HinesSight

Praise be to obsessively committed citizen activists

A few weeks back I was asked by a reporter, "Do you think you're going to make a difference?"

Then we talked about why I've been so intensely focused on trying to save the last two beautiful US Bank trees in downtown Salem (three have been cut down for no good reason; there is even less reason than that to kill the remaining trees). 

I didn't get much of a chance to answer that first question, other than to say "Sure."

After spending a few hours yesterday listening to Thom Hartmann, a progressive radio talk show host and author, speak here in Salem, I'm motivated to spend some blog time pondering why us citizen activists do what we do.

Hartmann talked quite a bit about Move to Amend, an effort to amend the United States Constitution to affirm that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

Local Move to Amend folks had tables set up in the Grand Theatre lobby. They're working hard to get Oregon's state legislature to be the second, after Vermont's, to support Move to Amend. 

That's a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. But praise be, from the deepest recesses of my non-religious heart, to activists who work so long, so hard, so diligently, so quixotically -- tilting at windmills that seemingly are next to impossible to attack with any hope of success.

Until that "seemingly" is shown to be false. And the windmills crumble after countless lance strikes.

Nothing is impossible for the obsessively crazed activist who refuses to stop fighting for his or her cause until the last drop of determination is drained from their being. Just look at how resistance to gay marriage is finally crumbling after so many years of apparently fruitless efforts.

As Barry Goldwater famously said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." We all remember the Chinese "Tank Man."

Did he have any chance against those tanks? No. Did he feel that he had no choice but to do what he did? Almost surely, yes. Did he make a difference? Yes, yes, yes!

After all, I'm inspired and energized by him. So are countless others. I hope he's still alive. But if he's not, if he was killed by the Chinese authorities, he lived as we all should: bravely, whole-heartedly, standing tall for truth, liberty, and justice in the face of oppressive power.

I can give reasons for why I've spent so much time, energy, and money fighting for causes that seemingly have little chance of success. However, I don't believe citizen activism can be explained. 

It is felt, not thought. Experienced, not a subject of exposition (though, yeah, as a blogger I guess I'm doing just that). Much more of an ungraspable energy than a solid analyzable entity.

I tilt at windmills, and sometimes succeed in stopping their turning, because I'm incapable of doing anything else. I bet most citizen activists feel the same. Artists make art because artistry drives them. Activists make waves because a calm sea of injustice drives them to stir things up.

Often, when I'm trying to right some unrightable wrong, I wonder whether I'd be happier spending my retired days doing something more pleasant. It doesn't take me long to realize, no, I wouldn't. Pleasantness is great, but I need more to be truly happy.

The rest of the lyrics to Impossible Dream, as familiar as they may be, express what lies at the heart of a citizen activist better than any other words I could end this post with.

It isn't success that an activist truly yearns for, but the feeling that at the end of the long day called Life, one's eyes can close in peace -- having been focused on the pursuit of what really matters, even if the quarry remained just out of reach.

DON QUIXOTE 
It is the mission of each true knight... 
His duty... nay, his privilege! 
To dream the impossible dream, 
To fight the unbeatable foe, 
To bear with unbearable sorrow 
To run where the brave dare not go; 
To right the unrightable wrong. 

To love, pure and chaste, from afar, 
To try, when your arms are too weary, 
To reach the unreachable star! 

This is my Quest to follow that star, 
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far, 
To fight for the right 
Without question or pause, 
To be willing to march into hell 
For a heavenly cause! 

And I know, if I'll only be true 
To this glorious Quest, 
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm 
When I'm laid to my rest. 

And the world will be better for this, 
That one man, scorned and covered with scars, 
Still strove, with his last ounce of courage, 
To reach the unreachable stars!

Skin biopsy unleashes my inner anxious Woody Allen

I can't recall what Woody Allen movie this scene was in, but the image has stuck in my mind.

Allen's neurotic character is worried about some health problem that his over-anxious mind has convinced him is deadly serious.

After a visit to his doctor, where he gets good news about his condition, Allen skips down the sidewalk happily saying "I'm not going to die! I'm not going to die!" Then he stops, get a worried expression on his face, and intones...

"Yet."

This closely mirrors my psychological state after I went in for a yearly dermatological exam last Monday. The physician's assistant asked me if there were any areas I was concerned about. 

"Some skin discolorations on my chest," I told her. She took a look. "Hmmmm. This one is scaly," she said. "I'm going to take a biopsy."

Oh, great, I thought. My first skin biopsy. The removal of some skin wasn't very bothersome, compared to what I heard from the PA at the end of my visit. 

"It could take up to two weeks to get the results. Sometimes we want a second opinion. We'll schedule your next appointment for three months from now to check on the other spots that were frozen off. Unless, of course, we need to..."

Her voice trailed off.

But I got the message. If the biopsy was positive, I'd need to get treated for... something or other. I didn't ask the physician's assistant any questions about what that might be. At the time my feeling was ignorance is bliss.

However, over the next few days my inner Woody Allen started to emerge. Even though I didn't feel super-anxious, the unknown biopsy results hanging over my head started to rain increasingly dire thoughts about my perhaps-not-so-long future.

In my darker moments I contemplated the likelihood of untreatable malignant melanoma. I found myself visualizing my funeral.

I made a Note to Self: after you get the diagnosis, make up a detailed screenplay-like outline of how you want the funeral to go, complete with video clips you want played, to make sure your mourners are exposed to all the Good Stuff about your life that should be emphasized.

I also found myself doing a few to-dos that I'd been putting off for a long time. I wasn't planning to spend my last days on procrastinated chores -- far from it -- but there were some things I didn't want my wife bringing up at gatherings after my demise.

"Brian was a great husband, but I can't believe he never got around to _______."

There were moments, though, when I actually felt grateful for the biopsy.

It felt like a wake-up call. Doesn't seem like I'd need a Death Reminder at the age of 64, but as I went on dog walks, mowed the lawn, and did my usual daily stuff, I was struck by how special each and every experience would be if I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do these things for much longer.

Then, in about the closest my unenlightened mind will ever get to a Zen'ish satori, I'd suddenly realize: Hey, you idiot! Every fucking day of your life you should realize that one day you're not going to be able to live much longer!

Meaning, a biopsy with its "you could die soon" potential message is obvious. It grabbed my attention. Yet all around me are other warning signs of a possible impending demise.

Like driving in my car, because serious accidents happen. Like walking along the sidewalk beside a brick building, because strong earthquakes happen (especially here in the Pacific Northwest). I just don't pay much attention to the ever-present risks of dying until something stark like a biopsy comes along.

As the days went by, I began to imagine what the phone call from the dermatology clinic would be like. Though I'd been told not to expect one for several weeks, I thought "it could be sooner." Which it was.

Yesterday afternoon. I glanced at the caller ID before I answered the phone. Yup, it's the clinic. I was pleased with how calm, cool, and collected I felt as I said "hello." Solid reality usually turns out to be easier to deal with than my free-floating anxieties.

"The biopsy was benign," I heard. "Nothing to worry about." Yeah, right. If you only knew...

Which I'm sure they do at the dermatology clinic. Skin cancer is scary. Biopsies are scary. But heck, life is scary. We just don't clearly realize that we're always living on a knife edge, unknowns on either side, until something jars us into feeling the sharpness of everyday living.

Like Woody Allen, I felt really happy after I got the good news. At first I saw my life stretching out before me for a long time to come, per usual. 

But then that Woody Allen yet... hit me. Yes, this time I apparently avoided the loudly ringing wake up call that screams No More Time!

Death has a way of making repeat appearances, though. The bastard teases you with peeks from behind the curtain, then retreats and leaves you alone, until Death marches out on stage and says "Time for your final bow."

Oh, that's another thing. During my four days of biopsy anxiety I started to think about what my last words should be. Either spoken aloud or silently within my head. Guess I need two versions, depending on whether they're meant for public or private hearing.

Another item for my to-do list. Better attend to this pronto. If there's anything I learned this week, it's to live FREAKING NOW.

Irritating: United Airlines' constantly changing ticket prices

My wife was seriously angry at United Airlines. But she did a pretty good job of keeping her cool when she talked with a customer service representative late on a Saturday night.

"I've just spent several days planning a family reunion. Tonight I finally figured out the best United Flights to take between Portland, Oregon and Lexington, Kentucky. I'm using frequent flyer miles to go one way, and will be paying cash for a ticket the other way.

It was tough to find a flight where I could use the frequent flyer miles, because you have so many restrictions on them. But earlier tonight I made a reservation. I then went to buy a ticket for the return one-way leg and found that the price had jumped more than $250 in just an hour or two. 

What's going on? This seems unfair. How can you guys change your prices so quickly late on a Saturday night?"

The answer she got wasn't very satisfying.

Prices, the representative told her, can change minute by minute. "Maybe somebody bought several tickets on the flight you want. There may have only been a few seats left at that price."

"But there were lots of seats still available on the flight," my wife replied. "It just doesn't seem right that you can raise the price of a ticket so much and so quickly after I had spent a lot of time planning my trip."

Well, this seems to be par for the course for not only United Airlines, but seemingly all airlines these days. So says an informative CheapAir article, "Air Fares 101: Why Do Fares Change All the TIme?"

The airlines want to be able to have their cake and eat it, too, and they go to great lengths to make that possible.  They employ a very high-tech strategy called yield management which intentionally aims to charge different prices to different passengers in order to maximize the total revenue collected for each departing flight.

...Airlines never just have one fare – they have several, even dozens, of fares for each seat and they employ sophisticated techniques to maximize the number of people who get stuck paying the higher of those fares.

...It’s actually even more complicated in practice. Airlines actually have computer programs that are constantly monitoring flights, analyzing booking patterns, and in real-time changing the number of seats available at each fare level.  If a flight is booking up faster than expected, an airline may decrease the number of seats available at some of their lowest fare levels, or wipe them all out altogether.  If a flight is not selling well, suddenly more seats may appear at fare levels that were previously “sold out”.

Amazon also engages in this sort of dynamic pricing, according to an article in the Portland Oregonian. But that strikes me as more justified, since usually there are multiple sources of something you want to buy online.

Airline travel, though, often is exceedingly uncompetitive.

United basically has a monopoly on decent flights between Portland and Lexington, "decent" being defined as not making a jillion stops and arriving/departing at a halfway desirable time. So when United raised its price by about $250 less than two hours after my wife had checked on the flight, she really didn't have any other airline alternative.

Fortunately, by morning the price had dropped from $800-something to $628 (still higher than the $605 shown the day before). Who knows why? Only the United Airlines computers, and they're not telling.

Before writing this post I checked on the cost of the flight. It's about the same, $654 now. But I noticed that a return flight to Portland on the same plane from Lexington, connecting with a plane that leaves two hours later from Chicago, costs $883 for an economy ticket. I think that's the price United briefly wanted on the night my wife got so irritated at the airline.

So what gives? Why does it cost $229 more to fly on the same plane from Lexington to Chicago to Portland, if you connect with a Chicago flight to Portland that leaves two hours later than another plane?

I took a look at the remaining seats for UA 518, the $654 flight, and UA 627, the $883 flight. At the moment there are 49 economy seats available on UA 518, the flight from Chicago to Portland (an Airbus 319).

On the slightly larger UA 627 (Airbus 620), there are 77 economy seats available. Yet United is charging $229 more to fly on this plane from Chicago to Portland. On a Sunday, so the difference in price can't have anything to do with the schedules of business travelers.

And if it is holiday (Fourth of July) related, why would United charge $229 more for a flight that gets into Portland two hours later, since you'd think that most people would want to return home earlier given that Monday is a school/work day.

Prices for airline tickets just don't make sense anymore.

Not to the customers paying for them. I'm sure somewhere in the complex computer code of the United Airlines reservation system there's a well-defined reason for each and every price change.

Which doesn't make the seemingly arbitrary pricing less irritating. I'd love to fly on an airline that treated its customers fairly, openly, and respectfully -- both in how it sells tickets and treats you while on a flight.

But so far as I know, that airline doesn't exist. Not in the United States, at least.

Another great reason to get married on St. Patrick's day

Nine years ago I wrote about what a terrrific decision we made when Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day.

It's our 14th anniversary today. We had the smarts to get married on St. Patrick's Day in 1990, which means that as soon as I start seeing mention of green beer in the newspaper or on TV a small still voice in my head starts speaking... “Anniversary, anniversary, anniversary.” 

The mathematically inclined will be able to calculate from the above that... today is our 23rd anniversary! I don't believe that number entitles us to any particular sort of valuable present. However, if you want to send us something lavish, feel free.

What I'm really looking forward to is our 32nd anniversary, just another mere nine years away, because then I -- but not Laurel -- will be able to celebrate a Golden Anniversary: 50 years! Gold, please! And lots of it.

I'm expecting that my Golden Anniversary well-wishers won't hold back because of a minor technicality: my 50 years of marriage will have been to two different women, as my first marriage lasted 18 years.

I feel that what counts in determining my eligibility for getting expensive gifts in 2022 is my overall commitment to marriage. If you disagree, feel free. Attach a note to the gold bullion you'll be giving me explaining why you are sending that gift reluctantly. I'll keep that in mind when I sell the gold and get myself a super-nice present.

This year's anniversary, though, didn't start out great for me.

Turning on my iPhone after waking up (I habitually weigh myself first thing in the morning, then enter the sometimes cheery and sometimes depressing figure into the nifty Weightbot app), I saw that Mint had sent me the decidedly uncheery news that a late fee had been added to our credit card bill.

Damn, damn, damn! I forgot to make the VISA payment! 

This probably wasn't the most romantic thing I could have uttered first-off to my wife on our anniversary. But after 23 years of marriage we've gotten away from some of the lovey-dovey rituals that newlyweds engage in.

I rushed to my laptop. I logged into our credit card company's website.

Ah, hope. Apparently because this was just Sunday, March 17, and the payment had been due on Friday, March 15, I was greeted with a message that implied that, if I made an online payment right away, forgiveness might be forthcoming from a giant financial institution.

I believe this was, by the way, one of the giant institutions that contributed to the second greatest financial meltdown in U.S. history, and received copious taxpayer largessse. So by comparison, my being two days late with a credit card payment was utterly insignificant.

But I figured bringing politics into this issue wasn't going to play very well with the corporate worker bees who handled decisions about late credit card payments. 

Clicking on the "contact" link on the company's web site, I took a different approach. Truthful, yet mildly manipulative in a charming (in my completely biased opinion) way.

It's our 23rd anniversary today. I was smart enough to get married on St. Patrick's Day so I wouldn't forget our anniversary. But wasn't smart enough to remember to pay our ____ VISA card this month -- until today. It was due Friday. I paid it as soon as I woke up.

Your online system showed that the payment (from our bank account) went through immediately, though it's Sunday. I hope you won't charge a late fee on grounds on this being our anniversary; I'm 64 and maybe getting a little forgetful; and we've been steady reliable ______ members. Thanks.

A few hours later I got a response. The $25 late fee had been erased. Sweet! Not as great an anniversary present as a gold bar, but nice. I also got an emailed lecture about the importance of paying on time, complete with tips about how to prevent future forgotten late payments.

My wife and I spend much of our time trying to figure out what is so great about the so-called "golden years." (Aside from getting all that loot on my Golden Anniversary.) So far, what we've basically experienced about growing old is...

It sucks!

But that's a subject for another blog post. One small benefit, which I took advantage of today, is that you can start to play the forgetful old person game. "Gosh, I'm sorry about the late payment. What do you expect from a semi-senile old codger like me?"

Anyway, mark your calendars for March 17, 2022. If you expect the price of gold to rise markedly between now and then, you might want to buy some bullion now for my Golden Anniversary present to save money.

How to check out a possible Craigslist scam

Yesterday my wife was thrilled to get a quick response to our Craigslist "for sale" posting of a UV sterilizer for a pond. When she showed it to me, I thought Scam! I'd seen suspicious responses like this before, when I'd listed my scooter for sale.

Hello! let's do like this, actually now I'm not in town for now, I came to visit my son so i wont be able to meet with you but am ok with it and let me know the last price ok, I'll proceed in issuing a Check out to you and when you received the check , I will make arrangement for pick-up. So get back to me with below details asap.

Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Postal Code:
Phone Number:

And as soon as this is provided, the payment will be overnight to you and i will let you know when its mailed out. I need you to be honest with the sale as I am a God fearing person.

Thanks

I told her this message raised alarm bells for several reasons: no mention of actual item for sale; no questions about it; no phone number to call; overnight delivery of payment for a fairly cheap item; and of course, the "God fearing person" mention.

With the aid of Google, I found a great site for checking out likely/possible Craigslist scams: Lets Get the Craigslist Scammers. I was led to it after Googling the first part of the message above. You also can search on the site itself.

What came back was this very similar message from a Perry Smith. (Ours was from "Eddie K.)

Hello! thanks for getting back to me let's do like this, actually now I'm not in town for now, I came to visit my family so i wont be able to meet with you to see the item but am ok with the price as seen on the advert. I don't mind to give you $50 to withdraw the advert for you to see how serious i am in the transaction, i will contact my secretary to issuing a Check out to you and when you received the check I will make arrangement for pick up. So get back to me with below details to be on the check asap. Name: Address: City: State: Postal Code: Phone Number: And as soon as this is provided, the payment will be overnight to you and i will let you know when its mailed out. I need you to be honest with the sale as I am a God fearing person.Note you don't need to worry about shipping the items for me as soon as you have the check and have the check cash my shipper will come over for pick up Thanks God Bless

Looking through the comments, I came across an even closer match submitted by someone who'd been contacted by a scammer.

Hello! let's do like this, actually now I'm not in town for now, I
came to visit my son so i wont be able to meet with you but am OK with
the price as seen on the advert, I'll proceed in issuing a Check out
to you and when you received the check , I will make arrangement for
pick-up. So get back to me with below details asap.

Name:
Address:
City:
State:
Postal Code:
Phone Number:

And as soon as this is provided, the payment will be overnight to you
and i will let you know when its mailed out. I need you to be honest
with the sale as I am a God fearing person.

Thanks
Williams Jane
God Bless.

Lesson: check out any Craigslist emails which seem even possibly suspicious. These scammers don't appear to be very creative, since they tend to keep out sending out messages which already have been identified as scammy. 

USA Today story about older motorcycle riders mentions...ME!

Here's what I found most interesting in a USA Today story by Kim Painter, "Older motorcycle riders more likely to get badly hurt" -- the parts that mentioned me.

Brian Hines, 64, a writer from Salem, Ore., rode a motorcycle as a younger man, but when he wanted to return to two-wheeled riding in 2009, he took some extra safety steps: He got a motorized scooter instead of a full-sized bike, repeated an optional safety course, bought a highly-visible white helmet and avoided riding at night or in the rain.

His precautions paid off and he never had an accident, Hines says.

...As for Hines, he did sell his scooter in 2012 – something he says greatly pleases his wife. "She was worried every time I took off." He says he likes a little risk in his life, "but there are ways to fill that need without risking life and limb." He's taken up skateboarding instead.

The rest of the story is worth reading also. Basic message: older riders need to recognize the increased risks they face because of poorer reaction times, decreased visual acuity, and such.

Reporter Kim contacted me after reading a blog post that I'd written after I'd started riding my Suzuki Burgman 650 maxi-scooter, "Older motorcycle riders, don't be scared by statistics." She thought that I made a lot of sense. 

Which, of course, I did. 

Davis talks about how the risks of motorcycling can be reduced markedly by going against the grain of what gets riders injured or dead.

That's why I have a white scooter, wear a white full face helmet, always wear complete protective gear, have green day-glo striping on my jacket, drive a scooter with antilock brakes, rarely drive at night or in the rain, don't speed or take turns too fast, don't ride after drinking alcohol, and -- vitally important -- retook the Team Oregon training class before I started my scootering.

