HinesSight

My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense

Yesterday I fell off a bridge into running water. Fortunately, it was a tiny bridge and the water wasn't very deep. How it appears to have happened contains a life lesson.

Yesterday I was taking our dog, Mooka, on her usual late afternoon walk, which begins on our property in rural south Salem. I had her on a leash, since the area by a creek is favored by raccoons, and we don't want Mooka running off and tangling with one.

I'd just crossed a little bridge that crosses the main part of Spring Creek, a short creek that feeds Spring Lake. The photo above shows the scene of my fall, a second bridge that crosses a smaller creek that only has considerable water in it after heavy rains.

Mooka was in the lead as I started to walk across the bridge, turning my head to the right to observe the mini-waterfall on the usually mostly dry smaller creek. (The waterfall is the splash of white past the ferns on the left side of the creek.)

Then I suddenly found myself falling off the bridge on the downstream (left) side. Best I can figure out is that as my attention was focused on the mini-waterfall, Mooka had started to pull on the leash I was holding, as she always does when our dog prepares to jog up some stone steps leading away from the creek.

I must have reached out to a snag that was the rotting remains of a tree that used to grow just past the bridge, but had lost most of its trunk in an ice storm, if I remember correctly. The snag pulled out of the ground, falling into the creek just before I did.

Here you can see the snag laying in the creek. Fortunately, I missed it, toppling into the water instead. As falls go, it was a fairly elegant one. I'd let go of the leash, so Mooka wasn't affected. I was wearing high topped boots, so I didn't twist my ankle.

I just climbed back onto the bridge and looked for the dog. But first I had to deal with my Apple Watch beeping loudly.

It had registered that I'd fallen and had started a 30-second countdown, I think it was, until 911 was called (I had my iPhone with me, so I assume that's how the call would be made). I was able to cancel the 911 call just in time, after first pressing "No" on my watch's screen, then realizing the question was Do you want to cancel the 911 call? and I needed to press "Yes." 

Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I'd recently written a post about how scientists have measured how quickly human cognition works, finding that it is amazingly slow at 10 bits per second. One of the lessons, said the researchers, was that the mind can only do one thing at a time.

That was my problem, I believe. My attention had been split between walking across the bridge with a dog leash in my hand just as the dog was pulling on the leash to get up the stone steps, while I was looking at the mini waterfall. 

All that combined to throw me off balance. I suspect that if I hadn't been looking at the waterfall, I would have done what I usually do, walk faster to keep up with the dog. But I had slowed to inspect the rare waterfall.

Anyway, I didn't suffer from my tumble into the creek. I just had to walk in soggy shoes and socks the rest of the way. From now on I'll try to do a bit better with the One Thing at a Time notion.

My wife made the healthiest main dish in the history of Christmas Eve dinners

Part of me says, "You shouldn't be bragging on Christmas Day." Another part says, "Dude, go ahead and brag -- you aren't bragging about yourself, but about your wife, Laurel."

I'm listening to that part.

For while the title of this blog post might seem to be an exaggeration, it accurately reflects the prevailing opinion among me, Laurel, and five friends we invited for a Christmas Eve dinner at our house last night 

Well, in the history of Christmas Eve dinners is an embellishment that I added for dramatic effect. But it's true that all seven of us agreed that few people were having as healthy a main dish as what Laurel served for dinner.

Here's a photo of my leftover plate that I'm having for dinner again today.

It's a vegetarian loaf with organic lentils, kale, brown rice, and carrots, with cranberry sauce as a glaze on top, plus some other minor ingredients. (It was supposed to have a celery stalk also; Laurel forgot to put it on the list when I went grocery shopping on Sunday, so celery wasn't included.)

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Ultimate Vegan Thanksgiving Load with Cranberry Sauce recipe. You have to scroll down a ways to find the recipe on this web page. 

Since I've been a vegetarian for 55 years, with no meat or fish entering my mouth during all that time, I readily admit that my taste buds are so attuned to healthy vegetarian food, there's no way I can compare this veggie loaf with turkey, ham, or any other food that once was walking around -- assuming it was raised outside of a factory farm, since in those places some animals don't have enough room to walk.

All I can say is that it tastes good to me, as it did to everybody who ate it last night. Of course, our Christmas Eve dinner included some other food: mashed potatoes, salad, green beans, chocolate cake, poppy seed cake. Our guests contributed several of the dishes. 

I'm not religious, but it was a Christmas miracle of sorts when I got on the scale this morning for my daily weigh-in and found that not only hadn't I gained any weight, I had lost some, even though I ate quite a bit last night.

That's a side benefit of eating healthy vegetarian food during the holidays, as well as throughout the year. It tends to be lower in calories.

My weight has bounced around a bit during the vegetarian phase of my life, which began when I was about 21. Currently I weigh just a bit more than I did in high school. However, my height is a few inches less (damn aging!) so my BMI, body mass index, must be greater now.

I'm not a strong proselytizer for vegetarianism.

Still, I'm not shy about pointing out that not only is giving up meat good for a person's health, it's good for our planet. Raising animals for food is a major contributor to rising greenhouse gas emissions, which makes being a vegetarian wise both personally and environmentally. 

Our 2024 Christmas letter is partly about saber-toothed tigers

Another year, another Christmas Letter. Or as we call it, our Holiday Greetings.

Per usual, I wrote it. The key to doing that this time was an image that popped into my mind of animals going extinct. Which pretty much sums up how I look upon Christmas letters: a dying breed.

Nonetheless, I'm still alive. And I enjoy writing the Holiday Greetings. Plus, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2024 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

Broadband is coming to Oregon's unserved areas, but slowly

A few days ago I decided to see whether there was anything new being reported by the Oregon Broadband Office, a state agency charged with overseeing projects to bring decently fast broadband to people in this state who lack it.

That includes my neighborhood in rural south Salem. Though we're only six miles or so from the Salem city limits, Oregon's capital, the only wired/fixed broadband (as contrasted with cellular broadband) available out here is crappy CenturyLink DSL that comes over ancient copper phone lines at the sluggish speed of 6-7 Mbps down and 1-2 Mbps up.

This is a far cry from the minimal broadband standard of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. And until I was able to bring DSL to our area in 2008 by writing a plaintive letter to the CEO of Qwest, the predecessor to CenturyLink, we had to use a glitchy satellite service, WildBlue, while neighbors of ours had to make do with dial-up.

Currently my wife and I enjoy Space X's Starlink broadband, which we've had since January 2021, when I became a Starlink beta tester. Since, Starlink has become much faster and more reliable as many more satellites are launched into low orbit. That's great, but I'd much rather have fiber optic broadband -- which is considerably better than Starlink's $120/month service. (Starlink speeds vary quite a bit; at the moment I'm getting 123 Mbps down and 17 Mbps up.)

I noticed a November 12, 2024 press release on the Oregon Broadband Office web site about $133 million being awarded to broadband projects in Oregon. Marion County, where I live, was to get $8,356,701 for 1,007 locations. That got me excited, until I checked out a map of the projects and saw that Ziply Fiber would be installing fiber optic on the east side of I-5 near us, while our neighborhood is a few miles west of I-5.

So close, yet so far. That spurred me to send a message to the Oregon Broadband Office:

I contacted your office before, wondering when our woefully broadband underserved area of several hundred homes out here in rural south Salem would benefit from the federal programs to expand broadband access.

From what I can tell after just looking at your site, Ziply Fiber has a contract nearby, on the east side of I-5, while we’re several miles from that area on the west side of I-5. So it looks like even though most of our neighbors suffer with 6-7 Mbps DSL from CenturyLink, the only option widely available other than Starlink, which we have and pay $120 a month for, there’s no plan for our neighborhood to get faster and cheaper broadband.

Please let me know if my gloomy assessment of the situation is correct. As I told one of your staff before, I’ve looked into every conceivable broadband option, including cellular broadband, and have come up with exactly zero options to DSL other than satellite internet, which I have.

I’ve noted that Starlink wasn’t eligible for federal grants to improve broadband access because the service was too expensive and too slow. So it’s frustrating that aside from crappy DSL, the only option I and many other neighbors have is Starlink and HughesNet, two satellite services that don’t qualify under federal rules as viable broadband. 

How long are we supposed to wait for “real” broadband? I’m 76, so I'm suspecting I’ll be dead before that happens in our neighborhood, though I’d enjoy getting some positive news from your office.

I got a quick reply from a staffer who I'd talked with before, Brian McGuirk. We set up a time to talk by phone last Tuesday. Once again, McGuirk was helpful, friendly, and informative. He told me that the $133 million was from the 2021 ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act).

So it's taken more than three years for that money to be allocated to broadband projects in Oregon. Given how the federal bureaucracy works, I suppose this is reasonable. McGuirk said that a much larger pot of broadband money is coming from the 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which contains $65 billion nationally for broadband. 

I found a June 14, 2024 story from our local newspaper, the Statesman Journal, "Oregon's 'Internet for All' application approved." 

Nearly a year after announcing Oregon would receive $688 million for the improvement and expansion of affordable, high-speed internet, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Thursday that the state can now request access to funding to begin administering the program.

A pre-pandemic study estimated 1.7 million Oregonians live in rural areas without access to high-speed broadband.

Nick Batz, director of the Oregon Broadband Office, said while the state generally has good connectivity, establishing access in those under or unserved areas is challenging.

The story said that the program is expected to be implemented over the next four years and completed by 2028. Well, I'll be 80 then. So maybe I'll live to see fiber optic at our house. Until then, I'm thankful for Starlink, which has made our broadband life much happier after we were able to ditch archaic DSL.

McGuirk told me about an area in rural Washingon County that is in the same DSL situation as our neighborhood is. After a bit of Googling, I came up with a 2020 story, "Is fiber coming to rural western Washington County? Perhaps, says Ziply." But that area still doesn't have fiber.

The rural portions of Washington County have always struggled to gain access to high speed internet, with some regions solely relying on satellite or microwave options, while others are on copper lines now owned by Ziply Fiber, which acquired the former network of the struggling Frontier Communications operation in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana on May 1 of this year.

...The Frontier network for rural residents in far western Washington County has been a constant source of frustration for years, with technical issues plaguing the aging network and often poor customer service being a hallmark of their legacy. With the acquisition of the network by Ziply, a new company, is there a future in western Washington County where internet connectivity comes in the way of fiber instead of copper? Perhaps, says the company. 

My wife's shoulder replacement surgery is helping me be a better person

When it comes to being a caring, compassionate person, I'd say that I'm about average.

I know people who are much more caring and compassionate than I am, and I also know people who are considerably less caring and compassionate. So I've got room to grow in this regard.

However, at the age of 76, I pretty much figured that I was set in my ways and wouldn't be improving my caring and compassionate quotient any time soon.

That was before my wife, Laurel, had shoulder replacement surgery. More accurately, reverse shoulder replacement surgery.

The difference between a reverse prosthesis and a standard shoulder replacement is that in a reverse prosthesis, the ball is placed on the socket side of the joint. This is opposite of where it is located in nature, or “reverse” of what you would expect. The socket is then placed on the arm side where it is supported by a metal stem in the arm bone (the humerus).

About ten years ago, I think it was, Laurel had surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff in her right shoulder. When it got torn again, my wife had to decide whether to go through another surgery, this time a total replacement of the shoulder. 

She wasn't wild about the prospect of needing to wear a sling for around a month and go through the physical therapy needed for her to make best use of a new shoulder. But this was the wisest thing to do, so last Tuesday she had the surgery on an outpatient basis from her Salem Health doctor. 

It went well. Now we're in the post-surgery recovery mode, which has been difficult for Laurel. The first 48 hours she was icing her shoulder via a machine for 40 minutes on and 20 minutes off. That meant sitting and sleeping in a recliner chair.

She was given several prescriptions to deal with pain and inflammation, along with other medications to dealt with the side effects of the prescriptions. In short, not fun, to put it mildly. 

As with her first surgery, I'm Laurel's caregiver. She needs quite a bit of care. Basically I'm her right arm whenever she needs to do something that requires two arms. Which is a lot of stuff. Until someone has lost the use of an arm, you don't realize how difficult it is to do previously simple things.

Here's how I put my caregiving in a post on my Church of the Churchless blog, where I write more philosophically than on this blog and my Salem Political Snark blog.

Until you can't use an arm for much, it's difficult to know all the things you won't be able to do anymore. We're rediscovering those things, since Laurel had rotator cuff surgery on the same arm about ten years ago that also required her to use a sling for a month. Of course, we were a decade younger then, so everything is a bit tougher now that we're in our mid-70s rather than mid-60s.

I've been having to do a lot more around the house than I usually do.

For example, Laurel used to walk our dog in the morning and I did it most afternoons. Now I handle both walks. We shared cooking duties before her surgery. Now I have to help Laurel with her meals, unless it's a simple one that doesn't require two hands. For the first 48 hours my wife was constantly using a machine with a timer to ice her shoulder, 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off. My job was to rotate three sets of 12 frozen water bottles into the machine every eight hours, making sure a thoroughly frozen set always was available.

What I've discovered from all this extra taking care of Laurel is that the more I'm focused on her needs, the less it bothers me when something goes wrong in my life. This both surprised and pleased me. The first time it happened, it felt like I'd taken a pill that reduced the sensation of the problem I was having by about half. 

Meaning, what used to irritate me considerably now irritated me only a little. It was as if constantly putting Laurel's needs before my own, even for just a couple of days, considerably lowered the feeling of Me I normally carry around. Having less Me rattle around in my mind, and more She (my wife), left less for an irritation to latch onto. 

Also, after six days of caregiving, I've been pleased that aside from a single instance where I got a bit testy with Laurel and had to apologize to her for that, I've been able to be caring and compassionate toward my wife to a greater degree than I anticipated. 

I hadn't realized that putting a loved one's needs before my own, which I readily admit should be my habitual way of acting, but hasn't been, can become a habit. It's sort of like I hadn't exercised my caring and compassionate mental muscle before, or at least not to the extent I'm doing it now (the exception being my wife's previous shoulder surgery).

So all in all, I'm feeling good both about Laurel's prospect for getting back almost complete use of her right shoulder, and my capability for learning how to be a more consistently caring and compassionate person. Of course, only time will tell how both things go.

My 76th birthday has me thinking about sending death letters before I die

For a while I've been pondering the notion of sending death letters to friends, family, and other people important to me -- not letters to be delivered after I die, but while I'm very much alive, not even sick. 

This idea has gained strength as I approach my 76th birthday. That sounds damn old to me. Which, it is.

My sister died at 71. My mother died at 73. My father, almost entirely absent from my life, died at 73 (best I can estimate; I'm not sure about the exact age).

So while I'm pretty healthy at the moment, having taken better care of myself than those relatives, I still sort of feel like I've living on borrowed time. After all, usually we have no way of knowing when we'll take our last breath.

Accidents happen. Unexpected heart attacks happen. Murders happen. The only way death is known in advance is if we commit suicide or if we have a fatal disease whose course is predictable.

My sister and mother died without me being able to speak with them. My father, the same, though we were so distant, I might not have wanted to talk with him before his death. 

I regret not being able to tell my sister and mother how much I loved them and would miss them. Hopefully they knew this, but we weren't a super-intimate family. I never told them things that I now wish I had, such as regrets about how I could have been a better brother or son, and my appreciation for all they did for me which, in retrospect, I took for granted more than I should have.

That's my motivation for writing individualized death letters to people I care about and sending them out while I'm alive and well, aside from some chronic health problems that are annoying rather than life-threatening. 

The letters would be a reflection of my deep feelings for these people. They'd allow me to say things more honestly and directly than I'm able to do in my usual communications with them. I'd imagine that I was on my death bed, even though I wouldn't be. What would I want to say to each of them if I knew that I only had fifteen minutes of living left?

For sure it wouldn't be aimless chit-chat. It would be heartfelt, real, emotional.

That's the spirit I'll try to put myself in when I write the death letters. Of course, if I end up living quite a bit longer, I might want to write a second death letter to some people. (The Social Security Administration says a 76 year old man lives another ten years, on average.)

I wouldn't expect a response to the death letters.

In fact, I see this as a downside of sending them while I'll alive, because I don't want people to think that I'm looking for them to say nice things about me after I've said nice things about them. However, to be honest, it wouldn't bother me if that happened. I just have no expectation of it happening, as I want my words to reflect how I feel about the person, not how I want them to feel about how I feel.

Anyway, this is something I'm planning to pursue over the coming months.

If I ever have a sudden massive heart attack or find a big semi-truck about to hit my little Subaru head on, I don't want my last thought to be, Damn, I never told _____ how much I care about them.  I'd rather have it simply be, Fuck! I'm about to die!

Verizon outage today was irritating for several reasons

It was a stressful morning in the life of my wife and I, two retired people who usually enjoy a relaxed morning of breakfast, browsing of online news sources, and watching our dog nap after her first meal of the day.

But today we had an electrician coming over to install two ceiling fans, and my wife, Laurel, came into my bedroom as I was just getting up, saying "My phone isn't working; I need to use yours to tell the electrician that if he's delayed, to text or call you, since he won't be able to reach me."

Looking at Laurel's iPhone 14 Max, the same model as mine, I saw the dreaded "SOS" in the upper right corner where a cellular connection is supposed to be. That's Apple's signal that our Verizon service had disappeared, but if we needed emergency help it can be reached via other cellular providers.

The strange thing was, my iPhone was still able to make phone calls and send/receive texts. However, the cellular range extender wasn't working that I'd talked Verizon into giving us after I pointed out to them that we'd bought two new iPhones from Verizon but couldn't reliably phone anybody from our house, the reception was so poor out here in rural south Salem. 

Laurel was told by several people that she called this morning, "You're breaking up." When she went closer to a window, the connection improved, just like our not-so-good old times before we got the range extender. Not surprisingly, since my iPhone was working and Laurel's wasn't, we figured that the problem was with her phone -- though I couldn't figure out why the range extender wasn't doing its thing.

Because we've both become addicted to our smart phones, like the vast majority of Americans, Laurel was worried about driving around later in the day with no functioning phone, just in case she had car trouble or needed her phone for some other reason. 

So, overly optimistic beings that we are, even though part of me knew this wasn't going to be easy given my past experience with contacting Verizon, I called Verizon on my phone. I'm pretty sure I heard a message that said something like, "We're experiencing higher than usual call volume due to outages in parts of the country."

