HinesSight

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.

My tip for starting a Stihl "easy start" chainsaw

I'm no chainsaw expert, but I've owned a small Stihl chainsaw for many years, needing it on our ten acre property in rural south Salem, Oregon. 

This year I got a larger Stihl chainsaw after a bad February ice storm decimated many trees. They were in short supply around here for a month or so, but I finally went into Ace Hardware and saw that chainsaws were available.

I ended up getting the MS 251C, an easy start Stihl model. I liked the idea of easy starting, along with being able to easily adjust the chain tension without a tool.

But when I took the chainsaw home, I had a tough time starting it. I did what the manual said, pressing the primer button a few times, gently pulling the cord a few times on full choke, then shifting the lever to a partial choke.

But when the chainsaw started and I'd blip the throttle to get the chainsaw into the "Run" mode, it would stop. Then it'd be even tougher to start, probably because the engine was flooded. I watched You Tube videos for tips, finding one that said to only press the primer button three times, a good suggestion.

(I was used to my Stihl backpack leaf blower, where a Stihl specialist at Ace Hardware told me I could press the primer button as many times as I wanted. But the leaf blower isn't an easy start model.)

Here's what finally worked for me: Once the chainsaw starts to run on the partial choke setting, I let it idle on that setting for about as long as it takes me to put on my leather gloves. Maybe a bit longer.

I realize that you're not supposed to let the chainsaw run at speed for very long with the chain brake on, but I don't blip the throttle. I just let the chainsaw run for fifteen seconds or so on the partial choke setting. Then when I release the chain brake and start using the chainsaw at full throttle, it doesn't stall on me like it used to.

Maybe this is just a quirk of my chainsaw. Or maybe I was doing something wrong with the starting procedure. It's just made a big difference to let the chainsaw idle for a while on the partial choke setting, a tip I felt was worth sharing.

Goodbye DR Field Mower, hello John Deere X394

It was a bittersweet moment when I sold the DR Field Mower with lawnmower attachment that I'd bought in 2016.


Over the past 25 years or so I've owned maybe five versions of the DR Field Mower, each better than the last. They've been put to a lot of work mowing grassy natural fields on our ten acres in rural south Salem, along with our lawn.

I've written about my field mowing experiences in a number of blog posts: here, here, here, here, here, here.

But as the saying goes, all good things come to an end. Hopefully so better things can replace them. But I can't be sure about that.

All I know is that it seemed like it was time to get a lawn tractor and electric lawnmower to replace what I've been able to do with the DR Field Mower with lawnmower attachment. 

At the age of 72, the joy of mowing our fields with a walk behind device was wearing a bit thin on me. And I realized that while I was still capable of handling the DR mower, I didn't feel comfortable with my wife using it.

So if I ever was incapable of mowing, we'd have to hire somebody to do it. 

After mulling over the pros and cons of getting a lawn tractor, one morning I woke up convinced that this was the right thing to do. That led me to drive to our local John Deere dealer, Papé Machinery here in Salem, Oregon.

And not only once -- three days in a row. That's how long it took for the salesperson I talked with, Ray Rodriquez, to steer me toward a lawn tractor that he felt comfortable selling to me and I felt comfortable buying. 

I'd taken photos of the fields I mow to show to Ray. Wise decision.

He told me that I wouldn't be happy with the lower end John Deere models they sell at Lowe's and Home Depot. Too flimsy for the terrain I was mowing on, filled with humps, bumps, gullies, and quite a few trees. His advice was to get a 300 series John Deere, or a higher numbered model.

I ended up buying the full-featured X394. ("X" means it is only sold by John Deere dealers; 394 shows it is the top model in the 300 series.) Four-wheel steering was the main feature that attracted me to the X394. You Tube videos showed how tightly this mower could cut around a tree or other obstacle.

When I told Ray that I was ready to order a X394, he told me that John Deere was showing a September 19 delivery date. Since this was mid-June, I was facing a three month wait. 

But a week ago I got a phone message that the lawn tractor had arrived over two months early. Apparently John Deere sometimes works in mysterious ways. 

I tried out the X394 yesterday. Here it is sitting in our cramped garage, with a utility cart behind it.

At first riding on the X394 felt decidedly weird, after so many years of using a walk-behind mower. For the first few minutes I worried about tipping over, even though the slopes were mild. But it didn't take long for me to feel comfortable with the lawn tractor.