I'm taking the same minimize-risks approach with skateboarding (actually, longboarding, but I can't blame Kim for using the more generic understandable term). I believe in living life crazily, on or off a four-wheeled board.

However, there is no contradiction between (1) taking risks which other people will view as "crazy," and (2) lessening those risks as much as possible. After all, getting hurt from a preventable accident often is better termed stupid than crazy. 

So I've continued to wear full protective gear almost 100% of the time when I'm on my longboard. With my big scooter, I never broke that rule. But since a longboard is quite a bit less dangerous than a motorcycle or scooter, occasionally I hop on one of my boards without a helmet or gloves on.

But rarely. I know that at 64, I don't heal nearly as fast as I did at 14, or 24. Older motorcyclists need to keep that in mind also. Be crazy and have fun. While being as safe as possible.

Oregon's First Cats survive Governor's mansion dog invasion

The state trooper guarding Mahonia Hall, the Oregon Governor's mansion here in Salem, gave me some faulty intelligence. I'm not blaming him; the enemies I asked about are notoriously sly and unpredictable.

"Is it OK to bring our dogs in? We'd been told that the First Cats might be running around the mansion." "You're fine," the trooper replied. "They'll be shut away upstairs." 

(Martha Russell photo)

So began a saga that could have ended in a public relations nightmare for the Willamette Humane Society. Imagine the headline: Oregon's First Cats terrorized by dog pack at lunch won by donors at Humane Society event.

My wife, Laurel, organized the lunch with Cylvia Hayes, Oregon's First Lady (who is the partner, but not the wife, of Governor John Kitzhaber -- which earns her some undeserved criticism from cultural Neanderthals for using the title).

We'd successfully bid on the lunch back in October at the Humane Society's Boo Bash fundraiser. Cylvia had agreed to host a lunch for ten, with Iggy's Catering generously providing the donated meal.

It took a while for Laurel to coordinate arrangements with Mary Rowinski of the Governor's Office, but today we and our two dogs set off for Mahonia Hall under electric power in our Chevy Volt (appropriate, since Cylvia has worked in sustainable economic development and clean energy for over twenty years.)

Laurel wasn't sure whether we should bring in old dog Serena and young dog Zu Zu. Mary had told us that the Governor's mansion was dog-friendly and our canines were invited to visit with the First Dog. Also, that Mahonia Hall was home to two cats. 

Now, to our dogs "dog-friendly" and "home to two cats" wasn't a contradiction.They love to chase cats. Cats are fun! Especially when they run.

But Laurel and I were worried that the mellow vibe of our lunch with the First Lady would be endangered (to put it mildly) if our dogs not only caught sight of the cats, but also caught some part of them. I worried even more that this would happen after our dog pack had careened through antiques, historical memorabilia, and other fragile furnishings in Mahonia Hall.

However, the state trooper's cheerful assurance that Serena and Zu Zu were welcome to attend the lunch assuaged our anxieties. Here's Laurel (in light blue jacket) being greeted by Cylvia and the First Dog, Tessa, a good-natured and attractive Rhodesian Ridgeback. Serena is in the foreground, scoping out the First Scents in the driveway. 

(Martha Russell photo)

iPhone camera in hand, I started to document our tour of the Governor's mansion that Cylvia said she'd take us on while Ian Johnson of Iggy's Catering was finishing the lunch preparations. Serena and Zu Zu seemed to feel right at home. In retrospect, though, I should have paid more attention to how eagerly Zu Zu (at the top) was sniffing around.

Because when we rounded that corner of the room, my worst fear -- and our dogs' greatest joy -- came into view. Cat!!! Strangely, I saw the cat sitting on the back of a chair before Serena and Zu Zu did. Maybe because the room was so filled with feline smells, they couldn't tell exactly where the cat was.

(Martha Russell photo)

Some excitement, but no disaster, followed. I yelled Cat, Cat! while putting a leash on Serena and holding Zu Zu by her collar.

Just in time, because First Cat #2 materialized on the floor. Serena got her nose swiped at, but the claws missed. At that point I started to be more worried about whether our dogs would get hurt, than whether the cats would.

Cylvia reassured the cat that all was well, even with two strange dogs running around the Governor's mansion. The First Cats then were escorted to another part of Mahonia Hall. We never saw them again.

On the other hand, Tessa never left Cylvia's side during our tour of Mahonia Hall. They're very close.

(Along that line, as a blogger I'd like to repeat some juicy stories Cylvia told us about what goes on under the covers of the bed she and Governor Kitzhaber share, but I'm going to hold off in hopes that the National Enquirer will pay me for the lurid details involving sleeping arrangements with a Canis lupus familiaris.)

We and the friends we'd invited to the lunch enjoyed Cylvia's entertaining description of Mahonia Hall. She led us through all three floors of the Governor's mansion.

Serena found some rooms more interesting than others. Like, any room with a cat bed.

Also, any room with a dog bowl.

A low-light of the tour for us came in the basement, where Zu Zu unexpectedly peed on the rug. She never has done this at home. Guess she wanted to leave her mark on the Governor's mansion (we didn't know our young dog was a Republican). Laurel cleaned the wet spot up with some paper towels from the kitchen.

Fortunately, we were told that the basement is the lair of Governor Kitzhaber's 16 year old son and his friends when they come to visit. Having been a teenage boy myself, I know that a little dog pee is well within their gross-out comfort zone.

Heading upstairs, Tessa posed dramatically.

(Martha Russell photo)

The upper floor features what Cylvia described as a ballroom with a nice wood floor. Zu Zu and Tessa enjoyed a bit of dog-dancing play on it. We were shown a small side room where, in the good old days of male dominance (I've heard of those days; haven't experienced them) men would retire to smoke cigars and engage in political man-talk while the women folk exchanged recipes, or whatever, in the ballroom.

Serena, our 13 year old dog, doesn't handle lots of steps very well. She stayed in a comfy spot on the ground floor next to the stairs while Cylvia showed us the upper floors.

Meanwhile, Ian of Iggy's Catering was doing his magic in the Mahonia Hall kitchen.

(Martha Russell photo)

Laurel and I had requested healthy vegetarian food, being health-minded vegetarians. Ian came through, big time. If you're looking for a quality caterer in the Salem area, check him out. We were impressed with the taste, looks, and organic-ness of the salad and main dish he served. (Naturally Ian also can go meat'y, if that's your thing.)

We all felt comfortable in the casual, yet also elegant, Mahonia Hall dining room. 

During lunch our dogs dreamed of whatever they dream about. Cats. Squirrels. Peeing on a Governor's rug. Whatever.

I didn't think about where Tessa was until I pushed back my chair when we were about to leave. Not surpisingly, the First Dog had been under the table, lying at Cylvia's feet.

(Martha Russell photo)

Martha Russell, a talented Willamette Humane Society volunteer, did some quasi-formal photo-taking after lunch. Here's Laurel and Cylvia with Serena, Zu Zu, and Tessa. 

Check out Martha's Adopt an Oregon Dog web site. She's an excellent photographer with a good sense of humor.

Many thanks to Cylvia Hayes, Oregon's First Lady, and Ian Johnson, Iggy's Catering, for a delightful lunch/tour at the Governor's mansion. And a special thanks to the First Cats for adding some zest to our visit. 

Tonight our dogs will be dreaming of their next trip to Mahonia Hall. I'll sneak into that room from the other direction... then slink behind the couch... and pop up right in front of that darned cat... and... [censored].

Notice what doesn't change in your life... and satisfies

I've gotten an insight into how to make life more satisfying. Focus on generally-unnoticed unchanges, what stays the same, rather than obvious alterations. 

Here's what I mean.

If your life is like mine, and I bet it is, it's full of damn's. For example: each example coming from recent actual My Life experience --

Damn, the water heater is leaking!
Damn, a wheel came off of my longboard!
Damn, I gained two pounds!
Damn, I tweaked my left hip and it feels weird!

In his fascinating new book, "Antifragile," Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers an insight into why these sorts of irritating damn's throw us off track in our search for happiness.

We notice what varies and changes more than what plays a large role but doesn't change. We rely more on water than on cell phones but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do. 

Those words got me to thinking.

About what is important to my feeling of well-being, yet goes largely unnoticed because it is always there -- sort of like how a fish takes water for granted because it's immersed in it, but couldn't live without the liquid in which it floats and moves.

I concentrated my thoughts on my immediate surroundings, our home, since my wife and I have been doing some long-range pondering about where we'd like to live when our non-easy-care house on ten acres becomes too much of a hassle to maintain for us senior citizen baby-boomers.

The timing of that when has something to do with how we balance the irritations of our rural home against its pleasures. 

As noted above, I tend to notice the "damn's" related to maintenance of our house, yard, and acreage. When things go wrong I have no choice but to concentrate on dealing with them. Those problems are in the forefront of my home-awareness, while the unchanging background is pretty much taken for granted.

I'm trying to rectify that myopia by viewing my life from a more mindful, fresh perspective. 

For example, walking the dogs every evening, I'm aware of how much I enjoy the paths we take, all unpaved, natural, woodsy. Down to the creek, across the little bridges I built, up the hill past towering firs, around the community lake inhabited by ducks, geese, turtles, and various other critters. 

After twenty-two years of living here, I'm familiar with every step along that looping path. Changes tend to leap out more than what stays the same. Damn, someone rode their horse on the trail before the ground was dry enough; look at the hoof damage!

Now, though, I ponder how important that dog walk is for me. And how much I'd miss my surroundings if we moved somewhere else. How many homes are so close to a natural area with such a wonderful variety of plants and animals encountered in a half hour walk where usually I don't see another person?

What my wife and I have nearby all the time to enjoy is marvelous.

But too often we focus on the fallen tree that needs to be cut up, the blackberries that keep regrowing, the ground squirrels and moles that attack our yard. In truth these are just minor blemishes which barely affect our pleasurable view of where we live.

Why, then, do I zero in on them so much? Because, like Taleb says, they are glittery moving irritation-objects, distractions that capture my gaze instead of the unchanging background that gives me so much satisfaction.

I need to become a mindful fish, much more aware of the water in which I continually swim.

Minimalist shoes get thumbs up from Nassim Taleb... and me

I'm slowly making my way through Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book (he's the author of The Black Swan, which has nothing to do with kinky ballet). 

Taleb's highly opinionated quasi-libertarian in-your-face writing style can be irritating at times, but in general I agree with most of his core theses, including: natural is more robust than artificial; stress is desirable when it strengthens us; things that last do so for good reasons.

A few days ago I came across Taleb's attitude toward shoes, which almost exactly mirrors mine. I've become a big fan of lightweight, barely-there shoes and sandals. 

In this post from late 2011 I shared a photo of my favorite shoes at that time, Teva's Zilch and Nilch, saying:

Most people like to be insulated from reality. After all, it hurts sometimes. So everybody puts on physical and mental coverings of one sort or another. Clothes, shoes, gloves, beliefs, hopes, imaginings. I used to do this much more than I do now.

...Currently these are my favorite shoes, Teva's Zilch and Nilch. I Zilch in warm weather; I Nilch in cold weather (with wool blend socks). They're wonderfully light: 7 and 7.5 ounces per shoe, respectively. By comparison, a pair of Columbia shoes I'd been wearing weigh 14 ounces per shoe.

So I've reduced by half the weight of what I carry around on my feet most days. 

...Along with lightness, I love how these shoes connect me with the earth in ways firmer, bigger, bulkier shoes can't. Walking across some rocks, like those in the photo, I really feel them through the soles.

So naturally I thought right on when I read Taleb's take on minimalist shoes. 

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. 

...Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology.

Recall my walk to the restaurant wearing shoes not too dissimilar to those worn by the ancient, preclassical person found in the Alps. The shoe industry, after spending decades “engineering” the perfect walking and running shoe, with all manner of “support” mechanisms and material for cushioning, is now selling us shoes that replicate being barefoot — they want to be so unobtrusive that their only claimed function is to protect our feet from the elements, not to dictate how we walk as the more modernistic mission was.

In a way they are selling us the calloused feet of a hunter-gatherer that we can put on, use, and then remove upon returning to civilization. It is quite exhilarating to wear these shoes when walking in nature as one wakes up to a new dimension while feeling the three dimensions of the terrain.

Regular shoes feel like casts that separate us from the environment. And they don’t have to be inelegant: the technology is in the sole, not the shoe, as the new soles can be both robust and very thin, thus allowing the foot to hug the ground as if one were barefoot — my best discovery is an Italian-looking moccasin made in Brazil that allows me to both run on stones and go to dinner in restaurants.

Then again, perhaps they should just sell us reinforced waterproof socks (in effect, what the Alpine fellow had), but it would not be very profitable for these firms.

Well, I have bought some waterproof socks, SealSkinz, feeling that these would allow me to wear sandals all year long here in often rainy-and-cold Oregon. However, I haven't used them much.

Mostly because my current minimalist shoe passion is the Teva Mush Frio Lace Canvas.

I have five pairs in different colors, including a nearly waterproof variant. The Must Frio is very lightweight, flexible, and comfortable. Amazingly, the Mush Frio weights only 6.5 ounces, less than the Zilch sandal shown at the beginning of this post.

I wear them year-round. They're stylish enough to wear in a nice restaurant (hey, I'm in Oregon) yet causal enough to look cool anywhere.

Most importantly, they feel natural to me. I hardly ever wear any other shoes, because I can't stand the heaviness and isolation from the surface I'm walking on. I used to put on rubber garden shoes to walk up our driveway and get the newspapers in the morning.

Now, I slip on my Teva Mush's, black, blue, and yellow version, as shown above. Big difference. The rubber shoes felt clunky, heavy, and artificial. The Mush's, flexible, light, and as natural as humanmade shoes can be.

With medium weight quarter-length wool socks, I've been totally comfortable wearing my minimalist shoes in sub-freezing weather. Seeing how many people wear shoes that strike me as hugely excessive -- heavy, clunky, uncomfortable -- I wish they would consider going a more natural footwear route.

It's made my walking around life a lot more pleasant. Go minimalist. I bet you'll like it.

Best planned community in Portland, Oregon area?

Like I said in my previous post about a planned community in Monmouth, Oregon, almost certainly someday my wife and I will want to leave behind the large house on ten rural acres that simultaneously drives us crazy and makes us happy.

There's a lot of people akin to us.

Baby boomers (we're in our 60's) who are in good health, have lived in a non-easy-care home for a long time, aren't interested in a traditional retirement community, and are beginning to think about where they'd like to live when "let's move" becomes not just a idle thought, but an urgent need or desire.

Reading about the Edwards Addition Master Plan, the community in Monmouth, got us thinking about what other planned communities are near Salem, where we live now.

Some Google searching today revealed... surprisingly few. Kind of disappointing.

We'd figured that the green, hip, cool, cutting-edge Portland area would have more planned communities where green, hip, cool, cutting-edge older folks like my wife and me could feel comfortable.

"Planned" is the key word.

Northwest Oregon has lots of wonderful neighborhoods. However, we're inclined toward communities with some sort of master plan, preferably with strong sustainable, environmentally conscious, outdoor activity, and dog-friendly components.

Currently we live in a 70's era planned community, Spring Lake Estates. There are easements behind most of the small acreages that allow quite a few miles of hiking/riding trails. We also have a nine acre lake on common property, and a neighborhood association. 

A planned community brings people together. It fosters more of a sense of, well, community. Without that, getting to know your neighbors and feeling like you belong is more difficult.

Though nowhere near ready to move yet, we've begun to explore options in our general area. Northward toward Portland, with all its amenities (yes, also headaches) draws us more than anywhere else in Oregon. We'd consider staying in Salem if a planned development didn't have the "blah" factor that curses this town.

Here's the communities I've found so far, along with my initial largely-uninformed snap judgment about each. If anyone has more suggestions, please leave a comment. 

Edwards Addition, Monmouth. Nice vibe. Pleasant town. Just fifteen minutes away, though. Put this sort of development in a different location, and we'd be more intrigued.

Pringle Creek Community, Salem. We've toured this development several times. A lot to like here. Small, though. On the right track; just not the development we're attracted to at the moment.

Villebois, Wilsonville. I've browsed the web site, but never been there. Like the sustainable, green angles. Seems to lack nature trails and has a "snooty" air; but maybe it's just the regrettable French'ie name. 

Fairview Village, Fairview. Quite interesting. Look and feel, based on web site, appeals to us. Proximity to I-84 and Columbia Gorge is worrisome. Windy? Plan to pay a visit one of these days.

Mountain Park, Lake Oswego. Beautiful area. Too country-club'y of a vibe, almost certainly. Strikes me as an old-style high-end planned community. We'd rather have a dog park than a staffed clubhouse.

Murray Hll, Beaverton. By and large, if a planned community web site features a photo of a stone wall with the development's name in big bronze letters, it's not for us. Enough said.

Orenco Station, Hillsboro. lt's won awards. Good place to live if you want to hop on a MAX light rail train and cruise into Portland. Seems overly urban for our taste.

As noted before, I thought there would be more choices. Maybe I've missed some planned communities. Perhaps Google failed me. Somehow I doubt it. Which means, there's a untapped housing market for a creative developer.

Could be wrong (an ever-present possibility). I just know enough baby boomers like us who don't want to grow traditionally old, yet realize that they are... growing old. 

Living in a large difficult-to-maintain single family home is becoming less attractive to them. Yet they're active, energetic and nowhere near ready to enter a dreaded "senior" housing situation. 

So where are the planned communities aimed, in part, at people like us?

We're not going to retire to a golf course community in Arizona. We want hiking, biking, and yes, skateboard/longboard trails much more than bingo and bridge in a social center. 

Build it, and we will buy it. 

Diagnosing a water heater leak (for dummies)

If you know a lot about water heaters, stop reading. If you're like us -- water heater quasi-dummies, especially when it comes to leaks -- read on. 

Yesterday we spent $99 to get educated from a pleasant George Morlan Plumbing guy about why what we thought was a leak in our water heater, almost certainly wasn't. 

A few days ago my wife noticed water pooling around the tile floor in front of our water heater. Not a huge amount, but quite a bit. She put towels around the water heater.

When I got home, I had the bright idea of putting paper towels around the bottom of it, so we could identify where the leak was coming from. None of the inlet/outlet fittings, overflow tube, or drain valve were leaking.

And the leak wasn't constant. It came and went.

In fact, the evening before the day the George Morlan guy was going to come out and check the water heater, I told my wife "We should call them and cancel the appointment; we're going to look like fools, plus pay $99 for a service call, since there's no longer a leak."

But an hour or so later, some of the paper towels were wet again. Leak! I was happy, because now, when the doorbell rang the next morning, I wasn't worried about letting the guy in. We had a real problem!

Well, not really. What we learned in the next half hour, at that cost of $99 was...

(1) Water heater leaks don't stop and start. (Sort of obvious, but, hey, we're water heater dummies.) Once a leak begins, it'll continue.

(2) A leak will be obvious when the access panels to the temperature setting, etc. are removed. Because a tank always is full, a leak will distribute water all around the outer lining of the tank. The guy felt the insulation under both access panels. Bone dry. No leak.

(3) At first he thought we might have a drainage problem, water coming into that corner of the house from outside. But I peered over the top of the water heater with a flashlight. Also bone dry. Water wasn't coming through the wall.

(4) Last possibility, which probably was the culprit: condensation. The tank rests on a metal bottom. My wife was able to push a thin duster under the small space between the tank and floor. It came back damp. The George Morlan guy said there's a roundish opening in the middle of the tank, used in transport or something. Water could have condensed there and flowed outward to the utility room floor. Strange, because this had never happened in the twenty-two years we've lived here. Maybe a rare meteorological condition, combined with doing laundry, or whatever.