OK, I thought, that must refer to the recent hurricane that decimated several states in the southeast, notably including western North Carolina, where a couple Laurel has kept in touch with since their college days moved a few years ago, so that state has been on our mind. What Verizon failed to mention, and damn well should have, was that a massive outage of their cellular service unrelated to the hurricane had occurred in many places across the country.

Later I saw that this was exactly what an author of a ZDNet story, "Is Verizon down for you? Massive outage puts phones in SOS mode across the US," thought.

If you're seeing SOS mode on your phone today, you're not alone. Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in America, is experiencing a massive outage that's affecting users across the US.

Around 10 a.m. ET, users reported that they could not call, text, or use cellular data. Many added that their phones were in SOS mode.

Phones enter SOS mode when not connected to their carrier network, either because they are in an area with poor coverage or because of a technical problem. Given that most of today's reports are from major cities, this issue seems to be the latter. 

When I used Verizon's "Check Network Status" tool, it showed that everything seemed to be functioning normally. My first thought was that this might be related to damage from Hurricane Helen, which ravaged parts of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. However, many people affected today by the Verizon problem aren't in the storm's path.

For most of the morning we were thinking that Laurel's nonfunctioning iPhone was caused by some glitch with her phone.

We tried restarting it, several times. We never were able to talk to anyone at Verizon, but Laurel talked with somebody at Apple, a company that actually has real live technical support people who speak with customers having a problem. We puzzled over the fact that settings on her iPhone was showing no Esim card, the electronic version of a physical sim card. I Googled "problem with Verizon cellular range extender," since that wasn't working.

Eventually I put "Verizon outage" into the Google News search box. That brought up lots of stories about a widespread Verizon outage reported by hundreds of thousands of people, which meant many more must have been affected, given that most people aren't going to report a problem on a web site that tracks outages.

It sure would have been nice if Verizon had prominently displayed a message to those of us looking for technical support either by phoning Verizon or going to the Verizon web site that, most likely, our problem was due to a widespread Verizon outage. That would have saved my wife and me hours of time we could have spent more productively than trying to figure out what was wrong with Laurel's iPhone.

In short, nothing, since by the time I drove into town around 2 pm and called Laurel's phone from my car, her phone was back to normal. 

Tonight I searched for any stories that described the cause of Verizon's outage. Couldn't find any. So far, Verizon apparently isn't revealing why so many Americans had to spend much of Monday with no Verizon cell service. For us, it was an annoyance. For a business, it was lost sales. 

Why would Verizon be hit with such a massive outage all across the country? Was it a hacking attack by some malicious foreign power like Iran or Russia? Was it an error caused by Verizon itself? Not only us Verizon customers deserve to know, but all Americans do, given how reliant we are on our smartphones these days. 

In 2024 we see very few bees and yellow jackets in rural south Salem, Oregon

We've lived at our house on ten acres in rural south Salem, about six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, for thirty-four years. This has been an unusual year for us as regards the bee and yellow jacket population.

We've seen very few of each on our property. Almost none.

Typically we have several natural bee hives. We have flowering plants in our yard that were chosen to appeal to bees. In 2024, though, the bees never showed up.

Same with yellow jackets. In past summers, when we'd eat breakfast on our deck some yellow jackets would appear almost instantly, especially when my cereal topped with raspberries and strawberries was on the table. This year, a few times a single yellow jacket buzzed around. That was it.

And by August we'd see yellow jackets going in and out of underground burrows, which we'd spray if one was close to where we walked. This year, no sign of that. 

Bumblebees have been fairly common. We've seen more of them in our yard than bees. That's never happened before, I'm pretty sure. 

Some neighbors who have a large yard with many flowering plants have noticed a similar marked drop-off in bees. Their theory is that it could be related to aerial spraying with a helicopter of Christmas tree farms north of our neighborhood.

I suppose that's possible. But it seems sort of unlikely to me, given how far away the tree farms are, at least a mile or so. 

It's a mystery. I haven't seen any news about western Oregon experiencing a big die-off in the bee population. Some Googling didn't reveal anything special about 2024 when it comes to natural bee hives in the Willamette Valley.

So I figured I'd cast this blog post into the waters of the Internet and see if it gets any responses from people more knowledgeable than my wife and I are about how bees and yellow jackets are faring in our area this year. 

Leave a comment if you have an explanation for why we've seen so few of them in 2024. Maybe this is just a hyper-local thing, a decline in numbers that is part of some natural cycle. It concerns us, though, that this could be a sign of something harming bees. (Yellow jackets, we're not as concerned about.)

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Photos of our yard and property, to remind me why we don't want to move

We bought our rural south Salem house, which was built in 1973, from a couple in their mid-60s who said they were selling because the house on five acres was too much for them to maintain anymore.

Well, 35 years later, Laurel and I now are in our mid-70s, taking care of the same house (extensively updated by us) and an additional five acres, for a total of ten, since we were able to buy an undeveloped neighboring lot quite a few years ago.

Someday, probably, we'll have to move. In case I ever wonder why it took us so long, I like to write periodic blog posts with photos of our yard and property, given that our surroundings are the main reason we love where we're been living since 1990.

Here's a tour of a walk I took this afternoon.

Outside our front door, we recently had the stone steps leading to our detached garage/carport improved to be more stable. More rock also was added on either side of the steps. 

We've also had the rock wall along a pathway to our yard improved. (In case you can't tell, we like rocks!)

This path is another recent addition. There used to be some grass here, but it didn't grow well, being directly under several large fir trees. So Norberto Flores' crew, who do great work maintaining and improving our property, installed a path with very fine gravel.

I like how the new path makes a big bend, kind of like a meandering river, to join with the end of the existing path.

The tracks in the grass were made by the John Deere lawn tractor I use to mow various fields and paths on our property. It used to take me much longer with a walk-behind field mower. Now I can do everything in just two hours. Power steering and four-wheel steering, and a heavy duty chassis, make the sometimes challenging mowing pretty darn easy.


This replacement Japanese Maple, which we planted after its much larger predecessor was crushed under a large oak limb in the Great Ice Storm of 2021, is growing nicely.

Our water feature adds some flowing liveliness and pleasing sound to the yard.

Leaving the yard, a path takes me to one of the fields I mowed today.

Below that is another mowed field.

Next to it, one more mowed field. I find mowing relaxing. It takes constant attention, to avoid large branches and to maneuver around the many trees, fallen logs, rocks, and such, but I'm so familiar with all of those things, mowing becomes a sort of mindful meditation for me.

A bench sits next to the path down to the spring-fed creek, which flows for most of the year. 

Laurel has added stepping stones and gravel to an often-slippery slope.

We've had two nicely designed bridges made to replace my decidedly amateurish bridges. This is the first bridge over one tributary of the creek.

This is the second bridge, over another tributary of the creek, nicely nestled between two trees, one of them a snag.

The barely visible creek is lined with lush vegetation.

More steps made by Laurel lead from the creek to the community trail, on an easement, that we use to get to our community lake, Spring Lake.

The easement trail goes up, then down to Spring Lake.

Daisies next to the lake.

Spring Lake is about nine acres. No motorized boats allowed. A blue kayak is on the left.

After walking around the lake, I return home. I like how our house is nestled under large oak and fir trees. We could be happy somewhere else, I'm sure, but we'll never find a place as close to nature as where we are now.

Why I didn't buy a Can-Am Spyder after my test drive

At the age of 75, I figured my motorcycle and scooter days were beyond me.

After owning a little Honda 55 in high school, which I took to college, I got my motorcycle endorsement in my 40s, owned one for a year or so, then limited myself to cars until I bought a Suzuki Burgman 650 scooter in 2009.

I liked it a lot. Rode it for about three years.

I might still be, except I succumbed to my wife's dislike of the maxi-scooter, since every time I rode it, she was convinced I was going to die riding it. (Actually I had zero accidents in the three years; never even put a scratch on the Burgman.)

Since, I'd had numerous urges to get another scooter. I enjoyed the Burgman's antilock brakes, adjustable windscreen, large underseat storage, and automatic shifting, All I had to do was twist the throttle, steer, and brake. 

That left my attention free for enjoying the open air and watching out for what people in their cages, otherwise known as cars, were doing around me.

But the older I got, the less eager I was to ride around on two motorized wheels again. I'm still fit, but painful sciatica in my right leg, likely caused by some degeneration in my spine, now made it more difficult for me to maneuver a scooter lacking reverse gear,

Plus, Suzuki no longer sells the Burgman 650, in the United States at least, so the next best option was a Burgman 400 -- which lacked some of the features that I really liked on the 650.

That led me to think more seriously about a Can-Am Spyder RT. I missed the fun of open-air riding, but wanted something safer and more stable than a two-wheeled scooter. Over the years I'd window shopped Spyders and enjoyed seeing them on the road once in a while (they aren't all that common).

I liked the lockable storage of the RT. I liked the heated seats and grips. I liked the antilock brakes and traction control. I liked the adjustable windscreen. I liked the reverse gear. It struck me as having many of the benefits of a motorcycle or scooter without many of the drawbacks.

So last weekend I took a test drive at our closest Can-Am dealer. My wife wasn't thrilled with this, but I promised her that I wouldn't buy one on the spot.

Well, it turns out that I'm strongly leaning toward not buying a Can-Am Spyder off the spot either. Here's why, based on my test drive and watching numerous You Tube reviews of the 2024 Can-Am Spyder RT Limited, which appealed to me most. In no particular order, my reasons are:

Cost. At about $32,000, the RT Limited is almost as expensive as my 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Limited, which has almost every option. That's a lot to spend on a vehicle that isn't as versatile as my Crosstrek.

Lack of driving fun. I realized that the Spyder wasn't going to handle like my scooter, since it has three wheels and doesn't lean. But I thought it would have a go-cart sort of agile handling. Not so. During my test drive, right away I didn't enjoy how the front wheels seemed jittery, reacting to slight imperfections in the pavement.

Some video reviews made the same observation, so this wasn't just me. Sure, I would have gotten used to how the Spyder handled if I bought one, but I was worried that my first impression would be a lasting one. The Spyder RT may be a good touring machine. However, it didn't strike me as a fun drive in town and on the two lane twisty roads in our rural neighborhood. 

Not fully automatic. it's baffling why Can-Am would make the Spyder automatically downshift, but not automatically upshift. That has to be done with a paddle shifter. Yes, there's no clutch, a plus. It just seemed crazy that a $10,000 (or less) scooter is fully automatic, while the $32,000 RT Limited is only semi-automatic. 

Rain is an issue. Living as I do in Oregon, rain is common here, aside from the summer months. I avoided riding my scooter in the rain, given the reduced traction on two wheels. But I figured the Spyder would handle rain well with its three wheels. Yes, better than a motorcycle or scooter. However, the single drive wheel in the back makes for some slippery moments in the rain, based on videos I watched about how the Spyder does in wet stuff. 

Safety is inconvenient. I recalled how, even though I enjoyed my Burgman 650 a great deal, I didn't like putting on and taking off safety gear every time I rode it. Full face helmet. Gloves. Jacket and pants. Boots. I took the advice of my Team Oregon motorcycle safety course: all the gear, all the time. Good advice, but on a hot summer day, I came to enjoy riding in my car in shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals after I sold my scooter. 

So I came to the conclusion that it didn't make a lot of sense to spend $32,000 on a Spyder RT Limited that wasn't nearly as safe or convenient as my Subaru Crosstrek, yet didn't have the fun factor of a scooter or motorcycle. I was getting the worse of both worlds: the high cost of a car, and less safety features than a car, without the riding enjoyment of a two-wheeled scooter or motorcycle. 

Understand: a Can-Am Spyder is a good fit for many people. It just isn't for me. 

Amazon Pharmacy just worked well for me

I'm a big fan of Amazon. Almost am ashamed to admit it, given how huge Amazon is and the many tales of how it screws over employees and businesses it doesn't want competing with its brand products.

But there's no doubt that Amazon is amazingly efficient.

I have Amazon Prime. My orders arrive promptly, sometimes the next day, with very few errors. It's just so damn easy to get stuff from Amazon instead of heading into town, a 20 minute drive away, and looking for something that may or may not be on a store shelf. Plus, I get a lot of benefit from reading customer reviews of products I'm contemplating buying.

So I decided to give Amazon Pharmacy a try. 

At my last primary care doctor visit I left with a prescription for daily Tadalafil, the 5 mg generic version of Cialis. In addition to its well-known use for erectile dysfunction, Tadalafil is prescribed for treatment of an enlarged prostate, which I have. 

I got a paper copy of the prescription because I wasn't sure where I wanted to get it filled. I'd asked the small local pharmacy that my wife and I use to let me know what it would cost for a 90 day supply of Tadalafil. Never got a response to the text I sent, which made me think that the cost would be a lot.

My next step was to go to our nearest Walgreens. I showed the person at the pharmacy window the prescription, and they scanned it into their system. I said that I'd filled some other prescriptions there, so they have my Regence MedAdvantage insurance information.

After some clicking away, the Walgreen's staffer said that my insurance didn't cover Tadalafil. I asked what the cost would be if I paid for it myself. Can't recall the exact amount, but it was about $840 for a 90 day supply.

Wow. For a generic. I said I'd have to think about this and took the prescription back. The cost quoted by a Canada pharmacy was about $140 for a 90 day supply, which shows how crazily expensive drugs can be in the United States.

I then remembered that Amazon had a pharmacy. It was easy to sign up for Amazon Pharmacy given that I was already a regular customer with Amazon Prime. The cost of prescription drugs is easy to find since all you have to do is type it into the usual Amazon search box. 

This is what I found for daily Tadalafil, 90 day supply.

I decided to dip my prescription feet in the Amazon waters. I sent a message to my primary care provider asking that an electronic prescription for my Tadalafil be sent to Amazon, using the phone and fax numbers provided by Amazon Pharmacy.

That just took a few days. Amazon Pharmacy then notified me that the prescription had been received. Soon after I got an email saying that, not surprisingly, my insurance wouldn't cover the prescription. I was asked if I wanted to make an order and pay out-of-pocket. 

Sure. A few clicks later I'd completed the order and almost immediately got this message from Amazon.

That message came on January 30. The next day, today, January 31, the Tadalafil was delivered to my doorstep. The cost was $29.50 rather than the quoted $26.60, but that's no big deal. The bottle had an expiration date of January 30, 2025 and said that the manufacturer was Solco Healthcare, which appears to be a reputable distributor of generics.

So my first experience with Amazon Pharmacy was very positive. I looked at some reviews of Amazon Pharmacy and many of them were negative. However, quite a few of them were from the early days of Amazon Pharmacy, so I suspect some of those initial problems have been resolved.

My other prescriptions aren't nearly as expensive, which means I'll likely stick with a local pharmacy for them, at least for now. Amazon Pharmacy can sure save people a lot of money on certain prescriptions, though, that's for sure.

Portland's Channel 12 got Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong

Being a weather geek of sorts, I'm well aware that forecasting is an uncertain science. It's about probabilities and models, not mathematical precision. 

All I ask is that professional weather forecasters recognize when they can be wrong, and communicate that to the public as clearly as possible. 

Which Mark Nelsen, the main KPTV weather guy at Portland's Channel 12, failed to do Friday night, the day before today's winter storm was to hit Oregon. This annoyed me.

After all, on Thursday I'd written this blog post: "Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct." It started out with:

I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick. 

Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes! 

I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge). 

I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.

Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.

That hope came true. With a bit over an hour left until the NWS Winter Storm Warning expires tonight, our home in rural south Salem has gotten about 1 1/2 inches of snow and quite a bit of sleet in the form of tiny ice pellets. Freezing rain accumulation was just about zero.

Which fit with this portion of the Thursday afternoon version of the Winter Storm Warning:

That forecast was right on, by and large. Salem, in the central Willamette Valley, got mostly snow and a small amount of freezing rain. Now, the Friday version of the NWS Winter Storm Warning did have a forecast for higher freezing rain amounts in our area, a quarter of an inch to half an inch.

This worried me, but I figured that since Salem was on the borderline of the freezing rain area, chances were we'd get closer to .25/inch than .50/inch. Bad, yet not horrible. 

However, Friday night my wife and I watched the 11 pm news on KPTV. We've been doing this most nights since DirecTV got into a dispute with the owner of KGW and took Channel 8 off the air. That was our favorite weather forecast. We enjoyed Mark Nelsen's forecasts on KPTV too, though.

Except for Friday.

That was when Nelsen went way overboard on KPTV's First Alert Weather Day schtick. For he said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021. 

Well, that was when our home was without electricity for twelve freaking days. My wife was shocked. I told her that an inch of freezing rain was way more than what the National Weather Service was forecasting, so I didn't think what Nelsen said would come true.

Of course, it didn't. However, that didn't stop me from lying in bed Friday night worrying about how we'd cope with another lengthy power outage. Heck, being in our mid-70s, some days we have difficulty coping with life (and our health issues) when the weather is just fine.

Saturday morning, today, Nelsen wrote a weather summary for the impending storm. It said in part:

• Today features mainly freezing rain and ice pellets south of the metro area down to Eugene. Expect power outages due to thick ice glazing. All models point to a destructive ice storm the next 12 hours in the Willamette Valley, Coast Range, and northern Oregon coastline.

Well, it probably is true that the weather models Nelsen looked at Saturday morning said that a destructive ice storm was going to hit the Willamette Valley. But Wednesday the National Weather Service had forecasted just a tenth of an inch of freezing rain, and on Saturday the amount was .25 to .50 an inch in the Willamette Valley, not the inch Nelsen was forecasting. 

At the very least, Nelsen should have told his viewers that there was considerable uncertainty in how much freezing rain would fall in the Salem area, with an inch being a worst-case scenario that had a good chance of not happening.

Look, I understand that local news on television is subject to the same pressures to keep viewers interested and engaged that social media like Facebook and Twitter are. Advertisers want as many eyes as possible on their ads. To get viewers, news outlets have to sensationalize things. As the old saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads" (the newscast). 

However, I see local news weather people as needing to adhere to a higher standard. Accuracy should be job #1. Entertainment value should be a distant second priority. Really low temperatures (its 18 right now in Salem) combined with a lot of freezing rain producing power outages is a scary proposition. 

If that's a near-certainty, fine. Mark Nelsen should have spoken the truth. But it turned out that not only wasn't there an inch of freezing rain in the Salem area, there was very little. Nelsen's confidence in his forecast was misplaced. 

So today I shifted our DirecTV DVR to start recording the Channel 2 news at 11 pm. For it will take a while for me to forget how badly Nelsen botched the freezing rain forecast for our area.

