed through several types of single, double, and triple-pane windows.

In the end I was getting both really hungry and bored. And we weren't sold on the Penguin Windows, which struck us as (1) wildly expensive, and (2) vinyl'ly unsuited for our almost all-wood interior.

So Jay smoothly shifted away from an estimate to replace all of our ancient aluminum-framed windows, to just those downstairs. That reduced the cost considerably. We thought it might be OK to try five windows as an experiment.

I won't bother to describe all of Jay's sales tactics, many of which were irritating. They're described in the litany of complaints from other people, which are headed by titles such as:

Don't waste your time…LIES AND BROKEN PROMISES…sleazy is too kind of a word…BUYER'S BEWARE! LIES! LIES! LIES!...STAY AWAY RUN AWAY AND HIDE…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!RIP OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...I just kicked the sales weasel out of my house…Stay away Run run run…Terrible windows and service

One comment came from a guy who used to work for Statewide (now called Penguin Windows).

I used to work for statewide and I agree that it's a S***ty company. Not only are the people high pressure but the atmosphere in the office is high pressure. If you didn't get a certain number of people scheduling appointments each week they would first verbally warn you, then write you up the next week and then they would fire your a** for being "incompetent" if you didn't meet the quota of appointments three weeks in a row. I worked for the Vancouver division for a few months and I will never do that again. Apparently they have been in the same territory for up to five years in some places, which is just stupid for the marketing tactics that they use. I would warn you to stay clear of these people. The next time you see someone in a baby blue shirt with a clipboard heading your way do the smart thing and turn tail and RUN! Dealing with this company is not worth the hassle. Cheers!

Over the weekend we came to our senses. I emailed Penguin Windows and told them we'd changed our mind, but might consider having just one window installed as a test. Laurel also left a message for Jay, who we talked to on Monday.

He said that it wouldn't be possible for us to get a single window. Jay wanted to meet with us again today, and to bring his boss along. We figured, why not? Wouldn't hurt to talk some more – so long as it wasn't for anywhere near four hours.

But today Laurel checked out some other window options. She realized that our woody home would look much better with wood-clad frames. She phoned Jay and told him he'd almost certainly be wasting his time if he came out, that we were strongly leaning toward cancelling our contract for the downstairs windows.

However, Jay insisted on coming out. Which, he did, promptly at 6:00 pm this evening (I'll have to give him this; he's punctual).

This time it just took us about 45 minutes to get Jay out the door. He was exceedingly reluctant to take "no" for an answer. We had him outnumbered (his boss didn't show up) and we both rank pretty high on an assertiveness scale.

Yet there were moments when our cancellation resolve started to weaken a bit in the face of Jay's relentless rear-guard Save the Sale manipulation techniques. Emotionally he went from cheery, to determined, to grumpy, to sadly put upon, to (thankfully!) resigned to his non-sales fate.

Someone single, lonely, elderly, and/or eager to please could easily have fallen prey to the slick Penguin Windows sales tactics. Jay reminded me of car salesman as they were several decades ago, complete with "Let me talk to my supervisor and see if he's willing to give you the discount that I want to offer."

Give me a break. We got several thousand dollars off of our estimate for being willing to have Penguin Windows put a sign at the end of our driveway when they did the work (which, now, they never will). That's just one of the many Penguin gimmicks.

Tomorrow the "Buyer's Right to Cancel" is being mailed to Penguin Windows, comfortably before the three business day deadline, and by registered mail.

The horror stories I read (along with some positive comments) make me feel good about escaping from the Penguin's clutches. We'll end up saving a lot of money when we go with another window company.

And we won't have rewarded obnoxious sales tactics.

I’m the DSL King of the World!

Step aside, Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm the new king of the world – unashamed to appropriate one of the cheesiest movie lines ever.

Because I deserve it.

I, me, myself, Brian the Hines, was responsible for bringing Qwest DSL to our rural south Salem neighborhood after many would-be kings (including moi ) had tried and failed for years.

At this very moment I am praising myself in a blog post that will be uploaded via wireless DSL, a vast improvement over our dreadfully unreliable Wild Blue broadband satellite service, which never saw a raindrop that it wasn't afraid to send a signal through.

Wild Blue also suffered from slow upload speeds. I could download at over 1000 kbps most of the time, but frequently I'd get a 30 kbps upload speed, not much different from our old 24 kbps dial-up connection.

