HinesSight

Treating our coliform infested well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Septic tank additives aren’t necessary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From snow to sunshine with snafus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Way justified.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticky sweetness offered up a clue.

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

Oh, fuck!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How’d that old man get in my photos?!

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

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

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

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

I suppose this is normal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remodeling – my path to enlightenment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m wrong, wrong, wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brain struggled to figure out what had happened.

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

It all became clear.

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

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

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

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

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

Onto the next wrongs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screen was still blank.

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chore Fairy left me in the lurch!

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

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

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

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

In the Chore Fairy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flip Video Ultra is my new joy toy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm still waiting. But I'm ready…

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

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

A few tips and observations:

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

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

--Along this line, I thought the Flip Video was stuck when it kept showing its uploading progress at "20%." I thought the program might be frozen but found that the progress bar suddenly jumped when it had finished reducing the size of the video and started the actual uploading. Again, be patient.

--When you set up an AOL Flip Video account, it isn't activated until you respond to an email that AOL sends you to validate that you're a real live emailable person. Not realizing this, I couldn't understand why the Flip Video software couldn't log into my newly created AOL account. Tip: check your email for a message from AOL and click on the link.

--The minimal (because the camera is so simple) instructions should emphasize that the camera needs to be "unloaded" from a Windows computer before detaching it from a USB port – via the Safely Remove Hardware icon. This guy's You Tube review of the camera mentions this, which redeems his cheesiness somewhat.

Bottom line: for $165-180 this is a great way to capture video. What the camera lacks in fancy features it makes up for in smallness and simplicity.

I'm getting my daughter one. She has the same Sony camcorder that I do, but says that she doesn't use it very much – even though my granddaughter is hugely cute and almost a year old. The Sony is too complicated.

Well, after a Flip Video Ultra arrives at her doorstep soon, I'm expecting to see a lot of charming child videos. I'll return the favor with what probably will be an endless series of cute dog videos.

Buyer beware with Penguin Windows

Thank God, or Tao, for Oregon's "Buyer's Right to Cancel" law.

It just saved us from a pushy Penguin Windows salesman, who somehow talked us into signing a contract for some vastly overpriced (though seemingly high-quality) replacement windows.

I wasn't going to mention the company's name in this buyer beware post. But after reading a bunch of comments from people who had remarkably similar bad sales experiences, I decided to say it like it is:

Penguin Windows engages in annoyingly high-pressure sales tactics.

Which, unfortunately, are pretty damn effective. Laurel and I generally are resistant to salesman B.S. But the guy who spent over four hours in our house last Saturday was good. Real good.

Yes, I said four hours. When Laurel called Penguin to get an estimate she was told that this would take an hour to an hour and a half.

I only wish. When Jay (not his real name) arrived promptly at 11 a.m., I figured I'd be back to my usual Saturday activities, like a nap, by early in the afternoon.

Nope. Jay had a seemingly endless series of sales pitches that he unveiled both before and after he measured our windows.

We saw frame samples from Penguin and other companies. We had the temperature in various spots in our living room measured by a nifty laser pointing device (I learned that our dog's exterior is about 80 degrees, while Laurel is considerably cooler). We watched a heat lamp experiment where Jay showed how much radiation passed through several types of single, double, and triple-pane windows.

In the end I was getting both really hungry and bored. And we weren't sold on the Penguin Windows, which struck us as (1) wildly expensive, and (2) vinyl'ly unsuited for our almost all-wood interior.

So Jay smoothly shifted away from an estimate to replace all of our ancient aluminum-framed windows, to just those downstairs. That reduced the cost considerably. We thought it might be OK to try five windows as an experiment.

I won't bother to describe all of Jay's sales tactics, many of which were irritating. They're described in the litany of complaints from other people, which are headed by titles such as:

Don't waste your time…LIES AND BROKEN PROMISES…sleazy is too kind of a word…BUYER'S BEWARE! LIES! LIES! LIES!...STAY AWAY RUN AWAY AND HIDE…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!RIP OFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...I just kicked the sales weasel out of my house…Stay away Run run run…Terrible windows and service

One comment came from a guy who used to work for Statewide (now called Penguin Windows).