Oh, almost forget to mention, for the benefit of other weather geeks, that after it was clear that the National Weather Service did the best job in forecasting the winter storm, I searched for an iPhone app that made use of NWS data and came up with the National Weather Forecast Data app.

It isn't the most attractive or well designed weather app, but it packages NWS data in an easy to use format and has lots of information that isn't available on other weather apps. For example, it has a "Discussion" section where detailed analyses written by regional NWS offices can be read. Geeky for sure, which is why I like this app and have paid $11 for a year's subscription to the Pro version.

Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct

I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick. 

Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes! 

I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge). 

I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.

Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.

That hope isn't unwarranted. After all, my understanding is that the National Weather Service is the data source for most private sector forecasts.

Those private forecasts, which include the apps on my iPhone, tend to overestimate bad weather, from what I've heard.

The reason is that people get more upset if they're planning an outdoor party, say, and an app says that day will be warm and dry, then it turns out to be cool and rainy, compared to the app saying the day will be cool and rainy and it turns out to be warm and dry. 

Here's the current National Weather Service forecast for Friday and Saturday in Salem.

No mention of freezing rain, which is way worse than snow. Total snow and sleet accumulation is 2 to 3 inches. Not a huge deal for me, especially since I drive a Subaru Crosstrek with winter tires.

This is the current Winter Storm Watch message for our area. It speaks of snow being the main precipitation type in the central Willamette Valley and freezing rain in the south Willamette Valley. Salem is in the central Willamette Valley. So that's good news if it comes true

By contrast, here's what the Apple Weather app is forecasting for Salem on Saturday: an inch of precipitation in the form of 13 inches of snow. Way different than the NWS forecast. 

This is the AccuWeather snow forecast: about 1.5 inches by Saturday afternoon, which is close to the NWS forecast.

But this is the AccuWeather ice forecast: over 6/10 of an inch by Saturday night. That'd be disastrous, and is hugely more than the NWS forecast.

Lastly, here's The Weather Channel forecast: it doesn't differentiate between snow and ice, simply saying that the total will be less than an inch. Which isn't helpful, since an inch of ice brings down trees, while an inch of snow is just a minor inconvenience. (Unless you have bald tires and live on a hill.)

Our Generac whole house generator worked great on its first outage

Well, like many things in life, we got what we paid for. It cost us quite a bit to have a Generac generator installed at our rural south Salem house last March, as I described in "We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma."

The ice storm was in February 2021, so we didn't exactly jump into the Generac decision, since it took us two years to decide on a generator upgrade from our 7,000 watt Honda generator that was a lot better than nothing, yet not nearly as powerful and convenient as the 24,000 watt Generac. 

I'd told Jeff, a Northside Electric guy who did the final electrical panel work and educated us about the Generac operates, that after getting this pricey device installed, my magical thinking leads me to believe that our power will never go off again. His right-on reply: "So get some life insurance and you'll never die."

Jeff was right. I'll die even if I get life insurance, and last night the power went off at our house for the first time since Genie, as I now fondly call our generator, was on the job. 

She, or maybe he, I don't know how to tell the sex of generators, performed great. As luck would have it, I was taking a hot bath when the bathroom lights went out and I found myself taking a bath in the dark. For a few seconds I wondered if Genie would live up to her nickname.

She did. The Generac automatically turned on after it sensed the power outage, which probably was related to high wind in our area.

After so many years (we've lived here since 1990, which means we've endured a lot of outages) of needing to wheel a generator from our garage into the carport, drag a heavy cable from the garage to the side of our house where the cable connected to a transfer panel in our utility room, make sure there was enough gas and oil in the generator, and start it, then turn it off when we went to bed, it was great to do absolutely nothing after our power went off.

Plus, before we had to start a fire in our wood stove to keep the house warm, and we didn't have hot water.

Now the Generac keeps almost everything in our house on, including our main heat pump (but not the heat strips, which use too much power) and hot water heater. The only things that aren't powered by Genie are the heat pump for our "apartment" area and a tankless hot water heater in that area.

I sleep in the apartment bedroom, so it got kind of cold during the night. But having all the lights work and running water available all night in the bathroom (we have a well) was way better than dealing with battery powered lanterns and a flashlight, as I did in our pre-Generac days. 

Fortunately, PGE restored our neighborhood's power this morning, so the outage lasted about 12 hours. It was a good initial test of Genie. We started off with our propane supply at about 73% full, though I'm not absolutely sure about that figure. This morning the gauge was at 70%. So that's not bad, since the Generac was on all night until the power was back on. 

Anyway, a Generac or similar whole house generator is something to consider if you have a need for one. Today I chatted during my teeth cleaning with the dental hygienist. She lives in Salem proper and said a neighbor has a Generac because one of the family members has a medical condition that requires a device powered by electricity.

Yes, it's fairly noisy, so if you live in a city your neighbors may not appreciate the Generac when its running. However, if you invite them over to enjoy your lights, warmth, and hot water during a power outage, I predict that all will be forgiven. 

Our 2023 Christmas letter is about cars that act like old bodies

Here's our 2023 Christmas letter, hot off the press of my mind this afternoon after I decided that I really wanted to write it, notwithstanding my wife having said that we shouldn't send one out this year, because there's nothing interesting to report on in our lives.

To which I thought, What?! How could that be, given all that happened with us in 2023? What she meant, I think, is that we haven't gone on any exciting trips or done anything noteworthy. That may be true, but exciting and noteworthy is in the eye of the beholder.

Plus, that's not the point of a Christmas letter. Or Holiday Letter, as we prefer to call it.

The point is to give people a glimpse into our lives that they wouldn't have otherwise. Also, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, and I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2023 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2023 Christmas Letter PDF

A kitchen faucet problem reminds me of the wisdom in "I could be wrong"

I don't like to be wrong. But I dislike problems that defy fixing even more, whether these be personal, political, or any other sort.

And what I've learned from painful experience is that when I believe I'm absolutely right, yet that rightness isn't resulting in progress at resolving a problem, the best thing I could do is tell myself, "I could be wrong."

This morning, when I emerged from a separate bedroom where I sleep, my wife told me that our kitchen faucet that we'd gotten earlier this year had stopped working. It's a Delta faucet with Touch2O technology. Meaning it can turn off and on with a touch once the water is running.

Pretty handy when I'm washing dishes and don't want the water running all the time. I scrub a pan with soap, touch the faucet, and rinse the pan. Another touch, the water is off. One more touch, and the water runs again at the same temperature and strength.

But today not only didn't Touch2O work, the faucet wasn't working at all. Laurel, my wife, had bought the faucet. She also was home when a plumber installed it. I asked her if she was sure that the plumber had connected the faucet to our home's electrical system rather than using a battery pack to power the faucet.

Yes, Laurel said, I'm quite sure.

So when I looked under the cramped area under the kitchen sink (we've got reverse osmosis equipment that takes up most of the space) I focused on troubleshooting tips other than replacing batteries that I'd found on a Delta Kitchen Faucet with Touch2O Technology support web page.

Those tips didn't get the faucet working. I then watched several YouTube videos about getting a Touch2O faucet working again, each of which said that if the light at the base of the faucet is blinking red three times (ours was), by far the most likely reason was that batteries needed to be changed.

But Laurel was sure we didn't have a battery pack. Since my wife is usually right, I also was sure about this. Until Laurel started moving things around under the sink in preparation for a visit from a plumber we'd contacted, who was going to bring a replacement faucet, which revealed a hidden...

Battery pack. We changed the batteries. The faucet worked fine. Happy ending. 

Except I wasn't so happy about how both of us had gotten locked into an erroneous assumption about what could be wrong with the faucet. With all the stuff under our sink, I couldn't tell what was at the other end of the faucet's power supply cord. So why didn't I move things around right away? That would have led to a discovery of the battery pack.

Because I never thought, "I could be wrong." Admittedly, that's hard to do when you feel like you're right. Not that I knew what was wrong with the faucet. I just figured that whatever it was, it couldn't be the battery pack, since we didn't have one. 

But we did. 

On the plus side, though at the moment I don't take a lot of comfort in this, after the faucet was working again I recalled a piece that I wrote in 2013 for my Strange Up Salem column in Salem Weekly, our city's alternative newspaper at the time. Here's an excerpt from "Keep Fighting, Good Citizens of Salem."

One determined person can make a difference. I tear up from the Man of La Mancha lyrics:

“This is my quest, to follow that star... No matter how hopeless, no matter how far... To fight for the right, without question or pause... To be willing to march into Hell, for a Heavenly cause.”

Keep fighting, good citizens of Salem. Remember: your opponents aren’t evil.

Often they suffer from Groupthink, a malady diagnosed by someone who testified at a recent City Council meeting. It is exacerbated by an isolation from outside influences.

The treatment? Opening up flows of information, discussion, collaboration, decision-making. Transparency. Listening to both sides. Considering creative alternative options. Doing this sincerely, not with lip service.

Huston Smith quotes a Zen friend. “I have a new koan: I could be wrong.” Beautiful. The best revolutions happen when people in power revolt against their own dogmatic attitudes and actions.

Often, though, they need the aid of a citizen activist pin to help puncture the Groupthink balloon in which they have encased themselves. City leaders, don’t fear this.

Well, I guess I should do better at practicing what I preach, since today I fell prey to my own dogmatic attitude about what was wrong with our kitchen faucet. If I'd listened to an inner voice saying, "I could be wrong," I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble.

Live and learn.

Next time I have a problem that is resisting being solved, hopefully that voice will be louder and more insistent. While I'm at it, I might as well also hope that our nation's political and religious leaders hear the same voice of I could be wrong because we sure could use more humble cooperating and less vitriolic competing.

I rejected getting an Apple Watch. Now I'm a big fan.

Well, I guess this shows that I have truly joined the Cult of Apple. Before, I only had a MacBook Pro laptop, an iPhone, an iPad, Apple TV, AirPods, and HomePod speakers. 

That speaks of abject devotion to all things Apple, but isn't quite cultish. However, now that I also have an Apple Watch, Series 9 variety, I believe that I qualify for membership in the Cult of Apple. (Don't need an invitation; I'm self-selected.)

For a long time I looked down on people with an Apple Watch, or indeed any sort of smart watch, as being techno-snobs. I proudly wore my Casio watch that was solar powered and kept time via transmissions from the atomic clock in Colorado, I think it is. That was plenty high tech for me.

Bu then my interest was piqued when Apple released some new products, including an updated Apple Watch. Since this happened near my birthday, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check out the Series 9 as a potential present from Me to Me.

I'm glad I did. Because I've come to know and love my Apple Watch, even though I haven't learned more than a small percentage of all the things it can do.

My first revelation was that it's marvelous to be able to choose what sort of display a watch has. When the Apple Watch arrived, I switched between several watch faces that appealed to me. Soon, though, I settled on the colorful and informative face shown in the photo above.

The globe at the top left shows where I am. OK, that's not informative, since I'm aware of being in Oregon. Next to it is the easy-to-see date and time. Naturally the time is always correct. It was pleasant to not have to fuss with changing a watch when Daylight Saving Time ended, as my Casio usually required me to get out the manual and refresh my memory about how to do this.

The Apple Watch is waterproof, by the way, as was my Casio. One difference is that sometimes when I take a shower with the Apple Watch, a warning pops up that my hearing could be endangered by high decibels, which must be the result of shower spray hitting the watch.

In the second row is a weather summary that I assume comes from the Apple Weather app. It shows the current temperature in Salem along with the high and low temperature for today. Now and the next four hours are shown with the forecasted temperature and whether it is expected to be sunny, cloudy, or rainy. Or, dark.

The left side of the bottom row is an exercise indicator. The red circle shows movement (calories burned, steps, miles walked) in relation to a goal, 10,000 steps a day, I recall I set it to be. The green circle is exercise. The blue circle is standing (which I nail every day, because I made the goal just three hours, I believe).

My Apple Watch sends me periodic messages to stand when I've been sitting for a while, and praise when I hit a fitness goal. I used to find this kind of annoying, but now I view the messages as my watch trying to make me healthier, instead of being a nag.

I haven't made use of the compass yet.  I do enjoy checking the elevation, though (368 feet at our rural south Salem home) and the offer to record my route in case I get lost.

The temperature info on the bottom right is the same as what's shown above. However, I like how the color of the semicircle indicates how cold or hot it is. This Apple Watch face comes in a wide variety of colors. I've stuck with this multi-colored option in part because it provides more information than a single color would.

Like I said, I haven't delved much into other tricks my Apple Watch can do. It will tell me if my heart rate is much too slow or much too fast, or I guess if my heart has stopped. I didn't get a watch with a cellular connection, figuring that since I almost always have my iPhone with me, I don't need that.

At first I wondered how I'd time 60 seconds, which is how long I use mouthwash twice a day. Then I realized that if I made the Apple Watch apps appear in alphabetical order rather than as icons, it was easy to have the Timer near at hand, where I could set timers for various lengths.

One benefit of timing with the Apple Watch is when whole wheat spaghetti is cooking for 11 minutes while I'm watching TV with my Apple AirPods in my ears. I couldn't hear the timer on our microwave with the AirPods in, but the Apple Watch vibrates when a timer is completed, so now I have no problem knowing when the spaghetti is ready.

The band I got is very comfortable and easy to fasten. It's great to be able to easily change a watchband, though I haven't needed to do this yet, rather than having to fiddle with those little pins on traditional watchbands.

So I'm pleased with my Apple Watch. It charges every night, though it looks like it could go several days without charging. Thus I don't have it with me when I'm sleeping. I put it on first thing in the morning, looking upon it like a friend I haven't seen for a while -- which I never did with my Casio watch.

If you need rural cellular internet, I recommend MobileData2Go

Recently I spent a lot of time checking out providers of rural cellular internet, which basically set you up with a router and plan that accesses the internet via one of the major companies: Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T.

If someone lives in a city, they probably have many internet/broadband choices. People like me who live in a rural area with poor cell service, don't. Out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, my wife and I suffered with 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL over ancient copper phone lines because that was our only option.

Then I was selected to be a beta tester for Starlink satellite internet, and our broadband life changed markedly. We were thrilled to have shows on Netflix not buffer constantly, and be in sharp focus. 

However, it's an open secret that Starlink customer service can be slow. There's no way to talk to anyone in person. It all happens through support tickets. So even though our Starlink equipment has been trouble-free so far, I wanted a viable backup to Starlink in case we had to wait weeks for replacement equipment to arrive if something broke.

That led me to Googling rural cellular internet companies after my daughter visited and I noted that her AT&T iPhone was getting a 5G signal. My hope was that I could find a reasonably priced plan that used AT&T (Verizon and T-Mobile are very slow at our house) so we could still have decent broadband if, or likely when, our Starlink system stopped working.

The clear winner in my search was MobileData2Go. Their unlimited plan was the least expensive; they sell a router so you don't have to keep paying for a rental; they have plans for all three major cellular companies; and I found that their customer service was superb.

The only downside to this otherwise happy story was that after several days of tweaking the AT&T router  that I promptly received from MobileData2Go, the signal we were able to receive was too unreliable and slow to make it worth continuing with the service.

This wasn't the fault of MobileData2Go. It simply was because our house is in a low part of the south Salem hills with no direct line of sight to a cell tower. I was hugely impressed with the competence and diligence of the people at MobileData2Go. I know good customer support when I experience it. 

Having contacted several other rural cellular internet companies, my strong advice to anyone interested in their services is Buyer Beware. One of the worst offenders would go nameless if I didn't share the name: HomeFi. 

HomeFi advertises on Facebook, where I learned about them. Luckily, I Googled "HomeFi reviews" and "HomeFi scam." I recommend you do the same, not only for HomeFi, but for any rural cellular internet company you're considering. Here's one of the HomeFi results from ScamPulse. 

I ended up ordering a Mobile Starlink system intended for RV users, even though I'm only going to use it as a residential Starlink backup. Don't know why I didn't think of this before, since a Mobile Starlink account can be paused during the months someone doesn't need it, which will be almost all of the time for us.

So I'm returning the MobileData2Go router. There was zero problem doing this, as this is a reputable company.

One sign of this is that MobileData2Go accepts PayPal in addition to credit cards, and includes a link to where PayPal lets you cancel a recurring payment in their FAQs. That impressed me, since I'd read numerous complaints about MobileData2Go competitors from people who had great difficulty in cancelling their rural cellular internet plan.

CarMax beat Capitol Subaru's offer on my 2020 Crosstrek

When it came time to sell my 2020 Crosstrek Limited because I was getting a 2024 Crosstrek Limited, the choice was between Capitol Subaru and CarMax. In the past I've sold cars on my own, but I don't enjoy doing this anymore.

My wife and I have bought quite a few cars from the Capitol Auto Group, starting back when they were on Mission Street. Now the four Capitol dealerships -- Chevrolet, Cadillac, Toyota, Subaru -- are adjacent to the Martin Luther King Parkway, which enables the Capitol slogan:

Your way on the parkway

Usually I've agreed with that slogan. But sometimes I haven't, especially when it comes to trading in a car. That's what happened this time. I found CarMax much easier to deal with than Capitol Subaru when it came to getting an offer for my 2020 Crosstrek.

That car was fully loaded with every possible factory option. I ordered the Crosstrek, which was built in Japan. It also had low miles, about 24,000, in part because I did so little driving during the initial Covid period.

Understand: I only have good things to say about the Subaru saleswoman I worked with, Emily Campbell. You won't go wrong if you buy a vehicle from her. My problem is with the trade-in policies established by Capitol management that Campbell had to operate under.

Campbell gave me a test drive in a 2024 Crosstrek after I'd brought my 2020 in for service and got to looking at the 2024 model, which was a redesign with some marked improvements from my 2020. Notably, a larger 2.5 liter engine rather than the underpowered 2.0 liter I had. Also, wireless Apple CarPlay and a bunch of other new features that appealed to me, including upgraded safety equipment.

I was curious to learn what my 2020 was worth. Campbell took some photos after my car had been serviced and said she'd let me know what Capitol would offer for it. But I never got that offer. I'm pretty sure it was because Capitol didn't want to give me an offer before it was time to trade-in my 2020 on a new car.

That happened fairly quickly, since Campbell found a 2024 Crosstrek Limited on its way to the dealership with the color and options that I wanted. I put down a $500 deposit on the 2024 around mid July and the car was scheduled to arrive on September 3. So it wasn't like I was asking for a trade in offer way ahead of time.