Our DSL started functioning (after some load coil problems were resolved) yesterday. Retrieving information rich web pages like the NY Times and Google News now is happening five times faster with DSL, even though the download speed (1239 kbps) is about what I was getting with satellite.

It must be DSL's much faster upload speed, 711 kbps, that's keeping a web-surfing smile on my face. Yes, cable and faster speed DSL users, I realize that what I've got is run-of-the-mill broadband; but beggars who live in the countryside can't be choosers when it comes to broadband options.

Many of my neighbors are deeply grateful that I've brought the potential of DSL to some 240 homes in our area. Quite a few are trying to run businesses out of their homes. That's tough to do with a dial-up connection, and satellite is expensive.

I've been thinking that a bronze statue of me, commemorating my DSL triumph, would be a nice addition to one of our local streets. Which could be renamed after me also.

The statue idea hasn't taken off yet, except in my own mind. But I've got a rough design pictured. I'd be gazing out over cyberspace, holding a laptop in one arm and the letter that I sent to the Qwest CEO in the other.

It was the letter that apparently did the trick, because my entreaties to Congresswoman Hooley, and through her to the FCC, didn't go any good.

Nor did an exasperated blog post directed to the previous Qwest CEO. A few weeks after writing that post, an acquaintance offered up the bright idea of writing an actual personal letter to the CEO. I did just that. Download qwest_dsl_letter_shared.doc

And the rest is south Salem DSL history.

Early on, after a Qwest manager called me saying "let's get this done," I joined the company's Refer A Friend program. I'd get $25 for every customer in the area who bought DSL after signing an "I'm Interested" sheet that I shopped around our neighborhood.

I ended up sending over 80 names to Qwest. So far about 24 have gotten DSL. I'm over halfway to paying for a new multimedia computer.

My involvement with Qwest hasn't gone totally smoothly. Nor has the DSL roll-out process. But some glitches are to be expected, especially when you're dealing with a large communications company (which, I learned, doesn't always communicate all that well).

I'm a happy DSL camper now. So if you've got satellite broadband and have a chance to switch to DSL, do it. Paying less than half the money for five times the speed is a no-brainer.

And now Oregon raindrops can fall on my head without me thinking, "Oh god, there goes my Internet connection."

Further unplugging of the Christmas machine

Last year we slowed down the Christmas machine, but it still had quite a bit of leftover energy. Now we're going to further unplug this monster.

No Christmas tree for us. This is a pretty big decision, given that our extra-large artificial tree has been a dominating feature of our living room for quite a few years.

Too dominating, we've decided. It's a pain to set up.

Just about as big a pain as driving to a real tree lot, agreeing on a suitable choice, tying it to the roof rack so it has a minimal chance of falling off on the drive home, carrying it around the side of the house to our deck, forcing it through a sliding door, getting it more or less upright in the tree stand, wrestling with tangled light cords, laboriously affixing them along with a huge number of ornaments, and then collapsing on the couch after a long evening and saying to each other, "Was all that work worth it?"

No, it wasn't.

Which is why we went the artificial tree route, which "merely" involves hauling four large boxes in from the garage, figuring out which boxes hold the different-sized branches (inevitably our labeling/storage system from the previous year is found to have glitches), sticking the branches into their proper color-coded holes, unbending the twigs that have gotten unduly bent, and then starting with "wrestling…" above, leading to the same collapsed "Was all that work worth it?" question.

So we're going to see how empty our lives are without a tree this Christmas. I suspect that the only void we'll be experiencing is free time.

No putting up and no taking down of a tree that had become an obligation rather than a celebration. Now I can spend those obligatory hours on more enjoyable activities. Like buying gifts for myself.

For once again Laurel and I have agreed to only give each other presents that the other person has bought for himself/herself. That guarantees an "Ahhhhh! Just what I wanted!" on Christmas day.

Sure, we'll probably bend the rules a bit and get each other a spouse-selected present or two. But like I said last year, explaining why making a contribution to the Elizabeth Bowers Education Fund will be so enjoyable:

You can't believe how much happier I'll be this year giving a donation to the fund rather than wandering around the Salem Center Mall the week before Christmas, searching aimlessly for a present for Laurel, who is horribly difficult to shop for because (1) she's picky when it comes to clothes and personal items and (2) she likes shopping for herself and already has anything she really needs, just because I know she'll have gotten me some "extra" gifts that I didn't buy for myself and I'll feel like a Scrooge if I don't make an attempt to buy her something, even though there's a really high probability that she'll be returning it the week after Christmas.