I used to work for statewide and I agree that it's a S***ty company. Not only are the people high pressure but the atmosphere in the office is high pressure. If you didn't get a certain number of people scheduling appointments each week they would first verbally warn you, then write you up the next week and then they would fire your a** for being "incompetent" if you didn't meet the quota of appointments three weeks in a row. I worked for the Vancouver division for a few months and I will never do that again. Apparently they have been in the same territory for up to five years in some places, which is just stupid for the marketing tactics that they use. I would warn you to stay clear of these people. The next time you see someone in a baby blue shirt with a clipboard heading your way do the smart thing and turn tail and RUN! Dealing with this company is not worth the hassle. Cheers!

Over the weekend we came to our senses. I emailed Penguin Windows and told them we'd changed our mind, but might consider having just one window installed as a test. Laurel also left a message for Jay, who we talked to on Monday.

He said that it wouldn't be possible for us to get a single window. Jay wanted to meet with us again today, and to bring his boss along. We figured, why not? Wouldn't hurt to talk some more – so long as it wasn't for anywhere near four hours.

But today Laurel checked out some other window options. She realized that our woody home would look much better with wood-clad frames. She phoned Jay and told him he'd almost certainly be wasting his time if he came out, that we were strongly leaning toward cancelling our contract for the downstairs windows.

However, Jay insisted on coming out. Which, he did, promptly at 6:00 pm this evening (I'll have to give him this; he's punctual).

This time it just took us about 45 minutes to get Jay out the door. He was exceedingly reluctant to take "no" for an answer. We had him outnumbered (his boss didn't show up) and we both rank pretty high on an assertiveness scale.

Yet there were moments when our cancellation resolve started to weaken a bit in the face of Jay's relentless rear-guard Save the Sale manipulation techniques. Emotionally he went from cheery, to determined, to grumpy, to sadly put upon, to (thankfully!) resigned to his non-sales fate.

Someone single, lonely, elderly, and/or eager to please could easily have fallen prey to the slick Penguin Windows sales tactics. Jay reminded me of car salesman as they were several decades ago, complete with "Let me talk to my supervisor and see if he's willing to give you the discount that I want to offer."

Give me a break. We got several thousand dollars off of our estimate for being willing to have Penguin Windows put a sign at the end of our driveway when they did the work (which, now, they never will). That's just one of the many Penguin gimmicks.

Tomorrow the "Buyer's Right to Cancel" is being mailed to Penguin Windows, comfortably before the three business day deadline, and by registered mail.

The horror stories I read (along with some positive comments) make me feel good about escaping from the Penguin's clutches. We'll end up saving a lot of money when we go with another window company.

And we won't have rewarded obnoxious sales tactics.

I’m the DSL King of the World!

Step aside, Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm the new king of the world – unashamed to appropriate one of the cheesiest movie lines ever.

Because I deserve it.

I, me, myself, Brian the Hines, was responsible for bringing Qwest DSL to our rural south Salem neighborhood after many would-be kings (including moi ) had tried and failed for years.

At this very moment I am praising myself in a blog post that will be uploaded via wireless DSL, a vast improvement over our dreadfully unreliable Wild Blue broadband satellite service, which never saw a raindrop that it wasn't afraid to send a signal through.

Wild Blue also suffered from slow upload speeds. I could download at over 1000 kbps most of the time, but frequently I'd get a 30 kbps upload speed, not much different from our old 24 kbps dial-up connection.

Our DSL started functioning (after some load coil problems were resolved) yesterday. Retrieving information rich web pages like the NY Times and Google News now is happening five times faster with DSL, even though the download speed (1239 kbps) is about what I was getting with satellite.

It must be DSL's much faster upload speed, 711 kbps, that's keeping a web-surfing smile on my face. Yes, cable and faster speed DSL users, I realize that what I've got is run-of-the-mill broadband; but beggars who live in the countryside can't be choosers when it comes to broadband options.

