HinesSight

It was a good day for our dog to die

Don't get me wrong. I didn't want our beloved older dog, ZuZu, to die. But she did last night, put out of her misery by a dose of morphine at Salem's emergency vet clinic.

What made it a good day -- and now the tears are coming, as I figured they would when I set out to compose this blog post -- was how ZuZu and I got to have a pleasant day together yesterday, since she went downhill really fast, as I'll describe later on.

Monday ZuZu and I had come back from central Oregon a day before my wife and other dog, Mooka. So on Tuesday I didn't want to leave her alone when I went to exercise at the River Road Courthouse athletic club.

In the morning we'd had our usual walk through our rural property, across a creek, and along a community trail here in Spring Lake Estates. ZuZu seemed pretty normal at that point.

She was walking a bit less energetically than usual, which likely was a sign of what was to come. But when she spotted a squirrel, the old ZuZu came to life. Zoom! She raced ahead and excitedly stared into the branches of a tree the squirrel had escaped to.

I'm so happy that ZuZu was able to chase a squirrel on her last day alive. It was one of her favorite things to do. We also ran into some neighbors walking their dogs, so she got to greet them a final time. Nice.

What I'm most glad about is deciding to take ZuZu to the Minto Brown Dog Park after exercising. It was starting to drizzle. I thought about going straight home. But I thought, "ZuZu enjoys the dog park. I've got time. Let's do it."

Yeah, it's a cliche. Live every day as if it were your last. And usually it isn't practical, since we need to plan for future days. 

However, it's also true that we never know. When we will die. When a loved one will die. When a pet will die. I had no idea when I drove the short distance from our athletic club to the dog park that ZuZu would be dead in less than eight hours.

We had a good time at the dog park. ZuZu didn't play with any dogs, but she did a lot of sniffing and tail wagging. Some people patted her. She peed several times. ZuZu wasn't super energetic, and wandered a bit more than usual, but she seemed fairly normal.

I did talk to her as we walked through the large grassy field. ZuZu had been diagnosed with late stage liver disease. Back in June our vet thought she only had days or at most weeks to live. After I took her to the 2019 WillaMutt Strut event I wrote, "Our dog likely is dying, but we had a good time today."

ZuZu and me back in June

Same was true yesterday. Except the likely turned to certainly a few hours later.

At the dog park I patted ZuZu and told her what a great dog she was, how happy I was that she'd come into our life after our previous dog, Serena, had to be put to sleep. (Another way of saying euthanized.) My wife and I had six good years with ZuZu, for which I'm deeply grateful.

It felt good at the time to tell her this, even not knowing what would happen later that day.

I'm also really happy about last weekend during a visit to our co-owned house in Black Butte Ranch. Laurel and I went to the Sisters Harvest Faire on Saturday without ZuZu and our other dog Mooka, figuring it would be distracting and difficult to enjoy the booths with two dogs in tow.

Sunday, Laurel took Mooka for a walk in the early afternoon. I decided to return to Sisters, browse some shops I didn't enter on Saturday, and take ZuZu for a stroll around the Harvest Faire.

Great decision.

I parked by Paulina Springs Books. We walked to an outdoor store, where I tied ZuZu up outside and she got to be admired by passers-by. Then we had a pleasant time strolling around the artsy booths. There were lots of dogs at the Harvest Faire. ZuZu got to greet them and enjoy the many smells.

ZuZu sat next to a chair I tied her to while a woman selling flowers at the adjacent booth patted her as I tried on a fleece jacket that I ended up buying. ZuZu loved attention from strangers. At dog parks she ran up to people as much as dogs.

It's wonderful, really, that ZuZu went downhill so rapidly. We were able to have some very good days with her just before her death, which wasn't unexpected given her liver disease, but shocked us by the suddenness of ZuZu's decline.

Yesterday around noon she threw up her breakfast. I was worried this was related to her disease, but hoped it wasn't. After we went to the dog park I gave her some white rice and canned chicken. She ate a few bites, the last food she'd ever eat.

Then ZuZu started pacing and panting in an agitated fashion. She'd sit for a minute or so, then walk aimlessly around the house, as if looking for some comfort she couldn't find. I noticed she was stumbling at times. By the time Laurel got home with Mooka around 7 pm, it was clear that ZuZu was in bad shape.