We haven't reached the end of our Christmas machine unplugging. But the less juice this materialistic ritualistic creature gets, the better.

The Puritans had a good idea: ban Christmas. That's the most Christian thing to do, really, since Christmas' source is thoroughly pagan.

Some of the key ingredients of modern Christmases - holly, ivy, fir trees, drinking and feasting - go back as far as it's possible to see. Our own cosy kissing beneath the mistletoe is a pale reflection of an older tradition of sexual licence and abandon.

Well, maybe I won't give up totally on Christmas, if we can just get back to the good old days when this holiday was celebrated the way it should be.

Do the Gratitude Dance (if you're not too full)

Thanks to a visitor on my other blog I learned about the Gratitude Dance.

It's super easy to do. And perfect for today. But maybe not advised after eating a big Thanksgiving dinner.

The Gratitude Dance is considerably kinder and gentler than the haka -- a traditional Polynesian dance that the Jefferson High School football team in Portland has taken up before each game.

YouTube, naturally, has many haka videos. I especially liked this one, a Hakan vs. Tongan face off at a rugby match.

Deer on LSD would be even worse

My wife is being driven crazy by a male. Par for the course, but this time he isn't me. It's a male deer, a buck. Or bucks. She doesn't know how many are doing what comes naturally to them this time of year.

Marking their territory. Which, unfortunately for Laurel, includes our ten acres in rural Oregon.

She's planted countless native trees on our property, protectively watering them during dry spells, netting them when they're young, spraying Deer Off in the fall in an effort to divert bucks' attention away from the enticing trunks.

After all, the bucks should have their eye on even more desirable life forms. The Wikipedia article on white-tailed deer says:

Males compete for the opportunity of breeding females. Sparring among males determines a dominance hierarchy. Bucks will attempt to copulate with as many females as possible, losing physical condition since they rarely eat or rest during the rut.

Well, that may be. But they sure take time out to rub on trunks with their antlers, all too frequently wrecking the tree.

The bucks favor deciduous trees, like maples, where there aren't any branches on the bottom four feet or so of the trunk. A small tree that bends must be especially rub-alicious, as these are where Laurel finds most of the markings.

Through some malicious deer sixth sense, the bucks have an uncanny ability to know which trees on our property have been planted, and which have grown up naturally.

They strongly favor the former, undoubtedly in an effort to drive Laurel – our neighborhood's Janie Appleseed – crazy.

The only good news in this annual buck Marks-A-Lot, which is more damaging this year for some reason, is that the deer aren't on LSD.

Today I browsed through a recent issue of New Scientist and came across an article about the craziest scientific experiments of all time.

#1, according to Alex Boese, is elephants on acid.

Indeed, the notion of tripping out with an elephant is more than a little disconcerting. I spent many enjoyable hours in the '60s watching walls melt and change colors. However, dropping acid with a 7000 pound bull elephant would seem to have a high probability of turning into a bad trip.

There's more than anyone needs to know about the experiment here.

The goal was to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant – highly aggressive behavior that's accompanied by (no surprise) hugely elevated testosterone levels.

Sadly, the main thing the scientists learned is that LSD can be fatal to elephants. Especially if you give them a dose that translates into 30 times the effective oral dose for a human of the elephant's weight.

I don't know how male deer would react to acid. They could very well go into a freaking tree-rubbing frenzy. But if they'd end up sitting around listening to Jimmy Hendrix, that'd be cool.

Anything to stop them from rubbing on tree trunks.

(Though not connected to the main theme of this post, I want to share some photos that I came across in the course of researching the buck-related subject of "big rack." Who knew that a big rack like that cost $400-750 ? Not for plastic surgery – for the antlers.)

My ipod Touch – so very huggable

I always figured that I'd be the last human on Earth to own an iPod. But here I am, two days into an increasingly intimate relationship with an iPod Touch, and I'm wondering: Baby, what kept us apart for so long?

The strange thing is, I hardly ever listen to music. Mostly I tune to talk radio and OPB/PBS when I'm driving around. At home, the Internet has been my closest inanimate communicative companion.

Yet I was drawn to the Touch as soon as it was released. It's got the look and feel of an iPhone without the expensive AT&T wireless contract. OK, I can't make a phone call with it. But I can browse the web and do a lot of other really cool stuff.

Or so I've been told by generally laudatory reviews (here, here, and here). I've just begun to get to know my new best friend.