Many of my neighbors are deeply grateful that I've brought the potential of DSL to some 240 homes in our area. Quite a few are trying to run businesses out of their homes. That's tough to do with a dial-up connection, and satellite is expensive.

I've been thinking that a bronze statue of me, commemorating my DSL triumph, would be a nice addition to one of our local streets. Which could be renamed after me also.

The statue idea hasn't taken off yet, except in my own mind. But I've got a rough design pictured. I'd be gazing out over cyberspace, holding a laptop in one arm and the letter that I sent to the Qwest CEO in the other.

It was the letter that apparently did the trick, because my entreaties to Congresswoman Hooley, and through her to the FCC, didn't go any good.

Nor did an exasperated blog post directed to the previous Qwest CEO. A few weeks after writing that post, an acquaintance offered up the bright idea of writing an actual personal letter to the CEO. I did just that. Download qwest_dsl_letter_shared.doc

And the rest is south Salem DSL history.

Early on, after a Qwest manager called me saying "let's get this done," I joined the company's Refer A Friend program. I'd get $25 for every customer in the area who bought DSL after signing an "I'm Interested" sheet that I shopped around our neighborhood.

I ended up sending over 80 names to Qwest. So far about 24 have gotten DSL. I'm over halfway to paying for a new multimedia computer.

My involvement with Qwest hasn't gone totally smoothly. Nor has the DSL roll-out process. But some glitches are to be expected, especially when you're dealing with a large communications company (which, I learned, doesn't always communicate all that well).

I'm a happy DSL camper now. So if you've got satellite broadband and have a chance to switch to DSL, do it. Paying less than half the money for five times the speed is a no-brainer.

And now Oregon raindrops can fall on my head without me thinking, "Oh god, there goes my Internet connection."

Further unplugging of the Christmas machine

Last year we slowed down the Christmas machine, but it still had quite a bit of leftover energy. Now we're going to further unplug this monster.

No Christmas tree for us. This is a pretty big decision, given that our extra-large artificial tree has been a dominating feature of our living room for quite a few years.

Too dominating, we've decided. It's a pain to set up.

Just about as big a pain as driving to a real tree lot, agreeing on a suitable choice, tying it to the roof rack so it has a minimal chance of falling off on the drive home, carrying it around the side of the house to our deck, forcing it through a sliding door, getting it more or less upright in the tree stand, wrestling with tangled light cords, laboriously affixing them along with a huge number of ornaments, and then collapsing on the couch after a long evening and saying to each other, "Was all that work worth it?"

No, it wasn't.

Which is why we went the artificial tree route, which "merely" involves hauling four large boxes in from the garage, figuring out which boxes hold the different-sized branches (inevitably our labeling/storage system from the previous year is found to have glitches), sticking the branches into their proper color-coded holes, unbending the twigs that have gotten unduly bent, and then starting with "wrestling…" above, leading to the same collapsed "Was all that work worth it?" question.

So we're going to see how empty our lives are without a tree this Christmas. I suspect that the only void we'll be experiencing is free time.

No putting up and no taking down of a tree that had become an obligation rather than a celebration. Now I can spend those obligatory hours on more enjoyable activities. Like buying gifts for myself.

For once again Laurel and I have agreed to only give each other presents that the other person has bought for himself/herself. That guarantees an "Ahhhhh! Just what I wanted!" on Christmas day.

Sure, we'll probably bend the rules a bit and get each other a spouse-selected present or two. But like I said last year, explaining why making a contribution to the Elizabeth Bowers Education Fund will be so enjoyable:

You can't believe how much happier I'll be this year giving a donation to the fund rather than wandering around the Salem Center Mall the week before Christmas, searching aimlessly for a present for Laurel, who is horribly difficult to shop for because (1) she's picky when it comes to clothes and personal items and (2) she likes shopping for herself and already has anything she really needs, just because I know she'll have gotten me some "extra" gifts that I didn't buy for myself and I'll feel like a Scrooge if I don't make an attempt to buy her something, even though there's a really high probability that she'll be returning it the week after Christmas.

We haven't reached the end of our Christmas machine unplugging. But the less juice this materialistic ritualistic creature gets, the better.

