HinesSight

Our curved railings by Outdoor Fence Co. turned out well

Our home in rural south Salem has quite a few quirks, most of them desirable.

For example, we have tons (literally) of granite rock in our landscaping, courtesy of the Garden Poet redesign not long after we moved here in 1990.

My wife and I love the natural look of large rocks and flat stepping stones.

But when we contacted Salem's Outdoor Fence Co. for a bid on installing a metal railing along the walkway from our driveway to front door, and another railing along the stepping stones from our carport to the walkway, those rocks became a bit of a problem.

Fortunately, not a big problem. The folks at Outdoor Fence Co. found locations for the metal posts that didn't require moving many rocks, though some of the pavers in the walkway had to be moved a ways.

Here's photos of the railings that were installed last Wednesday. We're happy with how they turned out. 

The walkway railing has a pleasing curve to it. We still need to repair some pavers that had to be moved to accommodate the metal posts.

Here's a view of the walkway railing from the bottom looking toward our driveway.

The railing from our carport alongside the stepping stones also turned out well. It replaced a clunkier wooden railing that required regular maintenance. 

Here's a view of the stepping stone railing from the bottom looking up. It also has an appealing curve.

As is typical of construction work these days, it took quite a while to get a bid for the work completed. Then we had to wait considerably longer to have the railings installed. We chose a dark brown color in a semi-reflective finish.

Throughout, the staff at Outdoor Fence Co. were easy to work with. When we had questions, they got answered. When we had concerns, they got resolved.

This was a fairly tricky project and it turned out nicely thanks to the competency of Outdoor Fence Co.

RRR is a terrific action movie about India under British domination

I just finished watching RRR -- "Rise Roar Revolt" -- a movie from India on Netflix that's a mind-blowing three-hour combination of action, thriller, romance, dance, superhero, and probably other genres that I could recall if my mind wasn't in such a blown state.

(It's got English captioning, and quite a bit of the dialogue is in English.)

I loved RRR. India fascinates me. I've visited the country twice and was a devotee of an Indian guru for 35 years, which led to me spending a lot of time around people from India. So when I read about the movie in a Rolling Stone review, I knew I had to see this highly popular film.

A subversive, supersized screed set in 1920’s Delhi, the latest film from the Telugu writer-director S.S. Rajamouli — its title RRR means different things depending on what translated version you see, but the Hindi cut opts for “Rise, Roar, Revolt” —  has already broken box office records in India and earned a rapidly growing cult following everywhere else, notably the States.

The first two paragraphs of the Rolling Stone review provide a good feel for this high-energy movie.

It’s tough to pinpoint the exact moment that the movie hooks you; mileage will vary per viewer. For some, it might be right from the get go, during a Melodrama 101 preamble involving a kidnapped child and casual colonial cruelty that leaves corpses in its wake. Others may find themselves leaning forward when a supercop, sporting the world’s most luxurious old-timey mustache, single-handedly beats back a crowd of thousands to catch a rock-throwing culprit. Or maybe the sight of a ripped, shirtless man sprinting through a forest and narrowly avoiding a midair collision between an angry wolf and an even angrier tiger is your investment tipping point.

Don’t worry: Should you somehow not find yourself entertained or exhilarated within the first 20 minutes or so of RRR, a.k.a. one-ninth of this film’s running time, stick around. There’s more. A lot more. Like an emergency rescue mission involving a sinking raft, a flaming train, a horse, a motorcycle, some rope and the flag of India. And a siege on a diplomat’s mansion punctuated by a CGI menagerie tearing into the British Raj’s troops. And the most frenetic, kinetic, class-conscious dance-off to ever double as a cultural fuck-you. And bromantic montages, slo-mo brooding, flashbacks that constitute their own short films, a man kicking an arrow through a tree trunk into another man’s head, and an acrobatic sequence involving a hero leaping, fighting and shooting legions of enemy soldiers while perched on his best friend’s shoulders that would make Butch and Sundance slow-clap.

A laudatory review in The New Yorker also is worth reading. It notes that while RRR is wildly nationalistic (I don't like Prime Minister Modi's Hindu nationalism, but I'm sure we both loved RRR), it does so in an appealing fashion that transcends modern politics.