She would press her head against a wall, or against my leg. The emergency vet we took her to said ZuZu probably was having severe headaches caused by a build-up of toxins. The vet thought that the last few months was a rally from her end-stage liver disease.

ZuZu had been on antibiotics, cortisone, a diuretic, milk thistle, and CBD. Thankfully, we had about four good months with her before yesterday. 

Our previous dog, Serena, declined gradually before she had to be put to sleep. That made the decision to euthanize tougher, until it became clear how much Serena was suffering. With ZuZu, there was no doubt. She was in extreme distress, though she didn't utter a sound.

The emergency vet said the fluid build-up could be drained, but it would come back right away. We didn't want to put ZuZu through more misery, so last night the morphine was administered. 

I'm sad. I'll probably be sad for quite a while. 

Yet I'm also glad. ZuZu and I had some good days together, including her last day. Death sucks. But it sucks less when the end comes fast, and pleasant recent memories balance out the pain of losing a beloved pet. 

And it's good to have our new Husky mix, Mooka, to pat and talk to. She can't speak in words, but I get a sense that Mooka is missing ZuZu also. 

My new favorite jacket: John Aranda's custom fleece

My wife, Laurel, and I love the Harvest Faire in Sisters, Oregon, an annual October delight that we've gone to for many years.

When we co-owned a cabin in Camp Sherman we made sure to schedule the weekend of the Harvest Faire, and we're still doing this now that we co-own a house in nearby Black Butte Ranch.

This year I went to the Harvest Faire on both Saturday and Sunday, while Laurel went only on Saturday. Good decision on my part, since walking by the booths today with our older dog, ZuZu, I took a longer look at John Aranda's handmade fleece jackets, vests, and hats.

There were only two large men's fleece jackets left. One caught my eye immediately, since I'm attracted to orange and black -- as shown by the fact that I was wearing an orange t-shirt and black pants today. 

When I got back to Black Butte Ranch, Laurel and I went for a bike ride that included a stop in the Big Meadow to say hello to the horses grazing away. This was the test drive for my new jacket. It performed marvelously. I really like what John Aranda has wrought.

He told me that the jacket has some of the features that I like in the Patagonia jackets I own. It is windproof, as evidenced by Aranda having me put my hand in one of the two small "phone" pockets in the chest area while he sprayed some cold compressed air over the pocket.

I felt nothing, just as I didn't feel the considerable chilly wind that accompanied our bike ride. This is now my favorite jacket: warm, good looking, four zippered pockets (two large, two small), windproof and water resistant.

I'm going to email Aranda and ask if he could send me photos of other men's fleece jackets, with various color combinations. That's how impressed I am with this jacket: I don't want to wait for the 2020 Harvest Faire to get another one.

(He lives in Gresham, Oregon. The back of his business card says: "Custom Fleece Hats and Jackets. Specializing in Windproof Fleece. Warm and Comfortable. Protection From Bitter Cold Weather. Made in Oregon.")

Here's my other Sisters purchases, a charming small town that I never get tired of. The mug was bought Saturday at the Harvest Faire. The blue color is appealing, as is the perfect 16 ounce size, with just enough room for the half-and-half I put in my coffee.

Every time I visit Paulina Springs Books in Sisters I walk out with at least one book.

I got Richard Dawkin's new book, "Outgrowing God," yesterday. Today I got a sale book, "No Barriers," which describes a blind man's inspiring adventures (such as kayaking the Grand Canyon), and "The Deep History of Ourselves" which has the subtitle  The Four-Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains.

Well, my brain is grateful for the dedication and creativity of people like John Aranda, the woman who fashioned my new coffee mug, and everybody who works to make Paulina Springs Books such a great bookstore. It changed hands last year, but the quality has remained as high as ever.

AncestryDNA results have me speaking with a Lithuanian accent

After listening to countless (almost) ads for Ancestry.com on the radio, a few weeks ago I decided to take a plunge into the waters of my DNA.

Well, let's make that watery spit, since my saliva is what got sent off for testing.

I don't know what took me so long to learn what countries my recent ancestors likely came from. Procrastination, I guess, since my rather unusual family history seemingly would make me a natural for an AncestryDNA report.