At any rate, in early to mid August CarMax gave me an online offer of $25,000 after asking a bunch of questions about my 2020, including the VIN. Around that time I'd gotten an email from Subaru saying they were interested in my 2020 Crosstrek.

I recall that I wasn't asked for the mileage, which I thought was strange. Regardless, I gave Subaru the info on my 2020 and got an offer back: $23,550, which was good for up to 45,000 miles on the car. The offer had an expiration date of August 31.

That led me to text Campbell, saying that I'd gotten an offer from Subaru that was less than what CarMax was offering for my car, and seemingly didn't take into account the low mileage -- though maybe they had that from my service record, all of which has been done at Capitol Subaru.

I figured that after Capitol learned that Subaru had offered me less than CarMax, they'd raise their offer.

I'd been telling Campbell that I wanted to have the trade-in set several days before the 2024 Crosstrek arrived, because from past painful episodes with various dealers I've learned that what should be a pleasant car buying experience can be hurt by an unpleasant car selling/trade-in experience.

Plus, how about that slogan Your way on the parkway. The way I wanted was to get a firm trade-in offer from Capitol Subaru before the 2024 came in, so the car buying and car selling were separated.

That never happened. A week or so before the 2024 was to arrive, I got an updated online offer for my 2020 from CarMax. This time the offer was for $25,600, six hundred dollars more than the previous CarMax offer. 

Since my 2020 had a MSRP of $32,103, I was pleasantly surprised that the value of my Crosstrek had held up so well. I headed off to CarMax (on Lancaster Drive) to have them confirm the offer by looking at my car.

Melanie Zuniga worked with me at CarMax. She was wonderfully efficient, as was the CarMax appraisal process. Within about 40 minutes I was told that no problems were found with my car and the $25,600 was a firm offer good for the next seven days.

Leaving CarMax, I felt that they deserved to buy my 2020 Crosstrek. After all, Capitol Subaru had plenty of chances to give me a fair offer. (The CarMax offer was right in line with the midpoint of the Kelley Blue Book trade-in price for my car, which CarMax showed on their offer sheet and which I'd already confirmed with my own KBB research.)

When I got home, I told Campbell that my wife and I were going to sell my car to CarMax. Campbell then told me that if I sent her the CarMax offer, Capitol would match it. That didn't seem fair to me, since Capitol was just piggy-backing on the CarMax offer, which had taken some time of CarMax staff. 

However, it turned out that the 2024 Crosstrek was delayed in arriving at Capitol Subaru.

By the time it came in, my wife was planning to go to the coast for a few days. We were going to be able to buy the 2024 on the evening before she was due to leave, but since I didn't want to sell the 2020 before I'd seen the 2024 and confirmed that I liked the Sun Blaze Pearl color (I do, a lot), my wife would have had to leave later for the coast than she wanted to if we were going to sell my 2020 before the 7-day CarMax offer expired.

Thus we ended up trading in the 2020 to Capitol Subaru for the $25,600 CarMax had offered. I regret doing this, because the CarMax car selling process was much better than the Capitol Subaru process that I encountered.

CarMax was straightforward, fair, and efficient. With Capitol Subaru, I couldn't get a decent trade-in offer until CarMax gave me one and Capitol matched it. Yes, I was told by Campbell that CarMax is huge and can shift cars around the country, which is true, while Capitol is local.

But somehow local small Capitol was willing to pay just as much for my car as CarMax was -- after CarMax had given me a firm offer. I can't say that my trade-in experience was typical for the Capitol Auto Group.

Still, based on my experience I'd advise getting an offer from CarMax, then selling your vehicle to CarMax even if a local dealer is willing to match the CarMax offer. This just seems to me to be the right thing to do, regardless of how large CarMax is. I like to reward good service, and like I said, I regret not being able to sell my Crosstrek to CarMax, given how well they treated me.

Also, when my wife and I were buying the 2024 Crosstrek, we were presented with a sheet that had the price of the car about $4,000 more than the MSRP that I'd expected. It turned out that Capitol Subaru had loaded up the price with every dealer add-on that I almost always reject, like a windshield treatment and clear coat for the paint. I've never had a dealer add that stuff on their own. In the past the financial guy asks about those options during the purchase paperwork, when I go "no, no, no, no." With the 2020 I did get a Rain-X sort of windshield treatment, which was basically useless. Capitol needs to stop doing this.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that in addition to the trade-in offer I got from a Subaru email message, I also got different trade-in offer estimates by clicking on a "what's your current car worth?" link on the general Subaru web site and by clicking on a similar link on the Capitol Subaru web site. All of those offers were less than the CarMax offer, though the general Subaru offer gave me a range of $23,470 to $26,765 for my 2020 Crosstrek. But I was never asked to get a firm offer by coming to Capitol Subaru. The only way I got a firm offer was by going to CarMax and telling Capitol that my wife and I were planning to sell the car to CarMax.

Some of our oaks are losing all their leaves in early September. Global warming.

We've lived at our home in rural south Salem, Oregon since 1990. In those 33 years, my wife and I have never seen some of the oak trees on our ten mostly natural acres lose all of their leaves in late August and early September.

Repeat, never.

But this is what the area in front of our well house looked like today. It sure seems to be a result of global warming. We didn't get any rain during June, July, and almost all of August. Maybe May also. And it's been considerably hotter than normal. The oaks must be stressed.

Update: Just saw this post from the National Weather Service on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Supports my thesis. The years 2021, 2022, and 2023 were three of the top five hottest summers in Salem dating back to 1892, with 2014 and 2015 being the other two. 

Usually the oaks lose their leaves after other deciduous trees, not before. This is how part of our Y-shaped driveway appears. That area of our property near the road gets the most sun. The oaks here are the ones losing their leaves.


Close to our house, where there is more shade, the oaks are still green. So this indicates that it isn't any sort of disease that's causing the falling oak leaves. It's heat stress, almost certainly.

This is just one sign, among many, of a dangerously warming world. All over our country, and in other nations, what used to be highly unusual is becoming commonplace as the Earth becomes steadily hotter.

Everybody has their own global warming freakout sign. For me, the falling oak leaves are my latest sign. Sadly, there will be many more so long as temperatures keep rising.

My guide to happiness: act stupid, then undo your stupidity

Everybody wants to be happy. And everybody has their own ways of accomplishing this.

Recently the New York Times had an interview with a Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard. When I saw that the story was called The 'World's Happiest Man' Shares His Three Rules for Life, I got excited.  

Yay! Finally I'd know how to be happy all the time. Sweet. But when I read what Ricard said the three rules were, I felt my Perpetual Happiness Balloon popping. 

You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave. They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.”

Ugh. No secret. Not just three points. Takes a whole life. Bummer.

Then I realized that while I'm far away from being the world's happiest man (I'm not even the happiest sentient being in our house, being eclipsed by my wife and dog, and likely also by the mice who live in our crawl space), I do have a secret to happiness that works for me.

Since a New York Times reporter isn't going to be beating down my door to learn what it is, I figured that I'd share it in this blog post.

Well, I already have in the title above. I ran out of space or I would have made it: Act stupid, then undo the stupidity and feel the bliss of relief.

There's no end of examples that I could offer for how I've applied this (no longer a) secret to aid in my happiness. Here's a good recent one.

Though I live just six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, Salem, our neighborhood's primary "broadband" provider, CenturyLink, offers a pitiful 7 Mbps via DSL that travels through ancient copper phone lines. 

When Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service came online several years ago, I was thrilled to have my application to be a beta tester of Starlink approved. That got us a decent broadband speed.

A few weeks ago Starlink sent me an email saying that because I was an early beta customer, I was entitled to send them $200 for a third-generation router that offered better features than our first-generation router.

OK, I fell for the pitch. I'm always up for a chance to improve our broadband life, especially since in the not-so-good old days of sloooooow DSL, streaming shows on Netflix often had us watching the buffering spinning ball as much as Bridgerton.

The new router arrived a few days ago. After I opened the box, I downloaded a PDF file that had the simple instructions for installing it. 

I read the instructions several times. I laid out the power supply cord and the ethernet cable. Connecting the power supply was a no-brainer. But the ethernet cable had two dissimilar connectors: one long and one short.

The place on the router where one end of the ethernet cable was to be inserted was strangely deep. So deep, I got out a flashlight and looked into the depths of it. My mind thought, "That must be where the long ethernet connector goes." 

I then studied the installation instructions again. Closely. Intimately. The instructions showed where the long connector of the ethernet cable was to go and where the short connector of the ethernet cable was to go. 

Supremely confident that I knew what to do, I inserted the long connector into the deep recess of the router and the short connector into the normal looking hole in the power supply.

Then I expectantly waited for the flashing white light on the router to turn solid, showing that a connection with the Starlink satellites had occurred. After watching the flashing light for a while, I got concerned and reviewed the instructions again.

Which elicited a loud F*CK from me. You can easily fill in the blank.

Somehow I'd gotten the two ends of the ethernet cable in the wrong places. Yes, even though I'd read the instructions several times, paying special attention to the images of the long and short connectors of the ethernet cable.

Worse, the short connector was stuck in the power supply. The little clip used to release an ethernet cable was nowhere to be seen. Or felt. I fiddled with it for a while, but didn't want to break the connector in the power supply.

Panic started to set in. If I couldn't undo what I'd just did, our broadband speed would plummet to near zero, since we have dismal cell service out here in the not-very-wilds of six miles from the Salem city limits.

However, with the aid of a very small screwdriver, I was able to push on the clip and release the short connector of the ethernet cable. Which then fit easily into the router, just as the instructions had said. And the long connector fit easily into the power supply, just as the instructions had said.

All I can figure is that when my brain thought early on that the long connector must go into the deep recess of the router, that erroneous thought won out in an unconscious battle between it and what the instructions said.

The relief I felt when the flashing light on the router turned solid almost immediately after, duh, I'd done what the instructions said, created a jolt of happiness in me which lasted for a long time. 

It's worn off now. But the good news is that it won't be long before I do something stupid again, which, when I undo my stupidity, will make me happy. 

Obligatory warning for those who want to follow in my happiness footsteps: sometimes I do something stupid that can't be undone, which obviously doesn't make me happy.

Our horrible Verizon tech support nightmare

OK, I guess "horrible" and "nightmare" are redundant in the title of this blog post. But after what my wife has gone through the past few days with Verizon, I wanted to include as many nasty adjectives as possible in the title.

Now, maybe this tale of woe will have a happy ending. No matter. Verizon has acted so incompetently after my wife called them about her iPhone losing its cellular service, there's no way we'll go back to thinking of Verizon the way we did before this debacle.

Last Saturday, two days ago, Laurel, my wife, tried to make a call from our home on her iPhone 14 Pro Max that was purchased from Verizon last January. It didn't go through. We have crappy cell service at our house in rural south Salem, Oregon.

However, I'd gotten Verizon to send us a signal booster after we both got new iPhone 14's and it was clear that we still were getting the same one or two bars as we did when we had ancient iPhone 8's. So that was good of Verizon, since the signal booster used our Starlink wi-fi to boost the signal to four strong bars.

Which my iPhone 14 still was getting while Laurel's had no bars at all, just the "SOS" notice that appears when there's no cell service but an emergency call still can be made. Not sure how. Maybe via satellite, since the iPhone 14 has that capability.

I Googled "no cellular connection on iPhone 14" and did some of the recommended things. Turn the phone off and on. Turn airplane mode on and off. Can't remember all that I did, just that when nothing worked, I said to Laurel, "You need to call Verizon."

On our land line, of course, since she had no cell service.

That led to Laurel being on the phone for almost three hours with Verizon tech support staff. First with an agent, then a supervisor, then another tech support person. She ended up being told that the problem had to be with the iPhone, since they couldn't figure out how to get the e-sim (electronic sim) in the iPhone 14 activated again.

So Laurel phoned Apple. We had AppleCare for the almost new iPhone 14. And the tech support person at Apple was pleasingly competent. He did his best to get the cellular connection working, but failed. His view was that the problem almost certainly wasn't with the iPhone, which turned out to be correct.

However, he agreed to send Laurel a new iPhone 14, with the proviso that she pay for the phone with a credit card. Then when Apple got her old iPhone 14 back within ten days, that payment would be reversed. 

Today the new iPhone 14 arrived from Apple. We had some problems transferring data and apps from the old phone to the new one, so Laurel had to call Apple tech support and get some help with that. They recommended backing up to iCloud, then restoring from iCloud, which ended up working fine.

But Apple tech support said Laurel would have to phone Verizon again to have the e-sim activated. 

That's what kicked off the second installment of her Verizon nightmare, for she was on the phone with Verizon tech support staff for four freaking hours, 1:30 to 5:30 pm today. The first tech support person dropped her call, then failed to call her back after she waited for twenty minutes. 

Laurel then called Verizon again and had to go through the horrible process of trying to get a live person to talk to. Verizon has no direct tech support phone number even though she had a ticket number. She ended up talking with four different Verizon staff. 

The last guy was the nicest, but he couldn't figure out the cause of the problem either. He ended up by saying that he'd entered a "Force SIM Status" request, whatever that means. Laurel was told that could take up to five days, so she headed into town and bought a cheap prepaid phone to use until Verizon figures out why she can't use her iPhone for calls and text messages.

Like I said, it's been a nightmare -- about seven hours on the phone over two days with Verizon tech support. Apple tech support was good. Verizon tech support was awful. Hopefully the problem will be resolved in a few days, or we'll be looking for a new cellular service.

I'm told, "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man"

I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy. Yes, I get irritated at people. But almost always I either keep my irritation to myself, or express it in as respectful a manner as possible.

That's why what happened at my athletic club today surprised me.

I was almost finished using the weight machines in what used to be called the Circuit Training room. It was termed that because the basic idea of it is that you go from machine to machine, getting a full body workout.

But some club members who focus on the free weights and different machines in an adjoining room will use a "circuit" machine for a long time, doing a series of varying weights and rest periods in between.

That will irk me if I'm feeling rushed. Which I usually am, because I try to leave just enough time to do my workout before my afternoon Tai Chi class downtown. 

Today I was down to my last couple of weight machines when I saw two young guys begin to use one of the machines that I hadn't gotten to yet. OK, no big deal, I thought. One of them would use the machine, then go into the free weight room to do something else while the other guy would use the machine.

This repeated several times. Again, no big deal. I figured that I could come back and finish the circuit after doing some Tai Chi on my own in an upstairs workout room.

But then, yay!, it looked like both of the guys had finished using the machine that was my last stop in the circuit room.

One of them was standing next to the machine with his back to me, using his phone. I waited for a bit to see if he was going to get back to using the weight machine. Didn't look like it, so I walked up and said, "You done?"

He said, "Yes." I reached around him and adjusted the weight to what I was going to use. Then he said, "Let me wipe it off first." Meaning, use disinfectant on a cloth to clean any sweaty parts.

Sometimes people go overboard on the wiping, and I was anxious to finish my workout so I wouldn't be late for my Tai Chi class. So I told the guy, "No big deal. I'm not fussy." I've said this before to club members who want to clean a machine before I use it.

My unspoken message is that I'm fine with a bit of sweat, and besides, I'm going to wipe off the machine after I use it. But the guy took what I said in a different way.

After some wiping, he walked away into the free weight room, saying over his shoulder, "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man." That surprised me. Even shocked me a bit.

I was just trying to save him some cleaning time. I had zero ill will toward him, since while he and his friend were taking turns using the machine, I recalled the time that I showed a friend of mine how the circuit machines functioned, which entailed me using a machine then him using the same machine.

So I wasn't even irritated, as sometimes I am, that he and his friend had spent so much time on the machine.

What struck me about this encounter, as minor as it was, is how so many people these days, me certainly included, are quick to take offense at small things. Like someone driving too slow, or too fast. Or having a lengthy discussion with a checkout clerk about the price of an item they think is on sale while fellow shoppers wait in line in back of them.

(I didn't pick these examples out of thin air; they're some of my habitual gripes.)

I wasn't blameless, of course. I could have simply said, "Thanks," when the guy said he was going to clean the machine. However, he could have done the old-fashioned respect your elders thing, since I clearly was old enough to be his father, and maybe even his grandfather.

I admit, though, that I sort of liked that he treated me like another young guy that he was irked with. That "man" on the end of his "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man" comment made me feel kind of good.

My bad handwriting makes for interesting grocery checkout discussions

Since I'm 74, I suppose I'd have an excuse for my bad handwriting if I chose to make one up. Like, my hands are shaky due to a neurological condition.

But actually my handwriting has been minimally legible to others for most of my life. Me, I can generally read what I write pretty well, though not always.

On the plus side, my affliction makes for some interesting conversations in the grocery store checkout lane. Here's what the clerk at LifeSource Natural Foods here in Salem, Oregon and I talked about today.

Clerk: The number you wrote on this container can't be right.
Me: (peering to see what was on the label I put on the container) Those are 9's at the end.
Clerk: No, I'm talking about the first number; 599 is bulk dish soap, and that isn't what this is.
Me: Yeah, it's bulk almond butter, 399. But hey, I got two of three numbers written legibly. 
Clerk: Thanks for remembering the number.
Me: Thank you for bringing me back to a memory of first grade. I'm going to go home and practice writing 3's until I can stop them looking like 5's. 
Clerk: Oh, you don't have to do that.
Me: I know, but I want to. Though in my defense, there was quite a crowd around the nut butter area just now, and I was a bit stressed wanting to write the number on the label I'd put on the container as quickly as possible.

Which was kind of true, though it doesn't explain the many other times I've been asked to decipher an item number I'd written on a label. Occasionally I'm even asked if the number is English, or, say, Sanskrit.

I try ChatGPT. Asking about myself, I'm impressed.

It took me a while, but after hearing a lot about the marvels of ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do -- I got around to trying out ChatGPT just now.


(All you need to do this is a free account with OpenAI.)

Because I have a significant online presence, and my ego is also significant, my first question for ChatGPT was about myself. I was impressed with the result, which took about five seconds to pop up.

Well, after reading that, I want to be ChatGPT's best friend. Its description of me was a bit over-the-top, but in my decidedly personal opinion, not hugely so.

ChatGPT did provide a profile of me that was kind of one-dimensional, since I'm also proud of my land use and political activism -- though I did ask Chat GPT about Brian Hines the blogger and author, and my Church of the Churchless blog has the largest Internet presence of my three blogs.

ChatGPT rapidly put together a description of me that was well written and accurate. My only minor quibble was that 2004 is 19 years prior to 2023 and ChatGPT said my churchless blog has been operating for "over a decade." But 19 years is over a decade, obviously.