When it comes to cinematic propaganda, blatant is better than insidious. Overt advocacy has the virtue of candor and the vigor of fervent emotion. A movie such as “Top Gun: Maverick” hides its messages under the guise of unexceptionable realities, whereas another new, high-energy, political action spectacle, the Indian film “RRR” (which was released theatrically in March and is now streaming on Netflix, where it’s in the top five), makes its statements explicit. It thrusts its imaginative artistry thrillingly and gleefully to the fore.

Here's the official trailer in Hindi.

And here's a great bollywood style dance-off. Be aware that there's quite a bit of gore and violence in RRR, but it goes along with the story line.

If you frequently think about sex, you're likely to be a man

Seemingly the title of this blog post is a good candidate for top honors in the "Well, duh, that's obvious" pantheon of trite statements.

But, hey, I learned about this unsurprising finding in the June 2022 issue of Scientific American, so it's decidedly science'y. 

The article is called "Men Aren't from Mars, nor are Women from Venus." This, of course, is a mirror image of John Gray's 1992 book, "Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus." It's based on a study of studies involving the personality traits of more than 15,000 people.

Cisgender people. Which means people whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, as contrasted with transgender people. Since 98 percent of the study participants identified themselves as cisgender, the article's authors don't draw any conclusions about the 2 percent.

They found in the data 18 specific self-reported traits that varied between the men and women in the study. An algorithm they built was able to predict a person's gender based on the scores they self-reported on the traits 78 percent of the time.

That seems pretty high to me, but it means that 22 percent of the time gender couldn't be predicted from a person's personality. 

What's sort of surprising is that just one trait out of the 18 could predict a person's gender 69 percent of the time, while apparently the other 17 just added another 9 percent to the predictability, bringing it to the aforementioned 78 percent.

That trait was... a focus on sex. Here's an excerpt from the Scientific American article. 

The most sizable of these differences [between men and women] was the degree to which cisgender people thought about sex, assessed by asking people to rate how much they agreed with the statement "I often have sexual thoughts when I meet an attractive-looking person" and disagreed with the statement "I do not frequently think about sex."

(This "sex-focused" characteristic, while not linked to major personality traits commonly studied in psychology, nonetheless fits the conception of a personality trait as a pattern in thought, emotion, or behavior. It also relates to a concept called sexual preoccupation.)

We found that gender could explain about 18 percent of the variation in the extent to which people are sex-focused. Men had a higher average score on this trait than women. There were still plenty of women who had a higher score than most men, however. In other words, individual men and women were highly varied, even though at the group level, men tended to differ from women.

On every trait, there was a substantial overlap between men and women. Yet at the tail ends -- where people either strongly agreed or strongly disagreed with the questions we asked them -- larger differences emerged.

For example, very low compassion was rare in both men and women, but the few people who identified as very uncompassionate were much more likely to be men. This result is consistent with the finding that antisocial personality disorder, which often involves a lack of remorse or empathy, is more common among men than women.

So my admittedly non-scientific summary of this research is that us men are more likely than women to be sex-crazed jerks who don't care much about other people.

Hard to argue with that assessment. But just today I was able to release a childproof bottle cap that my wife couldn't open. So men are good for something!

Salem Art Fair should move to Riverfront Park

Having been unimpressed with the new Salem Art Fair location in Bush Park -- as described in "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now" -- when I saw Wes Bouche's Facebook post, I thought Great idea! ( I assume last two words were meant to be "same time.")

This makes a lot of sense.

The World Beat Festival has lots of booths, just as the Art Fair does, and it fits nicely at Riverfront Park. The old amphitheater could be used for daytime entertainment, with the new Rotary Club amphitheater used for the evening headliner shows.

Maybe there's some drawbacks to having the Salem Art Fair at Riverfront Park. I just can't come up with any at the moment. The setting is gorgeous, with the Willamette flowing by and Minto Brown Park just an easy stroll away via the pedestrian bridge.

Parking is plentiful at Riverfront Park, especially with the downtown parking garages just a short distance away. Visitors from out of town who come for the Art Fair would be able to walk downtown easily to enjoy the shopping and dining there.

The Salem Art Association should give this idea some serious thought. Yes, Bush Park was a great location for the Art Fair when it could be held under the towering white oaks. But now this is off the table given the damage being done to the roots of the trees by soil compaction.