I know quite a bit about my mother's side of the family.

I know almost nothing about my father's side, since (1) he was adopted as a baby, (2) I only spent one hour with him in my entire life, though we had some telephone conversations, and (3) all he told me about his parents was that they were Polish-speaking Germans who came to the United States in the early 1900s, after which his mother reportedly died in childbirth and his father deserted the baby. Namely, him.

So when Ancestry notified me this morning that my DNA results were ready for examination, I was excited to see what they showed. Here's the Ethnicity Estimate.

This generally fits with what I already knew of my genetic heritage. But I was thrilled to see that Baltic States was my top result, 41%. I've got nothing against Poland or Germany. I just find Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to be cooler, being less populated and more unusual.

So I'm trying to develop a mild Lithuanian accent, though I'm handicapped by not having the faintest idea what a Lithuanian accent sounds like. I'll just have to trust my genes, I guess.

Regarding Norway, I'd forgotten that my maternal grandmother's father was from Norway. So that 15% seems about right, given that my grandmother apparently comprises 25% of my genetic makeup. (Don't trust me on that, since I'm pretty much DNA clueless.)

I signed up for a six month Ancestry U.S. Discovery membership, which entitled me to peruse family trees and contact people who showed up as possibly related to me.

The top "hit" was Patricia Hines, who indeed is a half-sister I only communicated with once, as far as I can recall. My father started phoning me when I was in my early 30's, so about forty years ago. Patricia must have gotten my address from him, since I remember getting a letter from her when I believe she was 16.

Science really is amazing. I spit in a tube, send it off to a testing facility, and soon I get a report showing that Patricia Hines is 100% certain to be a close relative. Even better, she had authorized people to send her a message, which I did. Don't know if I'll hear back from her, of course. Here's what I said to her.

Patricia, a voice out of the past from Brian Hines. I recall that we communicated, by letter I think, or  maybe by phone, after our father, John Hines, got in touch with me shortly before he died. As you may know, I got to spend one hour with him in a Boston hotel room, along with Mike. The visit didn't go very well, as I related in a blog post.

https://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2005/05/one_hour_with_m.html

I'd love to know more about you, your siblings, and my father. He only told me a few things about his parents, who he said were Polish speaking Germans whose last name was Mueller. Michael told me once that he'd send me copies of genealogical/family research our father had carried out, but this never happened.

A few days ago my birthday happened, as they do every year, and I became 71. I signed up with Ancestry because I'd like to know more about my paternal origins. Don't know why, not that why's matter in this case, really. It's just a blank spot in my life. Aside from my daughter and granddaughter, I'm not in touch with anybody from my mother's side of my family, mostly because of death.

My wife and I are living pretty happily in rural south Salem, Oregon on ten acres, though we have thoughts of moving into town as our property becomes more difficult for us to maintain. Our two dogs love it though. Squirrels! Deer! Coyotes! (well, they are more competitive and scared of coyotes)

I've got a web page that tells about me: www.brianhines.com I recently published a book based on some of my blog posts, and I'm working on another one, after writing three previous books. I enjoy Tai Chi and citizen activism here in Salem. Anyway, it'd be great to hear from you. My email address is [email protected]

I'll end with "Love, Brian" even though I don't know you, because I really do love coming into contact with my half sister. My other half sister, on my mother's side (from my mother's first marriage, before she married my father) died quite a while ago.

Love, Brian

With the help of Patricia's family tree, and some work of my own, I was able to make a start on my family tree. There's quite a few blanks, but this is more than I've ever been able to construct, family tree-wise.

I was surprised by how good I felt while thinking about and investigating my genealogy, especially since I haven't been much interested in this subject previously. 

Maybe it's because the older I become, the more I can relate to the photos of relatives that are displayed in our house. They're all dead now, but once they were alive, just as I am at the moment. One day I'll be a photo on the wall, a memory rather than a living presence.

So today I felt gratitude toward all of my ancestors who made it possible for me to be alive. It's an obvious fact of evolution that if any one of my countless ancestors, ranging all the way back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living beings -- which could be as long as 4.5 billion years ago -- hadn't reproduced, I wouldn't be here.