Like most electronic gadgets these days, the Touch comes with an extremely minimalist "manual." Actually, it's a foldout that basically tells you how to get the thing turned on and where to find the real user's guide online. So I still don't know how to do a quarter of the stuff this marvel is capable of.

Nonetheless, last night I found myself sitting on the couch at 1 am, iPod Touch in hand, connected to my in- house wi-fi system, with a vague thought – What am I doing watching a YouTube music video of someone singing in Chinese this time of night? – meandering through my Touch obsessed mind.

There's simply something lovable about it. Like other Apple products, it's marvelously well-designed and intuitive. At first the lack of visible controls worried me: How do you make this creature do what you want? Where's the volume adjustment?

However, it didn't take long for the touchiness of this new iPod model to sooth my anxieties. With a scroll of the finger or a double tap the iPod leaps to obey my command.

At the moment that often isn't what I expected it to do. But hey, I still haven't read the user's guide (thanks to the above-linked reviews, I just learned that double-clicking the Home button brings up a volume control no matter what else you're doing, so that solves one question).

It was super easy to transfer my first music CD (a Nora Jones album) to the Touch via my computer's iTunes interface. That motivated me to drive to a Radio Shack store and get a connector for the MP3 Aux input in my Prius.

Voila! Nora now was singing to me over my car radio!

And instead of wondering "what's the name of this song" I could turn to the iPod Touch and see what was playing. I could even do a finger scroll thing over the name of the track and rate the song from 1 to 5 stars (apparently my Touch can be told to only play songs I rate highly).

So, yeah, I'm in love. Of course, instant infatuation often strikes when I meet-up with some seductive piece of technology.

But I've got a feeling this relationship is going to be different. I'm looking forward to brushing the cobwebs off of our CD collection and getting lots of tunes into the receptive interior of Ms. iPod Touch.

I can envision a future where political talk radio and I don't spend nearly as much time together. That'll be good for my blood pressure. Plus, I don't want my new friend to feel jealous.

She's touchy, you know.

I just found out I’m 10 years younger!

I took ten years off of my age today. To be precise, 10.3 years. So says RealAge, which offers a nifty calculation of the difference between your calendar age and your "real" age.

Like a lot of baby boomers, I've never felt that I really was 58 years old. Physically, I'm just about in as good a shape as I've ever been. Mentally, I'm still an adolescent in many ways. But, hey, that's par for the course if you're a man.

I decided to look for a real age online test after I came across a story on CNN called "What men should eat every day." Of the eleven recommendations, I nailed every one – aside from #7, eating fish three times a week.

Nope. As a longtime vegetarian, I won't buy my health at the expense of another animal's death. So I get my omega-3s from vegetable sources, not fish.

But with a score of 10 out of 11 under my belt I was curious to learn whether my exemplary diet, combined with other lifestyle and health indicators, meant that I was considerably younger than 58.

Google brought me to the RealAge site, where I spent 20-30 minutes answering a bunch of questions as honestly as I could.

(The web site had a few glitches; if these happen to you, just go back to the previous page and continue from there; I got hung up at the very end until I took the final step of forwarding the survey to my wife via email, which seemed to make the RealAge web server happy).

After a hour or two my real age – 48.7! – and recommendations for making it even lower were sent to me in an email message, and also made available on the web site (before taking the test you sign up for a personal account; you can decline all the offers to send health-related information, which I did).

My wife and I are health junkies, so I'm a discriminating judge of advice in this area. I found "My RealAge Plan" to be pretty darn good, though it did seem to miss the mark a few times.

I was told that I'm consuming less than the average amount of unsaturated fats. Maybe, but my daily salad dressing is olive oil and vinegar, and I rarely use any sort of saturated fat. I also was advised to consider buying a mid- to large-size motor vehicle next time I purchase a car, because my compact (Prius) supposedly is more dangerous than a larger vehicle. Questionable, given SUV rollover statistics.

However, I agreed with most everything else I was told. Such as:

--increase my lycopene intake by eating more tomato-based dishes or tomato sauce
--increase my vegetable intake (though a vegetarian, I don't always eat at least five servings of vegetables a day)
--increase my whole grain intake (I should be eating 6 to 11 servings a day; man, that's a lot)
--do more strength-building exercises (I lift weights three times a week for a total of about 45 minutes, but twice that is the goal)

The RealAge web site lets you update answers to your test questions and then see how this affects your real age. That's handy, considering the test takes quite a while to complete.