So if the Art Fair has to be held in an open grassy area, why not have that area at Riverfront Park? It's a considerably more pleasant setting than where the Art Fair was held this year.

Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now

After a Covid-caused hiatus, the Salem Art Fair is back in Bush Park this weekend.

But not in its usual location under trees, because that was causing damage to the white oaks from soil compaction. So it moved to the large open grassy area adjacent to High Street. 

Laurel and I went to the fair this afternoon for our usual Friday visit. It was enjoyable. However, not nearly as enjoyable as in the previous location.

Paying for admission was the first shock. Recalling that the previous entrance fee was $5, I handed over a $20 bill for the two of us and waited to get my change. Which didn't happen, since the new entrance fee is $10 per adult.

OK, no big deal. As soon as we started looking at the booths, though, I realized that Art Fair 2.0 has lost much of what made Art Fair 1.0 so appealing. 

Before, the artist booths were laid out on each side of a central paved path that served as a connecting link between the food/entertainment area at the north end, and another food/entertainment area at the south end.

Now there's just a big grassy field with booths arranged in a rather confusing fashion. It used to be easy to tell if you'd seen all the artists. We'd start at one end, look at each of the booths in each of the rows on one side of the central paved path, then head back the other way, looking at each of the booths on the other side of the path.

This year, we kept wondering if we'd already seen a half-circle of booths, or if we'd missed one, because the layout isn't nearly as clear.

UPDATE: After some further reflection, it dawned on me that what the new location of the Art Fair lacks is the energy of the old location. Before, there was the sense of being part of an artistic celebration with other people. There wasn't nearly as much open space, so you felt a connection with your fellow fairgoers as people walked along fairly close together, browsing the art. Now, after paying for admission you're set loose in a big field with tents that doesn't have anywhere near the same sense of energetic intimacy. Hopefully this will be fixed next year. A more linear layout with some curves in it would help a lot, as this would foster designated paths for viewing different parts of the Art Fair. Put simply, the old Art Fair layout had "soul." This layout felt sterile and detached.

Again, I get why the location had to be changed. These oaks are right next to the new location. They're protected from root damage now. But fairgoers and artists aren't protected from the sun. And the oaks provided a sheltering natural atmosphere that added a lot to the ambience of the Art Fair, which now is lacking.

Currently there's artist booths scattered around a big flat grassy field. Better than scattered around a big flat asphalt parking lot, for sure. But worse than being under the shady limbs of large white oaks. I suppose that if someone had never been to the Art Fair at the old location, they'd think this one was just fine. However, I was unable to stop comparing old and new.

At least the temporary fence around the Art Fair has gotten shorter and more attractive. It was kind of jarring to have some of the booths right next to a sidewalk and city street. Again, my memory of previous Art Fairs forces me to look upon the 2022 version through the eyes of all the Art Fairs I've been to since moving to Salem in 1977.

Laurel and I found ourselves moving through the artist booths more rapidly than usual, given the lack of shade when not actually inside a booth and the warm weather today. I did pause to admire the colorful shoes on display in this booth.

I was wearing colorful shoes myself, albeit created not by an artist, but by Keen (these are their Uneek brand of sandals).

This booth also caught my eye.

Not to belabor this point -- though admittedly I am -- but after we reached the northern end of the booths and turned around to walk the other way, it was kind of difficult to tell which artists we had already seen, and which artists we hadn't.

At the old Art Fair sometimes Laurel and I would split up and agree to meet at a certain time at row 11, or whatever. At the new Art Fair, the numbering scheme wasn't readily apparent. If someone is attracted to a piece of art, yet isn't quite ready to buy it, this makes finding the artist's booth again more difficult than it should be.

Part of the fun of being unartistic, which I certainly am, is looking at a piece of art and thinking, "Hey, I could make that!" Of course, I really couldn't, since undoubtedly quite a bit of skill goes into painting a canvas blue. But the thought was still in my head.

The Art Fair features art with a wide range of prices for every budget. Two of these sculptures had tags saying $16K and $20K. "K" stands for thousand, or I would have pulled out a twenty dollar bill and taken one of the pieces home.