(5) As long as he was there, I asked another question that I'd been wondering about: should a water heater be drained regularly? He said, "No, there's no need." I told him that I occasionally hook up a hose to the valve at the bottom of the tank and drain a couple of gallons from it. Since we're on well water, usually there's some crud that comes out. He said newer tanks stir up the tank water in such a way, even that now isn't necessary.

So we learned some stuff about water heaters. Worth the $99, I guess.

Good news is that we have a 10 year warranty on our six year old water heater, so if there really is a leak (which seems unlikely), we'll get both the $99 back and a new water heater.

Anyway, the key tip was to check under the access panels for wetness if a leak is suspected. Somehow I thought the inside of a water heater had seams, but this isn't the case. Thus a leak anywhere leads to water all around the outside of a tank (under the outer cover, that is). 

May 2013 bring personal craziness and collective sanity

I'm toasting the New Year four hours early here on the west coast. Might be asleep by midnight, wild and crazy 60-somethings that my wife and I are.

An ironic statement, albeit sort of true. And I'm wishing us more craziness in 2013. You too. May a crazy wind fill your sails and propel you into wonderfully strange lands. 

The sort of crazy I'm wishing upon you, me, and everybody isn't pathological. It's life-enhancing, a fine madness (to borrow a thought from a movie title).

I got to thinking about how cool such craziness is after I finished a longboard land paddling session yesterday at Salem's Minto Brown Island Park. Land paddling became a passion for me in 2012. I've got a newspaper article to prove it.

Rolling up to my parked car, I got off my longboard, took off my backpack, and retrieved my iPhone from its innards. I clicked on the Runmeter app. I pressed "stop." I inspected the Runmeter statistics.

Skate time: 1:26:50
Distance: 7.21 miles
Average speed: 4.98 mph

Wow! New records! 

The words not so crazy, not at all popped into my head.

When I revealed my intention to take up senior citizen skateboarding at the age of 63 back in July, the near-universal reaction from friends and family was...you're crazy. Which made me feel like I was on the right track.

Not because I seek to do crazy things. Because I've found that I enjoy doing things which tend to strike other people as crazy. Meaning, risky. Or not age-appropriate. Or unlikely to succeed. 

So hearing "that's crazy" doesn't worry me. I'm much more worried about coming to the end of my life feeling like I haven't fully lived.

When I started practicing my longboarding on Minto Brown's trails, after sessions in a middle school parking lot, I ran into a youthful fellow longboarder and his father. After chatting with the boarder, he pushed himself away up a slope at a highly respectable speed.

The father said, "My son is really into this now. I'm glad. He's lost fifteen pounds and gotten away from gaming indoors. He rides five to seven miles at a time on his longboard."

Seven miles! I was amazed.

At the time I wasn't comfortable going more than a few hundred yards, though that was before I discovered the joys of Big Stick land paddling. I couldn't imagine pushing my way along seven freaking miles of up and down leaf/twig strewn Minto Brown Island Park trails on a longboard.

Yet yesterday I did just that, just a few months after I thought "I could never do that."

I didn't even set out to go seven miles. I just rode my Norgeboards Kalai farther than usual, because I was enjoying myself so much on a cold, dry, sunny Oregon winter day.

I cant remember ever feeling in better shape. At 64.

This is what craziness can do for you: make you a lot happier and healthier than you were before. Doing what feels good, what feels right, for you, maybe not for anybody else, but for you -- this is what makes life more than just living. 

What that extra something is can't be put into words. You just feel it as the truest thing. For you.

I've got to say, though, that while doing your own thing crazily is a plus for individuals, it's a downer for the collective Us known as the political process. This was Fiscal Cliff Insanity Day. I followed the soap opera'ish ups and downs on my iPhone's Twitter feed.

Not pretty. Not encouraging. Not a good sign for our country's future. 

I blame Republicans more than Obama and his fellow Democrats, but politicians on both sides share responsibility (albeit not equal) for letting their personal interests overshadow the national interest. When leaders are tasked with preventing pain to the collective known as the citizens of the United States, craziness is the last thing I want to see them engaging in.

Hopefully in 2013 our representatives in Washington will learn to keep their crazy confined to their personal lives, where it can be a very good thing, and act a lot more sane in their congressional guise.

Happy New Year! Have a crazy one! 

(Here's more longboard inspired thoughts on living life crazily.)

Our 2012 Christmas letter is still pleasingly paper'ish

How long will we persist with our old-fashioned paper Christmas letter? Well, until the modernistas drag my quill pen and parchment from my ever-aging traditional-writing hands.

OK, that's an exaggeration. I compose our annual holiday missive on my laptop, making use of Pages and iPhoto. 

But then it's printed on my color laser printer. Yes, on paper. Here it is, in all of its PDF file glory, looking almost exactly as it does in its crinkly wood pulp guise. 
Download 2012 Christmas Letter PDF 

Read all about it! Cute photo of my granddaughter! New dog compared to old dog! Old guy learns how to land paddle on his longboard!

Some people have gone all electronic with their Christmas letters. But I still enjoy bringing the hot-off-the-printer copies to our living room/kitchen table, where I surround myself with tools of the Christmas letter mailing trade.

A box filled with cards that Laurel buys at after-Christmas sales and stores away. (I choose the most ironic, while Laurel favors cute animals.) Stamps. Christmas'y return labels charities kindly send us in hopes of a donation, which I'm happy to use so long as they don't say "Mr. and Mrs. Laurel Hines," as sometimes happens. (I'm liberated from marital stereotyping, but not that liberated.) My paper list of those who I send a paper card to.

The only negativity that accompanied this year's Christmas letter mailing came from Laurel. She looked at a stack of all-ready-to-be-mailed cards and said, knowing full well what answer she'd get, "Did you actually lick those envelopes?"

"Of course," I told my health-conscious wife. "I've licked envelopes all of my life with no adverse effects." This led to a semi-heated discussion about what is put into the part of the envelope that gets licked.

Turns out, nothing really bad, which I pointed out to Laurel after some Googling of this subject. Nonetheless, I learned that some people are opposed to envelope licking not so much because of its effect on the licker, but on the recipient.

If you get a Christmas card from me and are picky about what was on my tongue just before I licked the envelope, I guess you should use a letter opener (do they stlll exist?) or a knife to extract the card.

Or you could potentially exchange some molecules with me by using your finger. I say, live dangerously! 

And keep on sending Christmas letters in whatever fashion you desire. We downplay the holiday season (our tree is below), but haven't kicked the paper Christmas card tradition.

Electrical switch erotica: "three-way" really a "two-way"

My wife has gotten me into three-ways. I've been enjoying myself, though sometimes it's hard to figure out what goes where.

The erotic temperature of this blog post starts to decline after those first sentences because I'm talking about electrical switches. Sorry.

Our forty year old house mostly has old-fashioned standard light switches, not the more modern-looking "decorator" switches. So my wife went to Lowe's and bought a bunch of switches, both two-way and three-way.

She forgot that a couple of switches at the bottom of our stairs control lights which also are controlled by switches at the top of the stairs. Hence, today I went back to Lowe's to get a few more Cooper 3-Way Switch with Ground.

I was assisted by a guy I've encountered before in the electrical department. He's super-knowledgeable. In fact, today he told me that he worked as a electrician for many years.

Hearing that, I realized he was the perfect person to answer a question that had been on my mind ever since I picked up the first Cooper 3-Way Switch with Ground box.

"Why are these switches called 3-Way? Seems like they really are 2-Way, since the switches are for electrical devices controlled by two switches."

The ex-electrician furrowed his brow. "I don't know," he said. "Never thought about this before. But you're right. The switches allow a light to be turned on and off from two different locations."

I spent an unduly large amount of the rest of my day pondering the quasi (very quasi) erotic implications of this electrical device naming convention. When two people engage in sexual activity, we view that as a two-way. 

The switches at the top and bottom of our stairs interact with each other similarly. One can turn on; one can turn off. Both can be turned on; both can be turned off.

However, a three-way involves, duh, three people.

Or seemingly, three switches. My electrical erotic imagination wasn't vivid enough to picture what sorts of playing around goes on with three switches all wired together. But I could easily picture humans doing... this and that.

Thanks to the Great God Google, who knows all, when I got home I was able to determine that my intuition was correct that something is amiss with calling a switch that shares electrical control with another switch a "3-Way." 

Wikipedia's Multiway switching article says:

This article follows American usage. Readers in the UK should read "two-way" for the American "three-way" and "intermediate" or "crossover" switch for the American "four-way".

The British and other United Kingdom'ers make more sense with their electrical switch lingo. But we've got the edge on the electrical erotica front with our "three-way" and "four-way."

How our dogs, cute as they are, drive me crazy

Dogs, we're told, evolved along with humans. So just as what other people do is a source of both joy and exasperation for us, family dogs are adept at the same behaviors. 

As are children, of course.

This is why I never regret having only one child. Early on I realized the truth of basic arithmetic: a mother and father together (2) outnumber a child (1), and apart equal the child (1 = 1). However, a mother and father together (2) equal a pair of children (2), and apart are outnumbered by them (1 < 2).

Which explains the qualms I had when my wife, Laurel, decided that we needed a younger backup dog in addition to our twelve year old Serena, a Shepherd/Lab mix. 

Instantly my not-yet-completely-senile 64 year old mind understood that when I went on an evening dog walk with two dogs, rather than one, they would form a pack and I would still be simply me. Like toddlers racing off in different directions, the dogs could team up to confound my theoretical Pack Leader status.

Highly theoretical, I can assure you.

My wife is much more adept at dog training than I am, largely because I never try to train our dogs. I follow the approach that worked so well in raising my daughter: give in, because its easier; if she isn't harming herself or anything valuable, or at least is doing so quietly, all is good.

Just as my daughter was cute on the outside yet devilish on the inside, so are our dogs. 

Here's Serena modeling her raincoat after it was delivered (tag is still on). Due to her age, Serena has lost most of her ability to vigorously shake off water, and her fur accumulates rain, so we got the raincoat to make it easier to dry her off after Oregon'ish walks.

And here's our new dog, Zu Zu, modeling her punk rocker Halloween costume. She's supposedly a Shepherd mix (her coloring supports that theory), but Zu Zu radiates mutt-ness in a most appealing way throughout her small, compared to Serena, wiry body.

Our vet figures Zu Zu is about two. That sounds right -- in dog years, a teenager. With all this entails.

When we first got her, I'd take Zu Zu and Serena on leash walks around a two mile loop in our rural neighborhood, because we didn't trust her off leash on trails. I looked like a cartoon character with elastic arms, a leash in each hand, one arm extended way forward attached to a little young dog straining to pull me along, the other extended way backward attached to a big plodding old dog used to walking slowly.

Laurel would tell me that I could train Zu Zu to not pull on the leash. But it seemed easier to do the elastic arms thing.

I was happy, though, when Laurel did enough training with Zu Zu to enable us to take her for walks on trails leashless. I became competent in yelling "Zu Zu!," then rewarding her with treats when she came back. The beginning of my evening dog walk now looked like this.

However, as trained and cute as the pack is, there still are two of them and one of me. Which means that while I'm focused on a dog in one direction, the other one often is up to a Drive The Human Crazy trick that canines are so adept at.

The pack's newest irritation involves a small dead deer. I call it a Loaves and Fishes deer, because no matter how many times Laurel and I try to get rid of the bones remaining after coyotes feasted on the animal, more seem to multiply.

Zu Zu and Serena have different approaches to sniffing out the forbidden fruit bones. They've been buried by coyotes and thrown deep into thick brush by us. Yet they keep reappearing.

Young Zu Zu will race ahead on the trail to the creek, dashing over a little bridge as if she's heading in the right direction. Then she'll circle back through the brush to search for a bone. I'll stand like an idiot calling "Zu Zu!," facing where I last saw her, then see her running toward me in the opposite direction from the deer graveyard, crunching something white in her teeth. 

Serena, on the other hand, is too old to run fast. So she ambles behind me, looking innocently this way and that, like a shoplifter pretending to just be out windowshopping. When I'm focused on trying to locate Zu Zu, who I affectionately call the "Little Monster," I'll look back and notice that Serena suddenly has ambled out of sight -- which means she's searching for deer bones.

Thankfully, Zu Zu has some cat-like genes in her. She likes to carry back a couple of vertebrae, or whatever, and proudly drop them at my feet. I then stash them in a crook of a tree outside of dog reach.

Best of all, today I trailed Serena and found the deer skeleton mother lode: a long leg bone and some other scattered bones. I picked them up, walked home, placed them in a trash bag, and put the bag in our garbage can. 

Deal with that, Little Monster Zu Zu and your pack mate! (Unfortunately, I expect on tomorrow's walk they'll somehow discover more pieces of the Loaves and Fishes deer.)

I could go on and on about how our dogs drive me crazy while simultaneously keeping me sane. For now, I'll content myself with just one more example: Serena's newfound attraction to dining like a Queen. An extremely spoiled Queen.

It used to be that we'd put high quality expensive dry and canned dog food in her dish, call "Serena! Dog food!," and she'd walk over to the pantry where her water and food bowls are kept. Given her German Shepherd heritage, sometimes she'd look at her meal snootily, as if it was beneath her notice. But eventually she'd get around to eating it.

Now, though, she tends to lay on the living room rug and just look at us when a meal is served. On a good day, we can take a section of the newspaper, lay it in front of her, walk to the pantry and pick up her food bowl, then position it (with a bow) between her Queenly Paws on the "place mat." 

Serena then deigns to lower her mouth to the bowl. Still comfortably seated, of course. On a bad day when Queen Serena is in an even more demanding mood, one of us has to dip our fingers into the bowl and hand feed her each bite.

Since we're vegetarians, I find touching canned turkey wet food and dry meaty kibble kind of disgusting. Having a dog tongue lick it off my fingers isn't a great feeling either. 

But that's what you get with a dog -- or a child. Craziness along with cuteness; hateness along with happiness. Wouldn't have it any other way.

I hate jury duty. Here's why.

Right now I'm trying my best to not listen to an irritating video about the All-American importance of jury duty, a video I've ignored before previous times I've been called as a juror.

It's being played here in the jury assembly room on the 5th floor of the Marion County (Oregon) Courthouse. One purpose of the video is to make me and my fellow morose potential jurors feel better about being forced to take time off of work, or whatever our usual life consists of, and do something we don't want to do.

Amazingly, I just heard a woman on the video say "It can be disappointing if you're not picked to be a juror." 

Are you freaking kidding? I will be overjoyed if I can get out of jury duty today. I have zero interest in being a juror. And I'm pretty damn sure that my feelings are shared by most of the other people in this room. 

Therein lies my distaste for jury duty.

It's absurd to force people to perform a service they don't want to do. How would you like to be operated on by a surgeon who doesn't want to be in the operating room, who is utterly uninterested in performing the procedure that you need to preserve your health, or even life?

The United States used to have a military draft. People were forced to serve. Now we have a volunteer military. Works much better. The quality of our fighting forces has gone up because they want to be a soidier, sailor, or whatever.

I don't want to be a juror. My expectation is that I'd be a lousy juror. My sole goal at this moment is to be excused from jury duty somehow or other. (Maybe the trial won't happen because of a last minute plea bargain or settlement.)

I'm not the person who I'd want to be in the juror box if I was on trial. So this destroys the oft-heard notion that the current jury system is founded on we are entitled to a jury of our peers.

Sure, I can agree with that. But the "peers" I want deciding my legal fate are akin to me in my best moments, not my worst. Most days I'm reasonable, in a good mood, willing to listen to both sides of an argument. 

Today, like every day I've been called for jury duty, I'm not. I'm bummed at being here in the juror assembly room, doing nothing at 9 am after getting up at 6 am, killing time by blogging about how much I don't want to be here.

I have a cold. I didn't sleep well last night. I'm living on Sudogest and cough drops.

Believe me, I'm not in the frame of mind that I'd want someone to have if they were faced with making an important decision. If we get to the point that an attorney questions me, I won't be shy to say just that. This isn't a ploy to get out of jury duty, though that's my goal.

It's the truth. 

If forced jury duty is such a great idea, why don't we conscript uneducated people to teach periodically in overcrowded classrooms? Why don't we periodically require atheists to attend a church on Sunday and preach to the faithful? Why don't we periodically require vegetarians to prepare meat dishes in prisons?

Here's an answer: they'd do a crappy job. Forcing people to do something they don't want to do almost always is a recipe for poor performance.

Four years ago I blogged, "Jury duty sucks, is un-American, and stupid." I still feel that way.

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.

Eight years ago I blogged, "Well, that was fun." Actually, not. I still feel that way.

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.

Our dogs are featured in Statesman Journal "PetClick"!

Fame. It's fleeting. Especially if you're a dog. Got to divide potential human fame-years by seven.

So today Laurel and I were thrilled to see Serena and Zu Zu prominently displayed at the top of page 6D in the Salem Statesman Journal. (Just five pages from page 1! And three sections from section A!)

Naturally you'll want to click on the image to enlarge our dogs closer to full size. And if you want to preserve the PetClick in another electronic form to become part of your Important Historical Archives, here's the PDF file.
Download Pet Click Statesman Journal 

The only disturbing aspect of this PetClick event is that I'd sent in a different photo to the Statesman Journal shortly before Laurel submitted this photo.

PetClick loves Laurel more than me! I'm devastated. 

I'd gotten an email from PetClick central saying that on Friday, the 23rd, my photo could either be seen in the PetClick online archives (bad) or in the paper version of the Statesman Journal (good). 

Optimist that I am, naturally I figured that today I'd be looking at my photo in the "real" newspaper. Except, my wife beat me out, pushing me into the online archives. I think... I couldn't even find my photo online. 

Here it is, my loser photo.

I figure that PetClick means what it says. You're supposed to submit photos of your pets, not of people. So maybe having Laurel in the photo was what made me a loser.

Couldn't be my marvelous photographic iPhone skills, or the astounding cuteness of the "small dog parked under large dog" pose.

Arrival of my Buddha nature has been delayed

Shopping at the south Salem Fred Meyer store today provided more evidence that my boundless compassion for all sentient beings, a.k.a. Buddha nature, has some room to grow.

Scene: I'm pleased to find a checkout lane in the grocery section that only has two people in front of me. Hey, I may be retired, but I'm a busy guy. This is only the second stop in my Trader Joe's - Fred Meyer - LifeSource Natural Foods route. I've already been to Les Schwab Tires and the post office. I've got to pick up our tuned-up bicycles at a bike shop. In short, I've got Important Things Left To Do. 

My inner thoughts: Great, the first woman is paying for her stuff. Second woman only has a few things on the belt. Sweet! I'll be out of here real soon. Right after that woman finds her money in that huge purse. Oh, great! She's got bills in her hand. Counting them out... give them to the checker... let's get going. Geez, no, I don't believe it. Now she's rummaging through more compartments, more zippers, more recesses in her purse. Must be looking for exact change... screw it, lady, just hand over the money and let the checker give you some change. Can't you see how you're holding up two other customers. Jesus fucking Christ! Is it a freaking surprise to you that you have to PAY after you go through a check out line? Couldn't you have rehearsed this at home? So happy I'm not her husband... oh, thank you sir... he's handing her some money from his wallet. Take it! TAKE IT! Forget finding the exact amount. FORGET IT! Yikes. Can't be. She's STILL looking through her purse. You're done, lady, you're DONE!!! The checker is trying to give you your receipt. Call it a day! Game over! Move on and let normal competent shoppers get through this lane!

Outer words spoken by the woman in front of me: Gosh, I know what it's like to not be able to find a bunch of money that you thought was in your purse. That's happened to all of us. It's a horrible feeling, not knowing where it went. I'm so sorry for you.

OK, in my Buddha nature defense I got to the checkout lane after the woman who said those words. She was standing closer to the woman searching through her purse for what seemed like eons. Maybe she heard the searcher-woman say something I couldn't hear.

Or missed hearing because of the loud complaining that was going on inside my head, me speaking to me. 