The Puritans had a good idea: ban Christmas. That's the most Christian thing to do, really, since Christmas' source is thoroughly pagan.

Some of the key ingredients of modern Christmases - holly, ivy, fir trees, drinking and feasting - go back as far as it's possible to see. Our own cosy kissing beneath the mistletoe is a pale reflection of an older tradition of sexual licence and abandon.

Well, maybe I won't give up totally on Christmas, if we can just get back to the good old days when this holiday was celebrated the way it should be.

Do the Gratitude Dance (if you're not too full)

Thanks to a visitor on my other blog I learned about the Gratitude Dance.

It's super easy to do. And perfect for today. But maybe not advised after eating a big Thanksgiving dinner.

The Gratitude Dance is considerably kinder and gentler than the haka -- a traditional Polynesian dance that the Jefferson High School football team in Portland has taken up before each game.

YouTube, naturally, has many haka videos. I especially liked this one, a Hakan vs. Tongan face off at a rugby match.

Deer on LSD would be even worse

My wife is being driven crazy by a male. Par for the course, but this time he isn't me. It's a male deer, a buck. Or bucks. She doesn't know how many are doing what comes naturally to them this time of year.

Marking their territory. Which, unfortunately for Laurel, includes our ten acres in rural Oregon.

She's planted countless native trees on our property, protectively watering them during dry spells, netting them when they're young, spraying Deer Off in the fall in an effort to divert bucks' attention away from the enticing trunks.

After all, the bucks should have their eye on even more desirable life forms. The Wikipedia article on white-tailed deer says:

Males compete for the opportunity of breeding females. Sparring among males determines a dominance hierarchy. Bucks will attempt to copulate with as many females as possible, losing physical condition since they rarely eat or rest during the rut.

Well, that may be. But they sure take time out to rub on trunks with their antlers, all too frequently wrecking the tree.

The bucks favor deciduous trees, like maples, where there aren't any branches on the bottom four feet or so of the trunk. A small tree that bends must be especially rub-alicious, as these are where Laurel finds most of the markings.

Through some malicious deer sixth sense, the bucks have an uncanny ability to know which trees on our property have been planted, and which have grown up naturally.

They strongly favor the former, undoubtedly in an effort to drive Laurel – our neighborhood's Janie Appleseed – crazy.

The only good news in this annual buck Marks-A-Lot, which is more damaging this year for some reason, is that the deer aren't on LSD.

Today I browsed through a recent issue of New Scientist and came across an article about the craziest scientific experiments of all time.

#1, according to Alex Boese, is elephants on acid.

Indeed, the notion of tripping out with an elephant is more than a little disconcerting. I spent many enjoyable hours in the '60s watching walls melt and change colors. However, dropping acid with a 7000 pound bull elephant would seem to have a high probability of turning into a bad trip.

There's more than anyone needs to know about the experiment here.

The goal was to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant – highly aggressive behavior that's accompanied by (no surprise) hugely elevated testosterone levels.

Sadly, the main thing the scientists learned is that LSD can be fatal to elephants. Especially if you give them a dose that translates into 30 times the effective oral dose for a human of the elephant's weight.

I don't know how male deer would react to acid. They could very well go into a freaking tree-rubbing frenzy. But if they'd end up sitting around listening to Jimmy Hendrix, that'd be cool.

Anything to stop them from rubbing on tree trunks.

(Though not connected to the main theme of this post, I want to share some photos that I came across in the course of researching the buck-related subject of "big rack." Who knew that a big rack like that cost $400-750 ? Not for plastic surgery – for the antlers.)

My ipod Touch – so very huggable

I always figured that I'd be the last human on Earth to own an iPod. But here I am, two days into an increasingly intimate relationship with an iPod Touch, and I'm wondering: Baby, what kept us apart for so long?

The strange thing is, I hardly ever listen to music. Mostly I tune to talk radio and OPB/PBS when I'm driving around. At home, the Internet has been my closest inanimate communicative companion.

Yet I was drawn to the Touch as soon as it was released. It's got the look and feel of an iPhone without the expensive AT&T wireless contract. OK, I can't make a phone call with it. But I can browse the web and do a lot of other really cool stuff.