My photos and commentary on Salem 2022 Tour of Homes

This year it was easy for Laurel, my wife, and I to visit most of the newly-built Salem houses in the 2022 Tour of Homes, because there were only three. Seven of the eleven homes in the Tour were in Dallas and one was in Monmouth.

Here's photos, and my commentary on them, for the two houses in south Salem that we visited. We passed on a house in NE Salem. The Tour of Homes runs from Saturday, July 9 through Sunday, July 17. Hours are noon-6 pm on weekends, 6 pm-9 pm on weeknights. Free admission.

This is a $785,000 house at 3311 Felton Street S. Our first impression was, "Wow, sure doesn't look like it should be that expensive." But we haven't bought a house since 1990, when we paid $145,000 for a 3,200 square foot house built in 1973 on five acres in rural south Salem.

So, yeah, times have changed. Building costs have risen. Land is more expensive. Tastes have evolved toward more costly materials. For example, our kitchen originally had formica. When we remodeled, the countertops became marble. 

Both houses were nicely furnished to make them look lived in. The living room area seemed comfy, though I'm not a fan of a high-up television.

Nice touch, shades that you can either see through, or not see through.

Laurel liked how the kitchen lights had no visible bulbs.

I realize that lots have to be smaller in order to accommodate the density needed to comply with Oregon's land use laws that protect farm and forest land by establishing urban growth boundaries around cities. But for $785,000, to us this seems like a really skimpy yard. 

Doesn't seem like there's any room to plant a shade tree either, which would make this patio more useable in the summer.

I was envious of the covered deck, though. That's something we don't have.

Naturally every new house these days seems to have a walk-in closet. In our 1973 house, you could walk into our bedroom closet if you pushed the hangers aside, but you'd only make it a few feet. So this is another feature we envy.

Whenever I see a bed with a million pillows, more or less, my bed with two regular pillows seems decidedly pillow-deprived.

We then headed to this $715,000 house at 6074 Evangelista Avenue S. If you visit this Tour home and use GPS, be aware that Google Maps only had Evangelista Street, no Avenue. So we and quite a few others ended up perplexed at the street address after Google Maps said "you've arrived at your destination." No, the tour home is on a new avenue a ways further up Evangelista. 

Another pleasant living room -- though actually it is rare to see an actual living room, since kitchens and "living rooms" typically flow together in modern houses.

Again, we were surprised how little of a yard remains when a 2,215 sq. ft. house is built on a typical lot. However, the steep slope meant that retaining walls took up much of the yard space.

I kept looking for holes in a putting green, but this was just artificial grass with no holes in it.

Kind of a bold kitchen look, with both brown and dark grey cabinets.

Not the sort of view we're used to, but given the nature of the lot, I guess there was no other option.

A room at the front of the house had the most appealing view. This is a problem with building houses with garages in the front next to the street. If cars were parked behind houses via an alley, as in the Fairview Addition development, the living room area can look out onto the street, which in this case would have made for a more attractive view.

Speaking of view, the people in the house behind this Tour home must have considerably less of one now. 

Leaving the Tour home, Laurel spotted this cell tower disguised as a tree. Great idea!

One reason we go to the Tour of Homes each year is to get some perspective on our own house -- which both pleases us and irritates us, given its age and lack of some modern features. However, after I parked my car in our carport (no attached garage) I had to take a photo to show what a difference there is between city living and country living. 

Yes, there's pluses and minuses to each. What concerns Laurel and me, though, is that nowadays new houses in Salem often lack even a slight connection to nature. Our problem is just the opposite. We have so much nature around us, it's a pain to maintain and keep under control. Especially at our age, 73. But going to the Tour of Homes reminded us of how wonderful it is for us to be able to live where we do.

When we look out of our living room area onto our (non-covered) deck, we see a wall of trees. That's healing. That's invigorating. Unless there's an ice storm, and the trees are crashing down.

Inside, our house has a warm feel with all the wood that was typical in houses built way back when. I shudder to think what all the lumber in our house would cost now, though I've heard that lumber prices have fallen from their shocking peak a while back.

So once again, we came away from a Tour of Homes visit feeling good about our own house. But I still wish we had a fireplace and a covered seating area outside, and Laurel would love to have a genuine walk-in closet.

