HinesSight

Spots that make me smile on our ten acres

Laurel, my wife, and I live on ten acres in rural south Salem. For thirty years I've had a love/hate relationship with our property. After moving here in 1990, we've done a lot to improve both the land and our house.

But it's a damn lot of work. And at the age of 71, I find that maintaining what we've got isn't as enjoyable as it was when I was 41. Yesterday I finished mowing some grassy areas with a walk-behind DR Field Mower. It isn't the worst job I've ever done. I just can't call it "fun."

However, as I mowed various parts of our property I'd notice things that would bring a smile to my mind, if not to my sweaty face. After I finished, I grabbed my camera and walked around the ten acres, looking for more of nature that raised my spirits.

Here's the Adobe Spark web page result, the photos and some commentary.

Dear young people, us old folks don't want to die from COVID

Dear young people of Oregon, and elsewhere also,

I'm writing to you even though I know you aren't big on reading blog posts, or Facebook, where I'll be sharing this message. I just feel the need to reach out across a generational divide (I'm 71) and talk to you about the coronavirus crisis.

Things aren't going very well at the moment. After states started re-opening, new cases have skyrocketed. Today they surpassed 40,000 nationally, a record since the crisis began.

This afternoon Vice-President Pence said it's good news that now young people are accounting for a larger share of cases, a change from earlier in the epidemic.

Well, I doubt that you guys and gals feel that way, since even if you don't die from COVID-19, the disease can be really unpleasant with a long recovery period. But likely you're less concerned about becoming ill than old folks like me are, since we're at much greater risk of dying from COVID-19.

Which gets me to the main thing I want to say to you, so much so I'm putting it in boldface and red to make it stand out.

Us old folks don't want to die from COVID.

If this already is obvious to you, great. We're on the same wavelength.

But since I've seen lots of stories about how young people are flocking to bars and other fun places as reopening has been happening, usually not wearing face coverings or practicing physical distancing, hopefully you can understand why I feel the need to state the obvious.

Look, I'm qualified to be speaking to you this way because I'm an old person who used to be young. By contrast, young people have never been old.

So I have more direct experience about how you look upon life than you do about how I look upon life -- since your direct experience of old age is precisely zero. When I was in the 60's, the decade, not the age, there was an oft-heard saying, "Don't trust anybody over 30."

That's how crazed we were back then about staying youthful forever. At the time it didn't dawn on me that soon I'd be over 30 and, seemingly, wouldn't be able to trust myself. 

I mention this tale from the Very Old Days to show that I realize how young people can look upon folks my age as if we were strange beings from another planet, with even those over 30 being difficult to grok. (Look it up; great word.)

Sure, you have parents and grandparents. I'm confident that you don't want them to die, but maybe you feel that after a certain age, 70 or 80 or 90, old folks are ready to cash in their life-chips and see what sort of game, if any, exists after this life.

I readily admit that some old people feel this way. Yet most don't.

I know this because I know a lot of old people, being one myself. Some haven't left their home since the epidemic hit, they're so afraid of getting COVID-19. Others are extremely wary of going to a grocery store or restaurant.

This is one reason COVID-19 deaths have declined while cases have been rising. Old people are continuing to shelter in place, or go out only while wearing a mask and otherwise doing what public health experts are recommending, while young people are party'ing on.

That'd be absolutely fine but for one not-so-minor detail. To repeat:

Us old folks don't want to die from COVID.

Yes, we're taking precautions.

But masks, physical distancing, and hand-washing only go so far. They aren't 100% effective. If someone is infected with the coronavirus -- and I'm talking about you, young people -- they won't know it for a while. Maybe not ever, if they remain without symptoms.

Yet they can unknowingly spread the disease to others. This is why it is really important that young people wear face coverings in public indoor places, and outdoors also when staying six feet apart from other people isn't possible.

Maybe you already know that. If so, I apologize for taking up your time. In that case, send this message on to some of your friends through whatever mysterious unknown-to-old-people medium you use to communicate with each other (TikTok?).

Lastly, I've got to say that there's a reason I said "Us old people don't want to die from COVID" rather than simply "Us old people don't want to die."

We know we're going to die.

It's a clear and present danger to everybody my age. The only question is, How will dying happen? Ideally, peacefully, at home, surrounded by loved ones. Which is precisely what doesn't happen with most COVID-19 deaths. It's a dreadful way to die, isolated and hugely distressing.

Keep that in mind when you're tempted to go out without a face covering. The life you could save might be mine. Or your grandmother's.