I mowed our main fields in about an hour. Here's the results.

 

The maneuverability of the X394 with its four wheel steering is really impressive. I had to focus on the side discharge chute, making sure it didn't hit the trees I was mowing around. Other than that, though, my first mowing experience went really well.

So did my cleaning experience. It was easy to hook up a hose to the washer port, turn the water on, then activate the blades for a minute or so as debris was flushed out.

Naturally I hadn't read the manual before setting off on the X394. Ray did give me a walk-through and test drive on the lawn tractor the day before it was delivered to me. I wasn't aware that I could put the parking brake on and get off the seat while the mower was running.

When I jumped off to move a fallen limb, the mower would stop. Safety thing. Next time I'll know better.

Hey, Salemians, start a Salon discussion group

Do you enjoy intelligent talks with friends? Does embracing the art of conversation appeal to you?

If so, consider starting a Salon discussion group. 

That's what my wife, Laurel, and I did back in the early 1990s. Since, a group of about a dozen people has met each month in someone's home for three hours of so of pleasant conversing.

Here's a photo of us in December 2017. Our Salon membership has changed some in the past four years. But everybody in the photo is still part of our group, even though Jim (front row on left) has moved to Ashland.

Last night my wife and I attended a Salon meeting in the back yard of Russ and Delana Beaton, rocking red in the photo above. This was our first BBQ Salon.

Russ handled the turkey burgers. I cooked the veggie burgers, being careful to use the non-meaty spatula. Jim even came, having journeyed from Ashland to Portland and stopping by Salem on his way back.

There's lots of ways to organize a Salon group. The Utne Reader is how Laurel and I got the idea to start one in Salem. The 1991 article now is online. 

We've been meeting monthly for so long, I can't remember how we started off.

Doesn't matter. What matters is how we've ended up. I share our approach not because it's the best way to do a Salon. Everyone has to decide that for themselves. This just works well for our group.

Someone has to do the scheduling. Currently that's me.

I keep a list of which home we meet at each month. Pre-Covid, I tried to rotate meeting places in a fairly regular fashion. We're about to start meeting indoors again, but have been using Zoom and outdoor meetings since March 2020.

Most people bring a snack or wine/beer to share. Food and drink isn't a big part of the meeting, the conversation is. But it's nice to have some sustenance in the early evening or late afternoon, our meeting time.

Causal conversation occupies us at first. Then after 15-20 minutes or so we assemble as a group. Mostly we just let the conversation flow freely. No preassigned topics. No rules. Just people talking about whatever, shifting from subject to subject spontaneously.

Sometimes the host starts us off with a particular subject. Other times someone just begins speaking about something that interests them. Like I said, no rules.

We all lean liberal. Politics usually comes up.

So do a bunch of other topics, including what's going on with our personal lives. There's a natural ebb and flow to our conversation, undoubtedly aided by how long most of us have been doing this Salon thing together. 

Sometimes I'll throw out an idea that I find amazingly interesting, because I'm me, and it will hit a conversational wall. After a bit of silence, someone else will start talking about a subject that elicits more interest.

It's like talking natural selection. Some ideas are embraced by the group and thrive for a while; others die a quick death. 

Often we disagree.

That makes for a more interesting conversation. We never attack each other personally, just the idea someone is expressing. Given the polarization of our country, I think it's wise to have a Salon group where the members mostly are of the same general political persuasion.

I'm not saying that avid conservatives and avid liberals couldn't have a good conversation. I simply doubt that the resulting arguments would make for a good regular Salon experience. Ditto for avowed atheists mixing with fervent evangelicals.

We're a liberal non-religious group. Works for us. Another group might be able to pull off a more diverse membership.

Currently there's 13 regular members, with Jim attending occasionally. Usually a few people can't make the monthly meeting.

Nine to twelve people is a good number for a discussion group. Any more, and the conversing becomes rather difficult, with the less talkative people finding it difficult to get a word in.

Yellow jackets and forecasts say weekend will be HOT

Before sharing how damn HOT several weather forecasts are saying the coming weekend in Salem will be, this sign my wife put up yesterday speaks to how yellow jackets are viewing our highly unusual weather.

We're used to yellow jackets causing problems on our rural property during the summer. But we rarely, if ever, see them acting aggressively before late July or August.

That's when I wrote "Killing yellow jackets in their hidey-holes," my detailed description of how Laurel and I normally deal with yellow jackets.