UPDATE: A commenter on this post shared an interesting New York Times story from 2000, "In Portland, Houses Are Friendly. Or Else." A few excerpts:

They have seen the enemy creep into the settled, earth-toned neighborhoods of this city -- the boxy transplants from the suburban netherland. Houses that turn their backs to the street. Houses that embrace a nesting pair of monster-size sport utility vehicles and little else. Houses that give no idea where the front door might be.

Snout houses, they call them, all garage and muscled front facades. And for the last eight months, Portland has made the snout house illegal, going to a frontier of design dictate where no other big American city has gone before.

...In this ever-quirky city of just under half a million people, the term ''snout house'' has since been shunned as offensive to people who live in snout houses. But the offending structure has been clearly defined in the city code: the garage cannot dominate the front of the house or protrude; the main entrance has to be close to the street and clearly identifiable from the sidewalk; and the side of the house that faces the street must have a certain minimum of window and door space.

I offer advice to someone new to using a urinary catheter

Today I heard from a woman whose 56 year old husband had his bladder go atonic, dysfunctional, two months ago. Understandably, he's suffering both physically and psychologically given this abrupt change in his life.

She had read the essay I wrote for 180 Medical, which supplies my catheters, that had the not-very-cheery title, "My urinary catheter-related depression and anxiety." I was asked if I had any resources, advice, or support I could suggest.

Well, here's the thoughts that come immediately to mind. I'll use this blog post as a reply to the woman, copying it into my email reply. I'll speak to her husband, hoping that some of what I say can be of some help to him.

First, and most importantly, know that these early months in your newfound catheter life almost certainly are the most difficult you'll experience. Things will get easier with time. Hey, like me, you've spent your entire life up to this point taking going to the bathroom for granted.

When you had to go, you just went. If a bathroom wasn't available, a tree would do.

Now you're faced with having to organize your peeing, to schedule your peeing. That's a huge adjustment. It's completely normal to feel upset, angry, anxious, depressed, maybe even guilty if you think you could have done something to prevent your bladder from going on strike, as I like to put it.

Guilt is something I've wrestled with, as I said in my essay. Recently I had three sessions with a counselor. One useful thing he said when I started to talk about how I felt bad that I might have been able to prevent my bladder from going dysfunctional was this:

"Hey, Brian, had this ever happened to you before?" I said, "No, of course not." "Then how could you have known what to do, since you'd never experienced anything like this?" Good point. That helped me shunt my guilt into a corner of my mind rather than front and center.

I've also been helped by a talk I heard on Sam Harris's Waking Up app by a modern practitioner of Stoicism. He spoke about how each of us, without exception, is living a dream life. Why? Because no matter how difficult our life might be, someone else has it worse, so to them we're living a dream life.

I keep this in mind when I'm feeling sorry for myself because I have to insert a plastic tube into my urethra, and thence into my bladder, five times a day. There are many people who can't walk. There are many people with incurable cancer. There are many people with intense pain.

Would they be overjoyed to trade my bladder problem for their problem? Absolutely. Now, this only gets me so far, because even though I can envision having a worse problem that a dysfunctional bladder, the plain fact is that I don't have that worse problem. I have a bladder problem.

I do feel grateful, though, when I see someone in a wheelchair and realize that not being to walk would be a heck of a lot worse than not being able to pee properly on my own. (And it isn't uncommon for someone to both not be able to walk and need to use a urinary catheter.)

A lot depends on finding a easy to use catheter that is comfortable to insert and remove. I'm a big fan of the Flex Coude Pro pocket-size catheters. Being on Medicare, I don't have to pay a whole lot for them, since they're spendy. 

It was aggravating at first when I had to apply lubricant to an inexpensive catheter, be super cautious about not touching it with dirty hands, and all that. Now I can carry several Flex Coude Pro pocket size catheters in my hip bag for when I need to use one when I'm out and about.

(I much prefer private restrooms, but can do my catheter thing in a bathroom stall if necessary.)

Deciding how open to be with friends and family can be a difficult decision. Using a urinary catheter isn't a normal conversation topic. If you have a bad knee, or a sore back, that's easy to talk about. Having to stick a plastic tube into your penis, not so much, to put it mildly.