Having coffee with an old friend on Father's Day is a great gift

OK, this photo was taken last Sunday, but it shows where Jim Ramsey and I also had coffee today, Father's Day -- the covered area outside of the Urban Grange coffee house in West Salem.

Jim is an old friend in several respects. Like me, he is old. (Though his recently-added gray goatee lends him an air of mature mystery, much as I like to fantasize my gray beard does.)

More importantly, I've known Jim for a long time. How long exactly is an unknown, which shows how long it has been.

I met Jim at some point after moving to Oregon in 1971 to attend graduate school at Portland State University. Since both of us were members of an India-based spiritual group that had few members in the United States, our paths crossed at meetings of the group even though at the time I was living in the Portland area.

Knowing that Jim was a realtor with Ramsey Real Estate, a family business, he was chosen by my first wife and I to find us a house in Salem after I got a job with the State Health Planning and Development Agency and was tired of doing the Portland-Salem commute.

Before too long we'd bought a house on Hillview Drive in south Salem, which if you walked out in the middle of the street, had a marvelous view of the shining lights of the Fred Meyer store. It also was close to a park and McDonalds, with children close to the age of our five-year-old daughter, Celeste, living nearby.

Perfect!

Until we moved to another part of south Salem where Celeste went to Candalaria Elementary School, Judson Middle School, and South Salem High School. That was followed by a divorce, remarriage to my current wife, Laurel, and many other changes to my life.

Throughout, from circa 1971 to 2020, forty-nine years, I've kept in touch with Jim. For most of that time I saw him every Sunday at meetings of our spiritual group. Sometimes we'd meet up as part of a group. Sometimes it's just been the two of us.

Eventually I had a falling-out with the group, having lost faith in its teachings even though I'd written several books that were published or distributed by the group. No matter to the friendship Jim and I had. We continued to get together, talking about politics, movies, books, cars, home life, health problems, all sorts of subjects.

When the Covid crisis hit, a stay-at-home order prevented Jim and I from getting together in person.

We also didn't communicate by phone or Zoom. I thought of checking in with Jim, but neither of us reached out to the other. I'd gotten so used to talking with Jim face-to-face, talking remotely just didn't appeal to me. This could be one of those male-female differences.

My wife talks to her female friends frequently by phone. Me, I figured that when Jim and I could meet in person again, we would. Until then, we wouldn't. Pretty damn simple.

It's been good to resume our coffee conversations the past two weeks. I feel better now. Maybe I would have felt better sooner if we'd talked by phone, but that's water under the Covid crisis bridge. Today we each brought a chair to free up the Urban Grange outside seating for other people. I brought a small table last week. Jim brought one today.

In all the many years I've known Jim, I don't recall ever explicitly telling him how much our get-togethers mean to me. So, now I am. Of course, since I'm a man, I"m not going to say this in person. I'll send him a link to this blog post. In my defense, I wrote about this sort of thing back in 2005 in "Why men don't share their feelings." 

To avoid messing up the warm fuzziness of this post, I'll copy in those 2005 musings as a continuation to this post.

Marion County and Oregon still seeing lots of new COVID-19 cases

This wasn't a cheery sight to see in my email inbox today, the latest Oregon Health Authority update about new COVID-19 cases.

Those 178 cases statewide are the most in a single day since the pandemic began.

Which means Marion County isn't going to enter Phase 2 of reopening tomorrow.

Like everybody else, I want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. But this isn't going to happen so long as new infections keep occurring at a rapid rate. So please, people, wear a mask and maintain social distancing. Many people in Salem aren't doing this. 

Here's a letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist about wearing masks that I liked a lot.

From Lloyd Timberlake,
Ridge, Maryland, US

Jessica Hamzelou's excellent piece on the science of the protective effects of face masks against the coronavirus inevitably didn't touch on unscientific, but important, aspects of masks, which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends we wear in settings like grocery stores.

Masks are a form of theatre, saying, "I am playing the role of a responsible citizen." They are a uniform expressing serious solidarity in the war against the pandemic. 

They are also a polite way to say: "Stay away from me. You don't know whether I am wearing this mask to protect me from you or you from me."

Perhaps most importantly, President Trump won't wear one. So they must be an excellent idea.

Starlink, save us from our rural broadband hellscape

My wife and I have a third-world broadband speed even though we live six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, Salem. Right now -- 7:30 pm on a Tuesday -- I'm "enjoying" a download speed of 5.8 Mbps and an upload speed of .71 Mbps.

That's crappy, because the only broadband available to us is CenturyLink DSL, brought to our house via a copper phone line and, I'm guessing, a team of low-paid internet elves who shovel the content of web sites and streaming services into the phone line as slowly as possible, and with frequent breaks.