I then tried to learn about Laurel Hines, my wife. But ChatGPT balked, telling me that it couldn't, or wouldn't, provide information on private individuals. I've urged Laurel to sign up with OpenAI herself to see if she has better luck learning about Laurel Hines. It could be that I have enough of a public presence to get a pass on the private person restriction.

Lastly, I recalled that ChatGPT is pretty good at poetry. So my curiosity, and ego, led me to ask it to write a poem about Brian Hines the blogger and author. Here's the result in two screenshots.

OK, this poem is more over-the-top than the prose description of me was. But I love it! Now I not only want ChatGPT to be my best friend, I want it to whisper sweet nothings into my ear about how much ChatGPT adores me. 

After I die, I definitely want ChatGPT to speak at the celebration of life held for me. Unless between now and then, ChatGPT turns sour on me, in which case it can go fuck itself, assuming a chatbot is capable of that.

On a more serious note -- not that I wasn't serious about what I just said -- it was both impressive and a bit creepy to see how well ChatGPT did with my two queries, each of which took only a few seconds.

We're only in the early days of artificial intelligence. There's reason for concern about it, but that's a topic for another blog post. For now, I'm content to bask in the warm glow of what ChatGPT said about me.

We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma

The memory is still sharp in my mind of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021.

Twelve days without electricity. Lots of tree damage. Many trips into town to get more gasoline to keep our Honda generator functioning. Having to keep our wood stove going to keep the house warm.

In short, not fun. So when some friends in our rural south Salem neighborhood told my wife and I that they were getting a Generac whole house generator, our ears perked up.

Turns on automatically when the power goes out. Capable of running a heat pump, hot water heater, well pump, and everything else in a house. Or at least, almost everything. 

Sure sounded good to us.

During the ice storm we had to take showers at our athletic club, since we didn't have a way to hook our hot water heater to the Honda generator. And while our wood stove worked fine, it kept the upper part of our house too warm, and left the lower part too cold. So being able to operate our heat pump was really appealing.

It took quite a while to arrange all the details of getting a Generac whole house generator through Northside Electric here in Salem, but yesterday the final work was completed. It wasn't cheap: $13,250, not including the cost of propane tanks.

However, I told Jeff Buyserie, the Northside Electric guy who handled some tricky final electrical panel work and educated us about the Generac yesterday afternoon, that my magical thinking leads me to believe that now that we've gotten the whole house generator, our electricity will never go off again.

Jeff's apt response: "So get some life insurance and you'll never die."

Here's the 24kW generator. We located it near our firewood stacks. The Generac has to be on almost level ground. Northside supplied the concrete pad the generator sits on.

The Generac can't be right next to a structure. We have it close to where the PGE power enters our house, and the circuit breaker boxes in our utility room. 

Eighteen inch deep trenches had to be dug for the propane and electrical lines feeding the Generac. We haven't had the trenches filled yet. The county inspection has been completed, so the trenches will be filled soon.

The Generac can be fueled by either natural gas or propane. Since our neighborhood doesn't have natural gas, propane was our only option. Given our hilly property, and where we wanted to locate the Generac, a 500 gallon propane tank was too large to be moved close to the generator. So Pratum Co-op installed four 120 gallon tanks, which together equal 480 gallons.

They're hooked together, so function as a single tank. Propane tanks can only be filled 80% full, so that gives us a maximum of about 384 gallons. Jeff from Northside Electric told us that likely the Generac would use around 2 gallons an hour on average. So that would equal 192 hours of run time if the propane tanks were full.

Which is eight days of constant generator operation. Four days if the propane tanks were half full. That's longer than most electrical outages last. And naturally the tanks can be refilled, so long as the roads are passable for a Pratum Co-op truck.

A lot of electrical panel work had to be done by Northside. We now have a Generac circuit breaker box that sits to the left of our old transfer box for our 7,000 watt Honda generator. So we could still use the Honda generator, though I hope we'll never have to. 

The main complication we encountered was getting the 3.5 ton heat pump for the 2,000 square foot main part of our house to work with the Generac. (We also have a smaller 2 ton heat pump for a 1,200 square foot "apartment" area; that part of the house isn't hooked up to the Generac.)

It turned out that the thermostat for the 3.5 ton heat pump was on a circuit that ran the furnace: air handler and heat strips for emergency heat, or when it is too cold for the heat pump to run efficiently. Jeff had to do some rewiring so the thermostat was on the Generac panel, but the heat strips weren't.

He said that the 3.5 ton heat pump heat strips probably took around 15,000 watts. So since we have a 24,000 watt generator, the heat strips plus the heat pump plus the extra wattage needed when the heat pump starts up likely would have sucked up the entire output of the Generac. 

So while we still have the heat strips available when PGE power is available, we'll have to make do with just the heat pump when the Generac is operating. If it's too cold for the heat pump to work without the heat strips (below freezing, basically), we'll have to use our wood stove.

I was grocery shopping when Jeff did the testing of how the Generac handled our house's electrical needs. When I got home, he and my wife told me that the Generac did fine with everything on: well pump, heat pump, hot water heater, lights, cooktop, etc., even the oven. It did strain the generator when the heat pump kicked on. Hopefully that won't be the case when we have a lesser load on the Generac.

I feel good about our Generac purchase.

The generator is set up to turn itself on every two weeks at noon for five minutes to keep the Generac "exercised." Northside Electric will do doing the maintenance on the generator, since I have no interest in doing this, in part because the Generac is much larger and more complicated than our Honda generator.

But we'll have to wait and see how the Generac does in a power outage. Well, unless my magical thinking is correct and we'll never have an outage now that we've spent so much money preparing for one.

LifeSource dumps my favorite veggie burger. I'm crushed.

It was the cheese that first set off the alarm bells in my brain. Up until then, my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods had gone as it usually does. 

Uneventfully.

I had no clue that my vegetarian life would be upended before I reached the dairy aisle, my habitual final stop before heading to a checkout register.

Glancing at my list to see what my wife and I needed there, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that something had changed in the alternatives-to-meat section.

Cheese had taken over several feet of that section, oozing over from the already large cheese department to the right of it.

My sometimes still sharp senior citizen mind jumped to a logical conclusion: The cheese must have displaced some items in the eggs/alternatives-to-meat area.

Jumpy, but not yet panicked, I scanned the shelves for what I usually buy in that section.

Tofurky Treehouse Tempe? Yes, still there. Tofurky Plant-Based Chick'n Barbecue? Yes, still there. Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger? Oh, crap! It's missing!

I peered at the labels under some empty areas of the alternatives-to-meat section. None said "Hodo Tofu  Veggie Burger."

My life didn't exactly feel like it was slipping away. Just markedly diminished.

For the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger is by far the best vegetarian burger I've ever eaten. And since I've been a vegetarian for over 50 years, I've eaten a heck of a lot of them.

I make a Hodo burger for lunch almost every day.

I love the taste. I love the simple ingredients: organic tofu, carrots, cabbage, onions, soybean oil, salt, dried shiitake mushrooms, garlic powder, white pepper. I love the nutrition facts: 200 calories, 9 grams of fat (just 0.5 grams saturated), 9 grams of dietary fiber, 19 grams of protein.

The Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger kicks the butt of every other vegetarian burger LifeSource carries, in my admittedly personal opinion.

If the Hodo burger was in a boxing match against, say, the LightLife burger that's still on the LifeSource shelf, the referee would stop the contest after the first round, declaring a knock-out. It not only tastes great, and has great nutrition, it looks great after being fried in a pan.

I don't put anything on the Hodo burger, just some salt. Ketchup disguises the taste of the burger, which is so good, I don't want anything coming between me and my beloved Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger.

That's why I stopped by the Customer Service desk at LifeSource and asked why it was discontinued. I didn't get an answer to "why," but was told that someone else also had asked about the Hodo burger, being disappointed that it wasn't available now.

When I got home, I sent a message to LifeSource via their web site. I expressed my dismay at their dumping such a fine upstanding veggie burger, while allowing lesser quality veggie burgers to remain.

It's been about a week. I haven't gotten a reply from LifeSource. 

I told LifeSource that Natural Grocers still carries the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger, along with three other Hodo products such as the Chinese 5-Spice Tofu Nuggets that I like a lot. LifeSource how has no Hodo products.

Last Sunday I stopped by Natural Grocers, where I rarely shop, and stocked up on the Hodo burger. I also bought some other things that I usually get at LifeSource, as long as I was in the Natural Grocers store. 

I'll ask LifeSource again why they discontinued the Hodo veggie burger. I've bought so many of them over the years, it seems like I should learn this. Maybe the Hodo burger, being tofu-based, fell prey to what I consider an irrational fear of tofu by many people these days. 

Regardless, they'll have to pry the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger out of my cold dead hands (leaving aside the question of who "they" is).

I just hope that Natural Grocers doesn't discontinue the burger -- which I doubt, since now they're the only place it can be bought in Salem.

When life goes wrong, it can happen in bunches

Anticipating how some people are going to react to this blog post, I want to start off by making one thing clear:

While my wife Laurel, our dog, and I are going through a stretch of more problems in our lives than usual, we're fortunate to have a decent income, good health insurance, and a pleasant home.

Lots of people have worse problems than we do, with fewer resources available to deal with them. Like, anyone homeless.

Having hopefully defused the "privilege" objection to what I'm about to say, my main point is simple:

Life can be tough, no matter who you are, and when things go wrong, it's unfortunate that sometimes those problems occur in bunches.

Mooka is our 5-6 year old Husky mix. She came from a shelter, so we don't know her exact age. As I wrote about in January, her hip dysplasia diagnosis worried us. 

She's an active dog. We live in rural south Salem with hardly any flat areas. Our home has several sets of stairs. Long walks and trips to the Minto Brown dog park were favorite activities of Laurel and Mooka.

That was threatened by the hip dysplasia. But in February Mooka started limping badly after playing with a dog she encountered on a walk. At first she wasn't putting any weight on that paw, though now she can, at least when walking slowly.

However, today a vet told Laurel that Mooka probably has an ACL tear in her knee. There's treatments that we're pursuing. However, knee surgery would involve a lengthy recovery period, which for a dog like Mooka, who really enjoys her twice daily walks and other excursions, would be hard to take.

Laurel had to spend many hours dealing with a screw-up by Best Buy after she ordered an induction cooktop and got something else. Fortunately Kelly's came to our rescue, so that problem has been resolved.

But a few days ago Laurel had a lengthy dentist appointment to have a broken crown replaced, after getting a temporary crown about a month ago. Now she has a toothache in that tooth, which shouldn't happen after a crown replacement.

That tooth has been worked on a lot over the years, so Laurel is worried that the root is damaged, which could require an implant. Not a fun prospect.

As for me, I'm scheduled for eye surgery next Monday at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland. This is related to the glaucoma diagnosis I got about a year and a half ago. I'm very nearsighted in my right eye, which is where almost all of the optic nerve damage has occurred to my peripheral vision, which happened surprisingly rapidly.

So even though two types of eye drops have lowered my eye pressure from the low 20s to about 10 in each eye (lowering pressure is the only way to slow down glaucoma from progressing), the Portland glaucoma specialist I was referred to wants me to get a Trabeculectomy.

I'm pleased that I can spell the procedure. Not so pleased at having eye surgery, a first for me. It'll be good to get it over with, though, since I had to cancel a February surgery appointment when I got Covid last month.

Anyway, while the health problems of my wife, dog, and myself aren't as serious as many people have to deal with, it's been stressful for us to have to cope with them all at once. But that's the way life is: unpredictable.

We just wish life could have spaced out those problems. Sadly, life isn't a conscious being that demands can be made of. Even so, we look forward to life giving us a break as spring approaches.

We find that Best Buy sucks and Kelly's rocks

My wife has been going through Best Buy hell after an incompetent salesperson ordered the wrong cooktop.

Laurel had taken a Consumer Reports rating of induction cooktops into the Salem Best Buy store, pointed to the General Electric model that she wanted, and trusted that the paperwork she got was correct.

Sure, she should have double-checked the model number. Or I could have. We admit that we weren't completely blameless in the mixup that led to Best Buy taking out our current radiant cooktop and installing what turned out to be a newer model GE radiant cooktop.

We simply assumed that what Laurel had asked for was what we got.

Well, until the Best Buy installers left and I turned on a cooktop burner and said to Laurel, "Hey, it's getting hot. Induction cooktops aren't supposed to get hot." That's when the real Best Buy problem started.

Because we figured it would be easy to talk with someone at the Salem Best Buy store, explain that we didn't get the induction cooktop that was supposed to have been ordered, ask for a return of the radiant cooktop that we didn't want, and order the correct GE induction cooktop.

Actually that wasn't easy to do at all.

After several frustrating hours on the phone, Laurel discovered that it is completely impossible to talk with someone at the Salem Best Buy store using that early twentieth century invention, the telephone.

Instead, she got Best Buy "customer service" (the quotation marks indicate irony) people who gave every indication of being in China. Or at least somewhere else where English isn't spoken very well. Not that English was the main problem.

The problem was that even the simplest question or request involved Laurel being put on hold for long periods of time, which sometimes ended up with the phone call being terminated, which meant she'd have to call the Best Buy "customer service" number again, reaching a different person, who she'd have to describe the cooktop problem to all over again.

After each call to Best Buy I heard more swearing from Laurel than she usually emits in a week. To her credit, she'd tell the Best Buy "customer service" people that she wasn't mad at them; she was mad at the incompetence of Best Buy.

At long last, after maybe a dozen phone calls, an appointment was made for Best Buy to uninstall the mistakenly ordered radiant cooktop. But Best Buy even screwed that up. Because the two guys who came to our house didn't know how to remove the radiant cooktop. 

In halting English, one of them said, "You may need electrician." No, we didn't need an electrician. We needed someone competent.

This led Laurel to make more frustrating phone calls to Best Buy. Eventually she learned that Best Buy had sent out a pick-up crew, which is different from an uninstall crew, even though it seemed obvious to us that since Best Buy had installed a radiant cooktop that we hadn't ordered, it would be necessary to uninstall it for the cooktop to be returned.

Fortunately, by this time Laurel had learned that working with Kelly's Appliances was heavenly rather than hellish.

We'd bought quite a bit of stuff from Kelly's over the years. So Laurel had the bright idea of giving them a call after the Best Buy "customer service" people had told her it would take quite a while to order the GE induction cooktop that we thought we were getting from Best Buy to begin with.

Laurel spoke with a Kelly's salesperson who told her that there were 27 GE induction cooktops available, and we could have one installed within a few weeks. Whenever she had a question about the order, Laurel could talk with that salesperson at the Salem Kelly's store right away, or get a different salesperson who was just as knowledgeable about our order.

Today a Kelly's employee took out the Best Buy radiant cooktop and installed the GE induction cooktop. He was pleasant, efficient, and competent -- three words that, sadly, don't describe any of the Best Buy employees Laurel dealt with.

Saturday Best Buy is supposed to pick up the radiant cooktop. We'll then get a refund, aside from the installation fee of $149, I think it was. 

The lesson we've learned from this is that it makes sense to buy appliances from a local company who has genuine customer service. Probably buying something from Best Buy is fine if you can walk out with it, get it working by yourself, and take it back to the store if you want to return it.

But for something fairly complicateed, like a cooktop or other appliance, trying to return something to Best Buy can be a nightmare. At one point Laurel was so frustrated with the "customer service" people in China, or wherever they were, she thought she might have to go the Salem Best Buy store and demand to talk to a manager.

We're very happy with Kelly's, though. Just something to keep in mind if you have a choice between getting something at Best Buy or at Kelly's. Our recommendation is to go with Kelly's. Unless you love to spend many hours on the phone getting nowhere with incompetent people.

Schools should meet needs of both visual and verbal thinkers

Today our monthly Salon discussion group talked about a bunch of interesting topics, including the difference between verbal and visual ways of thinking.

I brought this subject up, saying that I've started to read a story in The New Yorker about Temple Grandin and how she uses her visual skills to come up with more humane ways of designing slaughterhouses. 

(As a vegetarian, I don't think slaughterhouses can be humane, but if there's ways to reduce the suffering of animals, that's a good thing.)

Here's an excerpt from Thought Process, the story title in the print edition, which became How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? in the online edition. Subtitle: Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize.

Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum, came to prominence in 1995, when she published “Thinking in Pictures,” a memoir that chronicled her years-long search for a way to put her visual and perceptual gifts to use.

She found a home in agricultural engineering, where she was capable of visualizing farm buildings from the animals’ perspective. Visiting a slaughterhouse where animals were often panicked, she could instantly see how small visual elements, such as a hanging chain or a reflection in a puddle, were distracting them and causing confusion.

“Thinking in Pictures” made the case for the value of neurodiversity: Grandin’s unusual mind succeeded where others couldn’t. In “Visual Thinking,” she sharpens her argument, proposing that word-centric people have sidelined other kinds of thinkers.

Verbal minds, she argues, run our boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures, and schools, which have cut back on shop class and the arts, while subjecting students to a daunting array of written standardized tests. The result is a crisis in American ingenuity.

“Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions.”

In “Thinking in Pictures,” Grandin suggested that the world was divided between visual and verbal thinkers. “Visual Thinking” gently revises the idea, identifying a continuum of thought styles that’s roughly divisible into three sections.

On one end are verbal thinkers, who often solve problems by talking about them in their heads or, more generally, by proceeding in the linear, representational fashion typical of language. (Estimating the cost of a building project, a verbal thinker might price out all the components, then sum them using a spreadsheet—an ordered, symbol-based approach.)

On the other end of the continuum are “object visualizers”: they come to conclusions through the use of concrete, photograph-like mental images, as Grandin does when she compares building plans in her mind. In between those poles, Grandin writes, is a second group of visual thinkers—“spatial visualizers,” who seem to combine language and image, thinking in terms of visual patterns and abstractions.

We talked about Grandin's observation that schools tend to favor verbal thinkers. One person said that when he was in high school, the students who took shop classes were looked down on by language-oriented verbal thinkers like him.

I agreed, saying that I felt the same way. Yet now my wife and I are thrilled if we can find a plumber or electrician willing to come to our house and fix something on short notice.

On the plus side, a discussion group member who does substitute teaching in the Salem-Keizer School District said that vocational education is getting more attention, and that the district is working to meet the needs of students who are more into visual thinking than verbal thinking.