Much more recently, if any one of my Baltic/Germanic relatives had failed to have children, there wouldn't be a me writing this blog post. Or doing anything else, because I wouldn't exist.

There's something beautiful about genealogy that I hadn't realized before today, how it reminds us of our connections to not only all people on our planet, but also every living being.

Ancestry.com lets you look at DNA matches that keep on scrolling for a really long time, with, not surprisingly, more people having shared DNA results the further down the "cousin" line you go. After Patricia Hines the strongest relative listed was, pleasingly, Al Capone. Yes!

Here's what a 71 year old guy does on his birthday

I have an easy answer to the title of this blog post: almost exactly what I do on any other day. After all, I'm 71,  not seven. A birthday party of any sort was the farthest thing from my mind.

I enjoy my usual Monday routine. So I followed it, with a few exceptions.

Reading and meditation in the morning -- check. Grocery shopping in early afternoon-- check. Tai Chi class in late afternoon -- check. Dog walk in early evening -- check.

The big surprise of my birthday came when I unlocked our mailbox. There it was, a birthday card from my daughter, Celeste (also signed by my granddaughter, Evelyn). 

Wow. Just Wow! 

In a FaceTime call last night, Celeste let me know that, per usual, my card would be arriving a few days late. I expect this to happen. I count on this happening. My birthday experience depends on this happening. It's one of the few things in life that is rock solid for me -- a card arriving from my daughter around October 9.

But when I checked the postmark, I saw that it was mailed on October 4. That was three freaking days before my birthday. Absolutely shocking. 

Tonight I had to let Celeste know via text message what she had wrought.

Hey, your card came today. Thanks for the love and nice sentiments. But there goes your record of late birthday cards! Need to start fresh in 2020. Hate to say it, but you’re becoming a responsible adult who does things on time. Which, actually, sounds like a good thing.

Laurel, my wife, also gave me a nice surprise: eleven homemade cupcakes with butter cream frosting to take to my Tai Chi class. Several people were missing, so I came home with two cupcakes, which got rave reviews from the happy recipients of the nine other cupcakes.

Then Laurel made a perfect vegetarian meal: nicely spiced braised tofu with rice, baked potatoes, and herb-enhanced sliced tomatoes. 

So yeah, I had an excellent birthday.

Some AllBirds waterproof wool shoes that I'd returned for a larger size appeared today, a present to me from me. And Amazon delivered a book I'd ordered about the nature of consciousness, "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience," by Michael Graziano.

All that remains is for me to fill up the bathtub with pleasingly hot water, grab a yellow highlighter, and read a chapter or two of Graziano's book.

Oh, and then munch on a piece of raspberry chocolate cake Laurel brought home from LifeSource Natural Foods while watching Stephen Colbert make fun of Donald Trump. Perfect!

Self-publishing, like me? Check out ebookpbook.

I've written four books. Three have been self-published. Or, to use the term Amazon has on my Break Free of Dogma listing, "independently published." 

Last year I praised ebookpbook after this firm ably prepared for just $79 an electronic/Kindle version of a previous book I wrote. See: "If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook."

That book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, cost a lot for the paperback interior and cover design. Wanting to support a local graphic design firm, I paid them $3,000. That may seem like a lot, but it was in line with what book design companies I checked out via Google were estimating for a book like mine.

So with Break Free of Dogma I had the folks at ebookpbook do the interior design. They also made some adjustments to the cover that I fashioned myself courtesy of a Kindle Direct Publishing template. See above.

This is how much ebookpbook charged me: $249. Fifty dollars was for the cover work. Interior formatting and ebook preparation was $199. 

That's amazingly reasonable. You can check out how the interior design looks by heading to the Amazon listing and clicking on "Look Inside."

By the way, there are a few typos in the 85,000 word, 307 page book. I'm responsible for them. I didn't use the ebookpbook copy editing service, figuring I was capable of doing this myself. I just missed several typos and have vowed to be more careful with my next book.

Which I'm planning to have designed by ebookpbook also. Next time I'll probably have them design a custom cover, since most of the books in their "Portfolio" section look more attractive than the cover I created.

In case you're wondering how ebookpbook manages to do such a good job for such little money, the main reason is that they're located in Chennai, India.