Since you're 56, probably you're still working. Depending on the sort of job you have, using a catheter at work either could be fairly easy or more difficult.

How open you can be with co-workers is another issue. It's hard to find humor in using a catheter, but you could always tell people something like, "In case you're wondering why it takes me longer to use the bathroom, here's why -- and it's probably not what you think."

Along that line, I tried out a hypnotist to see if she could make me feel better about my bladder problem. Once she asked me how long it took to do my catheter thing. I told her, around seven minutes, I guess. She said, since you do it five times a day, that's 35 minutes a day, right? 

Which helped me to realize that while using a catheter occupied a really big space in my anxious brain, it wasn't a huge part of my day. After all, obviously I was spending time in the bathroom prior to using a catheter. Now I was just spending a bit more time.

I was familiar with the term "differently abled" before. Now it means something real to me. And hopefully to you. We're both differently abled when it comes to peeing. Some people have to use a cane to help them walk. My whole life I've worn glasses or contacts to help me see. Now I use a catheter to help me pee.

Yes, it's a big deal. But not such a big deal for me as it was five years ago. Sure, adjustments large and small have to be made in our lives, and also in the lives of our wives. Yet life goes on. Hopefully these ramblings are at least some small help to you.

If I've missed the mark on what you're concerned about with your catheter life, email me and I'll try to share some ideas more tailored to your needs and situation. Know that you're not alone in your struggles, though sometimes it will feel that way.

I can't celebrate Independence Day when freedom is under attack

I resonate with this image I saw on Facebook, though it doesn't go far enough.

Yes, the horrendous Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade took away the freedom of women in about half the states to choose an abortion. Thankfully, Oregon isn't one of them.

But there's plenty of other threats to the values our country was founded on. We're in grave danger of losing them.

Democracy. The January 6 committee is doing a great job of revealing the details of how close Trump and his enablers came to overturning the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. What's even scarier, though, is how Republicans across the country are working hard to make sure that the next anti-democracy coup attempt, probably in 2024 but possibly as early as this year's midterms, succeeds. 

Further, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about whether state legislatures have the right to choose their own presidential electors even if the candidate they favor didn't win the popular vote in the state. This could mean that state judges and supreme courts would have no say in such an attack on democracy.

Women's right to health care. It's bad enough that so many states either have made abortion illegal or are about to do so. It's clear that if Republicans win the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2024 they'll ban abortion nationwide. Already abortion-banning red states are working on laws to prevent women from going to other states for an abortion. This is blatantly unconstitutional, but it's possible the Supreme Court would let them get away with it.

Protecting the environment. It used to be that both major political parties agreed that protecting the environment was a good thing, since everything we value -- life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness -- depends on preserving the natural systems that keep us alive and our economy functioning. In other words, conservatives used to believe in conserving our air, water, and natural resources.

No more. The Supreme Court has undermined the ability of the federal government to deal with the carbon pollution that threatens the habitability of our planet through global warming. Polls show that most Americans want to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly, our ability to do that has been diminished by an out-of-control Supreme Court that is functioning not as a legal body, but as an arm of the Republican Party.

Freedom to not be shot. Being 73, I'm old enough to remember when guns were used for hunting and target practice. I grew up in a rural community where the progression was BB gun, pellet gun, .22, deer rifle. No assault rifles. Very few handguns. We not only survived, we thrived, because mass shootings in schools or anywhere else were nonexistent.

Now the Republican Party and Supreme Court have decided that it's better to deny children and other people the right not to be shot and killed than to permit reasonable gun control measures. This doesn't increase personal freedom, it limits it, since the freedom to stay alive undergirds every other freedom.

Separation of church and state. Authoritarians like India's Prime Minister Modi like state-sponsored religions, in his case, Hinduism. In our country, increasingly, it's Christianity. The Supreme Court has ruled that a football coach had the right to pray in the middle of the field after games, surrounded by his team -- ignoring the fact that voluntary private prayer is fine, but coerced public prayer isn't. Atheists, Muslims, Jews and other non-Christians on his team would have felt they had to take part in the coach's praying. That's un-American.

I'm as patriotic as anybody. But I won't be celebrating Independence Day tomorrow. Or any day until our country demonstrates that it really cares about personal freedom and independence.