What I find fascinating is how each of us only has directly experienced one style of thinking: our own.

So it's easy to believe that those who use a different style are either miracle workers or mentally deficient -- whereas the truth is that we're all just doing what our diverse brains lead us to do, no judgment required.

I remember a skilled woodworker who rebuilt our deck shortly after we moved into our house in 1990. I never saw him make a sketch or write down a plan. He had what seemed to me an almost magical ability to construct a structure intuitively, given what must have been his high visual skills.

Keith, a.k.a. The Garden Poet, could do the same thing with landscaping. Like the guy who rebuilt our deck, Keith didn't make any sketches or plans. He came up with design ideas in the course of doing the landscaping work.

My wife and I learned to be surprised, always pleasantly, when we'd return home and see what Keith had created while we were gone. His mind also was decidedly in the visual style of thinking.

Me, I'm strongly verbal. But I told our discussion group that I've always been able to visualize concepts as if they were objects floating in the sky of my mind, rearranging themselves into various patterns as I ponder some subject I want to talk or write about.

All kinds of thinking styles need to be valued by society. As Grandin said in the excerpt above, mechanics, builders, and other visual thinkers are just as important as scholars and writers who favor verbal thinking.

Though I suspect that almost everybody utilizes a blend of visual and verbal thinking. It's great that schools appear to be recognizing this to a much greater degree than in the not-so-good old days when I was in high school in the 1960s. 

Which brought up a distressing memory just now. I ended up being the salutatorian of my graduating class of 1966, thanks to Keith Glentzer who had much better math and science skills, becoming valedictorian for that reason.

When I took biology, the teacher took a special glee in bringing in wildflowers that we had to name. I was terrible at looking at a wildflower and coming up with its name -- even though I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains where most of the wildflowers came from.

I was verbally proficient, but visually handicapped. I almost got a "D" in biology because I simply couldn't remember the names of the wildflowers. (I still can't do this.) The teacher thought this was amusing, as did my classmates, since I had a reputation as a brainy student.

Which was generally true. But throw a verbal thinking person into a visual thinking pond, and they'll struggle. Same applies to visual thinking people thrown into a verbal thinking pond, which is what our schools have been historically.

Our dog's hip dysplasia diagnosis worries us

Pets are almost as important as children to those of us who no longer have children in the house. Or, in the case of my wife, have never had a child.

So when we got a phone call from our vet tonight, giving us the results of X-rays taken when we wanted to know why Mooka, our Husky mix, was limping at times, what she told us was really disturbing.

But not to Mooka. That's a plus side of being a dog. You don't know that you've been diagnosed with right hip dysplasia with degenerative joint disease. 

What shocked my wife, who has owned several purebred German Shepherds, a breed prone to hip dysplasia, is that a mixed breed dog who is only about five years old (she was adopted from a shelter, so we're not sure exactly how old Mooka is) would have hip dysplasia at such a relatively young age.

And not only that. Mooka also may have herniated discs in her spine, because she got a IVDD diagnosis too. That's Intervertebral Disc Disease. 

There's treatments for Mooka's problems. So we're hoping she still has quite a few years of happy running around in her future. At the moment we're just dealing with the unpleasant news that arrived this evening. 

Mooka is still the same dog she was before we got the report from our vet.

It's my wife and I who are changed, because we love Mooka and had been visualizing her being healthy for much longer, since mixed breeds/mutts tend to have fewer health problems than purebred dogs. But life is full of surprises, often unwelcome ones.

After Oregon's great ice storm of 2021, I'm glad the 2022 version was milder

If I didn't know what post-traumatic stress felt like before, I sure do now. Because as soon as I heard that a significant freezing rain event was headed our way, I couldn't get thoughts and feelings of the Great Ice Storm of February 2021 out of my mind.

Along with hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, our home got about 5/8 of an inch of ice in that horrendous weather disaster. We lost lots of trees, including two big branches from an ancient white oak.

And our electricity was out for 12 days. Not fun, obviously. 

It's difficult to forecast freezing rain, since it requires a special atmospheric setup: a layer of warm air that melts frozen precipitation, which then freezes when it hits cold surfaces. I'd seen estimates that the Salem area, where we live, could get as much as four-tenths of an inch of ice from freezing rain.

Not as much as in 2021, but enough to cause problems with falling limbs/trees and power outages. So foe days I doom scrolled my iPhone's weather apps, along with perusing the National Weather Service web site for our location and the weather news on Portland TV stations.

In the end, we only got a few tenths of an inch of ice. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot. Believe me, it is. Our driveway in rural south Salem became a solid sheet of ice, impossible to walk or drive on, even with my Subaru Crosstrek and its winter tires.

That dark dot in the driveway is a stuffed wolf. More about that in a bit. Above is a photo of the upper part of our driveway, where I'd parked the Subaru close to Lake Drive. This is what just a little bit of freezing rain can produce: virtually impassible roads.

Also, very difficult to walk on walkways, like the one leading to our front door. Take one step on the walkway without temporary cleats on shoes and you'll be on your butt. I know, because that almost happened to me this morning.

Freezing rain isn't nearly as attractive as snow. It gave our yard a sort of snow-like feel, but it's easy to walk on snow. You can play in it. You can throw it. With freezing rain, you struggle to deal with it. It's the nastiest form of winter precipitation.

Still, since our electricity didn't go off -- my biggest worry with this 2022 ice storm -- I was in a pretty buoyant mood this afternoon. So I did engage with the ice on our driveway in a playful fashion. 

My scientific quest was to determine what would slide furthest: a shoe, a banana, or a stuffed wolf? After the experiment, I then attempted to rescue the wolf from the middle of the driveway, which didn't go so well, as shown in the video. Nonetheless, I await my senior citizen scientist award.

The video shows the lighter side of white ice. Black ice is scarier, being clear, so a roadway can look fine when it really isn't. I wrote about this in "Black ice story in New Yorker brings back some slippery memories."

I'm hoping that a story in the most recent issue of The New Yorker, "Black Ice, Near-Death, and Transcendence on I-91," will make people more aware of the dangers of black ice, and also reassure people like me who live in areas that don't get a lot of snow, but do regularly get black ice, that we aren't winter weenies.

Our 2022 Christmas Letter has a theme of falling (not in love, on the ground)

Given our age, somewhere between 40 and 100, like almost equidistant, it becomes more difficult with every passing year to find a Christmas Letter theme that doesn't sound like it was written by a couple as old as we are.

So in 2022 I embraced my inner geezer and chose to write about our unexciting senior citizen lives. A central theme is falling. But there's also a paragraph about our dog, Mooka. Something for everyone! Well, assuming you're somehow interested in the things we are.

If this Christmas letter doesn't push a Wow button for you, click here for a compilation of our letters going back to 2005. I've shared the 2022 letter in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2022 Christmas Letter PDF

How a single stink bug cost us $430 today

Bloggers like me have to choose our subjects to write about with care.

Until noon today, I was pondering between a $300 million Salem bond measure, advice on who to vote for in the midterms, and the increased risk of nuclear war due to Putin's Ukraine threats.

But after Tim Paquin of Precision Garage Door Service diagnosed what had caused our garage door opener to stop working, I realized that this was my chance to contribute to the accumulated store of knowledge regarding garage door opener repairs.

In short, consider that a stink bug is the culprit. Here's what Paquin found after taking a look inside the opener in a quest to learn why it had no electrical power.

That stink bug must have really had a grudge against my wife and me, because the repair guy said that the bug managed to fry itself on the part of the circuit board that controls the power supply. 

At first I thought this was funny.

When I learned how much this damn stink bug was going to cost me, the hilarity of the moment was considerably reduced: $75 service call + $304 Linear circuit board + $99 operator service and programming - $48 senior discount = $430.

Sadly, there was no discount for a stink bug committing suicide on the very worst part of the circuit board to die on (from my perspective; maybe the stink bug had a glorious final exit).

Stink bugs have been an annoying part of our life here in rural south Salem, Oregon for quite a few years. It seems like forever, but a Wikipedia article says that they reached Oregon only in 2009. Mostly they cluster on our windows on warm days in late summer or early fall.

Some get inside. We've found that the BugZooka bug catcher, a wonderful invention that lets us suck stink bugs up with ease (unlike flies, they are easy to sneak up on) is the best way to deal with them. A BugZooka is kept handy in a corner of our house.

Stink bugs are adept at getting inside a house or garage. My wife had gotten rid of lots of them in our garage, but obviously we missed the one that cost us $430.

I guess I could ask our State Farm agent if they offer insurance for stink bugs that cause fatal damage to a circuit board, but I suspect their underwriting department doesn't have enough data to calculate the minute odds of this happening. 

Unfortunately, it happened to us.

I just chose Pfeifer Roofing and Leaf Blaster for gutter protection

Like me, probably you've seen ads for gutter protection systems. There are quite a few of them: Leaf Filter, Gutter Shutter, Leaf Guard -- to name a few. 

I've looked into some of them over the years.

Since we moved into our non-easy care house in rural south Salem that's surrounded by large oak and fir trees, for about thirty years I've been cleaning our gutters via a leaf blower.

Even though parts of our house are two level and so quite a ways off the ground, I've been comfortable with using a backpack Stihl blower, walking judiciously along the edges of our roof. My wife isn't so comfortable with me doing this, especially now I'm a youthful 73.

When I've considered a gutter protection system, two things have stopped me from even getting an estimate.

First, they all seem to have drawbacks. The cheapest and easiest to install systems have the most problems. Second, every gutter protection system that runs an ad in our local newspaper has a bunch of horrible reviews from unsatisfied customers.

Sometimes people don't like how the system worked. Often, though, it was sleazy sales tactics that ticked people off. 

Today an employee of Pfeifer Roofing, Sam Randolph, came to our house to give us an estimate for some fairly minor roof repairs. Pfeifer installed a new roof for us quite a few years ago. We were pleased with the work they did then, and since we've had Pfeifer find and fix some leaks.

After I answered the door, I asked Sam if Pfeifer recommended any gutter protection systems, and if they installed them. I went through my problems with the systems that advertise, saying that I trust Pfeifer more than any of them.

Sam told me that they install a micro-mesh system, the Leaf Blaster Pro.

He had a sample with him, which looked great. Stainless steel. Very fine mesh. A ridge on the outside to direct heavy rain into the gutter.

He noted that the system requires new gutters. But since our gutters are fairly old, that seemed fine. And Sam said they'd use our current downspouts, which have a debris diverter installed on them. So I asked for an estimate, which Sam sent to me within a couple of hours.

The cost for new gutters with the Leaf Blaster Pro system on our 3,200 square foot house and detached garage/carport is estimated to be $4,920. Seems reasonable to me, though I have no idea what other gutter protection systems would cost.

I just really like the idea of having new gutters and Leaf Blaster Pro installed by Pfeifer, a company my wife and I trust. I'll have more to say about the system once it's installed and we've gotten some decent rain. 

If you're thinking about a gutter protection system as the leaves begin to fall, check out a local roofing company like Pfeifer before committing to one of the other systems. 

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.

My email nightmare shows how hooked I am on Gmail

I've got quite a few problems in my life, as do we all.

But what sets off a special fear in me is when I get a message from Apple Mail on my MacBook Pro laptop saying something like, "Unable to connect to Gmail. Username or password not recognized."

Sometimes the problem is easily fixed by restarting my computer. But a few days ago it was a waking nightmare.

Nothing had changed with my Gmail account. I'd simply shut the lid on my laptop, as I do every night before I go to bed, then flipped it open in the morning, as I also always do.

I tried reentering my Gmail password. No luck. I tried shutting down my MacBook Pro, then restarting it. No luck. 

Weirdly, I could send messages in Apple Mail, but wasn't able to receive any emails. So obviously Apple Mail could connect with Gmail for sending. Gmail also was working fine on my iPhone and iPad, so the account log-in information clearly was still valid.

I decided to download Mimestream, a third party email program for the Mac that was free in its beta version. It worked fine with my Gmail account. That told me the problem was with Apple Mail.

After Googling "Apple Mail problem with Gmail" and seeing a bunch of articles that claimed to describe easy ways to fix a problem, yet actually were quite complicated, I decided to hold off on trying to fix my problem by, say, deleting my current Gmail account and adding a new one.

I didn't want to make a bad situation worse by doing something wrong.

In the course of looking at my email accounts in Apple Mail, I noted that in addition to the Gmail POP account that wasn't working properly, I had a Gmail IMAP account. My bright idea was to activate the IMAP account and deactivate the POP account.

(I don't really know the difference between POP and IMAP, aside from the fact that supposedly IMAP is best when you have several devices, since POP deletes messages after being downloaded. But I've had no problem getting email on my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad even though I mostly use my MacBook for email and that had a POP account until recently.)

After finding a missing setting for a Gmail IMAP account, I was able to receive emails again on my laptop. Yay!

My excitement lessened, though, when I noticed that Apple Mail was saying "downloading 40,000 messages", I think it was. Apparently switching from POP to IMAP caused previous received emails to be treated as new emails.

Actually that 40,000 figure was way too low. I ended up with a gigantic trove of emails in my inbox going back to 2008, which may have been when I signed up for Gmail. 

The past couple of days I've been reviewing the emails for May and June, since I hadn't replied to all of the messages that I wanted to. I've also been deleting a year's worth of emails each morning. I recall that 2008 and 2009 had about 14,000 emails each.

So I must have gotten several hundred thousand old emails downloaded to Apple Mail, given that 14 years worth, or thereabouts, came in after switching to IMAP.

That's a scarily large amount, especially considering that I'm just an individual, not a business. One reason I get so many is that I have three blogs. I get an email whenever someone leaves a comment on a blog post, which is several dozen times a day, at least. 

It was decidedly weird to scroll through the (seemingly) endless emails I'd gotten from 2008 to the present in the course of selecting them to be deleted. This was like a time machine of sorts, reminding me of days long past and what I was doing back then. 

A poignant moment came when I noticed emails from my sister and brother-in-law, who died soon after each other in 2009 and 2010. I thought of re-reading them, but decided not to. 

What struck me about the near-panic I felt when Apple Mail stopped receiving emails, and the relief I felt when messages started flowing again into my inbox, is how dependent I and so many others have gotten on email.

For most of my life communications happened in-person, by phone, via the mail, or occasionally through a telegram. (Remember those? You won't unless you're pretty damn old.) Somehow we survived those times.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with my current dependence on email, and secondarily on text messages. As technology changes, so do the ways we communicate with each other. I just was shocked at how many emails I'd received since 2008.

Don't feed the ground squirrels in Bush Park. They can bite.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, took our dog Mooka for a walk in Salem's Bush Park. Mooka loves going to the park because she finds the California ground squirrels there endlessly fascinating.

Partly because they're so tame. Partly because Mooka hugely enjoys chasing squirrels on our rural south Salem property, though I don't think she's ever caught one.

(Dogs suck at climbing trees; good news for squirrels.)

Laurel got into a conversation with a man who told her that a child had been bitten at Bush Park by a ground squirrel, probably while feeding one of the cute little critters. He thought the child may have needed to get a rabies shot, but wasn't sure about this.

He also said that because of the proliferation of ground squirrels in Bush Park, there's an effort to kill them. Not sure how, but poisoning their burrows would make the most sense. 

So it isn't a good idea to feed the ground squirrels, as tempting as that might be. They aren't native to Oregon, as evidenced by "California" in their name. We've had quite a bit of experience with them on our property.

The squirrels have gnawed away at the bark of a gorgeous tree in our yard, almost completely girdling it before we put up netting to keep them away from the trunk and branches. In 2009 I wrote about another problem we had with them in "California ground squirrels are driving us nutty."

Crawling under the deck, Laurel found that the little bastards had dug completely under our house's concrete foundation and had made their way into our crawl space. Evidence: insulation that they had dragged out through the tunnel (probably to make a bed where they will have sex and create more California ground squirrels to drive us even nuttier).

Back then I said that I couldn't imagine killing them, so we got a live trap and took them elsewhere. But it was difficult to trap them, and transferring them just moves the ground squirrel problem.

I got a Varmint Killer Air Rifle in August of 2009, blogging about this in "I become a fearsome (ground squirrel) killer." That was wishful thinking, since I don't believe I ever actually hit one. So I increased my firepower.

It turned out that a .410 Mossberg self-defense shotgun was just the thing I needed to compensate for my lack of accuracy with the air rifle. Loaded with birdshot, and living as we do out in the country where shooting is common, I was able to blast away at ground squirrels in our yard with pleasing results.

Not that Laurel and I enjoyed killing them. We're both vegetarians and animal lovers. However, when the ground squirrels started digging into our crawl space, that caused us to declare war on them. 

Since, we haven't seen many ground squirrels. Mooka, a fairly young dog, is quicker than our previous dog, who died from a liver problem. We let her out when we see a ground squirrel in our yard, which seems to be scaring them away, by and large.

Here's a good article about how to get rid of ground squirrels in your yard. It describes ways to deter them rather than killing them -- which is our preference also whenever possible.

How our dog drives me crazy: Example 1 of 1,000

I keep reading about how modern dogs are evolved from wolves who became domesticated when people realized that they could be useful, and stopped chasing them away from their prehistoric camps.

That's probably true. But now the dog-human relationship seems to have swung almost totally in the direction of dogs benefitting from living with us. 

Sure, I enjoy the company of our Husky mix canine, Mooka. However, she doesn't contribute very much around our house. The most useful thing she does is occasionally catch a mole or vole that's burrowing in our yard.

Meanwhile, she regularly drives my wife and me crazy. I guess that's her job -- challenging us to stay as sane as possible in the face of her antics. 

This morning Laurel took her for a walk around the community lake in our aptly-named neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates. Walking ahead of Mooka, Laurel realized she was nowhere to be found. And she wasn't coming when called, a sign that something has seriously grabbed Mooka's attention.

Eventually Mooka appeared out of some brush near the lake. She was carrying something. Laurel thought it might be a tennis ball thrown and lost by another dog owner. But no, it turned out to be a goose egg.

It was impressive that Mooka could gently cradle an egg in her powerful dog jaws. Laurel wanted to return it to the goose nest, though. Which Laurel never found. What she did find was newly sprouting poison oak growing in the area Mooka had been rummaging around in. 

So Laurel had to wash her clothes, since we both are allergic to poison oak, and Mooka got a good hosing down.

My afternoon walk with Mooka wasn't so eventful. Just the usual way Mooka drives me crazy on our mostly leashless walk along some Spring Lake Estates trail easements, then on Lake Drive back to our house.