But as noted in my first blog praise of this firm, I would never have known this if I hadn't asked Jason Pearce, the person I worked with last year, where he lived -- since he'd reply to my emails at times that indicated a decidedly distant time zone.

With Break Free of Dogma I worked with Vidya, who was equally competent, professional, timely, and organized. The only time her being in India came up was after I sent her this message:

Vidya, I just read a story about the horrible water problems in Chennai, India, and remembered that Jason said he’s lived there for 14 years. Don’t know if you are in Chennai, but if so, I wanted to express my sympathy for whatever problems you and others may be having. Global warming is causing temperature and precipitation extremes, and the world isn’t doing enough to stop carbon pollution. Very sad.

Vidya replied:

Thank you for your concern Brian. I do live in Chennai but fortunately managing with the resources available. Some parts of the city is very bad, especially the poor, who cannot afford to buy water. I live in an apartment here with three other neighbours and buy water of about 12,000 litres every 3-4 days.

It's marvelous that the Internet has made it so easy to communicate with people halfway around the globe. That said, I'm not recommending ebookpbook because they're in India, but because they make it possible for authors to get their book published at a very reasonable price with ease.

Break Free of Dogma consists of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog. I basically copied and pasted content from my blog, and sent ebookpbook a manuscript with minimal formatting. No matter. They fashioned a good-looking book from that material in just a few weeks.

Few authors make much money from their books. I'm certainly not raking in the dough from Break Free of Dogma sales. That book was a labor of love for me, not a personal profit center.

So being able to have ebookpbook fashion books at such a reasonable cost makes independent publishing feasible for authors who aren't willing or able to either design a book themselves, or pay someone thousands of dollars to do this.

And that's a gift to the entire world.

Not all vaping is dangerous. Vaping cannabis flower is safe.

I ingest THC and CBD by vaping every day. It's my substitute for a nightly glass of red wine, because I believe cannabis is more beneficial and safer than alcohol.

So it bothers me when reports of vaping illnesses and deaths (including two here in Oregon) make it sound like all kinds of vaping should be given up.

What appears to be dangerous is vaping e-cigarettes containing nicotine, and vaping THC cartridges that contain additives and oil.

A Vox story today, "THC vape products appear to be the main culprit in the mysterious lung illness outbreak," says: 

Investigators appear to be getting closer to uncovering one of the main causes of the outbreak of mysterious lung injuries linked with e-cigarettes: vaping products containing THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis.

On Friday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said that while they haven’t figured out exactly which chemical or device is making people sick, the majority of the cases in both national and state studies to date appear to involve THC-based vaping products. Many of them are illicit products labeled with brand names such as “Dank Vape.”

Note the mention of products, chemical, and device. That's because manmade THC cartridges, not the natural loose-leaf cannabis flower, have been implicated in the vaping illnesses.

The cartridges are used with vaping devices. They contain concentrated THC that is considerably stronger than cannabis flower. I used to use THC cartridges, but now only vape ground cannabis flower in my much-beloved PAX3 vaporizer. 

I buy cannabis flower ("buds") that's been tested in accord with Oregon cannabis growing/selling regulations. I grind it into small pieces using my Santa Cruz herb grinder. Then a small amount of ground cannabis goes into the heating receptacle of the PAX3 vaporizer. 

A little goes a long way.

Vaping cannabis flower is far removed from my Cheech & Chong'ish college days in the late 60's when we'd roll joints out of whatever was available on the black market: flower, leaves, seeds... it all was rolled up and smoked.

Which meant we were inhaling, not surprisingly, smoke. Not so with vaping, where, not surprisingly, vapor is inhaled. A PAX web page explains:

A vaporizer is an electronic device that heats dry herb or concentrated cannabis to release vapor. Vaporizing does not combust the plant material, reducing odors. Vaporizing herbs has its roots in ancient history. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the use of hot stones to create steam vapor baths as early as 440 BC. We’ve certainly come a long way from using rocks, with many electronic options of varying sizes and capabilities on the market today.

Thus it isn't vaping that is dangerous.

What's causing illnesses and deaths is something in a product that's being vaped. Note in the quotation above that a vaporizer can heat "dry herb or concentrated cannabis." It's the concentrated cannabis that health authorities are worried about, not the dry herb (cannabis flower).