This experience taught me a lesson which I will soon forget, because I always do: while it may seem obvious that many people in the world are fucking idiots whose only mission in life is to drive me crazy through actions clearly designed to irritate and delay me, the truth might possibly be rather different -- that I am not the wise center of the world around which fools revolve, but merely one of the pack, like them neither inherently wise nor foolish, just human.

Nyah, I'll think tomorrow, or in the next few minutes. That makes too much sense. I'm surrounded by fucking fools trying to drive me insane! 

Why I ended up buying a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro

I plunked down $2,300 and change for a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro yesterday (256 GB flash storage, plus Apple Care and a USB Superdrive).

I must have been one of the first to order the computer on Apple's web site, since I kept refreshing the closed-down store page until it popped up all functional, with the new goodies -- iPad Mini, new iMac, and my lusted-for laptop -- ready for purchase.

Surprising. Because if I believed myself, I never would have thought that I'd end up doing what I just did. Consider...

Last June I anguished about whether to buy a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro or a 13 inch MacBook Air.
A few days later I'd come up with reasons to choose a basic MacBook Pro over the new retina model.
After a few days more I was talking myself into why I should buy a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro. 
In August I explained why I wasn't going to wait for a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro. 

Yet here I am in late October, eagerly waiting for Apple to ship me a replacement for my dearly beloved, yet now dated, three year old 13 inch MacBook Pro. Obviously I changed my mind -- after changing my mind several other times after the 15 inch retina MacBook Pro made its debut in June.

I played around with the 15 inch'er several times at an Apple Store in suburban Portland's Bridgeport Village. I liked it, but I couldn't fall in love with it. At the risk of sounding sexist, it was like dating a woman twenty pounds overweight after enjoying the company of someone pleasingly svelte. 

Everytime I touched the bigger retina laptop, she (oops) it seemed just too damn large.

The extra real estate to the left and right of the keyboard struck me as excessive. And no matter how I tried to convince myself that I needed a larger screen, I recalled how the 13 inch display I'd used for three years suited me just fine. 

So whenever I was tempted to call an Apple Store employee over and say "I want to buy a 15 inch retina MacBook Pro," the words wouldn't leave my mouth no matter how loudly they echoed in my brain. I'd go home, then daily look for Internet gossip about a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro.

Gossip which became more believable in October. Supposed sightings of the smaller retina laptop were reported. I decided to wait until the iPad Mini release party on October 23, this being the most likely date for a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro announcement.

I'm glad I ended up ordering a 13 inch retina model. That size just seems, well, fitting to me.

My current 13 inch MacBook Pro fits nicely in my backpack. The retina replacement will be a pound lighter and 27% smaller in cubic inches (109 vs. 80 cubic inches). That'll give me room to store the superdrive and an ethernet adapter the occasional times I need those devices -- which are built into my current MacBook, but were left out of the new retina MacBook Pros. 

Reviews of the recently released 13 inch'er are scant. A round-up of initial impressions can be read here. But I didn't feel like I needed to wait for detailed reviews to order a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro. It felt right to do this. After it arrives, I'll have a couple of weeks to change my mind.

From what I've read, the geeks who've left comments about the 13 inch little sister of the well-received 15 inch retina laptop generally aren't wild about it. Many seem to be gamers, or 3-D afficionados, who don't like the graphics capability in the smaller machine. Plus, they think it's overpriced.

To which I reply, that's no big deal to me.

Since I prefer a 13 inch laptop to a 15 inch laptop, I don't mind Apple pricing the 13 inch retina MacBook Pro a bit higher, proportionately, than the 15 inch machine -- when compared with the non-retina models. And I doubt that I'll ever need more processing power than what the model I just bought offers. 

I loved the look of the retina display when I tried out the 15 inch model at an Apple Store. I'd bring along my basic 13 inch MacBook Pro, set it beside the retina display, then think "ugh!" when I looked at my computer. 

The display always had seemed pleasingly sharp and clear. But I didn't know what I was missing until I saw the retina screen. Being a blogger and an author, I spend a lot of time staring at words on-screen. Letters look fine on my current computer; they look way better on a retina display.

My 64 year old eyes will appreciate that.

Spending about $300 for a retina display and some other benefits over a 13 inch MacBook Air with a 256 GB flash drive is well worth it to me. If I keep my new laptop for three years, that's $100 a year, 27 cents a day, for the pleasure of looking at much better looking text and images.

I put a quarter in the tip jar at Starbucks whenever I get a grande Pike Place. So I feel fine paying that much daily to myself for a beautifully designed new 13 inch Apple laptop with a beautiful retina display.

Apple makes great products. My three year old MacBook Pro has performed almost flawlessly. A few days ago I closed the cover to put it to sleep, which dislodged it from the support of a slanted laptop stand that I keep it on for a better typing position.

My frantic late-night attempt to catch the sliding computer failed. Crash! It dropped in a free fall from a four foot high kitchen counter onto a hard tile floor. My wife yelled, "Is your computer OK?" "I bet it is," I assured her.

I was right. Apple knows how to make computers that work reliably. Even after being dropped. I'm looking forward to my 13 inch retina MacBook Pro being as enjoyable to use as my old laptop.

Update: here's a review that calls the 13 inch retina MacBook Pro Apple's best laptop. Naturally, I agree.

As it stands with Apple’s current laptop line-up, the 13-inch MacBook Pro comes out smelling like roses. It doesn’t have the raw horsepower of the 15-inch Pro, and it doesn’t have the extreme thinness of either Air, but it does have the overall best value. With its respectable internals, mid-range weight, and brilliant screen, the 13-inch Pro is simply the best laptop Apple sells now. A week ago, that wasn’t the case. The previous version of the 13-inch was good, but the new version is fantastic. Unless you have very niche and specific needs, this is the laptop you want to have.

A guy backed into my Mini Cooper today...

So, this afternoon I pull out of the Lifesource Natural Foods parking lot here in Salem, carrot juice ready to be consumed as a healthy mini-lunch, and find myself behind a guy in a car who's also trying to turn onto Commercial Street.

He pulls forward, seemingly having spotted a break in the traffic. I drive forward a bit also, figuring that if he's going to turn onto Commercial, perhaps it'll be possible for me to get onto the street, after he does.

But after pulling forward, he stops, having changed his mind about turning. No problem, I think. I stop too. However, he then backs up, apparently figuring that he's pulled too far forward into the nearest Commercial Street lane.

Which is a problem. Because my Mini Cooper and me are behind him. Bump. His rear bumper and my front one connect at a few miles an hour.

One of those awkward everybody out of the car moments ensues. He says, "I'm sorry." Then, "Doesn't look like the scratches on my bumper are very serious." I look at my Mini's bumper. "Same here," I say, "no big deal."

He looks relieved. Says something about no reason to get insurance companies involved for something so minor. I agree. He extends his hand. I shake it. We get in our cars and drive away.

I wish more problems between people could be resolved like this. Reasonably. Calmly.

We could have argued about the micro-accident. There could have been some accusations exchanged. One of the other of us could have gotten excited about a few blemishes on our car. My car was much newer than his, so I suppose I had more reason to do this. Plus, he backed into me while I was stopped.

However, my attitude was life happens. A little touch-up paint, and both of our cars are going to be essentially back to normal. 

Driving off after our friendly handshake I thought about the two times a deer has run into one of our cars while I was driving it. Once a deer started to run across Liberty Road, hit its head on the right door panel, then stumbled off into a field, seemingly not seriously injured.

Another time, a deer ran into the left rearview mirror, knocking it mostly off -- aside from some wires that held it on. I didn't blame either deer. 

There's a Zen story, or Taoist, can't remember which, about a man in a rowboat paddling along in the fog who suddenly feels a jolt. Damn! Another boat has run into me! He's pissed off. Then he sees that no one is in the other boat. It was just drifting all by itself. His anger fades away.

Being an avid reader of neuroscience books, including Sam Harris' on this subject, I don't believe in free will. As strange as it may sound, we're all driverless boats, just doing what we're doing.

Stuff happens for cause and effect reasons, free will not being one of them. Everything the guy in the other car did made sense to him at the time. There were reasonable reasons for him pulling forward, then stopping, then backing up. Ditto for me doing what I did.

Result: a few blemishes on our bumpers. Also the result of non-freely willed causes and effects.

(Extraneous observation: it sure seems to me like back in the old days, 50's, 60's, 70's, cars had bumpers which actually protected against bumps with no discernible damage; but maybe I'm wrong about this -- could be that the cars I drove back then were so funky, another scratch or dent didn't stand out.)

Anyway, I kind of enjoyed this episode today. It was pleasing to find the other guy and me handling what could have been an unpleasant moment so pleasantly.

Wish this could happen all the time, both in politics and in "real life."

When a man goes to the dermatologist

A few days ago I went to the dermatologist for a six-month checkup on some benign skin growths that had been frozen off.

Here's how the conversation went after the physician's assistant (PA) who had done the cryotherapy walked into the exam room.

PA: Hey, good to see you again. How are the growths looking that we froze off last time?

ME: I don't know. I try not to look at myself very closely. When I'm in the bathroom, I stand as far back from the mirror as I can, and then I blur my eyes when I have to look at my aging face.

PA: (after a pause, when she seems to be trying to decide whether I'm kidding or serious; in fact, I'm serious) OK, let's take a look...Excellent, you're looking good! They've healed up nicely.

ME: Thanks, that's nice to know.

Now, likely some women would have the same attitude toward their frozen-off skin growths as I did. But I suspect a typical conversation at the dermatologist's office with a female patient would start off more like this.

PA: Hey, good to see you again. How are the growths looking that we froze off last time?

WOMAN: Well, they're better. I'm glad you're taking a look at them, though. For the first week after you froze them off they were red and scaly. I had to use quite a bit of makeup to cover them up. After that, they steadily became less obvious. Yet I still had to put on some extra makeup over them. When I look closely at the spot on my right cheek, it seems slightly darker than the other one. What do you think? I've been worried about it.

Yes, the new Apple Maps sucks. It led me astray.

I'm glad I still have Navigon on my iPhone 5, because I can't trust Apple Maps after what happened yesterday. 

I've been playing around with Apple Maps since I got my new iPhone last Friday. Some reviewers have called it the worst Apple product ever. Don't know if I'd go that far, since when it works, Apple Maps handles turn by turn directions well.

But when it doesn't... you're not going to get to where you want to go.

Fortunately, I knew where Silver Falls Dermatology is in south Salem. I had a 1:45 pm appointment for a check-up and left home with just enough time to get there. I used Siri on the way to test out Apple Maps again.

"Where is Silver Falls Dermatology in Salem, Oregon?" Siri came up with an answer that looked correct when I glanced at the screen. Commercial Street. Yeah, that's right. I clicked on the link to get turn by turn directions.

Only problem was, when I got close to the clinic Apple Maps was telling me to head north for another 1.9 miles. I ignored the instruction. Sitting in the waiting room I took a closer look at the Apple Maps info for Silver Falls Dermatology.

First, it had the clinic at Commercial Street NE, rather than SE. Second, it had the wrong street number. I asked the receptionist if the clinic had any other offices in Salem. "No," she said. "This is it." 

Apple Maps indicated the info came from Yelp.

Oh, great. Google Maps never has led me astray. Google Maps is tried and true (though I'm sure it isn't 100% accurate, just almost so). Now Apple has dumped Google Maps so it can offer its own in-house map system with turn by turn spoken directions.

Good intention. Bad execution. (Great for Navigon and other purveyors of GPS apps for the iPhone, though.)

I hope a Google Maps app returns to the iPhone. Until then, I'll use Navigon for navigating to places I've never been to before and only use Apple Maps for playing around purposes in familiar territory.

After some awkwardness, iPhone 5 and me become friends

Being a long-time user of Apple'ish things (iPods, MacBooks, iPhones), I have reasonable expectations of a new product: It will work perfectly and make me ecstatically happy! 

Most of the time this happens, more or less. Getting my iPhone 5 order via FedEx yesterday and firing up this long-awaited replacement for my iPhone 4 was right in line with previous Apple experience. After a few glitches, bliss.

What threw me off at first was iTunes, which strikes me as disturbingly un-Apple. iTunes looks and acts like something a Microsoft programmer would produce. Functional, yet rather difficult to use and understand.

Firing up my black 32 GB Verizon iPhone 5 started off smoothly.

I was easily able to enter my home's wi-fi network password, and tell the iPhone that I spoke English and lived in the United States. But then, after informing the iPhone that I wanted to restore from an iTunes backup of my old phone, problems started to pop up.

Earlier that day I'd backed up my iPhone 4 to make sure all my apps, photos, and such were transferred to the iPhone 5. However, when I connected the iPhone 5 to my laptop, iTunes told me it couldn't do the sync because I didn't have the most recent version of iTunes, 10.7 as I recall.

OK, no big deal. On the iTunes menu bar I found "update," clicked on it, and was met with a "you have the most recent software" message. Hmmmm....

My wife often says to me, "Given that you know so much about computers, and still have problems with them, what do grandmothers who are clueless about technology do?" (That's a sexist, ageist remark, but since my wife is a woman almost as old as me, she's entitled to say it.)

Good point.

I knew enough to check the App Store on my MacBook Pro, which indeed was offering me an OS X update that included iTunes. After downloading the update, iTunes started to "restore" my iPhone 5 with iPhone 4 content.

Except... I got worried when I saw how fast the transfer was going.

I've got lots of apps. I've got almost 1,000 photos. I've got Navigon, which has large map files. When the iTunes sync was completed in just a few minutes I was pretty sure something had gone wrong. When the iPhone 5 had restarted and I checked to see what was on it, I knew something had gone wrong.

No music of mine. No apps of mine. No photos of mine. 

Fortunately, I did the right thing while I thought what should I do now? Which was, nothing. The iPhone 5 was still connected to my MacBook and iTunes. On its own iTunes started to transfer my backed-up iPhone 4 files.

(When I later fired up my wife's iPhone 5, the apps and such transferred smoothly right away; don't know why my phone's sync experience was so different.)

After that, my remaining problem was with Navigon. I'd heard that the new Maps feature sucked, since Apple had ditched Google Maps, so I wanted to be sure that Navigon was working in case I needed turn by turn directions.

The Navigon app, though, wasn't functioning on the iPhone 5. Navigon's web site was distinctly uninformative about how to fix the problem. Phoning customer support, I reached a helpful guy who spoke perfect American English (thanks for that, Navigon!). He told me to delete the Navigon app, then download it again from the App Store at no cost -- since Apple knew I'd already paid for it.

Bingo. I then was able to reinstall the Oregon database. Navigon was back in action.

I've played around a bit with the native Maps app on the iPhone 5 and found it accurate for the simple task I gave it when I went to exercise yesterday. I'd told Siri "Where is the Courthouse Athletic Club in Salem, Oregon?"

Siri promptly gave me a list of the various Courthouse clubs in town and asked me to pick the one I wanted. After choosing the River Road club, the Maps app led me there with clearly audible turn by turn instructions. Cool. I'll stick with Navigon for serious GPS navigating, though.

I'm enjoying my iPhone 5, two days into our relationship. Siri is a kick. She's fun to play around with. I got ideas for some intimate questions to ask her from this post. Siri alone is reason enough to upgrade from an iPhone 4.

Moving from AT&T to Verizon is another reason. AT&T just announced higher-speed LTE service in Portland, but so far there's zilch LTE anywhere else in Oregon. Verizon, though, has an extensive LTE network, which even reaches our house in rural south Salem. 

Here's what's impressive about LTE: I've found that usually we only have one LTE bar showing. Sometimes two, but not more than that. Yet before writing this post, with that one LTE bar showing, I installed the free Speed Test app, turned off wi-fi, and tested our Verizon download/upload speeds.

Wow.

Verizon LTE showed 4.82 mbps down (a measly .08 mbps up, but who cares about up?) By contrast, our Qwest DSL wi-fi showed 3.69 mbps down and .29 mbps up on a SpeedTest.net test. Verizon LTE with one bar on my iPhone 5 is faster than Qwest DSL!

Nice. Not surprisingly, I'm finding that checking my email and such goes way faster than it did with AT&T. All in all, I've got zero regrets about upgrading to an iPhone 5. And it looks like we'll get as much as $250 for our iPhone 4's if they're sold to Amazon. 

Since the iPhone 5 cost us $299 (with a two year Verizon contract), we could end up paying just $49 extra for each new iPhone. Love it!

Global warming makes me buy "snow tires"

I'm not kidding, despite the title of this blog post. This year I really am strongly leaning toward getting snow tires for my 2011 Mini Cooper S, and part of the reason is global warming. 

Yes, the world is getting warmer. But this doesn't mean that winter weather everywhere is going to be milder. Actually, it's going to be weirder. 

Does it seem as though your weather has become increasingly “stuck” lately? Day after day of cold, rain, heat, or blue skies may not be a figment of your imagination. While various oceanic and atmospheric patterns such as El Niño, La Niña, and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been blamed for the spate of unusual weather recently, there’s now a new culprit in the wind: Arctic amplification. Directly related to sea-ice loss and earlier snowmelt in the Far North, it is affecting the jet stream around the Northern Hemisphere, with potentially far-reaching effects on the weather.

...There have been many examples of “stuck” weather patterns during the past few years. Deep troughs in the jet stream hung over the U.S. east coast and Western Europe during the winters of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, bringing a seemingly endless string of snow storms and teeth-chattering cold. In the early winter of 2011/2012, in contrast, these same areas were under ridges, or northward bulges of the jet stream, which brought unusually warm and snowless conditions over much of North America.

...While it’s difficult to point the finger at Arctic amplification in causing any of these weather events, they are the types of phenomena that are expected to occur more frequently as the world continues to warm and the Arctic continues to lose its ice. Further research may find ways to predict which regions will experience which conditions. But in the meantime, it’s increasingly likely that the weather you have today will stick around awhile. 

So likely the Pacific Northwest is going to see more weather extremes as the jet stream gets stuck in a certain pattern. This includes lasting cold in the winter, as well as snow.

I've owned several sets of snow tires over the years. Actually, they're better termed "winter tires" nowadays, because they're made out of materials which remain pliable under 45 degrees F., making for much safer handling in cold weather even when it isn't snowy or icy. 

(See here, here, and here for benefits of winter tires.)

Last year I put Bridgestone Blizzaks on our Hybrid Highlander SUV, which previously had all season tires. Even though the Highlander is all wheel drive, usually we couldn't get up our fairly steep driveway when it snowed. But with the Blizzaks, no problem. 

The Tire Rack is a quality online source of tires and wheels. That's where I bought a steel-wheel Blizzaks package for the Highlander. The tires arrived by UPS all mounted and balanced. Les Schwab then put them on the car at no cost, because we bought our all season Toyos for the Highlander there.

I'm leaning toward the Bridgetone Blizzak LM-60 Performance Winter Tire, which Tire Rack recommends for the Mini Cooper.

Maybe our Oregon winters will be milder than usual, thanks to global warming. There's a good chance, though, that we'll see some unusual cold and/or snow spells. If that happens, I'll be glad I have the Blizzaks on the Mini, since my wife will be using the winter-tire equipped Highlander to get around.

And now that I've learned more about the benefits of winter tires in our normal cold weather, getting Blizzaks for both cars seems like the thing to do even if we have a normal winter.

I'm one of the first to order the iPhone 5. Am I gloating?

Night owls that we are, my wife and I were watching a recorded The Daily Show episode as midnight approached yesterday. Her attention was on the TV. Mine was on my watch, as I waited for the hour to strike twelve, when preorders for the iPhone 5 were scheduled to begin.

I'd already decided that Verizon would replace AT&T, now that our two-year iPhone 4 contract had expired. The remaining challenge was to get my ordering underway as soon as possible given the obvious pent-up demand for an updated iPhone with a new digit after its name.