Psychologically, I like the idea of getting an estimate of how old you are health-wise, right now. I've taken a couple of "how long will you live?" tests. One told me 92. The other, 96.5 (though I called that post, "Don't believe those longevity calculators").

I enjoyed learning that I've got a good chance of making it to my 90s. But finding out that today, at this very moment, I'm actually 48 rather than 58 – this was way better news.

For one thing, I can start telling friends and family to start shopping for insulting Over the hill at 50 birthday cards, because that's what I'll be expecting to get when I hit my next decadal celebration.

Me hunter. You gatherer. I need GPS.

This cartoon reveals how it all began. How men became hunters and women gatherers. Naturally, the guy was told to do it by his woman.

I don't know which sex ended up with the better deal. However, I do know that this goes a long way toward explaining why Laurel, my wife, was bewildered when my Garmin GPSMap 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator arrived in its Amazon box.

"Don't you already have a GPS receiver?," she asked. "Sure I do," I told her. "But it's ancient. This one has a color display and does a lot more than the old one."

Unwilling to relent, Laurel pressed on. "I bet it cost a lot. $500, right?" "Actually, it was about $300. Amazon sells them at a deep discount. And your point is?"

Which brought the conversation to an end.

Because if it'd continued Laurel knew I'd bring up the rather significant price difference between (1) the GPS receiver and (2) the continued remodeling of our kitchen and living room areas, which carried on last week after a several month hiatus.

Once part of our thirty-five year old house appeared more up-to-date, Laurel couldn't stand how old the adjoining rug looked. Plus, she wanted Dura Ceramic tile to lead from the front door into the kitchen.

So the family gatherer arranged for the tile and carpet guys to come in for four days, seriously disrupting my blogging and Internet life. In other words, my life (my office got recarpeted also).

The cost was well over an order of magnitude greater than what my GPS receiver set us back. It was worth it – I'm happy with the new tile and carpet now that my laptop life is back in order – but this experience pointed out to me again how different Laurel and I are when it comes to our respective hunter-gatherer tendencies.

Evolution: you can't argue with it. I do most of the grocery shopping, but in a hunterish way. Laurel shops in a gatherish way. She browses. I track down my grocery prey with ruthless efficiency.

I don't use a GPS receiver. But I'd like to. I've already gotten more than $300 worth of enjoyment from the Garmin 60CSx (which I can highly recommend, along with lots of other satisfied users).

The first day I got it, I went on my usual around-the-lake dog walk with the receiver in hand. When I walked into the house I yelled to Laurel, "Pretend that you're interested in the GPS details of my walk."

I made her listen to how far I went (1.15 miles), my average moving speed (2.98 mph), the time I spent moving (26 minutes), and other fascinating facts I can't recall numerically: total elevation gain, highest elevation reached, total time (which included the minutes I spent standing still trying to figure out a receiver feature), and more besides.

Laurel was careful not to say anything back to me, not even a "that's nice," because that might have encouraged me to bore her further with how absolutely wonderful the 60CSx is.

No problem. I'm happy talking with my new friend Garmie about himself. The fact that he's a piece of electronic machinery and I'm a conscious human being doesn't keep us from bonding. I just hope Laurel feels the same way about her new carpet and tile.

I've no doubt that my caveman ancestors would have been just as thrilled to have a device that told them exactly where they were and how to get back to the cave.

I've also got no doubt that while they were doing what they had to do – hunting down mammoths with nastily large tusks – their women were pondering a different arrangement for the hides on the floor.

Like they say, Plus ça change.

Would you pay $5 for a strawberry? I did.

I should frame my March 18 Fred Meyer receipt in case I ever doubt my insanity. That was the day I impulsively decided to grow strawberries on our deck.

We've lived in rural south Salem for seventeen years. We've always gotten all of our food from grocery stores, not our property. That's worked just fine.

But a strawberry pot displayed in the garden center caught my eye. I pictured myself going out and picking handfuls of super-sweet Oregon berries every day. I'd slice them for my cereal. I'd savor my strawberry self-sufficiency. If I couldn't eat them all myself, I'd set up a roadside stand. Probably would turn a healthy profit. While eating fresh berries well into the summer.

Here's the reality. And this is the better bunch of plants.

The deer really mangled another container. Note the single flash of red. That's a strawberry. The only strawberry. A small strawberry. A $5 strawberry.