Now, I realize that experienced marijuana consumers already know what I've talked about in this blog post. My intended audience is other people who hear "you should stop vaping" and jump to the conclusion that all varieties of vaping are dangerous.

They aren't. A comment on an Oregonian story about vaping illnesses got it just right.

Wanted: Giant Mutant Squirrels to eat acorns (lots of them!)

In case the audio on my "Wanted" video isn't clearly recognizable by Giant Mutant Squirrels, and they're reading this blog post, I'm hoping they will pay a visit to our home to deal with the amazingly high number of acorns in our yard -- as documented in the video. More than we've ever seen.

A bit of Googling taught me that oak trees go through regular cycles of many/few acorns, seemingly as an evolutionary adaptation. When there are lots of acorns, animals like squirrels can't eat them all, which leaves many acorns to become new oak trees.

That's great for the trees. Not so great for my wife and I, who have to pull up oak starts and run the risk of taking a tumble if we step on some of the little round senior citizen tripper-uppers on our driveway. Hence, the call for Giant Mutant Squirrels.

Here's the full Q&A on this subject from the New York Botanical Garden folks.

Q. Why are there so many acorns this year? Do they foretell a harsh winter?

Answer

Like many trees, oaks have irregular cycles of boom and bust. Boom times, called “mast years,” occur every 2-5 years, with smaller acorn crops in between. But the why and how of these cycles are still a mystery.

Scientific research can tell us what a mast year is not. A mast year is not a predictor of a severe winter. Unfortunately, plants and animals are no better at predicting the future than we are.

Strangely, mast years are not simply resource-driven. Sure, a wet, cool spring can affect pollination and a hot, dry summer can affect acorn maturation. But annual rainfall and temperature fluctuations are much smaller in magnitude than acorn crop sizes. In other words, weather variables cannot account for the excessive nutty production of acorns in a mast year.

So what does trigger a mast year? Scientists have proposed a range of explanations—from environmental triggers to chemical signaling to pollen availability—but our understanding is not clear. The fact is, we simply don’t know yet.

Boom and bust cycles of acorn production do have an evolutionary benefit for oak trees through “predator satiation.” The idea goes like this: in a mast year, predators (chipmunks, squirrels, turkeys, blue jays, deer, bear, etc.) can’t eat all the acorns, so they leave some nuts to grow into future oak trees. Years of lean acorn production keep predator populations low, so there are fewer animals to eat all the seeds in a mast year. Ultimately, a higher proportion of nuts overall escape the jaws of hungry animals.

Whatever the reasons and mechanisms behind acorn cycles, mast years do have ecological consequences for years to come. More acorns, for example, may mean more deer and mice. Unfortunately, more deer and mice may mean more ticks and consequently more Lyme disease.

Many animals depend upon the highly nutritious acorn for survival. Oak trees, meanwhile, depend upon boom and bust cycles, and a few uneaten acorns, for theirs.

Amazing Acorn Facts

• There are about 90 species of oak in North America. All oaks produce acorns.
• Acorns belonging to trees in the red oak group take two growing seasons to mature; acorns in the white oak group mature in one season.
• Oak trees have greenish, inconspicuous female flowers and are wind pollinated.
• Oak trees of North America annually produce more nuts than all the region’s other nut trees together, wild and cultivated.
• One huge oak can drop up to 10,000 acorns in a mast year!
• Masting takes a lot of energy! Oak trees grow slowly in a mast year and grow well the year after.

Salem Climate Strike 2019: my photos, videos, commentary

Here's photos and videos I took at today's student-organized Salem Climate Strike event on the steps of the Capitol building, plus my commentary. Really inspiring to see so many young people standing up for preserving our one and only Earth for human habitation.

My book is a worst-seller. I'm fine with that.

I've written four books. My advice to people who want to ask an author, "How are your book sales going?," is the same advice I'd give to someone who wants to ask a woman how much she weighs. Don't do it!

Unless the author is Stephen King. Or the woman is Claudia Schiffer.

Five weeks ago I self-published my most recent book, Break Free of Dogma. (Amazon delicately calls it "Independently published," which does have a nicer ring to it.)