The iPhone 4S didn't appeal very strongly to me, being merely a 4 plus an added letter. But a 5, a freaking 5, now that was something to lust for -- especially since I could get new customer pricing from Verizon. 

Everything went smoothly with the ordering... up to a point. Gizmodo's advice to get a black 32 GB iPhone 5 from Verizon made sense. So I didn't have to hesitate over the phone choices (white or black? 16, 32, or 64 GB?) Verizon was offering to me.

But at about 12:15 am I hit a glitch. I hadn't thought through the implications of wanting to keep our current cell phone numbers. I'd pictured myself being asked by the Verizon web site if I wanted to have the same numbers my wife and I have now, then typing in the numbers.

Done! 

In reality, not. Because Verizon, reasonably enough, also wanted to know our AT&T account number. Since we have paperless autopay I didn't have a statement on hand. So I presciently had a sinking feeling: I need to log into our AT&T account; this isn't going to go well.

I guess my unconscious had recollected a memory of ordering an iPhone 4, also on "opening day," several years ago. AT&T's web site had frozen up under the pressure of a frenzied mass of Apple addicts, all wanting to be one of the first to get the new gadget.

Same thing happened last night. I got error messages when I first tried to open a page. Eventually I'd succeed in getting the AT&T web site's attention, but it was working glacially slow.

Over on another Chrome tab my half-completed Verizon order was waiting away. I wasn't sure how long Verizon would put up with the inactivity. Visions of iPhone 5's dancing away from increasingly empty Verizon warehouse shelves while I fussed around trying to get my AT&T account number danced through my head.

After about fifteen minutes AT&T's overloaded web site finally coughed up the information I needed. I then quickly clicked my way back to the Verizon order page, pleased to find both that my order was still intact and Verizon's own web site was operating absolutely normally. 

Which, from what I've heard, pretty much sums up the difference between AT&T and Verizon: suckiness versus works-goodness.

Here's the result of my late night online labors. Expected ship date: 9/21/2012. Sweet! A week away. If the date is accurate.

Regardless, two iPhone 5's soon will be in the hands of me and my wife. Gloating by successful early orderers like me reportedly is commonplace. 

Apple's website was down occasionally after midnight, as were the sites of some of its wireless carriers. Fans flooded Twitter and other social media sites with ordering advice, and also to gloat when they were able to successfully purchase the phone.

"iPhone 5 has been pre-ordered...boiling with excitement!" tweeted David Christensen, a Web designer in Los Angeles.

"Got my & the wife's iPhone 5's pre-ordered. Haters, you may proceed with your hating," wrote Shahin Ourian, a digital content creative strategist in L.A.

Dustin Pagliughi, a television producer who lives in the Miracle Mile district, said he woke up at midnight to pre-order a black 32GB iPhone 5. He used his iPhone 4 to make the purchase.

"It's one of those items that I've been waiting for them to announce, so I figured, why not?" the 32-year-old said. "I wanted to get it as fast as possible."

Being a mature 63-year old who has achieved an enlightened compassionate Buddha-nature (in his own mind at least, where it counts), there is not an iota of gloating in this blog post.

I'm merely sharing purely factual information about how I have two black 32 GB iPhone 5's on the way from Verizon, while other new iPhone fanciers are facing dwindling supplies due to the astoundingly high demand for Apple's newest must-have.

Time to relax. Briefly. Because now I've got to keep my eye out for the release of a 13 inch retina MacBook Pro. Rumor has it that it's shipping to retailers. I want one!

(That's how Apple operates: the addiction never ends; the dealer always has a new high for sale.)

Why I'm not going to wait for a 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro

Rumor has it (isn't Mr/Ms Rumor a reliable source?) that a 13 inch Retina Macbook Pro will be announced by Apple on September 12, along with the long-awaited iPhone 5 and probably other goodies.

I've used a 13 inch MacBook Pro for over three years. Love it!

At least I did, until the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro was released. Since, I've bounced back and forth about what Apple laptop should replace my aged current one.

On the day of the release I blogged, "New Retina MacBook Pro or MacBook Air? Laptop lust will decide." At that point I was debating between the 15 inch Retina and 13 inch Air models.

A few days later I was thinking, "Reasons to choose a basic MacBook Pro over the Retina." I could get a solid state drive in a basic new MacBook Pro and also still have a built-in DVD drive, which I use fairly frequently.

But a few days after that I wrote "How I'm talking myself into buying a Retina MacBook Pro."

So I've been all over the Apple laptop map, comparing specs, reading reviews, and looking at the new Apple offerings in the Bridgeport Village Apple Store several times.

Eventually the big question for me came down to a choice between the 15 inch and anticipated 13 inch Retina MacBook Pros. I couldn't decide whether the bigger screen real estate in the 15 inch outweighed the lighter weight and smaller form factor in a 13 inch Retina laptop.

When I played with a 15 inch'er in the Apple Store, it just seemed so big. I wasn't sure whether it would fit as comfortably in my compact BBP Industries backpack that I like a lot. But the BBP specs say it will hold a 15 inch Apple laptop just fine.

Here's what has sold me on not waiting for a 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro.

I'd like a bigger screen. And the 15 inch Retina weighs 4.46 pounds, almost exactly the same as the 4.5 pound 13 inch MacBook Pro that I've been happily hauling around for three-plus years. And when I calculated the size of each, it turns out that the volume of the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro (97.6 cubic inches) is smaller than the volume of my 13 inch regular MacBook Pro (108.5 cubic inches).

The reason: the Retina laptop is just .71 inches thick, while the old MacBook Pro is .95 inches thick.

So if I get a 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro, actually I'll have 11 cubic inches more space in my backpack's laptop compartment -- seemingly plenty of room to put a portable SuperDrive and Ethernet connector when I need to carry around those gadgets.

Given that screen size has become my major purchase criterion, I don't see any need to learn how the anticipated 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro will be configured. Aside from being cheaper, I doubt it will have any technological plus'es over the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro, other than being smaller and lighter (for those who consider that a plus).

I might change my mind again, of course.

For now, though, I'm strongly leaning toward bringing a 15 inch'er into my life. (But I'm somewhat concerned about reports of Retina screen problems; only with LG displays, though; guess I could demand a Samsung display if I buy the laptop at an Apple store). 

Warning should come with 2012 Portland Street of Dreams

Last Friday my wife and I, along with two south Salem neighbors, ventured up I-5 to experience the 2012 version of Northwest Natural's Portland-area Street of Dreams. 

We enjoyed ourselves, but after gawking at seven houses in the $950,000 to $1,300,000 price range I felt like every admission ticket should come with a warning:

Visitors to the Street of Dreams are hereby warned that after viewing these houses, you will find your own home disgusting and unlivable. Everything you like about your current home will seem shabby and horribly out of date.

Unless you're a 1%'er, what you lust for in the new houses will be beyond your means, so you will die frustrated, feeling that your life has been lived in a rundown shanty compared to what could have been. Enjoy the Street of Dreams. Then, expect to feel depressed when you walk in your own front door. 

The difference between Salem and Portland is made clear by the cities' respective Street of Dreams. This year Salem dreamed of affordable homes that were mostly in the $300,000 range, or less. My wife and I didn't bother to go. Average isn't very interesting, even if brand new.

But the 2012 Portland Street of Dreams had us Wow'ing at almost every room of the seven houses. As Susan Nielsen said in her Oregonian column:

This year's Street of Dreams in West Linn isn't just the usual builders' showcase of luxury suburban mansions. It's also a time machine taking you back to the housing market of 2007, when houses were pure money and a nicer one was always right around the corner. 

The majority of us don't live in that housing market anymore. In most parts of Oregon and for most income brackets, it doesn't exist. But you can visit it for fun, or for old time's sake. It smells of new bark dust and new wealth, each house standing as a shrine to a time of wanting more, buying more and trading up. 

True. However, my daughter lives in the Hollywood area, where a million dollars doesn't buy you anywhere near the luxury it does in Portland.

In recompense for all the trouble she caused me when she was a teenager (including deciding to attend college at the University of Arizona so I could pay out of state tuition for four years), I like to send her links like this one, which shows House #3, our favorite, "The Oregon Dream." 4,776 square feet. 5 bedrooms plus bonus, 3 1/2 baths. $1,075,000. 

Eat your bigger-home-lusting heart out, dear daughter! Be sure to watch the video, so you'll be as unhappy with your southern California home as we are with our south Salem home after touring the Street of Dreams.

 

Not surprisingly, my wife and I tended to ooh and ah over different features of the houses. Living as we do in an early 70's home, when people apparently owned far fewer clothes than they do now, Laurel longs for a walk-in closet that's even half the size of what is standard in high-end houses these days.

She also loved the gigantic walk-in showers.

Sometimes Laurel bathes our 65 pound dog in our shower, which isn't much bigger than a phone booth (if you remember what those looked like). They barely fit. But if we lived in one of the Tour of Homes houses, we could get a full-grown water buffalo for a pet and keep it clean. No problem.

I, on the other hand, now don't see how it is possible for me to live contentedly without a covered "patio" area that is much more like a living room stuck outdoors than an old-fashioned patio. 

What I need, desperately, are cushy leather couches, gas-powered fire pit and grill, big screen TV, a large water feature that looks like it was transplanted from an old growth forest, a hidden speaker system, built in mini-kitchen, and Zen'ish decor to aid in my contemplation of life's natural simple pleasures as I sip from my $80 bottle of wine while enjoying an Oregon rain storm from the comfort of my warm and dry outdoor pleasure palace.

So my wife and I both have unrealistic, yet utterly real, lusts for some home makeovers.

Sadly for our VISA balance, and fortunately for Laurel, houses in the 2012 Street of Dreams also featured more practical items -- such as a tile'ish floor covering for our kitchen and a low-backed couch that I didn't even know we needed, yet obviously we do, if my wife says so.

Disappointingly frequently Laurel reached for the Street of Dreams program I was carrying and wrote down I want! notes next to the description of the house we were in. I tried to find the program after we got home so I could bury it in the garbage can where she wouldn't find it, but it had disappeared. 

Likely Laurel has it squirreled away in her Home Improvement file, which contains a seemingly endless list of ideas to make our lives more perfectly contented once X, Y, or Z becomes a part of our house.

Thank you (not entirely ironically) Portland Street of Dreams for making that file thicker.

As for me, rumors abound that the iPhone 5 will be released in a month. Now that definitely will make my life hugely happier since I have an ancient outdated iPhone 4, at least until the iPhone 6 comes along. And we can actually afford new iPhones. 

Note: the Portland Street of Dreams continues through August 26, 2012. So if you're feeling unduly satisfied with your life and live in the area, head over to West Linn.

Act my age? That's a really bad idea.

My driver's license says I'm 63. So does my birth certificate. But how old am I, really? Answering that question requires that we get down to what's real.

And that's a matter of opinion.

Yes, I believe in objective reality when it comes to science. I won't argue calendar facts. The Earth takes a year to go around the sun. I've been alive for 63 of them. No argument there.

But subjective reality is really real also. When I ignore the subjectively irrelevant detail of my calendar age, close my eyes, forget the past, focus on the now, and simply feel how old I am, I have no idea. None at all. 

So far as I can tell, I'm ageless. 

Getting back into recollection mode, I try to remember how it felt to be ten years old. Meaning, what the conscious experience of being me was like. Pretty damn close, if not exactly, like it feels now. Ditto if I think about what it felt to be 20, 30, 40, 50.

Given this subjective fact, I'm evolving a personal theory about aging: it's biological for sure, yet psychology plays at least as important a role. We're told, "act your age." 

Bad idea. Really bad idea.

Doing that locks us into a mindset dominated by the calendar, not our genuine self. More accurately, our genuine non-self. There's nobody 63 years old inside my head. Neuroscience can't find a senior citizen in my brain's neurons. 

Whatever old person exists within my psyche is created by my own mental processes, and those can be altered.

I really enjoy looking at my skateboard (longboard) whenever I go into the room where I keep it.

I haven't had time to practice riding it for a few days. Tomorrow, probably. I've loosened up the trucks, which makes it easier to turn. I'm still a beginner, but after a few hours of longboarding I feel like I'm ready to move on to another level of learning.

Understand: acting a quarter my age (lots of longboarders are teenagers) would be ridiculous if I was forcing myself to do it. There's nothing more fakey than an old guy/gal who artifically tries to look and act like someone much younger.

However, if the part of you that doesn't know how old the calendar says you are speaks, "do it!", pay attention.

Whatever it is -- if not excessively illegal or immoral.

When a 71 year old guy who struck me as ageless told me about how much he liked longboarding, my intuitive immediate reaction was "yes! that's for me!" Later, if I thought about my chronological age, some qualms would start to arise.

But when I simply focused on how I felt about smoothly carving my way down sloping streets or paved pathways, considering the fitness of my in-shape senior citizen body as objectively as I could, there didn't seem to be any reason to act my age.

Like I said before, I believe that each of us plays a big role in how aging affects us. Dwelling on how many years the calendar says we've been alive pushes an essentially irrelevant fact into the forefront of our psyche, obscuring our subjectively truer sense of how old we feel ourselves to be.

A few days ago I had an interesting experience.

A friend told me that he'd been hitting his head quite often lately. He didn't know why. He'd just been bumping into stuff, including a painful encounter with a large bolt above him that he wasn't aware of before straightening up.

For at least fifteen years, maybe twenty, I've been using the same sort of weight machines at our athletic club. I can't recall ever hitting my head on them. Until the very afternoon of the day I'd heard about my friend's head bumping problems.

After leaning in to change the pin which controls a machine's weight stack, I hit my head on a metal support. Damn, it hurt! I ran my fingers through my hair to see if I was bleeding. Nope. But it sure felt like I should have been.

My first thought after Damn! was... "I'd just heard about someone else hitting his head. Is it possible that my unconscious guided me to mimic what happened to him?"

Sure seems possible. Our brains work in mysterious ways. For sure, I don't believe we create our own objective reality. I'm too scientific for that. However, I do believe that we largely create our own subjective reality. 

What we think about, what enters our brains through other means, all that alters our inner geography. We form the world within which we live, then continually reform it through every thought, emotion, perception, sensation.

So don't think about how old you are. Feel how old you are. Wordlessly. Intuitively. If you feel ageless, or much younger than your years, that's more true than what your driver's license tells you. Regardless, don't worry about acting your age.

Act however you damn well feel like.

"Safety Huey" would agree. He's a long-haired longboarder of indeterminate age who is featured in a You Tube video showing tips for safely longboarding in the Portland hills. (There's no way to truly satirize Portland; this wonderful city to the north of me is a beautiful satire of itself.)

Safety Huey wears a t-shirt that says, "65 isn't old, if you're a tree." Well, then, be a tree.

 

My wife parallel parks better than me

Wow. I said it. Right there in the title of this blog post. A headline. Wasn't as hard as I thought. 

Neither was getting out of our car yesterday after I'd mangled my first attempt at getting into a fairly tight parking space on a cross-street between LIberty and Commercial, conveniently near the Salem Art Fair in Bush Park.

"There's a spot!" my passenger-seated wife had yelled out a minute or so before.

"I think it's too small," I told her, not entirely accurately. Because actually what had gone through my mind as I glanced at the size of the parking space between two cars was, That's going to be tough for me to parallel park in.

Because I still have some lingering needs to assert my manly parking skills, notwithstanding the bold honesty of this blog post, I want to point out that in my lengthy parking career I've successfully parallel parked countless times, beginning at age 16 with the dreaded driver's test exam.

Parallel parking was what scared us learner's permit holders the most.

Friends a bit older than me had shared horror stories of hitting cones, or whatever, while taking the parking portion of their driver's test, thereby setting back a few weeks their acquisition of a coveted license.

My mother, a divorcee, owned a 57' VW bug though. I breezed through the parking portion of the test. Back in 1964 lots of American cars were giant, so fitting a Volkswagen into a space suitable for one of them was pretty damn easy.

Over the years I can remember some parallel parking triumphs that merit a Gold Medal. Like finding a miniscule space after driving around with my wife and some friends for what seemed like eons in the NW 23rd Street neighborhood of Portland, where parking spaces are as rare as right-wing Republicans.

I'd stopped next to the car in front of the space, preparing to back into it. Another parking space-seeking car was close behind me, the driver undoubtedly thinking "I'll grab this spot after that gray-haired geezer gives up on it."

The parking space was small. I had a parallel parking audience. I felt the pressure from the driver behind me (could almost hear baseball'ish taunting coming from him, Hey driver, hey driver, no way you're going to fit, no way, hey driver!)

But I did. First try.

I strutted out of the car and admired my handiwork. Tires even against the curb, about a inch from it. Our car also was evenly spaced between the vehicles ahead and behind. Just a foot or so separated our front and rear bumpers. 

I felt like a freaking parallel parking star. This was before the days of smart phones, or I would have taken a photo of my amazing accomplishment. 

Way different from how I felt yesterday upon ending up at an embarassingly unparallel angle after making my first attempt at getting into the space.

I'd started way too far out from the car in front. We'd taken our month old Chevy Volt, which my wife has come to love hugely more than the detested Nissan Leaf we'd owned before. The Volt basically is Her Car. I usually drive my equally beloved Mini Cooper, which is a lot smaller and has much better rear visibility.

OK, Brian. Enough excuses. Get to the point. 

I'm trying. It's just tough... my self-esteem... the Internet is so public... everyone will know... got to just SAY IT.

My wife looked at me and asked, "Do you want me to park the car? I'm good at parallel parking."

Compared to who? my male mind began to scream.

But I already knew the answer. As would anyone who drove down the side street, seeing me stuck at that horribly awkward angle neither in nor out of the parking space, blatantly obstructing any traffic that soon was almost certainly going to come along.

Rapidly assessing my options, I decided it'd be best to show my sensitive, egoless, feminist-supporting side. Or at least, pretend to show it.

"Sure," I told Laurel. "Give it a try."

I put the car in park, jumped out of the driver's seat, and stood on the grass next to the curb, doing my best to look like I was helping my wife parallel park, as a dutiful husband would if she was driving and needed some assistance getting into a small spot.

It was difficult to keep up that look, though, because Laurel smoothly pulled up close to the car ahead, started to back up, then turned the wheel sharply just as her front tire got to the rear tire of the other car, angling expertly into the parking space on her first try.

Textbook parallel parking.

To support the shaky cover story of why I was standing on the sidewalk while my wife parked the car, I yelled out a few unnecessary comments. "You've got plenty of room. Keep going back. Still got a foot or so. OK, stop!"

It was a beautiful display of parallel parking. After we finished walking around the Art Fair and got back to the car, I told Laurel, "You drive." She deserved the honor for the rest of the day. (I usually drive, parallel parking being a rare event in the places we usually visit.)

Today, thankfully, was another day.

My wife had struggled to balance her credit union checkbook and finally given up. I told her, "No problem. I'll handle it." Which I did. I'm a checkbook balancing genius. Parallel parking, not so much.

My senior citizen skateboarding: days 1 & 2

Yeah, I did it. Got a skateboard. Longboard, actually. They're different breeds of the same four-wheeled animal. Quite different critters.

Skateboards are all tricky; longboards are for cruising, carving, dancing. I thought about the pros and cons of jumping into longboarding at the age of 63 (see here and here). 

Then my inner voice, which hopefully isn't a senile or self-destructive one, spoke to me. "Dude, do it!" Since it used the word dude, I trusted the voice. Figured it was in tune with the skateboarding vibe. 

After talking with the dudes at Salem's Exit Real World skateboard/snowboard shop, I settled on a Landyachtz longboard, The Switch. The description appealed to me, even though I have no idea what the "new school freeride movement" is.

Sure seems like something I need to be a part of, whatever it is.