Following in the furrows of the author of "The $64 Tomato," I just figured out what this misadventure in gardening cost me:

Strawberry pot $ 20
Organic potting soil $ 13
Strawberry plants $ 12

Total $ 45

On the benefit side of the equation, there's no way I ate more than ten strawberries before the deer (even though I used Deer Off), drought (caused by my frequent forgetting to water the plants), and depleted soil (belatedly, my wife told me strawberries are supposed to be fertilized, not just plunked in potting mixture) brought my farming career to an ignominious end.

Given how small each berry was, and my preference for round numbers, I'm figuring that each berry cost me close to $5. By contrast, yesterday I bought two boxes of local (Blue Heron Farms) berries from Vista Market for $4. The boxes held 33 strawberries.

That's 12 cents a berry. A mere 42 times cheaper than what I was able to grow myself.

William Alexander, author of "The $64 Tomato," had a similar experience with his much more extensive (and expensive) garden. Here's an excerpt from his book that I can totally identify with, albeit on a smaller scale:

So just how many tomatoes did I get this year? Exactly nineteen. The groundhog got almost as many. They were large and delicious, these nineteen Brandywines, and that number does represent a tomato a day for almost three weeks. Still, it doesn't seem like much. It isn't much.

Time, finally, to do the depressing math: $1,219 divided by nineteen equals -- gulp -- $64 per tomato.

Holy cow.

This was sobering. I never realized how much growing my own food was costing me. I went to Anne with the numbers.

"You won't believe this," I said. "Remember that joke I made about the expensive tomato?"

"Uh-huh," she said, distracted, as she leafed through the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Twenty dollars turned out to be a tad low. That was a sixty-four-dollar tomato."

"Maybe that one you stuffed with crabmeat? That was good," she said, not looking up.

"You don't understand. I'm not talking dinner-menu prices. Every Brandywine tomato we picked this year literally cost us sixty-four dollars to grow."

Now I had her attention. She put the journal down and stared at me for what seemed an eternity.

"And just how do you know that?" she finally inquired hesitantly, not sure she really wanted to know.

I laid the spreadsheet in front of her. She studied it for a minute.

"We spent all this on the garden?"

"Maybe more. I'm sure I forgot some things."

She pushed away the paper as if it were contagious and flipped a page in her journal. "Well, we see this," she said, borrowing a phrase she often uses with patients. Meaning, in this case, that she was over the shock and ready to move on. And inviting me to join her. Truthfully I wished I hadn't done this exercise in accounting. Some things you're better off not knowing. I've said that the garden had become a family member, but at the moment it felt, not like the beloved grandmother you care for, but like the embarrassing uncle you avoid at weddings, loud and extravagant beyond his means, always in trouble, always in debt.

We see this. I, too, wanted to move on, but there was still one unspoken question troubling me, one that spanned months, years, ages. A question I both had to ask and was afraid to ask.

"Was it worth it?"

Anne deliberately closed the journal, placed both hands on the cover, and looked up at me.

And smiled.

What else can you do?

Well, at least I made some deer happy. Maybe it's better for me to view this experience as a successful exercise in providing gourmet supplemental feed for wildlife rather than a failed attempt at strawberry growing.

Rationalizations: the backyard farmer's best friend.

A cooler shade of Green—our new 2007 Prius Touring

Two days ago I had no idea that the Toyota Prius came in a "Touring" model. Now one sits in our driveway, a replacement for our 2004 Prius.

We were early adopters, ordering Prius 1 in September 2003 and getting her in November. It's been a great car, virtually glitch free and a steady 45 mpg performer. But Prius 1 had some downsides that were beginning to seriously bug me.

We also have a Toyota Highlander Hybrid, a midsize SUV. This more macho car was supposed to be my main ride. However, Laurel commandeered it about six months ago because her back, which has some problems, finds that the Highlander has more comfortable seats. So I've been spending a lot more time in Prius 1.

Which offered me many more hours to contemplate how the beige seats clash with the black dashboard and the blue exterior. This bugged us from the beginning, making us wonder how the land of Zen harmony could be so bad at designing cars with harmonious color schemes.

However, we sucked it up and ordered a blue/beige Prius, as un-Feng Shui'ish as it looked. The brownish all-weather mats that we got from an auto parts store (Toyota didn't offer custom mats of that sort back then) didn't raise the car's Feng Shui score, that's for sure.