Currently my book ranks #2,098,091 on the Amazon best-seller list. 

At first glance that struck me as pretty damn low. But then I remembered that my book is called Break Free of Dogma, not Break Free of Rationalizing. 

So I just Googled the question, how many books does Amazon sell? I came across a wide variety of answers, so picked the highest number I could find: 58,407,108 as of December 1, 2016. There's got to be at least 60,000,000 now, so that puts me in the top 4%.

And if I bought a couple of copies of my own book, hey, I could easily make the top 2 million best-seller list.

My first book was published in 1995, though Amazon shows it in several places as 1765 for some reason. Back then, getting published was even more ego-deflating than it is now. 

I had to mail queries to dozens of potential publishers, then endure the agony of getting replies with painfully brief rejection notices. Such as "Thanks for your submission. It doesn't fit with our publishing plans. Not now. Not ever."

I eventually found a publisher who offered a pitifully low royalty and did next to nothing to promote the book. A spiritual organization I was a part of did buy thousands of copies for resale, but I got exactly zero royalties on all those books. 

Things are much more efficient now, thanks to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. A writer can get a book published quickly at little cost, which means they can see how few copies of their book are being sold much more rapidly. Progress! 

It's always exciting to get that first printed copy of a book in the mail. I eagerly flip through the pages to see if it looks OK. At which point my eye hits upon a typo that went unrecognized even after several close readings of the manuscript. That marks the beginning of reality replacing fantasy.

I always think that people are going to flock to what I've written with as much zeal as I felt while composing the book. That fantasy would make sense if everybody was me. Sadly, they're not. 

A friend recently told me that he heard an author say, "I write books that I'd want to read." That resonates with me. I've been slowly reading through Break Free of Dogma. I love it. It's fashioned out of 93 posts from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06.

I was struggling to make sense of the doubts I had about the spiritual path I'd been an ardent traveler on for 35 years. Re-reading what I wrote about some fifteen years ago made me realize how glad I am that I've made the jump to being spiritually independent.

As I note in the Introduction to my book, currently there have been about 4,600,000 page views on my Church of the Churchless blog. That's a lot. So I've had many readers, albeit ones who paid nothing to read what I've written. 

I don't write for money.

Few authors do. That's why book sales don't matter much to me. Sure, I'd be happier with more copies of my books being bought. But as with most things in life, satisfaction has to come with the doing, not with how others react to what's been done.

A quilter may spend a lot of time making a bedspread that few people ever will see. A jogger runs for the pleasure of exercising, not for the roar of a crowd at a finish line. A parent puts decades into raising a child, uncertain how their progeny will turn out, content simply to have done their parenting best.

I write because I like to write.

If someone enjoys what I've written, so much the better. However, if no one reacts to my literary product -- the number of Amazon reader reviews for Break Free of Dogma now stands at precisely zero -- my heart is mildly disappointed, yet in no way broken.

After all, I can always turn to Vincent Van Gogh. While there's some dispute about how many paintings he sold while alive, a reputable number is... one.

Thus Van Gogh serves as an exemplar for every person whose artistic expression wasn't recognized in their own time. I like to envision my book becoming a best-seller. Sure, it'd be nice to have this happen while I was alive. 

Which is why you should head to Amazon and buy a copy of Break Free of Dogma now, since there's a good chance I'll still be breathing when my sales ranking falls under the 2,000,000 mark, thanks to you and others. 

Just think: every person who buys a copy of my book assures that I've sold more books than Van Gogh sold paintings during his lifetime. I'm not saying that I'll cut off my ear if my book sales don't perk up. But wouldn't you feel bad if that happened? (I'd feel worse, of course.)

UPDATE: As chance would have it, right after publishing this blog post I came across a New York Times piece, "Steal This Book? There's a Price." It says:

Since 2009, when eBooks and book piracy became a phenomenon, income for full-time authors has declined 42 percent, according to Rasenberger, with the median income from writing now so low — just $6,080 a year — that poverty level looks like the mountaintop.

Wow.

Half of full time writers make less than $6,080 a year, while half make more. This makes me feel a bit better. Amazon sends me about $90 a month in royalties, so I'm hauling in a bit over a thousand dollars a year in my decidedly part-time book-writing "career." Which keeps me in occasional non-fat vanilla lattes, but not much else.