Our premier freeride specific board which has helped define the emerging ride style of today's longboarder. This board has given riders of all levels the chance to experience the new school freeride movement making stand up slides and drifting easier than ever.

I like: how the platform is dropped low; it feels stable... how the board is symmetrical, so I can't get it pointed the wrong way... how there's "dropped hips" (sounds like my aging body) at each end where my feet can get pretty much locked in.

If you are a 50'ish AARP member or even -- gasp! -- a social security recipient (I'm both) who is considering getting a longboard, my main message is what I said above. Dude, do it! 

After you think about it. Like I did.

I'm physically fit. I do Tai Chi. I ballroom dance. I regularly lift weights and do the ellipical trainer aerobic thing. I'm handling my longboard quite well after just an hour or so of practicing. Video evidence below. Many fellow senior citizens could follow in my Vans-clad footsteps.

Step 1 at the skateboard shop: tell the salesman, "I want to look cool, even if I end up longboarding like shit."

Step 2: be safe. I ended up buying a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and gloves. So far I've only worn the knee pads and gloves, because I've been practicing at slow speeds on flat ground. When I go out on a road, the helmet and elbow pads will go on also.

I've ridden a big Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter for three years, never failing to wear a full set of protective gear every time I get on it. (I'm selling the scooter, figuring that one risky activity at a time is enough for me; the skateboard shop dudes, by the way, told me that longboarding is way safer than motorcycling/scootering; I agree.)

So I'm used to reducing risk by wearing the right gear. Us senior citizen skateboarders need to be particularly attentive to this, given that we heal more slowly than younger folk. 

In my two days of practicing, I've had a few stumbles, but no falls. I've even been able to hold my iPhone while I recorded some on-board video action. My wife said, "Who wants to see where you're going, without seeing you on the board?" 

Well, I'm not expecting my Senior Citizen Skateboarder series will go viral on You Tube. And soon I'll share some third-person view videos of me in my oh-so-cool Vans shoes doing whatever I'm able to do on my longboard.

Which is, so far, push off... go in a straight line... stop by a foot drag... make sweeping turns on flat ground.

Tomorrow, though, down Pikes Peak! Well, maybe after quite a few tomorrows. Here's what I've been up to on day 1 and day 2 of my longboarding. 

 

 

 

Indiana is weird: down on coffee, up on chickens in swings

Yesterday I got back from a visit to Indiana. It was bizarre there.

Starting with the weather. On Saturday we were driving around in our (blessedly) air conditioned rental car. I glanced at the outside temperature display.

108 degrees. One...hundred...eight...degrees.

With high humidity. I felt like I was being waterboarded while standing straight up. At first it was difficult for my Oregon lungs to breathe. I kept thinking, "Is this air, or watery gruel I'm inhaling?"

Whenever the highly unusual heat wave came up in a conversation with locals, I'd mention global warming as often as I could. Indiana being rather (or a lot?) conservative, those two words seemed to pass through the brains of Indianans without leaving much of a trace.

I heard this year's corn crop is drying up. Maybe that will drive some climate change sense into midwest right-wing heads.

Bloomington, though, seemingly is the Indiana equivalent of Texas' Austin: an enclave of progressivism in a state that doesn't similarly lean leftward. We felt more at home in Bloomington, particularly at the Roots restaurant -- vegetarian and organic friendly. 

But after we ate our lunch... coffee bizarreness ensued.

My wife, Laurel, wanted to get a cup of coffee and some sort of healthy muffin. How tough is that in Portland, Eugene, Corvallis, Ashland, Bend, or even here in less-cool Salem? Yes, we were in Indiana, not Oregon. Yet wouldn't liberal Bloomington have the same sort of caffeinated vibe?

We figured it would.

So after Laurel rejected the first coffee place we found after leaving the restaurant (it's muffins weren't organic, or whole grain, or something), we walked up the block in 104 degree weather, expecting that we'd soon run into another coffee house.

After all, downtown Salem has two Starbucks on opposite ends of the same downtown block. And across the street is the Beanery, another coffee house with healthy snacks. And a block or so away in one direction is the Governor's Cup, with the Clockworks Cafe a block away in the other direction.

Indiana, however, isn't nearly as coffee-addicted as Oregon is. My wife and I wandered on for several more blocks in the water-boarding'ish heat, looking for hot coffee, Oregonians that we are. 

No luck.

Laurel said, "Where's the nearest Starbucks?" I got out my iPhone and fired up the Starbucks app. Good god! None near downtown, where we were. I was starting to get freaked out. What kind of city doesn't have a Starbucks or other coffee house on every block? 

A non-Oregon city, obviously. We ended up driving back to the resort where we were staying. Which, also bizarrely, daily supplied only one regular coffee packet and one decaf packet for the inroom coffee machine. 

First thing we did after checking in was write a note for the maid service: "Please leave three packets of regular coffee, no decaf." That'd get us Oregonians through the morning. Barely.

Lastly, the chicken on a swing thing. I'd heard that tipping cows was a form of midwest entertainment, but putting chickens on swings? New to me. Here's video evidence that this is a hot Indiana trend.

 

Senior citizen skateboarding: my new passion?

Can't get it out of my mind. Longboarding, which is skateboarding on, duh..., a longer board.

After blogging about how I'm seriously considering giving longboarding a try at the age of 63, asking "am I crazy?", I've come to no firm conclusion. Of course, knowing the answer wouldn't tell me much. I've never had a desire to be averagely normal.

And leaving aside obvious clinical insanity, craziness is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. We all do, think, and believe stuff which makes other people say, that's crazy! While to us... they're crazy.

So viva la craziness. The world would be way too boringly sane without it.

The Great God Google provides me with lots of fodder to feed unlimited herds of pro and con arguments about taking up skateboarding at my rather advanced physical age (psychologically, I'm embarassed to reveal how young I feel).

Lena Salmi, a 58 year old woman who happily longboards in Helsinki, Finland, inspired me on the pro side. 

The city is an adventure playground for a skateboarder, Lena Salmi claims. She views her home town with fresh eyes: there is a good chicane over there, and this is a good site for tricks. A public space need skateboarders more than the boarders need the city, she argues.
      “We give the city a measuring scale and show how a space works. We also develop the street culture. Longboarding is an incredible means of contact between people. Passers-by stop to look at us. All of a sudden the civil servants are not quite in such haste.”
      ”I allow the onlookers to have try for themselves and the dogs to sniff my board.”
      Salmi declares that she is having a lot of fun when she is skateboarding.
      Not everybody, it seems, is OK with that.
      ”A man cycling by once asked me: ‘Why do you bother with that stuff, an adult woman like you?’ I replied that I was a woman, but not an adult.”
      ”Another time a little boy asked how I was allowed to skateboard, even though I was so old. Where does the joy disappear from a person’s life?”

Tracy McMillan's If You Fall, You're in Trouble was much more of a downer.

I actually know a few of these Grown Man Skateboarders, living as I do in Los Angeles' hipster-strewn Eastside. It's hard to really be against older dudes on skateboards! They look cute with the wind in their hair -- but then, I've always been sort of partial to the manchild. It seems to me the real problem is that if they fall, they're in trouble. I once dated a guy who'd been a skateboarder in his youth -- he had broken virtually every bone in his body. No, seriously. He had bones sticking up at 90 degree angles out of, like, his clavicle. Rainy days are going to be hard for that guy in 2030.

A lot more positive is Am I too old to learn to skate? Amusingly (for an old geezer like me), the oldest specific example cited of someone starting to skateboard was Jose, who returned to the sport at the -- gasp! -- ancient age of 45.

It comes down to my basic rule for living: there are no rules. Including that one. Life is a mystery. Dive into it however, wherever, whenever you feel like it; swim around; explore; it'll still be a mystery.

I emailed the dudes and dudettes at Exit Real World, an Oregon skateboard/snowboard business with stores in Salem and Portland. I've always liked the name. Never been in the store. I quasi-seriously explained why I first wanted to ask them my crazy question via email.

Yesterday I wrote a blog post called, "At 63, I'm seriously considering skateboarding. Am I crazy?" I've gotten one comment from a friend who is about my age. His answer: yes.

For a while today I thought I agreed with him. But somehow I can't get the notion of longboarding out of my mind. 

...So I'm asking for your honest opinion. I realize that you're in the business of selling skateboards and gear, but you're also in the business of guiding people in the best direction for them -- which could involve, I assume, telling them "skateboarding/longboarding isn't for you."

...I was worried that if a 63 year oid guy walked into your Salem store, alarm bells would go off, a trap door would open up, and I'd find myself in an underground chute that leads to the Senior Center. An email seemed like a safer way to start off getting your opinion on 60+ longboarding. Any advice, based on your experience and expertise, would be welcomed.

l got a reply today. I liked how it started off. And ended.

Hey Brian, I was thoroughly entertained by that read. I've been in the skateboard industry for the past 10 years and have seen all shapes, sizes, and ages skateboarding. That's the good part, there aren't any rules for skateboarding. I think that plays a big part in the popularity of skateboarding.

...What's the worst that could happen when in a helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards on if you chose that route? As long as you take it slow and learn the basics and don't start at the top of booyah hill in South Salem I'm sure you'll do just fine!

Well, I can evision various "worst's."

But the good news is that in 2011 there was only one skateboarding fatality of someone 25 years or older. Just one! And that person was 35. Senior citizen skateboarding is perfectly safe! (Along with being extremely rare.)

Most people think of tricksters in skate parks when skateboarding comes to mind. But there's all kinds of ways to get on a board and enjoy yourself. Like I was told, there aren't any rules. Longboarding simply can be a means of commuting, of getting from here to there.

Or, of dancing. This video appeals to me. I doubt I'll ever be dancing on a longboard with anywhere near this sort of expertise. But I could do whatever I can do. Which is the whole point of skateboarding.

 

At 63, I'm seriously considering skateboarding. Am I crazy?

I've never been on a skateboard in my sixty-three years.

But after a great conversation yesterday with a guy eight years older than I am, I'm seriously thinking of getting a longboard skateboard -- for cruising around, not doing fancy tricks.

Is this crazy? Not to me. And not to the 71 year old man I met while we were waiting for our cars to be serviced at Mini of Portland.

Killing time, we found ourselves standing together, looking at the new Mini two seat model in the showroom. Noticing what I was wearing, he said "That's a Crazy Shirt." "Yeah," I replied. "T-shirt and pants both; I love Crazy Shirt clothes; wear them all the time."

He was similarly attired. Had on the same Kona Coffee-dyed pants I often wear. We bonded immediately. Two old guys who like fast, fun cars like our Mini Coopers and comfortable, youthful Hawaiian-themed clothing.

In the course of our conversation, I mentioned how I'd been pondering taking snowboarding lessons this coming winter. (I used to ski, but don't play around in the snow anymore.) That led him to say: "How old do you think I am?"

"I don't know," I told him. "You look fit, but you're probably older than I am." "I'm seventy-one," he said. "Until four years ago I was a skateboarder." 

A longboard skateboarder, he explained, looking longingly out the window at busy four-lane Canyon Road, which leads downhill from Portland's Sunset Freeway into the non-wilds of Beaverton. "That'd be such a great road to ride a longboard on -- if it wasn't so filled with traffic."

It turned out that he'd "caught an edge" (not sure what this means on a longboard) while avoiding an obstacle on a downhill road run. The fairly serious fall made him realize that his reflexes weren't as good as they used to be, so he gave up longboarding.

Still... "You should do it!" he enthusiastically told me. "I had four or five boards at one time, and made one myself. Get a good carving board. Remember that word: carving."

Well, I just might take his advice.

Going on my usual two-mile dog walk this afternoon, I looked with fresh eyes upon the sparsely traveled rural road that loops through our neighborhood. Some parts are pretty steep, but (perhaps overconfidently) I imagined myself smoothly carving my way down them, cap on backward, grooving to the beat of my 63 year old mind which is still young enough to come up with thoughts like "grooving."

My Mini Cooper friend and I (never got his name) agreed on a lot during our brief conversation. Life is short. It can end at any moment. Risks are everywhere. Yes, skateboards are dangerous. So is simply living. 

There's lots of ways to "catch an edge" and take a tumble.

Cancer. Heart attack. Car accident. Falling off a ladder. Recently a newcomer to my Tai Chi class said he broke his back while simply standing on his snowboard, turning to look at a cute girl, and falling on his butt.

I'm not really disheartened by how few hits I got on a "senior citizen skateboarder" Google search. I don't feel like I'm as old as I am. I'm in very good physical shape. I do Tai Chi, lift weights, ballroom dance, hike and bike, boogie board big waves in Hawaii regularly. I could handle a longboard skateboard, for sure.

Just like this 72 year old man did first time out in the only You Tube video I found of someone my age or older skateboarding (but I didn't search very long).

 

l like his attitude. At the end of the video he also expresses a "just do it" philosophy.

My Mini Cooper friend told me that he thinks he could live to be ninety. His goal is to die a slippery slope sort of death: be bold and active right up until the end, then, whoosh!, abruptly slide into that last breath and heartbeat.

Sounds good to me also.

I hope the guy gets back on his board one day. Make a You Tube video when you're ninety, dude. I'll watch it when I'm 83. Maybe while I'm still riding a skateboard (around the old folks home?).

Baby owl visits us, then freezes like a statue

A few days ago my wife and I were about to get in our car. I was locking the front door when I heard Laurel say, "Brian, look at this. An owl!"

It looked like a garden statue, perched in groundcover just off the edge of a stepping stone leading to our carport.

At first I was worried that it'd fly off if I aproached it from the front with my iPhone in hand. But no. What we assumed was a baby owl was so "frozen," I never saw it even blink.

(Laurel watched it longer than I did and eventually saw it blink.)

From above, it must have been almost invisible, given its markings and how it blended in so well with surrounding vegetation.

Freezing makes a lot of sense for a little owl out in the daytime. Danger largely lurks from above. Hawks must look for motion, so a stationary creature isn't likely to grab their attention.

It was gone by the time we got home after doing some errands. My wife had thought about picking it up and putting it in a tree if it was still there. Looking at its expression, and beak, my feeling was "no way."

We're glad we sold our Nissan Leaf and bought a Volt

After two weeks with our 2012 Chevy Volt, my wife and I are pleased with our decision to sell our 2011 Nissan Leaf and get an electric car that also runs on gas.

(Our reasons for selling the Leaf are detailed here; photos of our Volt and first-day-home impressions are here.)

We had our Leaf for about six months. We've only been driving the Chevy Volt for two weeks. But important benefits of the Volt are clear already.

"Range anxiety" is gone with the Volt. We never ran out of electricity with the Leaf. Usually we'd get home with plenty of estimated range left, forty or fifty miles, or even more. But even when I wasn't consciously aware I was driving a fully electric car, an undercurrent of anxiety was present in my psyche. 

With the Leaf, running out of battery power means calling a tow truck. With the Volt, I calmly watch the remaining range indicator drop down to 1 mile, then wait for the gasoline powered generator to kick in, which runs the car's motor.

Big difference.

Emotionally the Volt is much more enjoyable to drive. Yet even with a trip to Portland (about fifty miles away), we've gotten 178 MPG out of the 430 miles driven so far. Most days, our gasoline mileage is infinite, since the Volt's 40-45 mile range on pure electric power allows us to drive around without using any gas.

The Volt feels normal, in a good way. Knowing that a fill-up is just a quick stop at a gas station away, rather than a lengthy stay at a charging station, makes driving the Volt feel much more like a normal car.

With the Leaf, I was always aware of driving an electric car; with the Volt, that feeling is in the background -- even though I like to keep an eye on the vehicle's electricity status display just to see what's happening with the battery pack.

That said, I like quirky cars. I mostly use our Mini Cooper S, while the Volt is my wife's main drive. I enjoy how the Mini's windows are controlled by rocker switches above the shift lever. After more than a year, my wife still gets irritated by this. 

"Why aren't they by the windows, like in every other car?" she asks. "Because the Mini is designed to be different," I reply. My wife likes the Volt because it feels so normal. It attracts attention not so much because it screams Electric!, as the Leaf does. Rather, it looks good. Sporty, lowslung.

The Volt is more pleasant to drive. My wife hated the unsupportive seats in our Leaf. She also disliked the light interior. The Volt's seats are much more comfortable. They don't feel very different from the Mini's seats: firm, with good side support to hold you in place under spirited driving.

Which can be done with the Volt. It doesn't handle like a Mini (few cars do), but it feels much more sports car-like than a Nissan Leaf. To me the Leaf exuded airiness, openness, futureosity. The Volt feels denser, enclosed, traditionally carlike.

This has pluses and minuses.

I didn't like the Volt's large rear pillars when I first drove the car, and I still don't. Rearward visibility sucks. And the car seems mildly claustrophobic compared to the Leaf. My Mini's large moonroofs let in light and a view of the sky; in the Volt I feel confined in a low, dark, interior.

However, this doesn't really take away from how much I enjoy driving the Volt. Yesterday I even found myself thinking (briefly) that I liked driving it as much as the Mini. That isn't really true. The Mini is much faster, handles much better, and has an appealing quirkiness the Volt lacks.

Still... the displays and audio system in the Volt are much more comprehensible and understandable than either the Leaf's or the Mini's. Chevrolet did a great job with both the touchscreen and other controls. I don't need to consult the owner's manual to figure out how to do something, as I have had to do with the Mini Cooper.

All in all, there's little we don't like about the Chevy Volt. Rear visibility is my main gripe, but after quite a bit of observing the right side blind spot, I've pretty much determined that when a car is no longer visible in the right side mirror, it is clearly visible via a look to the right.

(I'm just used to changing lanes with more confidence in the Mini and the Leaf.)

My only real anxiety now is whether we signed up for a lease with enough miles on it. Based on how we drove our two Prius'es (Prii?), we decided to go with 10,000 miles a year. That should be enough, but given how enjoyable the Volt is to drive, at the moment I'm choosing it over the Mini when my wife isn't driving the Volt more than I thought I would.

Likely that's just new car infatuation, though. And with the aid of our Chevy salesman, we figured out that even with the over-mileage penalty, it's still cheaper to sign up for a 10,000 a mile lease even if 1,000 extra miles a year are driven.

Bottom line: the Nissan Leaf is an excellent electric car. The people we sold our Leaf to are enjoying it a lot. But for us, the Chevy Volt is an even better choice. 

How I'm talking myself into buying a Retina MacBook Pro

Without rationalizations, what would my life be? Dreadfully filled with, ugh!, impersonal reality. I've got sound neuroscience on my side here.

Ever since Apple announced the Retina MacBook Pro, I've been wrestling with whether I should get one. On the day news of the new laptop was released, I presciently blogged, "New Retina MacBook Pro or MacBook Air? Laptop lust will decide."

That's how it's been going the past eight days.

Logic and reason lead me one way, emotion and intuition lead me another way. And here's the likely neuroscientific fact: my brain (a redundancy, because "my brain" is me) already has made the decision. I'm the last one to know what unconscious brain processes already have decided.

Can't be absolutely sure what that is. 

But the fact that I've been spending quite a bit of time thinking up rationalizations for spending $600 or $700 more to get a Retina MacBook Pro, rather than a basic MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, seems to indicate which way my brain is pointing.

Sure, I went off on a reasonable route when I wrote a follow-up post, "Reasons to choose a basic MacBook Pro over the Retina." What I said made a lot of sense. Yet I resonated with what Steve, a commenter on that post, told me.

Your reasoning is rock solid and I agree with every point. But after seeing the retina display in an apple store in Columbus Ohio, I had to have the new box. Stay tuned.

I haven't seen a Retina MacBook Pro in person yet. Probably I will soon. When that happens, I suspect that I'll fall in love with the laptop, just as Steve did. Mostly with the display. After all, if looks aren't everything with this computer, they're almost everything.