Another irritant was how washed out the touch screen panel got whenever the sun hit it. I enjoyed watching the miles per gallon graphs continuously update, but half the time I couldn't see them. Nor what channel the radio was on, or what temperature the climate control system was set at.

Thus when Laurel tossed a Capitol Toyota postcard at me and said, "This came in the mail today," I took a closer look than I ordinarily would have. Buyback program for Prius owners. Hmmmm…

The next day I took Prius 1 in to see what she was worth for a trade-in. Exactly what I'd calculated myself on the Kelley Blue Book web site, it turned out: $16,325. Not too bad for a three and a half year old car that cost $23,152.

There was one 2007 Prius on the lot, a Touring model. First I'd heard of it. It comes with a firmer tuned suspension, bigger low-profile tires, alloy wheels, and a slightly larger rear deck spoiler.

On a test drive the sales guy, Kelly, was curious to know if I could discern a difference between the Touring model and Prius 1. Sure seemed like I could. The Touring corners better and has more road feel—sort of Germanic, even. Not quite BMWish, but certainly closer than Prius 1.

This matches with most, but not all, of the comments on a Green Hybrid discussion group thread about the Prius Touring.

Right off the bat I liked the car. The gray interior soothed my overly beiged soul. And the silver exterior looked fine to me. A backup camera came with the $575 Package #2, along with stability control, a sound system, and the must-have Smart Key. (Once you get used to never having to take out a key to lock, unlock, or start a car, keys seem so 20^th century.)

The price for a 2007 Touring with pretty much the same features as Prius 1 came to $24,529—darn close to what we paid back in 2003. For a bit over $8,000 I could get unbeiged, cooler wheeled, and back-up camera'd. Plus have a brand new car. The deal was done.

Driving Prius 2 home today it didn't take me long to discern another benefit. The display panel seemed much easier to read in direct sunlight. I need to confirm this, but it sure appears to me that Toyota has improved the display.

Serena the Wonder Dog hasn't taken her first ride yet. Prius 2 is ready for her, though. The Capitol Toyota parts department found us a couple of mats that will do just fine for muddy dog paws. Only one was made for the Prius, but the other is a close enough fit for dog-transporting purposes.

Now I've got to figure out what else to do to pimp my Prius. I'm thinking tinted windows for sure.

So if you're wanting a cooler shade of Green with your Prius, look into the Touring. In my ten miles of driving experience with it, I'm happy with Prius 2. Hope the eventual owners of Prius 1 are as pleased with our old car.

Our remodeled kitchen: before and after photos

A month ago I never would have believed that I'd ever blog enthusiastically about our remodeled kitchen. Yet here I am, posting before and after photos with caffeine-fueled delight.

Here's an "after" that doesn't have a matching "before." We've got an open house, early '70s vintage, completely woodified—no white walls.

We wanted to stay as natural as possible. Bisque appliances, not stainless steel, retro though it may be. Granite countertops, because after considering various possibilities we realized that nothing looks as stone-like as real stone.

You couldn't call our tastes sophisticated. Hey, we live on ten acres in the south Salem countryside. Poultry art is what we proudly display in the revamped island area that faces our living room.

I was wary about this whole kitchen remodeling thing. Laurel was the force that got the Remodel Train moving down the track. If it had been up to me, I'd have left it on a siding.

Our old kitchen seemed fine. Just like my old couch—my beloved couch—that got sent to Salvation Army heaven soon after we got married seventeen years ago. Laurel usually prevails on home decorating issues. Mostly I sign on the "head of household" line, but I'm still trying to figure out what in the household I head up.

Probably for good reason. Because Laurel was right and I was wrong about remodeling the kitchen. I love what Oregon Bath and Kitchen has wrought. These guys have our unreserved endorsement. They were a pleasure to work with, from Randy the head honcho designer/estimator to every member of Arne's construction crew.

The oven and microwave used to be in a structure on the right side of the island. That got taken out, so now the only island appliance is a cooktop. This opened up the kitchen to the living room. Now we can perch on the left side of the island, enjoying the view from the living room windows.

Before, the far end of the kitchen just, well, ended. We had a dresser against the wall. Now the kitchen cabinets and floor extend all the way to the stairs. The display cabinet was Randy's idea. A good one. Gives the geese something to look at.

Our panty used to be functional, but just barely. The sliding doors stopped sliding smoothly a long time ago. Paper recycling bags filled the countertop. Now we have pull-out shelves on the left side.