Like last night, when I fired up Apple TV to see what HBO Max had to offer and was met with a spinning ball when we tried to watch a program, which would play for a few seconds before the spinning ball returned due to our slow DSL being even slower than usual.

I've spent a lot of time trying to find an alternative broadband provider. None exists. At least, none that I'd consider using. 

In addition to living in a rural south Salem neighborhood lacking cable TV or fiber optic providers, our house gets poor cellular reception. So cellular internet isn't an option. Alyrica, a fixed wireless provider, came out to our house last year and flew a drone around in an attempt to find a sightline to their cell tower from the top of tall fir trees next to the house.

No luck. And today I got an online rejection from Peak Internet, another fixed wireless provider. Here's the message I got after supplying our address. "Thank you for your interest in Peak Fixed Wireless service. If your location is in green, you may qualify for service." 

Sadly, our house is where the orange marker is, quite a ways from the green. 

This week I emailed Danielle Gonzalez, the broadband access staffer with Marion County. She helpfully provided me with a link to a list of internet service providers in our zip code, 97306, which includes both rural areas and an area in the Salem city limits. None of them serve our neighborhood, aside from CenturyLink.

(We used to have satellite internet via WildBlue before I talked Qwest into bringing DSL to our neighborhood in 2008. It was slow and went out in rainy and stormy weather, which is frequent in Oregon. So I'm not interested in HughesNet or Viasat, the only current satellite internet providers.)

Gonzalez said she'll send me the name and phone number of a local CenturyLink manager in charge of broadband once she learns who this is. I've been told by CenturyLink that fiber optic exists along Liberty Road until a few miles north of us. But I'm suspecting that CenturyLink doesn't want to spend the money to extend fiber optic to our neighborhood of several hundred homes.

So that leaves me in despair, trapped in a rural broadband hellscape with only one hope: Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system.

It shouldn't be this way, since fast broadband (in contrast to our 6 Mbps broadband) is a necessity these days -- for businesses, home or otherwise; for online learning; for entertainment, streaming videos, games, and such; for writers/bloggers like me who need to upload large files with photos.

Just as every American should be able to get quality healthcare, so should every American be able to get quality broadband. That neither is happening shows how screwed-up our society is. Government isn't functioning as it should, so people have to rely on private enterprise to fill unmet needs. 

But so far no private enterprise has been willing to meet the need of our neighborhood for an alternative to slow DSL. Hopefully Starlink will be our savior. 

Starlink ultimately will use thousands of low-orbit satellites to provide internet access everywhere in the world, naturally with the focus being on broadband-lacking areas. As of late April 2020 the word was that beta testing would begin in about three months, with public beta testing in about six months.

The initial beta test will apply to those located in “high latitudes,” Musk added. To date, SpaceX has said that Starlink service will initially be made available to customers in Canada and in the northern United States in 2020, with additional service expansion to follow to other parts of the world throughout 2021. On Twitter in response to a question about whether Germany counts as “high latitude,” Musk said that it does, indicating beta service at least may be available in more markets than the U.S. and Canada ahead of next year.

Well, Salem, Oregon sits on the 45th parallel. Sure looks to me like that should count as the northern United States, though the center of Germany is about 51 degrees north. 

Regardless, I hope Starlink turns out to be as good as it looks to be. I'm encouraged by the fact that Elon Musk's Tesla cars are a big success, as is his SpaceX rocket. Reportedly the cost would be about $80 a month, which I'd pay gladly to get a broadband speed nearly equal to fiber optic.

For now, I endure with DSL. Maybe we'll be able to stream HBO Max tonight. Maybe not. I look forward to the day when those "maybe's" are a memory, not reality. For us, and also for lots of other people with no current broadband choice. 

It’s the space race, but unlike the 50s, this race’s goal is to connect the world—including rural areas—to the internet. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet project aims to bring affordable, fast internet to underserved parts of the US and the world.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) 2016 report found that 62 percent of Americans have only one choice for “fixed advanced telecommunications capability.” And when they looked at rural areas specifically, the number of Americans stuck with just one internet service provider (ISP) to choose from rose to 87 percent.

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said that while existing ISPs are improving, it’s still hard for them to reach rural areas. But “Starlink . . . will cover all parts of the globe.”

Photos of George Floyd protest in Salem, Oregon

Here's photos and a video I took at today's George Floyd protest at the Capitol mall. I was deeply moved by thousands of people coming out to protest the murder of Floyd and others at the hands of police officers. I used an Adobe Spark web page to share the images.