Such is the theme of almost every review I've read about it. The other new features get a thumbs-up. The retina display gets leaping high-fives. For example, Mashable gushes:

Back to that screen. Perhaps surprisingly, the first thing you notice is the deeper colors, not necessarily the sharpness — although that becomes clear when viewing photos with lots of detail. Browsing through the Flickr feed of the NASA Goddard Space Center, the crowd could see those extra pixels working to show, say, the wispy clouds in satellite shots of earth.

Virtually all images were displayed with more vibrant colors and better contrast than on the older Pro.

It’s not just photos that benefit from the extra pixels, but text and iconography as well. Everything from the system fonts to app icons to the galactic background image looks sharper, with better contrast.

After I connected the retina Pro to an external (non-retina) Acer monitor, it became something of a game to drag windows from one screen to the other, watching the images and text magically transform as they crossed from edge to edge, becoming crisper and more affecting.

So I'm assuming that the Retina also will work its magic on me when I see and touch the temptress. This is why I'm working on my rationalizations.

The price difference isn't very much, spaced over three years. I've had my 2008 13 inch MacBook Pro for about three and a half years. A new 15 inch 2.3 GHz Retina MacBook Pro with a 256 GB flash drive, 8 GB of memory, an external superdrive, and an external Ethernet adapter would cost me $2,656.

 A comparably equipped 13 inch basic MacBook Pro would cost me $2,048. That's a $608 difference. For that, I'd get a larger retina display, a quad-core processor, and other high tech goodies such as better sounding speakers, quieter fan, HDMI port.

There are 1095 days in three years, which likely is about how long I'd keep the Retina MacBook Pro. So for a mere 55 cents a day, I'd enjoy all the delights that the most amazing laptop on the planet offers. If I was renting a laptop, would I pay 55 cents more a day for the Retina instead of the basic MacBook Pro?

Sure I would. 

I'm a "creative professional," if I think I am. Just about every review says that the Retina MacBook Pro is aimed at creative professionals, not ordinary laptop users. At first that gave me pause, since I'm retired and use my computer mostly for web surfing, email, writing, and basic photography/videos.

But hey, if I want to consider myself a "creative professional," I damn well can. I'm a published author. I'm working on rewriting my first book, which is out of print. I have two active blogs and spend an hour or two a day composing posts for them.

That's a heck of a lot of creativity going on. It's just the professional part that's a stretch, since the income I get from writing each year wouldn't even pay for a Retina MacBook Pro, much less support me in any sort of non-homeless style.

So what? In my own mind I'm definitely a creative professional who needs a cutting-edge laptop.

Beauty will soothe my soul (even though I don't believe I have one) and save the world. All reviewers agree: the Retina MacBook Pro is a beautiful piece of laptop computer art, along with other Apple produts like the iPhone and iPad. They may have quibbles with aspects of the technology, but the overall impression is beautiful. 

This rationalization has been aided by a book I picked up in the charming "library" that takes up a corner of the Camp Sherman, Oregon post office lobby. Residents of, and visitors to, this small town (pop. 200 or so) leave books there for communal enjoyment. A few days ago I picked up Susan Susanka's "The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters."

She's an architect who writes about remodeling your life, using tried and true design principles. Chapter Two is titled, Noticing What Inspires You. It begins with a Ghandi quote:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Yes! I agree! Mahatma Ghandi clearly is telling me, "Brian, you must buy a Retina MacBook Pro." After all, I want the world to be more beautiful, to have more clarity, to function more effectively. And Susanka writes:

Whether an object or a setting is beautiful or meaningful to anyone but you is irrelevant. It's what that thing or place is accomplishing in your life that counts.

Well, I'm pretty sure that a Retina MacBook Pro will be hugely beautiful and meaningful to me. Won't know for sure until we meet up, face to display, but that's my intuition. Or more accurately, rationalization. 

Welcome to our day old car baby, Chevy Volt

Aw, so cute. When I saw her for the first time she was just five miles old. My wife and I immediately bonded with her. Liked her lines. And her soothing feminine Viridian Joule light greenish color. 

Here she is after we brought her home yesterday from Salem's Capitol Chevrolet dealership.

All on electric power, mostly on the freeway. We then drove into town that evening for a dance lesson and practice. Voltie shifted to gasoline power only for the last mile. Battery range was almost exactly as expected, about 35 miles.

We ordered the Volt, so had to wait several months to get it. There weren't any already built cars available with the options we wanted -- including the Viridian Joule exterior and dark console interior.

Both were good choices. The semi-standard white console looks horrible, in our utterly subjective opinion.

To get black, we had to order leather seats and other "premium trim" goodies. The total price for the car was pretty high, but we're leasing it on a three-year 1%, 10,000 miles a year deal. That made the Volt seem a lot more affordable, especially since the price included a healthy GM rebate and the effect of GM taking the $7,500 electric car federal tax credit.

I'll have more to say about the Volt after we've driven it for longer than one day. So far, my wife and I are impressed. The main problem I'm having is getting used to looking at the Chevy emblem. I haven't owned an American car for over 35 years, and never thought I would again. 

This photo belies that inaccurate assumption.

Rear visibility is my only serious gripe. Changing lanes requires quite a bit more caution than was the case in our previous electric car, a Nissan Leaf, which felt a lot more airy. The Volt is much more sporty, though. The Volt's seats also are vastly more comfortable and supportive than the Leaf's.

And likely we'll be able to get around town most days solely on electric power, as we were able to do with the Leaf. Yet with the comfort of knowing that over 300 miles of gasoline powered range are available.

Plus, I got an absolutely free bag of corn nuts out of the deal, thanks to Kelly Stewart -- who is Capitol's Toyota sales manager, yet agreed to work with us on buying the Volt since we'd bought two Prius's and a Highlander Hybrid from him previously.

Kelly is a carsalesperson delight.

Personable, straightforward, honest, reliable, lighthearted. That's how I got the corn nuts: via our mutual sense of humor. A few weeks ago I emailed Kelly, asking him if he knew the status of our Volt order. Last we knew it was sitting on a train in Ohio.

He responded:

I am checking at which way station it is currently resting… Should be here in less than a week if I were guessing. I will give you an update as soon as I get a call back from GM satellite tracking…

That stimulated a great idea. I immediately replied with:

Thanks. Appreciate your checking the Volt's progress by satellite. Alternatively, here's an idea: pack up a small sleeping bag, water, and lots of bags of corn nuts. Get one of your employees to drive you out to Wyoming, or wherever, and find the train our Volt is on. Sneak onto the rail car. 

Then send us Twitter updates every half hour, complete with a photo of the countryside and GPS coordinates. If you do that, I'll nominate you for the June Chevy Customer Service of the Month Award (leaving aside the minor detail that you work at a Toyota dealership). 

Think about it. You'll get out of the office, and we'll be assured of knowing where the Volt is at every moment. (You can sleep in the 29 minutes between Twitter updates.)

Sadly, Kelly didn't do as I asked.

He did, however, hand me a bag of corn nuts as soon as we met him at the Capitol Chevrolet dealership. Nice gesture, though I would have preferred if he'd ridden along on the train with our car, sending us Twitter updates.

Anyway, we like the Volt, so all is forgiven. Well, except for the fact that my wife and I now already are both addicted to Corn Nuts, a snack we hadn't eaten for many years.

I assume Capitol Chevrolet will be paying for our treatment in a Corn Nut 12-step program.

(Thumbs up also to equally personable Allan Hadley, Capitol Chevrolet/Subaru Fleet Manager, who worked with Kelly and us on finalizing the sale yesterday. My wife and I appreciate car salespersons who act like normal human beings, and treat customers the same way -- as contrasted with the traditional sales games played by car dealership employees. After all, a high quality product should almost sell itself; just look at how Apple is doing.)

Zu Zu, our new dog, wears flowers in her hair

Finally, an almost-summer-feeling Oregon afternoon. Laurel, me, and our two canine dog pack went for a walk around the neighborhood lake. 

A big patch of wildflowers caught my eye.

Also, Laurel's. 

While I was getting out my iPhone and snapping some shots of the flowers, she was adorning Zu Zu with some daisies. Of course, dog photography being what it is, as soon as we tried to pose Zu Zu she shook violently, then laid down on her back.

Which messed up her flower arrangement. Still, it brought back memories of the 60's to see our new dog with flowers in her fur.

Crazy Shirts model spotted at Salem dog park!

OK, let's add "Aspiring" at the start of the title for this blog post.

Because right now I am not an official model of Crazy Shirts clothing. But after Crazy Shirts executives see today's Salem (Oregon) dog park photo shoot, I expect a modeling contract will be in the mail.

(One negative omen, though: Crazy Shirts seems to be age'ist in its current choice of clothing models. On the positive side, there's a dog in this photo of a 2012 photoshoot.)

My own photoshoot was spontaneously organized by my wife, who asked for my iPhone after I cajoled Family Dog #2, Zu Zu, to jump up next to me on a Minto Brown Dog Park bench.

"So cute," Laurel said. I assume she was talking about me, even though she was looking at Zu Zu.

Fortunately for my modeling career, I was wearing my Ugly Tuna Saloona hat, a Chile-Dyed Pepper Dragon t-shirt, and Chocolate-Dyed Canton Sweatpants -- all from Hawaii-based Crazy Shirts, which has become my favorite clothing source (and I'm saying that only partly because I want to kiss up to the Crazy Shirts staff who choose catalog models; I really do love their clothes).

The first photo has some energy to it. However, the vibe I get is of an irritated dog about to bite a guy who's trying to pat it. Probably should omit this one from my Crazy Shirts portfolio.

The second photo turned out better, aside from Zu Zu's butt being crammed into my armpit. On the plus side, Laurel was standing far enough away to prevent the Crazy Shirts' advertising department from clearly seeing how old I am.

An improvement. However, Zu Zu's tongue seems to be sticking out and she isn't exhibiting a high degree of adoring behavior to her owner canine caretaker.

Ah, a big dog smile. And a dog lovingly facing in my direction, subtly encouraged by my right hand pressing into Zu Zu's neck. This photo should put me over the top, Crazy Shirts modeling contract-wise.

The photoshoot ended with some canine backsliding. However, I look pretty damn good, in my utterly subjective opinion. I then grabbed the camera and...

Took a single photo of Laurel with Zu Zu. Sadly for her own modeling career, Laurel isn't wearing anything from Crazy Shirts. 

(And sadly for mine, I don't see "Model" as one of the available career opportunities on the Crazy Shirts web site.)

Innocent bee swarm...or something more sinister?

Maybe I've read too many mystery novels, and watched too many junky murder movies. But...

I'm worried that there's more to this bee swarm than meets the eye. Especially since the swarm is right at eye level, on a branch overhanging a trail that Family Dog #1 and I walk on often.

As soon as I drove home yesterday and got out of the car, Laurel excitedly asked me if I had my iPhone with me. "Of course," I said. "Good. There's a bee swarm on the trail to the creek. My phone's battery is dead. I want you to take a photo of the swarm."

Nothing too suspicious in that request. But when I approached the swarm and told my wife, "No way am I getting any closer," she said "Bees are gentle when they're swarming. Don't worry. You can move nearer."

I noticed, though, that she was standing in back of me. Which got me to thinking...

Bee swarm. Right on the trail where I often walk. Her iPhone conveniently lost its charge. A wife urging her husband to get closer to a humongous bunch of bees. Why, this could mean...

My wife has fallen in love with a bee keeper. A specialist in killer bees. Who has genetically modified the killer bees to look like regular "nice" bees until they sense a pheromone within ten feet of the swarm. Which was surreptitiously sprayed on my hair while I was sleeping. 

Could be. Or, not.

So I'm playing it safe and keeping my distance from the possibly killer bees. Along with making notes for a screenplay to send off to the Lifetime channel. Tentative title of movie: "Sara's Killer Swarm."

Why we sold our Nissan Leaf and bought a Chevy Volt

Goodbye, dear Leaf. I had mixed feelings about seeing our Nissan electric car loaded onto an auto transport trailer a few days ago.

The car was on its way to a new owner in eastern Washington.

It needed a lift, given the Leaf's 100 mile range. I was happy to have sold the Leaf, since the Chevy Volt that we ordered to replace it is on a train at the moment and should arrive in a few weeks. Yet I enjoyed the Leaf and was sort of sad to see it go.

(As described below, my wife felt differently.)

After placing an Auto Trader ad for the Leaf, I got quite a few emails from people asking "Why are you selling the car?" Good question, since we only owned the Leaf for about eight months and it had just 3,000 miles on it.

Here's the detailed answer that I shared.

Our reasons for selling the Leaf are kind of unusual. Meaning, quite specific to us. My wife has a sensitive back. Even though she test-drove a Leaf several times before we bought ours, almost as soon as we got the Leaf home she started feeling uncomfortable in the front seats. That's the main reason we had leather put on the seats, added some firmness to the driver's side seatback, and got the electrically activated lumbar supports in the front seats.

My wife also didn't like the front headrests, which, like on most new cars these days, are angled forward in an attempt to reduce the "whiplash" distance in an accident. So after some negotiating with Nissan, we were able to buy some headrests from another Nissan car that are much more upright. Thus we have two sets of leather headrests that will go with the car when we sell it.

I found the Leaf seats comfortable. Researching this subject on Leaf discussion groups, I learned that some people don't like the seats, while most people do. Consumer Reports thought they were somewhat soft and lacked support. Adding leather and the other things we did helped quite a bit, but my wife still gets some back pain when driving the Leaf. (She also has trouble with many mattresses and chairs, her back being quite sensitive.) So that's one reason.

Another reason -- and this only will make sense to you if you're an avid dog lover, or know someone who is -- is that when the rear seats are folded, the Leaf "luggage" compartment slopes downward toward the hatch, because of the battery stack in the middle of the car. Our oldest dog is 12 1/2 years old. She's getting some hip problems, being a Lab/Shepherd mix. Our dog tilts downhill when she's on the pad that we put in the luggage compartment. Pretty clearly, she doesn't like riding in the Leaf as much as she likes to ride in our Mini Cooper or Highlander SUV. This might not seem like a big deal to you, but you don't know how dog crazy my wife is.

Lastly, we live about six miles from the Salem city limits, out in the country. Even so, range in the Leaf hasn't been a big issue. When the Leaf is fully charged, usually it shows an estimated 100 miles of range, or thereabouts. That's a lot of driving, even starting six miles from Salem -- where we do most of our shopping, errands, and such. Range, though, drops to 80 miles or so in the winter if it's near freezing, given the need to use the heater, wipers, and headlights more. So a minor issue added on to the more important "seat comfort" and "dog" issues is range.

We've ordered a Chevy Volt, which is being built for us. It's supposed to arrive in late May or early June. We're staying electric. But the seats in the Volt feel more comfortable to my wife, and the luggage area where our dog(s) will go is completely flat. That's why we're selling the Leaf. I might have told you more than you need, or want, to know, but felt that if you're thinking of a Leaf, it would be helpful for you to fully understand why we're selling it.

Obviously, it's also got a lot of plus's. Aside from the environmental benefits, freedom from gas stations, and low cost of "filling up," I like the light, quick, airy, high-tech feel of the car, even though I mostly drive my Mini Cooper S. Meaning, I like a responsive sports car feel, yet the Leaf has its own distinctive driving appeal. The Volt feels more sporty, yet the Leaf has an air of quietness (literally, road noise is less in the Leaf than in the Volt), responsiveness, and openness (Leaf feels more spacious than the Volt, and visibility is better) which I like a lot.

Ignoring chainsaw safety tips pays off for stupid me

Sometimes doing a bunch of stupid stuff can add up to something sort of smart, like how multiplying two negative numbers produces a positive result.

Yesterday I broke quite a few chainsaw safety rules. But if I hadn't ignored all of them, I probably would have gotten hurt.

Chain saw stupidity... let me count the ways.

(1) I stood on the top of a folding ladder while using the chainsaw.
(2) I held the chainsaw high over my head while cutting.
(3) I did the work with nobody else close by. 
(4) I failed to consider how a branch could snap back after being cut.

I probably ignored some other chainsaw safety rules also. Not smart. 

I've got a healthy respect for chainsaws, having heard horror stories from people a lot more skillful with them than myself, including a couple of pros who handled damage to a very large oak tree on our property a few years ago. 

These guys laughed while relating a story about how one of them got whacked in the forehead by the very same small Stihl chainsaw model that I own. The tale was indeed funny... in retrospect. But there's nothing humorous about a chainsaw injury, which I've managed to avoid so far.

Even yesterday -- when we had bark dust blown into our non-easycare yard, as we've had done every spring the past three years. The bark and two man crew arrived in a large truck which always has difficulty navigating our narrow, steep, tree-lined driveway.

After the driver backed in almost as far as our carport, I congratulated him. "I'm getting better at it," he said. "There's still a problem with some tree limbs, though."

Looking at the side of the tall truck, I saw what he meant. He'd managed to back in by pushing some fairly substantial (2" thick, or so) protruding oak branches out of the way, along with some smaller fir branches. 

They were pushing against the right side of his truck. I told him, "I'll cut them while you spread the barkdust. Then they'll be out of the way when you leave, and next year it'll be easier for you to get the truck down our driveway."

Good intention. It was the execution that was the problem. 

The more I've used my pleasingly light Stihl chainsaw, the more comfortable I've become with breaking some standard safety rules. Like, not cutting anything above shoulder height. So I took a quick glance at the branches, figured I could reach them if I stood on a folding ladder and stretched my arms out, and got out the equipment that I needed.

Chainsaw. Ladder. Gloves. Safety glasses. Ready to go.

What I should have done, though, is spend more time pondering the position of the thickest oak branch. Semi-consciously I assumed that just the very end of it was being bent back against the side of the truck. However, actually the entire branch was under quite a bit of backward pressure.

That could have been bad news if I'd been following the safety rule: do not operate a chainsaw above shoulder height. Because if I'd leaned an extension ladder against the truck and climbed up until my head was higher than the branch, I'd have gotten a nasty physical shock to add to my mental surprise.

Wow! I thought, watching and feeling the oak branch snap backward with surprising force after the chainsaw had cut most of the way through the wood.

I was happy that the branch had whipped over my head, not into my head (or neck/chest). I wasn't pleased, though, with how the chain had gotten stuck in the cut.

I was still holding onto the chainsaw with my right hand, leaning backward now on the folding ladder, rather than forward, owing to how much the branch had moved after most of the pressure had been released from being against the side of the truck.

I pulled on the blade. Stuck. I pulled harder. Still stuck. What the hell, I said to myself. Done everything wrong up to this point; might as well keep going. 

I decided my best bet (though perhaps not the smartest one) was to try to cut the branch completely through from my precarious leaning one-handed position on the ladder. At first the chain wouldn't turn at all. After a few more tries, it did. The end of the branch dropped to the ground. The part of the branch still attached to the tree snapped back a few more feet.

Hey, that wasn't so bad, said my overly optimistic self. I got off the ladder, pulled the cut branch out of the way, and moved to the next branch that was stuck against the truck. And after that, another one.

Here's the most amazing part of my chainsaw cutting adventure: basically the same thing happened with the next two branches. Guess I'm a slow learner. The branches snapped back after being cut most of the way through, but the chain didn't get caught, and I was a lot more mentally prepared for the whoosh.

Better to be lucky than smart, I guess. Better yet, though, lucky and smart. Next time I use my chainsaw I'll do more thinking about what I'm doing before I do it.

"You look like Richard Branson." Nice compliment.

Though I'm irked at Hawaiian Airlines for dropping its non-stop Portland, Oregon to Maui flight, on our return from Honolulu a few days ago a Hawaiian employee made me feel really good.

I'd forked out an extra $70 for two seats in an exit row, where I'd stretched my legs in comparative comfort for the five hours it took to cross the western Pacific. As we started our descent into Portland, a flight attendant sat down in the jumpseat that faces backwards across from the exit row.