Much of my time on a dog walk is spent staring at a motionless dog obsessing over a rodent hole. Or, some other place where Mooka smells a small critter that she really wants to catch. 

Me, I have the strange idea that a dog walk should mostly consist of walking along with our dog. Mooka has a different understanding.

Pretty clearly she views walking as a means to get from one captivating scent to another captivating scent, spending as much time as possible engrossed in the smells, with as little time as possible actually walking.

I'm fine with this up to a point.

That point has a limit when I start thinking about how much I want to get home and eat dinner, along with watching my recording of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC so I can keep in touch with my own obsession: politics and current affairs.

So after waiting for what seems like ten minutes for Mooka to cease her sniffing at some spot, but probably is more like 45 seconds, I start issuing commands to our dog: "Mooka, let's go!" Though her hearing is excellent, Mooka ignores me until, maybe the fifth time I say this, I try to sound more like a stern Alpha pack leader.

"Mooka, let's go, now!" She then ambles slowly away from whatever she was smelling to find a new scent, after which we repeat our little game of me commanding and Mooka very reluctantly complying.

Part of our walk is along a wide grassy part of the trail where it is easy for me to see what Mooka is up to. 

But out here in the country there's plenty of places for a mischievous dog to hide from sight. Like behind this impressive pile of wood from the February 2021 ice storm that hasn't yet been split and hauled away. 

Eventually, though, I put on Mooka's leash when we reach Lake Drive, a lightly travelled road where you can walk along the center line as if it were a yellow brick road that leads not to the Wizard of Oz, but ...

To another thing to stop and smell.

The good news (for me) is that now I have Mooka on a leash and can pull her away from the enticing garbage can. Our house is just a few hundred yards away, so I know that I've survived another attempt by our dog to drive me crazy.

Tomorrow will be another day.

My John Deere X394 lawn tractor works great on rough ground

After several decades of using a DR Field Mower (which you walk behind) to cut grass on our ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon, last summer I decided to admit that my 73 year old body needed an easier way of doing that job.

So after considerable research and discussions with Ray Rodriquez at Pape Machinery, our local John Deere dealer, I bought an X394 lawn tractor. 

It's taken me a few mowings to get used to the X394 (X means it is only sold through a John Deere dealer; the 94 indicates that it is at the upper end of the 300 series tractors; I think the 4 relates to the four-wheel steering).

Today I mowed almost all of our grass except for our lawn. I'll share photos below.

It only took me about 90 minutes, which is way less time than I spent doing that job with the DR Field Mower. It also was much easier, since I sat on the cushy John Deere seat with my water bottle nestled in the cup holder on my right, instead of wrestling the DR Field Mower around.

When I talked with Rodriquez about my mowing needs, he had me look at two types of grass visible from his office window. One was a flat lawn. The other was a flat field. I told Ray, "Neither looks like the bumpy sloping fields I need to mow."

I showed him photos of those fields. He then was adamant that if I got anything other than a high-end 300 series with a solid steel frame, I'd be unhappy after a year or two when a cheaper John Deere model made of less strong stuff had a bent frame.

I'm glad I took that advice. The four-wheel steering is perfect for our fields, which have many trees and other obstacles to navigate around. And the power steering on the X394 makes mowing much easier also.

Here's a tour of what I mowed this afternoon, starting with the easier areas and moving on to the tougher areas.

This small patch of grass close to our house is almost lawn like. 

A larger field next to the top of our driveway is fairly smooth, but definitely field-like. I'm wary of steep slopes, so I had to leave unmoved some grass on the sloping area next to the driveway, which I could handle with the walk behind DR Field Mower. No big deal. I can use a trimmer for that.

This sloping area is easy to handle with the X394. The bare ground could be an issue if it was muddy, since the X394 doesn't have traction control. Last year I almost got stuck a few times, so now I'm cautious about mowing when the ground is wet.

I then headed across our actual lawn, which didn't need mowing today.

The X394 has a 48 inch deck, but is quite a bit wider with the large side discharge chute. It just barely fits between the rock on the left (next to our dog's butt) and the Oregon Grape on the right.

This field, with some branches covered by a tarp waiting to be burned in the center, may look fairly smooth, but it is rough going -- with tough bunches of grass, field mice burrows, and such. When I used the DR Field Mower here it felt sort of like a bucking bronco as I walked behind the mower as it jerked this way and that. But the X394 handles this field great.

The next field down is fairly smooth. If you look closely, you can see how close I can mow to most of the trees, given the four wheel steering on the X394. The obvious exception is the drastically leaning tree on the left, which got that way after a February 2021 ice storm decimated our part of Oregon. Just haven't gotten around to cutting that tree down. The black burned area in the top center is where a lot of debris was burned after downed trees were cleaned up after the ice storm.

This field is a challenge. Quite a few trees to mow around. A gully in the center that I've learned to avoid with the X394. Several stumps that were cut low to the ground, but I managed to hit one with the deck set at a 3.5 inch height. Maximum height is 4 inches, which I'll try next time. Every time I use the X394 I learn more about what it can do, and what I should avoid doing. Like, mowing over that stump.

After I finished mowing, I hooked a hose up to a coupling on the deck of the X394, turned on the water, and cleaned out the clippings by running the mower blades for a minute or so. Great feature. Sure beats reaching under the mower to clean the deck. I use a backpack leaf blower to clean off debris from the mower before I park it in our garage.

I can heartily recommend the X394 for anyone with rough ground that needs mowing. I've only used the lawn tractor for about 7 hours, but so far it has operated flawlessly. The only problems I've had have been self-created, such as the times I almost got stuck by using the X394 in an area where I shouldn't have been mowing.

Live and learn.

I'll end by sharing a couple of photos of the creek that runs through our property just past the last fields I mowed today. Thankfully, creeks don't need mowing. 

Scheduling group meetings is tough in the Age of Covid

For many years I've done the scheduling for a monthly Salon discussion group my wife and I are members of. 

Pre-Covid, that used to be easy. 

We'd meet in the homes belonging to the dozen or so people in the group. I kept track of where we met each month, doing my best to keep to a regular rotation among the various homes. 

I'd ask the people who were next up in the rotation if they could host a meeting on a certain date. If they could, then I'd email everybody in the group to see if that date was OK for them.

Pretty damn simple. 

Post-Covid scheduling also was easy for quite a while. From March 2020 until November 2021 we met either via Zoom, or, if the weather was warm and dry enough, outside in the back yard of one of our members.

In December 2021, when Covid cases were pretty minimal, we had a maskless in-person meeting at our house. Everyone survived. A few people chose not to attend the meeting, feeling they weren't ready yet to meet in person.

Now our discussion group is in an awkward period, along with the rest of the country, really. 

Covid cases are rapidly declining, along with hospitalizations and deaths. But we're not quite in the endemic stage, when Covid simply becomes an ongoing problem to live with, like the flu.

So the twelve members of our group are representative of the range of attitudes toward Covid at this stage of the pandemic, which probably soon will become an endemic (using that word as a noun rather than an adjective).

Eight of us, including my wife and I, are fine with meeting in-person indoors.

Everybody in our group has been fully vaccinated and boosted. We're all Covid-careful. So getting together in someone's house seems low-risk. After all, we've been in public stores, gyms, and such with strangers who don't always wear a mask.

Having a small private meeting with people you know and trust is considerably less risky. And naturally anyone who wants to, can wear a mask during the meeting, which reduces the Covid risk even more (likely to almost nothing).

However, four members of our group aren't ready yet to meet indoors. They're OK with meeting outdoors, but currently the weather is too unpredictable for that to be a good option. 

This has made scheduling our March meeting difficult. I've always gone by the adage, "greatest good for the greatest number." If nine people can make a meeting on one date, and eleven on another date, I'll go with the day that works for the most people.

Problem is, a Zoom meeting would have the largest number of our members taking part. Yet eight of our twelve members prefer an in-person meeting. 

That's the way we're going to go this month, with hopes better weather will enable us to meet outside soon -- a desirable option until the four people reluctant to meet indoors feel comfortable doing that.

Complicating things is the difficulty in gauging how strongly people feel about meeting indoors versus via Zoom. How is it possible to compare those who really hate Zoom meetings with those who really hate the idea of meeting indoors when Covid is still circulating in our community?

Is one form of hate more worthy? Maybe. Maybe not. But I don't know how to assess that, so I'm simply assuming that the opinion of someone who wants to meet indoors is equal to the opinion of someone who wants to meet via Zoom.

Anyway, these are interesting times we live in.

Everyone wants to get back to complete normal, but Covid isn't going to allow that for the foreseeable future. So we all have to navigate a course that leads as close to normal as possible, without veering off into the shoals of either excessive risk-taking or excessive caution.  

Our 2021 Christmas letter adds an asterisk to how we're doing: Fine*

If you're a store employee, or someone else who asked us how we're doing in 2021, likely we said "Fine." But that wasn't really true. We just either felt that they really didn't want a full answer, or there wasn't time to provide one. 

Thankfully, we were able to correct this through our 2021 Christmas Letter. Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF

Hot bath plus marijuana: a recipe for fainting

Since I'm always on the lookout for fresh grandiose ideas to spice up my senior citizen life, I'm putting out an alert that if someone is looking for a Poster Child, or in my case a Poster Geezer, to be a spokesperson for the danger of mixing a hot bath and marijuana, I'm available!

(Especially if the gig comes with a generous expense allowance, which I can use to pay for our water heater electricity and visits to my favorite cannabis emporium.)

Until last night I was blissfully unaware of what can happen when someone, like me, mixes these seemingly innocuous pleasures in what can be a dangerous combination:

An especially hot bath, which I sat in for longer than usual, while puffing away on my PAX3 vaporizer filled with its typical bathtub dose of indica marijuana, reclining a bit more deeply in the tub than is typical for me.

Re-creation of what befell me last night, minus the hot water and my naked body
(use your imagination to fill in those details, if you dare)

I often feel a bit lightheaded after taking a hot bath. That was the case last night.

But I had no trouble climbing out of the tub, toweling off, getting dressed, and heading into the kitchen to prepare the evening dog treat for Mooka, the family canine, and a bowl of applesauce for me.

The problem came when I felt somewhat dizzy and decided to lean over a kitchen counter until that passed. 

My next recollection was Laurel, my wife, shaking me and saying, "Brian, you fainted."

I had no problem believing her, since I was lying on the kitchen floor. My glasses were askew, with one earpiece bent quite a bit from my fall. 

"You've got a black eye," Laurel said. 

I got up, walked over to the living room couch, and sat there for a while with an ice pack on my eye -- which I later switched to a bag of frozen peas.

Today the swelling around my eye has gone down a lot, though the area under my eye is still black, probably from my glasses being pushed against my face after I fainted. Otherwise, I have no aches or pains.

Which makes me think that my falling down after fainting must have been quite graceful. Sadly, no record of it exists, not even in my wife's memory, since she heard me fall but didn't see it.

Having grown up watching Lassie the Collie do amazing feats, like alerting the family when Timmy fell in a well, I wondered why Mooka the Husky mix wasn't licking my face when I woke up. 

Sadly, Laurel said that Mooka ran downstairs after I fainted, apparently scared by all the commotion. Lesson: don't count on your dog to rescue you from a hot bath/marijuana fainting spell. Unless you have a reincarnation of Lassie.

Some Googling revealed that fainting is fairly common after being in hot water -- shower, bath, hot tub.

Some of the stories were quite horrendous. I guess it all depends on where you are when you faint, sharp corners, deep water, and hard surfaces putting you at greater risk.

The NurseMummy web site informed me that:

As a general rule, hot showers and hot baths can cause dizziness due to a drop in blood pressure caused by the hot water dilating your blood vessels. The hot water increases your blood supply to your legs, arms, feet and hands, and reduces the amount of blood your heart has to pump; less pressure on your vessels and circulatory system. 

And the Mayo Clinic informed me that Hotter Hot Tub Water Poses Increased Fainting Risk.  

Hotter water in hot tubs poses increased health risks from fainting, Mayo Clinic researchers report. Mayo Clinic heart researchers had six subjects soak in 104 degree water (the current recommended temperature for hot tubs) and 106.7 degree water for 21 minutes to see if hotter water caused any ill effects.

They concluded that the higher temperatures posed little health risk from heart or circulation problems. But they found that when the subjects stood up to exit the tub, systolic blood pressure dropped dramatically, nearly twice as much in the hotter water compared to the 104 degree temperature. The result is less blood flow to the brain, which can cause fainting, which in turn might lead to injury by falling or by drowning. The authors point out that in an earlier study 36 hot tub deaths, 25 were found to be caused by drowning.

So the hotter than usual bathtub water, combined with the fact that in older people marijuana temporarily lowers blood pressure, likely caused me to faint.

But I'm about to head off for another bath, just not so hot. At least I'm now aware of what can happen by mixing overly hot water with a relaxing bowl of cannabis.

Which reminds me of something a friend recently told me. He said that one day he was holding a frisbee and suddenly realized that he'd forgotten how to throw it. That worried him until he realized that he'd taken LSD.

Be Covid safe at Thanksgiving, then don't worry much

Yesterday via Zoom, my wife, Laurel, and I discussed the holidays from a Covid perspective with a dozen friends about our age -- some older, in their 80s, some younger, in their 50s and 60s, and some like us, in their 70s.

So, yeah, it was a decidedly senior group. Keep that in mind as I describe both the anxiety and hope shared last night. 

Since this was a meeting of our monthly Salon discussion group, we took the opportunity to talk about what to do in December: have an in-person gathering, or keep on Zoom'ing. 

Two-thirds (8) were fine with meeting in-person at our house. We're all fully vaccinated. I'm pretty sure everybody has gotten a booster shot. We all wear masks when out and about in indoor spaces, like grocery stores, where some people may be unvaccinated.

This portion of our group, which included me and Laurel, felt that the benefit of getting together for a December potluck definitely was worth the minor Covid risk of meeting in-person.  

We don't find a Zoom meeting nearly as satisfying as a real meeting. Zoom is better than nothing, but way less satisfying than sitting in a living room and conversing face-to-face. Naturally we're concerned about our physical health. Our mental health is equally important to us, though.

The other third of our group, four people, were less enthused about meeting in-person. Two friends were adamant that they didn't want to do this maskless, since eating and drinking requires taking a mask off.

They correctly noted that asymptomatic spread of Covid can happen via vaccinated people, which potentially increases the chance that more dangerous variants other than Delta will pop up. And two friends were undecided, leaning for the moment against meeting in-person.

Which is fine. 

As with most issues, different people can be equally familiar with the same facts, yet come to varying conclusions about the meaning of those facts. My Tai Chi instructor likes to say about alternative ways of doing Tai Chi, "Not good/bad or right/wrong. Just different."

So if your family or group of friends isn't in agreement about how to handle a Thanksgiving get-together, don't make this into a battle. Likely there's a way to please most people, though maybe not everyone completely. 

The New York Times has a useful story, "We're Having a Holiday Gathering. Are We Nuts?" 

The story asks a series of questions about your gathering, beginning with Will everyone at the gathering be vaccinated? In the case of our discussion group the answer was yes. Which produced this response.

Happy Vaxgiving! Enjoy your celebration knowing that by being vaccinated, you’ve already made the party safer for everyone.

To further lower risk, encourage every adult to seek out a booster shot. It only takes a few days for the extra protection to kick in. While you’re at it, get your flu shot! Flu remains a serious health risk during the winter.

You’re well protected with vaccines and boosters, but since no vaccine provides 100 percent protection, keep going for more advice to help make sure the coronavirus doesn’t crash your holiday party.

The next question was Is there anyone who will be at your gathering who's at high risk from Covid-19? I said yes. Which elicited: 

A lot of people will share their holidays with an older parent, grandparent or others at high risk. The key to a safer celebration is this: Plan the event around the most vulnerable person in the room.

Consider bringing the party to them, so someone at high risk doesn’t have to spend time in airports or on trains. People at high risk should get booster shots and talk to their doctors about the risks of traveling.

Getting tested a few days before the party and using on-the-spot home tests on the day of the event will allow you to enjoy each other’s company without worrying. Adding a portable air cleaner, opening windows or turning on exhaust fans can also lower risk for Covid and any other viruses that might be lurking. Anyone with the sniffles should stay home.

Nobody likes wearing masks — and if everyone is vaccinated and tested, they aren’t really needed. But some high-risk people may be more comfortable using a mask and having others wear them, too.

Since we all live in the Salem area, traveling by public transport didn't apply to our group. The other advice did, though.

It makes sense to use home tests to reassure people that no one at a gathering has Covid. I'll suggest this to our group, though I'm not sure how easy it is to get home tests or how much they cost.

Regarding masks, I'm going to tell our discussion group that anyone who wants to wear a mask throughout our December gathering should do so. No need to partake of food and drink if they don't want to.

And we could use part of our house as a place where anyone who's concerned about being around maskless eaters and drinkers could do their own eating and drinking, then rejoin us when they're done.

There's ways to make almost everyone comfortable with attending a holiday gathering. This just takes a bit of common sense, collaboration, and flexibility. The New York Times story correctly points out that the most Covid-vulnerable people should get special consideration, since they run the greatest risk.

Our new composite deck looks great, thanks to Apex Paint & Remodel

We've had wooden decks and railings for the 31 years we've lived our here in rural south Salem. When we moved to our house, that was the only choice. 

So every few years I'd stain the decks and railings. When I was in my 40s, it was sort of fun. Less fun in my 50s and 60s. And in my 70s, not fun at all. 

That's one reason we had Apex Paint & Remodel take out our old decks and replace them with TimberTech composite decking with metal railings by CableBullet.

My wife and I are really happy with the recently completed result.

This is our main deck. We went with an outside mount for the railings to avoid having them bolted to the horizontal part of the deck. The cables are almost invisible at times, as in this photo taken from inside our house.

Our house was built in 1973. The railings give it a more modern look, compared to the wood railings we had before. The black metal goes nicely with our black window frames.

Here's a view of our house from further away. The upper deck on the left side of the photo also was replaced.

We'd admired cable railings when we saw them at Salem Tour of Homes houses. They don't obscure a view of our yard anywhere near as much as the wood railings did. Also, they don't have to be stained!

(I found staining our railings to be more annoying than staining the decks, since railings have four sides that need staining rather than just one.)

Here's the railing on the other side of our main deck.

Our smaller second floor deck turned out great also.

Again, the look of the metal railings is a lot cleaner than our old wood railings.