Or so I've been told by generally laudatory reviews (here, here, and here). I've just begun to get to know my new best friend.

Like most electronic gadgets these days, the Touch comes with an extremely minimalist "manual." Actually, it's a foldout that basically tells you how to get the thing turned on and where to find the real user's guide online. So I still don't know how to do a quarter of the stuff this marvel is capable of.

Nonetheless, last night I found myself sitting on the couch at 1 am, iPod Touch in hand, connected to my in- house wi-fi system, with a vague thought – What am I doing watching a YouTube music video of someone singing in Chinese this time of night? – meandering through my Touch obsessed mind.

There's simply something lovable about it. Like other Apple products, it's marvelously well-designed and intuitive. At first the lack of visible controls worried me: How do you make this creature do what you want? Where's the volume adjustment?

However, it didn't take long for the touchiness of this new iPod model to sooth my anxieties. With a scroll of the finger or a double tap the iPod leaps to obey my command.

At the moment that often isn't what I expected it to do. But hey, I still haven't read the user's guide (thanks to the above-linked reviews, I just learned that double-clicking the Home button brings up a volume control no matter what else you're doing, so that solves one question).

It was super easy to transfer my first music CD (a Nora Jones album) to the Touch via my computer's iTunes interface. That motivated me to drive to a Radio Shack store and get a connector for the MP3 Aux input in my Prius.

Voila! Nora now was singing to me over my car radio!

And instead of wondering "what's the name of this song" I could turn to the iPod Touch and see what was playing. I could even do a finger scroll thing over the name of the track and rate the song from 1 to 5 stars (apparently my Touch can be told to only play songs I rate highly).

So, yeah, I'm in love. Of course, instant infatuation often strikes when I meet-up with some seductive piece of technology.

But I've got a feeling this relationship is going to be different. I'm looking forward to brushing the cobwebs off of our CD collection and getting lots of tunes into the receptive interior of Ms. iPod Touch.

I can envision a future where political talk radio and I don't spend nearly as much time together. That'll be good for my blood pressure. Plus, I don't want my new friend to feel jealous.

She's touchy, you know.

I just found out I’m 10 years younger!

I took ten years off of my age today. To be precise, 10.3 years. So says RealAge, which offers a nifty calculation of the difference between your calendar age and your "real" age.

Like a lot of baby boomers, I've never felt that I really was 58 years old. Physically, I'm just about in as good a shape as I've ever been. Mentally, I'm still an adolescent in many ways. But, hey, that's par for the course if you're a man.

I decided to look for a real age online test after I came across a story on CNN called "What men should eat every day." Of the eleven recommendations, I nailed every one – aside from #7, eating fish three times a week.

Nope. As a longtime vegetarian, I won't buy my health at the expense of another animal's death. So I get my omega-3s from vegetable sources, not fish.

But with a score of 10 out of 11 under my belt I was curious to learn whether my exemplary diet, combined with other lifestyle and health indicators, meant that I was considerably younger than 58.

Google brought me to the RealAge site, where I spent 20-30 minutes answering a bunch of questions as honestly as I could.

(The web site had a few glitches; if these happen to you, just go back to the previous page and continue from there; I got hung up at the very end until I took the final step of forwarding the survey to my wife via email, which seemed to make the RealAge web server happy).

After a hour or two my real age – 48.7! – and recommendations for making it even lower were sent to me in an email message, and also made available on the web site (before taking the test you sign up for a personal account; you can decline all the offers to send health-related information, which I did).

My wife and I are health junkies, so I'm a discriminating judge of advice in this area. I found "My RealAge Plan" to be pretty darn good, though it did seem to miss the mark a few times.

I was told that I'm consuming less than the average amount of unsaturated fats. Maybe, but my daily salad dressing is olive oil and vinegar, and I rarely use any sort of saturated fat. I also was advised to consider buying a mid- to large-size motor vehicle next time I purchase a car, because my compact (Prius) supposedly is more dangerous than a larger vehicle. Questionable, given SUV rollover statistics.