Looking at me, she said, "I've been thinking for the whole trip that you remind me of someone. A little while ago I figured it out -- the guy who runs Virgin Atlantic, you know, um..."

"Richard Branson!" I blurted out, all excited. "Except, he's blonder, tanner, and better looking. Thanks, though."

She added, "I kept wondering why Richard Branson would be flying coach on Hawaiian Airlines." Good point. Unless he was thinking of buying the airline (which I'd be heartily in favor of, if he brought back that direct Portland-Maui flight).

My wife diplomatically said, "Yes, there's a bit of a resemblance." OK, I guess. I just scrolled through quite a few pages of Richard Branson images on Google. I didn't find many that made me think, "That's me."

Yeah, there's a bit of me reflected in this expression. Branson is just a few years younger than I am, which makes me wonder about his decidedly less gray appearance.

And there's a mild resemblance here. Again, there'd be more if Branson was as naturally gray as me.

Sadly, I can't recognize any commonality between me and Richard Branson in this photo. I suck at anything having to do with water skiing. Having a beautiful naked woman hang onto me would make my suckedness even worse, leaving us both in the water (not a distasteful notion, though).

So in the end, I'll preserve a fond memory of the flight attendant's comments through this blog post, but I won't expect to be treated like royalty if I ever fly on Virgin America/Atlantic.

(Note: over on my other blog I've shared some photos of our trip to Maui, along with life lessons learned on tropical beaches.)

Hawaiian Airlines drops non-stop Portland-Maui flights, so we drop Hawaiian

Most likely, yesterday we took our last flight on Hawaiian Airlines. For about twenty years we've flown direct from Portland, Oregon to Maui. In January 2012 Hawaiian dropped non-stop Portland-Maui flights. 

So my wife and I are going to drop Hawaiian. We had lots of frequent flyer miles accumulated through our usually-annual flights to Maui, supplemented by our habitual use of a Hawaiian Airlines VISA card, which gave us one mile for every dollar charged.

This year we used up almost all of our frequent flyer miles to buy "free" tickets for a flight to Maui that required a plane change in Honolulu. Ugh. Never again.

From now on we'll fly Alaska Airlines' non-stop to Maui from Portland. And cancel our Hawaiian VISA card. Hawaiian Airlines made a bad business decision. 

Have you enjoyed direct flights from Maui to Portland on Hawaiian Airlines? That service is about to end. Beginning mid-January, you will need to make connecting flights through Honolulu.

This move is bad for Maui tourism. Nonstop service is what attracts visitors to the Neighbor Islands. With fewer options for direct flights, tourists who understand the consequences of connecting flights will opt for a different airline or a different locale to visit.

The Portland flights always seem full, but if statistics show otherwise, why drop the number of days for the direct service to zero? We understand that difficult business decisions sometimes need to be made, but we don't understand the wisdom of deserting an existing market entirely.

Yesterday we asked a Hawaiian Airlines employee why the non-stop flight was cancelled.

"I have no idea," we were told. "The company doesn't tell us employees anything. The direct flights were almost always full. People liked them. Now we're losing business travelers who can't get to Maui early enough to do a full day's work. You should write Hawaiian and complain."

For sure. I'm going to.

Maybe it won't make any difference, but the more people who gripe about losing the non-stop Portland to Maui flight, the more Hawaiian Airlines will realize that whoever dreamed up this stupid move made a bad decision.

From a Facebook page, I learned that Mahalo@HawaiianAir.com is an email address to send complaints to. And the above-quoted letter from The Maui News says, "Leona Duarte at the airline is accepting email from affected travelers/businesses, Leona.Duarte@HawaiianAir.com" So I'm going to send my message to both email addresses.

I'm going to let Hawaiian Airlines know that it was much less enjoyable to fly to Maui through Honolulu. Yesterday my wife and I left Maui pretty much on schedule at 12:45 pm. Our flight to Portland left Honolulu about twenty minutes late, around 3:00 pm. 

So we spent over two hours getting farther away from Portland. Which meant that by the time we got our bags and hopped on the Park N' Fly shuttle, it was after midnight. Living as we do in south Salem, we didn't get home until close to 2:00 am. 

Not fun. Not compared to the non-stop Portland-Maui flights that we and so many others had come to like so much.

The Hawaiian Airlines employee we talked with had the same attitude as I did: "It just isn't right that now a lot more Oregonians are going to be flying on Alaska Airlines to Maui. Getting to Hawaii should be on Hawaiian Airlines."

I agreed. Wholeheartedly.

My wife and I love the service and island-atmosphere on Hawaiian. More than that though, we love not wasting hours of our time making an unnecessary stop in Honolulu -- which is an unattractive, poorly designed airport with horrible eating options for health-minded vegetarians like us. 

Hawaiian Airlines likely is about to feel the full impact of disgruntled formerly loyal customers. As mentioned above, we've now used up almost all of our frequent flyer miles. From now on, we'll use Alaska Airlines for our annual vacations on Maui.

Good bye, Hawaiian. We've enjoyed your company for several decades. But your inexplicable decision to drop all direct flights to Maui from Portland is causing us to embrace Alaska. Change your ways, and we'll probably come back into your arms wings.

Not if you continue to make us fly through Honolulu, though.

Thanks to Obama, I'm going to stop saying "that's so gay!"

Yesterday I was thrilled to learn that President Obama has come out (so to speak) in favor of gay marriage. This is a good move ethically as well as politically. 

Homosexuals are people too, Mitt Romney and fellow gay-bashing Republicans. Recognizing the obvious will energize Obama's base, and it won't cost him many votes since homophobes already plan to vote against him.

Eugene Robinson ends his column on this subject with:

Politically, Obama may have taken a big step toward reclaiming the future.

The magic of hope and change that suffused his 2008 campaign has dissipated after 40 grueling months in office. Obama’s supporters could point to his accomplishments and cite the reasons why Romney would be a poor replacement, but the optimism and excitement were missing.

Obama could have kept silent on gay marriage, and frustrated progressives would still vote for him. Instead, he spoke out when he didn’t have to and took a stance that might hurt him in key states — reminding us how he can surprise and inspire.

Did I just catch a whiff of that hopey-changey stuff in the air?

For sure. I've already vowed to make a change in my habit of blurting out what I now realize is a slur: that's so gay!

Here's an example.

In the past, my wife has tried to get me to buy a Jams World shirt when we've gone to Maui. She likes the Jams World clothing line. High quality; made in Hawaii; kind of expensive, but not super-outrageous given what you get for your money.

Almost universally -- coincidentally, up until yesterday, the day Obama stated his new position on gay marriage -- I've responded to her pointing out a men's Jams World shirt I should consider buying with Oh, no, that's so gay!

Now, I've had good reasons for saying that. Check out the retro Jams World flambe.

lt just isn't me. Most of the time I wear gray and black combinations, often from Hawaii's other cool clothes purveyor, Crazy Shirts. My taste runs more toward a dark-themed macho Chinese dragon or big breaking wave, not pink flowers.

Still, I also like colorful shirts. Yesterday my wife showed me a Jams World shirt that was much more subdued than the one above. I ended up buying it. However...

My first reaction, more from habit than anything else, was to tell her that's so gay when she said, "I like this Jams World shirt." I kept my mouth shut, though. Partly because we were in a public place and I no longer feel comfortable saying that's so gay, in the same way I wouldn't say that's so black. 

And partly because I had just learned about Obama's gay-friendly words a few hours before. I was enthused by them. I felt that the United States had taken a big step toward ending discrimination against homosexuals. 

Which has been a long time coming. 

Back in my high school years, 1962-66, us guys taunted each other with faggot! There weren't any openly gay students in my high school. Any guy who looked or acted too feminine was teased mercilessly. We had essentially zero compassion for gays.

So I was astounded to read what Mitt Romney said about his own (much worse) gay-bashing experience, given that we are almost exactly the same age.

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case."

Ridiculous. Back in the 1960's attitudes were hugely different toward homosexuals than they are now. Almost certainly Romney is trying to erase and excuse his past, as he so often does.

My past is still with me.

I wasn't so clearly aware of that until yesterday, when I caught myself about to say that's so gay! Yes, it seems that there is a certain gay style, though I can't describe it exactly. Likewise, there is a certain black style, though I also can't describe it exactly.

But my use of that's so gay had a homophobic edge to it. I was afraid of looking like I was gay. I didn't want people to think, "Only a gay guy would wear that shirt." 

Why? Why couldn't I simply say to my wife, that shirt doesn't appeal to me; too pink, too bright?

That's what I'm going to say now. No more that's so gay. Of such small steps revolutions are made. May we have legal gay marriage all across the United States soon.

Here's the Jams World shirt that I bought. I've worn it several times. No one has asked me if I'm gay.

In the unlikely event someone does, I'll respond, "Yes. You must have been able to tell from the Jams World shirt. Very observant. By the way, please support gay marriage. We gays deserve equal rights. Along with nice clothes."

Oregon weather breaks my May heart... then heals it

Oregon weather, I'm fed up with you. I've had enough abuse. This afternoon I realized that I can't stand you anymore.

Driving around in south Salem, I just had to pull over, grab my iPhone, and document what a crappy companion you've become. 

Come on! You're ridiculous! My Mini's thermometer doesn't lie. The warmth between us is gone. You're giving me 43 degrees. That's cold any time. Especially...

When the time is 12:50 pm -- middle of the freakin' day! -- on May 4. Spring. In fact, late spring. Yeah, I'd been listening to the "Chill" station on Sirius satellite radio. But that doesn't entitle you to make the outside what I'm grooving to on the inside.

Speaking of outside, Ms. Oregon Weather, this is what you looked like when you were giving me that 43 degree frigid treatment. You've gone gray. And blah. And all rainy weepy. I don't find you attractive any more. It's over!

Oh, sweetheart... I'm sorry for those harsh words. When I got home, after being so pissed-off at you, my heart melted when I saw how beautiful you can be in your sunnier moments.

Thanks for the flowers. I'm going to do my best to work things out with you.

Oregon Weather, my dear, you're an alluring creature. Hellish to live with when you're nasty; heavenly when you choose to be seductive.

My photographic evidence that the world's alright

There's a lot wrong with the world. No doubt about that. But I've accumulated some photographic evidence on my iPhone which shows how alright things are also.

Along with some fellow Trader Joe's-loving friends, we've been worried about how well the recently-opened Salem, Oregon store is doing. Seems like it isn't very crowded whenever I shop there.

But when I glanced into the blue/green glass bin at the D&O Garbage recycling center a few days ago, I thought Alright! 

Tossing my own Charles Shaw (Trader Joe's famous $2.49 wine) bottles into the bin, I was struck by how many similarly labeled bottles -- with the square dark logo on a white label -- already were in it.

And the photo above was taken just after another recycler who had different wine tastes had dumped a large bag of other brand bottles into the front of the bin.

Here's a close-up of the back of the bin that gives a more accurate portrayal of how "Two Buck Chuck" is dominating south Salem's wine bottle recycling bin. If our local Trader Joe's store is selling as much other stuff as it's selling Charles Shaw wine, the store is doing just fine.

Next, not long ago I was short on time and in desperate need of a heavily discounted 16 ounce cup of coffee in my own mug (sitting on the curb in the photo above) from the downtown Beanery.

Love your massive 35 cent discount, Beanery! Starbucks sucks with its measly 10 cents off.

I scanned the parking spots as I drove down Court Street, worrying that I was going to be late for a dog training class that my wife wanted me to attend with her if I had to walk a ways to feed my caffeine addiction.

Then I saw it: Alright!

A "Small Car Only" sign. No problem with my Mini Cooper. Not only no problem, I had lots of room to spare (note the distance between the rear bumper and the white line marking the end of the spot).

Mini Coopers rule. If we all drove them, imagine how less crowded our roads would be. Plus, they'd seem oh-so-European.

Lastly, I assume that you, along with most of the rest of the millions (or billions?) of people who were astonished at the news that our dog had cloned herself, have been waiting to learn whether the clone and the original have continued to get along.

As you can see from the photo above, absolutely. All together now...

Alright!

My iPhone speaker survives toilet water. Here's how.

I wish I had a better story involving wild sex, drugs, or fighting off a home invasion about how my beloved iPhone 4 ended up in a toilet this morning. 

Actually...I'd put the phone on some magazines that were headed to the recycling bin. Forgetting where the phone was after, um, I'd done my (stand-up) business, I grabbed the magazines from a counter and heard a highly disturbing splash as the phone hit the water.

Moving as fast as my semi-awake 63 year-old self does that early in the day, I had the phone out of the toilet in just a few seconds.

Luckily, it was snugly enclosed in both an Incipio semi-rigid "bumper" case, and an utrasuede/leather Waterfield slip-in case (highly recommended for slip-in afficionados; great case). So after toweling off the mildly wet iPhone, I decided to turn the phone on and see if it was going to explode in a shower of sparks.

Nope.

I was pleased to see that the phone worked fine. Seemingly. Except when I fired up my Solitaire app and started to play a game. It worked, but absent the clicking sounds that accompany a card turn. Shit! I thought.

Which turned to double and triple Shit! when I found that You Tube videos played, but with no sound. And I could make a phone call to my wife where she could hear me, but I couldn't hear her through the usual phone speaker -- only when I changed to speakerphone. With earbuds, sound could be heard fine through the headphone jack.

That led me to a panic-stricken Google search.

Where I found "How to fix the iPhone speaker problem (water damage)." The simple advice was to strip some cotton off of the end of q-tips, insert them into the headphone jack, rotate, and remove. I did this several times, with no success (other than getting the headphone jack really clean).

I also read the comments on that post, plus the accompanying You Tube video.

These led me to a couple of other attempted fixes: inserting a credit card in the charging slot at the other end of the phone from the headphone jack, and blow-drying the headphone jack. I also blow-dried the charging slot for good measure.

I don't know what worked, one, some, or all of these fixes. Regardless, after the last blow-drying my iPhone had recovered it's soundability. Bliss! I kept playing my "Brazilian Girls" album to confirm that everything was back to normal. 

So give these tips a try if your own iPhone gets wet and refuses to speak to you. The q-tip approach makes sense.

Some commenters on the post surmised that water (a short?) makes the iPhone think headphones are being used, so the external speaker is turned off. I seemed to see a brief message to this effect ("headphones") appear when I started to play "Brazilian Girls" before the phone was back to normal.

If you use a blow dryer, be judicious and don't run it too long.

I left my iPhone on a counter with the dryer on high pointing at it from about six inches way. When I checked back after a few minutes the metal phone casing was really hot. When I tried to turn on the phone, I got a "too hot to use; allow to cool" sort of message. After I waited a while, the iPhone worked normally, so maybe it was the final blow-drying that did it. 

Just don't overdo it, or you might have a bigger problem than a speakerless phone -- a cooked phone.

Metallic coolness & great benefits: Chase Sapphire Preferred card

Up to now I've taken my credit cards pretty much for granted. They've been pieces of plastic which have simply done their job: paying for stuff I want to buy, and giving me frequent flier miles on Hawaiian or United Airlines.

But after Hawaiian dropped it's direct flight from Portland, Oregon to Maui (where we vacation frequently), the luster of our Hawaiian card dimmed dramatically. Even before that happened, I looked around for an awards card that could be used on any airline, for any sort of trip.

And settled on the Chase Sapphire VISA card, which I extolled in a 2010 post.

A few months ago, Chase sucked me into upgrading to the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. The $95 annual fee was waived for the first year. I liked the benefits that come with the card, which include a 7% annual point dividend, and 20% off travel booked through Chase Ultimate Awards. 

When the Preferred card arrived, I discovered another benefit (though some find it a drawback). The card is unusually heavy, because it is made of metal, not plastic. And the numbers are on the back, not the front.

It gets a lot of attention from credit card-familiar store clerks. More often than not, when I use it I hear "Wow, that's a heavy card," or simply "Cool." 

But today I learned that the Chase Sapphire Preferred card is more than a pretty face. It can do some heavy travel-lifting also. My wife has been figuring out airline arrangements for a family reunion in Indiana this summer. This involves some complexities, as she is going to stop off in Wisconsin on the way back to see some old friends.

I told her that since we've accumulated quite a few points on our Chase credit card, we should try out the Ultimate Awards airline booking service. The result, after an initial glitch (apparently caused by the online reservation system being out of service for a while), was excellent.

Making reservations for both of us, including selecting seats on each flight, was at least as easy as any other online system I've used, whether through Orbitz or an airline. There's no extra booking cost. And we did indeed get a 20% discount when we paid for our tickets.

Meaning, Chase's Ultimate Rewards system adds on 20% to the points we redeemed for the airline tickets, thereby making my ticket 20% cheaper (because we had enough points to pay for all of my ticket, though only part of my wife's -- the difference being paid for through, of course, a charge to our Chase Sapphire Preferred card).

So I can heartily recommend this card to those who use a credit card a lot and want a highly flexible rewards plan. For us, the $95 annual fee is less than the monetary benefits we'll get every year from the card.

Plus, it looks and feels way cool.

Great deal on used Nissan Leaf -- here in Salem, Oregon

Car has been sold. Sorry. Hope you find another used Leaf. 

The all-electric Nissan Leaf is a terrific car. It's just turned out to be a less-than-ideal fit for our lifestyle. We live about six miles from the Salem city limits, so we use up twelve miles of range just getting to the edge of town.

Plus, our aging dog doesn't seem to like the sloping Leaf hatch compartment (it slopes because of the mid-car battery stack).

While that may not seem to be a big deal, you don't know how dogcentric my wife is. Whenever we look at a new car, one of the first things we do is tell the salesman we need to put our dog in it to see if she can stand up easily.

So we've ordered a Chevy Volt, wanting to keep ourselves in the electric car world, and put up an Auto Trader ad for our 2011 Leaf with only 3,000 miles on it. 

As I say in the ad...

Leather seats! Level III quick charger! ... If you want a Leaf, our car is a great deal. We added aftermarket leather seats and electrically-activated adjustable lumbar support ($1500 value). And this is a 2011 SL-E with the Level III quick charge port for full charging in about 30 minutes ($700 value).

Of course, the car also has the usual SL features. Navigation. Back-up camera. Intelligent Key entry. Level I and II charging. Bluetooth. Solar panel spoiler. Etc. Etc. Our Leaf has some dealer-installed options: all-weather rubber mats (hey, we live in Oregon), bumper protector, splash guards, cargo floor organizer.

At the time of this ad placement, there are twenty-five 2011 Leaf SL's for sale via Auto Trader in the entire country. Average asking price is $30,914. Ours is $27,995, about $3,000 LESS. Yet our Leaf has over $2,000 worth of MORE features -- the leather seats, lumbar support, Level III quick charger. 

Someone who wants to buy a Leaf for about $10,000 less than a new 2012 model should find our offer really attractive.

Not everybody can make full use of the $7,500 federal tax credit (Oregon also has a $1,500 state tax credit). And the credit can't be taken on a new Leaf until the person's 2012 tax return is filed a year from now.

Our used Leaf has everything useful a 2012 Leaf has, aside from heated seats/steering wheel/mirrors. I don't consider the 2012 battery heater (which is only needed in really cold weather) and the rear HVAC duct to be truly useful.

And our car has leather seats plus electrically-activated lumbar support in the front seats.

Consumer Reports noted that the Leaf's seats aren't very comfortable, which we agree with. That's why we had leather put on the seats by Beaverton's Coach Automotive Accessories, who did an excellent job. Again, a $1,500 value.

Our Leaf can be easily driven home within an 80 mile or so range.

So if you live in Portland, Corvallis, Eugene, or thereabouts, and are looking for a Leaf, head over to the Auto Trader ad and check out our car.

The car also can be shipped via an auto transport company for not a whole lot of money -- way less than a buyer will be saving by getting our used Leaf. And since our car has a fast Level III charger, this offers more options for getting the car home.