The view from inside our house is much enhanced by the cables.

Wide TimberTech boards were used for the sides of the deck. Before we had vertical wooden boards as siding. I like the horizontal look better.

The stairs turned out well also.

We've now used Apex Paint & Remodel on two projects, one inside and one outside. They're a small company with a great group of employees. They work carefully, cleaned everything up perfectly, and were pleasant to chat with.

And they play good music at a reasonable volume while they're working. Another plus!

Mooka, our Husky mix, is obsessed with hunting moles

All dogs are strange. Every dog owner knows this. That's part of what makes them so interesting and adorable -- their strangeness.

Of course, if dogs could talk, I'm pretty sure they'd say, "Hey, you humans are even stranger!" No argument there.

I wasn't a dog person until after a divorce I got married again to a woman who had a purebred German Shepherd. I had a cat. But not for long, since the dog and cat didn't get along. Fortunately, we were able to find a cat lady on the Oregon coast who was able to adopt my cat.

Following the purebred German Shepherd, we've had two Shepherd mixes and, most recently, a Husky mix. Here's a photo of Mooka, taken shortly after we adopted her from a Texas shelter in 2019.

Even though Mooka only weighs about sixty-five pounds, right away I could tell that her Husky'ness translated into an impressive pulling ability. I'm six feet and 175 pounds, but when Mooka pulls on a leash attached to her halter, it's a bit tough for me to hold her back.

That part of being a Husky mix obviously made sense to me, since Huskies pull heavy sleds. And she's good natured, a real people lover, which also fits, given that Huskies traditionally worked closely with humans in an inhospitable environment.

What my wife and I find difficult to understand, though, is why Mooka is so obsessed with hunting moles, gophers, voles, and indeed anything else that lives underground.

When I take her for a walk in the morning, she's had her doggy breakfast. Yet today, like most days, as soon as she got out of the door, Mooka headed right for her favorite mole hunting area on our ten acres in rural south Salem, Oregon.

Catching up to her, I found Mooka carefully sniffing each of about a dozen mole mounds in a grassy field below our house. She inspected each one, eventually focusing on what I assume was the hole with the most recent mole activity.

I've never had the patience or the inclination to wait and see how long Mooka would keep on obsessing over the mole mounds. She never leaves them on their own. I have to call her away from them with increasingly loud calls of "Mooka, let's go!" 

She'll reluctantly walk away from the mole area with a wistful look backward, and an aggrieved attitude of a dog who was having ever so much fun until her killjoy human pulled her away from a joyful activity.

I've read that Huskies have a high prey drive.

OK, that explains why Mooka also is very interested in squirrels, deer, raccoons, and other creatures on our property. It just surprises me that a Husky mix would be so obsessed with hunting ground-dwelling animals.

Doesn't seem like something an Arctic dog would do. However, I suppose moles and such are common in Alaska and other points in the far north during the warm months. Regardless, this is probably Mooka's strangest habit.

She also is an anti-retriever, liking it when I throw a stick and she runs away with it, wanting me to chase her. That's strange, but our last Shepherd mix did the same thing. So maybe I'm the strange one, since I play the dog's game and try to catch them when they race away with a stick.

I am the Leaf Whisperer. Behold my talent.

After 31 years of living in a rural south Salem property that I at first considered Leaf Hell, I've upgraded my opinion to Leaf Purgatory, since Leaf Heaven is beyond my reach -- unless I develop a brain tumor that somehow makes me love to deal with gigantic amounts of leaves every fall.

Actually, I don't mind leaves all that much.

Especially on a fairly warm, sunny, calm day like this Saturday in very late October. They're undeniably beautiful. At least, when they're still on trees. Once they reach the ground, my affection for leaves diminishes.


But rather than curse my leafy fate, which comes with the territory of a house surrounded by large oaks, with a yard containing numerous other deciduous trees, I want to praise my ability to make copious quantities of leaves disappear from where they're not wanted.

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, I learned about Master Class. That's where, the web site says, you Learn From the World's Best.

OK, Master Class executives -- here's my pitch for hiring me to put on a Master Class in Rural Leaf Blowing and Disposal. 

Let's get one issue off the table right away. I use a leaf blower. A two-cycle Stihl backpack blower. Yes, the sort of leaf blower that is nastily proficient at spewing out hydrocarbons.

"If you look at the unburnt hydrocarbons you find that this leaf blower in 30 minutes of operation...is, in fact, emitting more hydrocarbons than driving an f 150 or any light-duty pick up from New York City to Los Angeles,"  Leamy said. 

However, I like to believe that if Al Gore or Greta Thunberg had visited me this afternoon, once they saw how many leaves I had to deal with, they would have said, "You've got our blessing to fire up that leaf blower, Brian." 

(There's no way an electric blower would be able to handle our leaves as effectively.)

Slopes require patience. There's several places in our yard where leaves must be blown uphill into an area where they can rot away in a suitable location. This requires a certain Zen sensibility, since leaves, like water, prefer to flow downhill.

And when a gust of wind blows downhill, as happened to me today, that's where leaves go: in the opposite direction from where I'd just blown them. But here there are, off of our grass and walkways.

Anyone can handle leaves on a level lawn. It takes a Leaf Whisperer like me to herd them in an area with many plantings of Oregon Grape, each of which likes to function as a leaf barrier. I forgot to take a before photo of this area. This is the after. By the way, can you find the canine in the photo above?

Don't look up in early fall, before all the leaves have departed trees. But if you do, consider that the remaining leaves will serve to hone your leaf disposal skills.

They aren't out to drive you crazy, even though I have accused our oak trees of doing this, since each tree has its own leaf falling schedule, which means they cast leaves into our yard over a period of quite a few weeks, not all at once.

I like to let leaves lay close to where they fell. This is both environmentally and philosophically pleasing. Also, the easiest thing to do. This is the beginning of a leaf pile that, by the end of leaf season, will be deep enough to make our dog delight in being able to bury herself in them. 

Ferns are even worse than Oregon Grape as leaf catchers. My wife planted these in between several trees that drop a lot of leaves and the brush into which I blow the leaves.

I'm sure that she, like the oak trees, didn't do this to drive me crazy, but to give me an additional opportunity to practice Zen-like leaf blowing patience and artistry.

This area offers a repeat of what I said before: don't look up, unless you want to get a look into your leaf blowing future.

Small logs make for an extra display of leaf blowing up-and-over skill. Also, they help prevent leaves from returning to the yard via wind.

It is eminently possible, and even fun, to blow leaves out of a water feature. They depart in a pleasing shower of spray.

Leaves that fall along one of our walkways have to be carried away in a large basket. I use them to "pave" an otherwise muddy trail that leads to the lower portion of our property. 

Bank shots are as satisfying in leaf blowing as in billiards. This corner attracts quite a few leaves as they're blown off our deck. Blowing them into the corner at a medium speed results in a rebound effect, getting them into a place where regular leaf blowing can happen. Just one of those skills one develops as a Leaf Whisperer.

Lastly, after you've put in a couple of hours on your leaf blowing craft -- which is how long it takes me to go through our yard on a day like today with lots of leaves -- take a moment to behold the majesty of what you have wrought.

Just a moment. Because until all the leaves have done their falling thing, by the next weekend you'll be doing the same leaf blowing thing. 

A big burn pile is still fun for me at 73

There's pluses and minuses that come with living on ten wooded acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. Our property is a heck of a lot of work to maintain.

But some of that work is so pleasant, it's better termed fun. Especially if that word, fun, is loosely defined. 

Today Laurel, my wife, and I tackled a large burn pile. Originally it consisted of a massive amount of branches that I'd hauled up to our burn area from a pile under two tall redwoods -- remnants of some tree work we'd had done after a destructive ice storm last February.

Here's Laurel tossing a branch onto the super-hot fire this afternoon.

It had bothered me to see the branches scattered under the redwoods.

So over the span of several days last summer, I filled up our nifty electric cart with supplies -- chain saw, gas, bar oil, water, safety gear -- and worked away at cutting up the largest branches into a size suitable to carry to the burn pile.

When most of the branches had been hauled away, I liked the way the ground under the redwoods looked.

The redwoods seemed happy also, though tree emotions can be hard to discern.

I had a relaxing 73rd birthday on Friday. Saturday was a day of labor. Laurel had been asking when I was going to get around to cutting up a bunch of wild plum trees that had collapsed in the ice storm. Some were still alive, but laying on the ground. 

They were on a trail just a few feet from our yard. So I spent three or four hours with my chainsaw cutting the base of each tree, then laboriously removing the branches that had gotten tangled up with other fallen trees and surrounding brush. I carried the trunks and branches to our lawn, then cut up the larger pieces so we could carry them to the burn pile.

Today was set everything on fire day. The Jefferson Fire District said it was OK to burn. The weather was dry and sunny. We were tired from the work we'd done the day before, but had enough energy for the burning.

I've written several other blog posts about the Joy of a Burn Pile: "Firing up a big burn pile reminds me: life is ablaze, yet ends in embers," and "A big burn pile reminds me why we're not in a retirement community." I find it really satisfying to see a lot of wood that we've carried to the burn pile go up in smoke.

However, this year smoke from the fire was pleasingly minimal. The branches that were under the redwoods were dry to start with, and they'd spent the summer under a tarp getting even drier. 

So we were able to get the fire going strong, then gradually add green branches from the wild plum trees I'd cut yesterday. I'd worried that the green wood wouldn't burn, but that worry faded as I saw that even green branches didn't stand a chance against the high heat of the fire.

We started burning at abut 1:15 pm. It only took us 90 minutes or so to get rid of the branches. Here's Laurel and Mooka, our dog, contemplating what we had wrought.

When all of the wood had been put on the burn pile, I enjoy pushing long unburnt pieces onto the hot coals, doing my best to avoid setting fire to myself. I wear leather gloves, though I took them off for this photo of Old Man and His Burn Pile.

The brown area in front of the fire used to be a pile of branches about five feet high.

A burn pile thus is akin to natural magic. You start with a huge pile of wood. You end up with a small amount of ashes. Plus heat and some smoke. By late afternoon the fire had shrunk even more, with all the wood, both dry and green, almost totally consumed.

Life is only predictable looking backward

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. Looking back, it was meant to be.

But almost certainly that's an illusion, because life only seems predictable after things already have happened. And even that is an illusion. 

To understand why, let's look more closely at how Laurel and I met.

The way I usually describe this is true, yet incomplete: I responded to a personals ad Laurel placed in Willamette Week back when the Portland alternative paper only came in a print edition.

In a 2016 post on my Church of the Churchless blog, "Who's afraid of The Big Bad Contingent World? Sartre, but not me!", I provided a wider perspective on how Laurel and I got together.

Here's a true tale about my life that does a pretty good job of illustrating the philosophical notion of "contingency." I related it in a comment on my 2006 post, "Breaking free of family influences." 

I graduated with a useless BA in psychology and was contemplating applying for an appropriately menial job. Then I overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria.

"Man, I can't do anything with a psych degree. And it takes at least three years to get a Ph.D." His friend replied, "You should get a M.S.W. It's just two years, and there are good jobs available after you graduate."

I had no idea what a M.S.W. was. I went to the library and looked it up. Everyone was talking about beautiful green Oregon, so I applied to the only school of social work in the state. Was admitted. Thirty-six years later, I'm still here.

A brief overheard conversation. My life heads off in a new direction. Go figure. I sure can't.

Seemingly, if I hadn't been in a certain spot in the San Jose State cafeteria at a specific time, in just the right location to overhear this conversation, I never would have applied to the Portland State University School of Social Work, never graduated with a M.S.W. and gotten a job at the Oregon Health Sciences University as a research associate, never moved to Salem to work for the State Health Planning and Development Agency, never met my second wife through her personals ad in Willamette Week, and, in general, never had the life I've lived here in Oregon since 1971.

That's contingency. Which is opposed to necessity.

Now, I realize that many people believe in fate or destiny. Others believe that God is pulling the strings of their life, and they're just a puppet in His/Her hands. 

I'm sympathetic to those views, since I used to believe in the Eastern notion of karma, which can be close to destiny if one assumes that a "karmic account" has to be brought into balance over various lifetimes through reincarnation.

But now I'm an atheist. I believe in science, not the supernatural.

So even though I believe in determinism -- causes and effects in accord with the laws of nature -- I also accept that these causes and effects are so complex, so contingent, so dependent on small changes in conditions, such as me arriving at the San Jose State College cafeteria just a few seconds earlier or later, there is no way to predict how life will go in advance.

Which doesn't stop us from thinking this is possible. 

Most people, me included, certainly, visualize a certain life trajectory for themselves. While the details are uncertain, we enjoy feeling that the broad outline of our future will unfold in a fairly specific fashion. I'll live here, either alone or with this person, doing this sort of thing, with my health and happiness being pretty much like such-and-such.

What I find amazing is that even though I know that by and large I've been unable to predict the course of my life in advance, I still believe that I can do this looking forward from right now.

Thus when things don't turn out as well as I expected, often I feel a sense of unfairness -- as if life had made a promise to me that was broken. But actually I was the one who had predicted the future, not life.

(Life isn't a being capable of making promises, obviously.)

This irrationality -- expecting the future to be much more predictable than it actually is -- applies to every area of life. Politics, for example. 

Today I watched Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. A central theme was President Biden's approval rating dropping considerably in August due to peoples' concerns about Covid and Afghanistan. 

Someone on the show said that back on July 4 Biden had said that Covid restrictions weren't needed any more. Now they are, and Biden is being blamed for this.

However, the rise of the Delta variant wasn't nearly as clear two months ago, nor was the refusal of a large percentage of Americans to get vaccinated, or how strongly many Republican governors would resist public health measures like wearing a mask.

Sure, in retrospect signs of all that were evident. At the time, though, the future looked quite different. 

Likewise, Biden is being criticized for how the pullout from Afghanistan was handled. Yet the pundits doing the criticizing on cable news hadn't predicted that the Afghan military and government would collapse in just eleven days or so, causing the withdrawal of our citizens and allies to be much more chaotic.

There's nothing wrong with looking back and trying to learn from history, whether it be the history of our single life or the history of an entire nation.

However, it's important to remember that history, and life, only makes sense after events already have happened. And decidedly imperfectly even then, because we necessarily have to pick and choose among a myriad of causes and conditions which are most pertinent to explaining how things ended up.

Bottom line: life largely is a mystery, whether looking backward or forward (but especially forward). So we should temper our expectations about how our life will go, since that's uncertain.

For this reason, being as appreciative and mindful as possible in the present moment strikes me as wise, since the next moment may be worse. Or better. Likely not exactly the same, though.

The curious case of MFS Total Return Fund (MSFRX) distribution history

I'm a long-time owner of the MFS Total Return fund. This is a well-respected mutual fund with a usual 60-40 split between stocks and bonds/cash. So the fund generates a fairly generous income stream.

Many years ago a personal holding company founded by my grandfather and uncle merged with the Total Return fund. The fund got a bunch of quality stocks, and the personal holding company received Total Return Fund shares equal in value to what the stocks were worth.

(The fund absorbed all of the capital gains from the stocks, a big benefit to the personal holding company.)

After my mother died in 1985, I inherited one-half of her Total Return Fund shares. My sister inherited the other half.

So I have a lengthy experience with the fund, which is appealingly conservative and dependable. That's why my uncle, a New England businessman, chose the Total Return Fund to merge the personal holding company with, part of the Boston-based Massachusetts Financial Services.

Thus it was surprising when I noticed recently that the monthly Total Return Fund dividend had dropped significantly on July 29, 2021 from what it had been for many years before. 

Sure, the amount of money my wife and I would get bounced around some as the distribution amount changed, but the changes were very gradual. In this case, though, what we got dropped 53% in a single month. Highly unusual. 

When I checked the Total Return Fund page on the MFS web site on September 1, the funds distribution history showed a .019 per share rate (rounded off) for both July and August, while the rate in June was .035. 

Curious about this disturbing change, I spent 20 minutes on hold until I was able to talk with a MFS customer service representative. She simply told me to talk with my financial advisor (MFS doesn't sell shares in its mutual funds directly to individuals). So I did that.

I emailed Steven, my advisor, two questions.

One was why the Total Return Fund had such a sudden large drop in its monthly distribution, and whether this drop was temporary or long-term. The other question was why, when I multiplied the distribution amount shown on the Total Return Fund web page by the number of shares we owned, the amount that appeared in our brokerage account was considerably less -- something I'd never checked on before.

Being a financial advisor, Steven was able to talk with someone at MFS. However, he didn't learn much. In a email from Steven, I was told:

The fellow I spoke with at MFS was unable to provide me with a cogent explanation as to why the dividend payout per share dropped almost in half in July 2021 and said it probably was due to a board decision that reset payouts on a new frequency, divs can be decided on a quarterly or yearly basis and the payments can be uneven month to month, etc.  This is not unusual since numerous factors constantly affect market prices and dividend payouts, some knowable in advance and some not.

OK. I figured that I'd just have to wait and see if the monthly dividend changed over the next few months. That left the question of why the amounts that showed up in our brokerage account were different from what I calculated we should be getting based on the figures on the Total Return Fund web page.

Today I learned what the problem was. Here's how I explained it in an email to Steven. But I still have no idea why the Total Return Fund monthly distribution has dropped so much. If anyone knows the reason, I sure would like to learn it. 

Steven, wanted to mention a curious finding. When I went back to look again at the MFS Total Return web page today, I noticed that the monthly distribution figures had changed from what I reported to you. They now show .014 for August and .030 for June. When I multiply those figures times our number of shares I get the exact dollar amount that went into our brokerage account. 

At first I thought I’d made an error in copying the numbers from the MFS web site. Then I remembered that I’d printed out the Total Return Fund distribution history. It turns out that as of September 1, the distribution history had a different set of figures than it did today, September 3. Since you’d talked with the MFS guy yesterday, all I can think of is that when you brought up the issue of us getting a different dividend amount per share than what was shown on the MFS web site, he checked the Total Return web page and found the error.

 

I agree with you that mutual fund companies don’t make mistakes in their distributions. But this episode shows, not surprisingly, really, that mutual fund web sites can contain erroneous information. Kind of amazing that apparently no one noticed this until now. My suspicions were aroused when I Googled “MSFRX distribution history” and found other financial web sites that had a different set of distribution figures than the MFS web site — which you’d think would have the best chance of being accurate, but in this case wasn’t.

 

Anyway, I now know that we’ve been getting the correct distribution amounts.