The right side used to feature open shelves. Now we've got a hidden place to put the recycling stuff. And the dog food. The dog bowls are still displayed in plain sight. Serena wouldn't have it any other way.

Laurel hated the spice shelves above our old cooktop. For some reason she likes sliding doors that actually slide smoothly. Plus it bothered her that wooden shelves were above a couple of burners. I sort of enjoyed living on the flammable edge. However, I'm much happier with our new look. And enjoyed arranging the spices in alphabetical order in the tall skinny shelves.

So we're happy remodeling campers. We did, though, have an emergency backup kitchen in another part of the house to use during the construction work. Without that, we'd have been hot plate'ing and take out'ing it like most people have to.

The only significant remodeling glitch was almost entirely our fault. We picked some wall tiles that turned out to be ghastly. After half of them were put in and the crew had gone home for the day we stood and stared at the almost-finished kitchen and said to each other, "Oh my God! What have we done??!!"

A frantic email and phone call to Randy soon followed. "Whatever it takes, we've got to replace those tiles," we told him. Fortunately, it didn't take much. The guys pulled them off in a few minutes.

It took an hour or so of browsing in the Oregon Bath and Kitchen showroom to choose a replacement. Which turned out great. We thought the black accent tiles would look good, and they do. Arne had the excellent idea to add a second row of accents.

Laurel hasn't mentioned any other remodeling projects recently. But like they say in the old Westerns, "It's quiet. Too quiet." I know her brain is cogitating away on the upstairs bathroom. The old tub seems fine to me. Not to her, though.

But what do I know? Like she never fails to remind me, I'd still have my old couch if decorating decisions had been left up to the titular "head of the household."

Man, I loved that couch. Like I love our bathtub. I'd better start saying goodbye to it though. Before too long I have a feeling that the pitter-patter (or thunking) of Oregon Bath and Kitchen feet is going to be heard in our home again.

Laurel gets LASIK; Brian becomes (briefly) Buddha-like

At 3:30 pm Laurel and I got home from her LASIK surgery.

For five and a half hours, and counting, I have been her compassionate care giver as she lies quietly in bed or a recliner, dark goggles on, popping her pain pills, listening to PBS and CNN (no TV watching until tomorrow, so says the Casey Eye Institute post-operation patient instructions).

So, yes, I'm looking forward to being nominated for sainthood. Or better, Buddha-hood. Already I have brought her several glasses of juice, set up a radio by her bed, cooked a Gardenburger, made a salad, and fetched some socks.

Being a man, I'm pretty darn proud of myself.

And thinking about looking into the possibility of signing up for respite care. In the past I've found that I'm good for about 48 hours of selfless wife care. Then I start to burn out, as I discover that my blogging time is getting limited and I can't watch television whenever I want.

Fortunately, recovery time from LASIK is fast. My declining aptitude for compassion and Laurel's increasing eye health should intersect tomorrow afternoon, just when I usually head off to the athletic club for my Friday workout.

The surgery on one eye went fine. Aside from the minor detail that she didn't get the procedure she'd signed up for—a custom cornea LASIK.

One of the things you don't want to hear when you go for surgery is "This is the first time that's ever happened." But that's what Laurel was told after she was ushered into the LASIK procedure area.

Apparently someone gave her eye dilating drops before a custom LASIK measurement could be taken. By then it was too late. Her doctor said she could either reschedule the appointment, or go ahead with regular LASIK. He assured Laurel that he's a conservative sort of guy and would recommend the custom procedure if it would benefit her.

But he didn't think it'd make any difference, given her minor eye aberrations. Hopefully he was right. (Semi-shameful admission: when Laurel told me about the screw-up, visions of the $200,000 OHSU tort liability limit flashed through my head even though I'm not a suing sort).

The lesson here is that even when you're getting care from a highly competent health care provider (the Casey Eye Institute is top-notch), make sure they know what they're supposed to do for you. Looking back, a simple "You do realize that I'm getting a custom LASIK, right?" from Laurel would have saved her, and the Institute, some grief.

I got a great view of the fairly new Portland Aerial Tram from a balcony outside the sixth floor of the Institute. There was a lot of controversy about cost overruns for the tram construction that seemed overblown to me at the time.

Seeing how sleek and futuristic the tram looks close-up, I'm convinced that no matter how much the tram cost, it was money well-spent.

So what if ten or twenty million more dollars than expected went to build it? That's probably something like an hour of Iraq war spending. No big deal, given how attractive the tram turned out.