Here's another all-too-true excerpt from Richard Conniff's opinion piece.

I tried to explain: Authors need to eat, too, and we get by (or not quite, these days), by showing up at our writing places at a designated time day after day and staying there till we have fretted out our quota of words, to be sent off, after a time, to a publisher, in the hope that, two or three years down the road, a few pennies may come trickling back under the ludicrously grandiose name of “royalties.”

Fairview Woods approved by Salem City Council

It was good to see the Salem City Council vote unanimously last night to reject an appeal of the 14.1 acre, 16 lot Fairview Woods development. 

Eric Olsen of Olsen Design & Development has been working on this project for several years. The Woods currently is a heavily treed parcel at the top of the old Fairview Training Center property in south Salem. It's filled with ivy, blackberries, and trash left by homeless people and others.

As Olsen discussed at the City Council hearing (I watched via the City of Salem's Facebook feed), The Woods was a difficult design challenge. 

Olsen's Fairview Addition development basically surrounds The Woods. Olsen became interested in the 14 acres when he realized that the owners of the property wanted to develop it, and if he didn't do this, someone else would take control of The Woods and possibly do things with it that weren't desirable for the people who live in Fairview Addition.

So what he came up with was a way to save most of the trees and allow public access to the property by having only 16 lots on the 14 acres -- with the lot sizes ranging from .3 acre to 1.1 acre. Here's a map from the Fairview Woods Refinement Plan.
Download Fairview Woods Refinement Plan

The green dots are trees. The white rectangles are illustrative home sites. The black lines are the private roads in The Woods. Olsen explained that the roads need to be private because if they were public and built to City of Salem standards, their width would require many more trees to be removed, along with wrecking the look and feel of The Woods.

Olsen said that the roads will be shared by vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, as narrow roads at the Black Butte Ranch and Sunriver resorts in central Oregon are. 

The large green area at the top of the curve of a road is a public Oak Park. 

Homeowners in The Woods only will be able to fence in 4,000 square feet of their lot, leaving the rest of the lot open for wildlife to meander through. A Homeowner's Association will help assure that no one cuts down trees unnecessarily. 

A central assertion of the person who filed the appeal of The Woods Refinement Plan that was the subject of last night's hearing was that the Master Plan for the Fairview property needed to be amended to make it compatible with the refinement plan.

But Councilor Tom Andersen, along with others, noted that aside from Pringle Creek Community, all of the development that has occurred on the Fairview property has deviated considerably from the original Master Plan.

Since my wife, Laurel, and I were members of Sustainable Fairview Associates during the time the Master Plan was being worked on, I know that this plan was a rather grandiose vision for the property, not a realistic blueprint for its development.

Laurel and I have been following goings-on at Fairview after we sold our shares in Sustainable Fairview Associates. Fairview Addition appealed to us enough to warrant putting down a deposit on two lots adjacent to The Woods, though we ended up deciding to stick with our non-easycare ten acres in rural south Salem for a while longer.

Now we're interested in Fairview Woods. It's tough to think of moving from where we are, but it's also difficult to envision us staying where we are for the rest of our lives, given that we're both now over 70 (not much over!).

Pleasingly, someone who lives in Fairview Addition testified last night that he surveyed other Fairview Addition residents about what they think of the plan for The Woods. I recall he said that 15 people responded, with 11 in favor of the Fairview Woods Refinement Plan, two neutral, and two opposed. 

The Morningside Neighborhood Association also approves of the plan for The Woods, albeit with some concerns that I believe have been addressed by Olsen Design & Development. 

I feel that Eric Olsen has done an excellent job of balancing the goal of preserving as many trees and as much open space as possible on the 14 acres, with the goal of having this development pencil out financially. My wife and I have talked with Olsen a number of times in recent years. I find him to be an honest, straightforward, caring,, creative developer -- the best kind.

Here's the tree preservation plan for The Woods. Being a proud tree-hugger, I like what I see.

Hopefully it won't be necessary to remove too many additional trees. In part this may happen because the location of the home sites shown on the map above are illustrative, not actual. Regardless, most developments in Salem preserve a much lower percentage of trees, being denser with wider roads.