However, I agreed with most everything else I was told. Such as:

--increase my lycopene intake by eating more tomato-based dishes or tomato sauce
--increase my vegetable intake (though a vegetarian, I don't always eat at least five servings of vegetables a day)
--increase my whole grain intake (I should be eating 6 to 11 servings a day; man, that's a lot)
--do more strength-building exercises (I lift weights three times a week for a total of about 45 minutes, but twice that is the goal)

The RealAge web site lets you update answers to your test questions and then see how this affects your real age. That's handy, considering the test takes quite a while to complete.

Psychologically, I like the idea of getting an estimate of how old you are health-wise, right now. I've taken a couple of "how long will you live?" tests. One told me 92. The other, 96.5 (though I called that post, "Don't believe those longevity calculators").

I enjoyed learning that I've got a good chance of making it to my 90s. But finding out that today, at this very moment, I'm actually 48 rather than 58 – this was way better news.

For one thing, I can start telling friends and family to start shopping for insulting Over the hill at 50 birthday cards, because that's what I'll be expecting to get when I hit my next decadal celebration.

Me hunter. You gatherer. I need GPS.

This cartoon reveals how it all began. How men became hunters and women gatherers. Naturally, the guy was told to do it by his woman.

I don't know which sex ended up with the better deal. However, I do know that this goes a long way toward explaining why Laurel, my wife, was bewildered when my Garmin GPSMap 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator arrived in its Amazon box.

"Don't you already have a GPS receiver?," she asked. "Sure I do," I told her. "But it's ancient. This one has a color display and does a lot more than the old one."

Unwilling to relent, Laurel pressed on. "I bet it cost a lot. $500, right?" "Actually, it was about $300. Amazon sells them at a deep discount. And your point is?"

Which brought the conversation to an end.

Because if it'd continued Laurel knew I'd bring up the rather significant price difference between (1) the GPS receiver and (2) the continued remodeling of our kitchen and living room areas, which carried on last week after a several month hiatus.

Once part of our thirty-five year old house appeared more up-to-date, Laurel couldn't stand how old the adjoining rug looked. Plus, she wanted Dura Ceramic tile to lead from the front door into the kitchen.

So the family gatherer arranged for the tile and carpet guys to come in for four days, seriously disrupting my blogging and Internet life. In other words, my life (my office got recarpeted also).

The cost was well over an order of magnitude greater than what my GPS receiver set us back. It was worth it – I'm happy with the new tile and carpet now that my laptop life is back in order – but this experience pointed out to me again how different Laurel and I are when it comes to our respective hunter-gatherer tendencies.

Evolution: you can't argue with it. I do most of the grocery shopping, but in a hunterish way. Laurel shops in a gatherish way. She browses. I track down my grocery prey with ruthless efficiency.

I don't use a GPS receiver. But I'd like to. I've already gotten more than $300 worth of enjoyment from the Garmin 60CSx (which I can highly recommend, along with lots of other satisfied users).

The first day I got it, I went on my usual around-the-lake dog walk with the receiver in hand. When I walked into the house I yelled to Laurel, "Pretend that you're interested in the GPS details of my walk."

I made her listen to how far I went (1.15 miles), my average moving speed (2.98 mph), the time I spent moving (26 minutes), and other fascinating facts I can't recall numerically: total elevation gain, highest elevation reached, total time (which included the minutes I spent standing still trying to figure out a receiver feature), and more besides.

Laurel was careful not to say anything back to me, not even a "that's nice," because that might have encouraged me to bore her further with how absolutely wonderful the 60CSx is.

No problem. I'm happy talking with my new friend Garmie about himself. The fact that he's a piece of electronic machinery and I'm a conscious human being doesn't keep us from bonding. I just hope Laurel feels the same way about her new carpet and tile.

I've no doubt that my caveman ancestors would have been just as thrilled to have a device that told them exactly where they were and how to get back to the cave.

I've also got no doubt that while they were doing what they had to do – hunting down mammoths with nastily large tusks – their women were pondering a different arrangement for the hides on the floor.

Like they say, Plus ça change.