Yet here we are in late June with Laurel getting stung as she walked to our front door, spurring her to warn delivery people to leave packages in our carport until we deal with the yellow jacket nest.

Global warming is very real.

Yellow jackets getting irritable a month earlier than usual is just one of a great many signs that temperatures are steadily rising, with extreme weather events like heat waves becoming increasingly common.

Like what Salem and the rest of the Pacific Northwest have to endure this coming weekend, and the beginning of next week. Forecasts differ about how hot it will be, but the consensus is HOT. 

Here's what the National Weather Service forecasts for our location: 102 on Saturday, 107 on Sunday,  100 on Monday.

The Weather Channel app has an even scarier forecast: 105 on Saturday, 115 on Sunday, 99 on Monday. That's insane! Yet possible. 

And here's what my AccuWeather app is showing: 104 on Saturday, 113 on Sunday, 101 on Monday.

AccuWeather says the record high for Salem on those days is: Saturday 103 (set in 2006), Sunday 99 (set in 2000), Monday 101 (set in 2008). So we could have record-setting heat on all three days, and almost certainly on Sunday.

Last year was a really bad fire season in Oregon. With all of the state experiencing drought conditions, this heat wave, and possible thunderstorms in central and eastern Oregon, threatens to make 2021 an even worse wildfire year.

Keep this in mind if someone tells you not to worry about global warming. But in one sense they're correct. We shouldn't worry about global warming; we should be terrified of it. 

And demanding that our elected officials at the local, state, and federal level act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible before our planet heats up so much as to be barely habitable for humans.

Is 94 degrees hot? Ask your inner child.

I just got back from a 2-mile hilly walk around a road loop in our rural south Salem neighborhood. The thermometer tells me it's about 94 degrees. 

But it can't tell me if that's hot. 

Hot is subjective. Temperature is objective.

The difference explains why I'm often asked by a Starbucks employee, when the temperature gets over 80 in our part of Oregon, if I want my grande decaf nonfat vanilla latte iced or hot.

I try not to sound too heat-superior when I reply, "Why, hot of course. I don't believe in drinking an iced coffee no matter what the temperature is."

Sometimes I add, "I grew up in a California town where it often was over 100 degrees in the summer, so the temperature here in the Willamette Valley doesn't bother me much."

Now, that town was Three Rivers.

It lived up to its name with three forks of the Kaweah River running through different parts of Three Rivers. So along with the summer heat came summer swimming -- a nice blend of temperature yin and yang.

I'm not sure whether my current tolerance for 90+ degree days stems more from psychological or physical factors. Maybe both. 

Regardless, my theory -- which I readily admit may have no scientific foundation -- is that whatever climate we grew used to as a child leads us to be more comfortable with that sort of climate as an adult.

So when I went for that two-mile walk today, 72 year old me in Oregon was reliving part of the experience of 12 year old me in California.

Feeling the hot air rising from the road and adjacent fields, I certainly was reminded of similar sensations when I walked or biked around Three Rivers. It felt natural to be walking along on a hot asphalt road, like I'd done this many times before.

Which, of course, I did in my youthful years.

It also isn't out of the realm of possibility that thanks to evolution, stresses in the early years of our life -- extreme cold or heat, for example -- cause our body to become adapted to those circumstances, making it easier for us to deal with similar situations in our adult life.

That said, it looks like we've got another string of 90 degree days coming after a respite in the 80s tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday.

My inner child may be fine with that, but my old man self wishes it wasn't going to be so damn hot.

Happiness in this dry spring is 2.6 inches in our rain gauge

This is what happiness looks like when, as my wife and I do, you live in a groundwater limited area in the south Salem hills and this has been the driest spring ever in our part of Oregon.

I turned off our sprinkler system last week when substantial rain finally was forecasted. Then I dumped out the small amount of water in the rain gauge. 

So we got about 2.6 inches of rain during the recent wet weather period. That's more than I expected, thanks in part to some intense showers that passed over us periodically.

The past three years have been drier than normal, if I recall correctly what the KGW News weather guys have been saying.

That's added to my anxiety about this year's very dry spring.

We rely on our two wells for water (one is used for the sprinkler system; the other supplies house water). So do all of our neighbors, since our neighborhood is rural.

Thus dry weather means something different to us than it does to people who live in a town or city with piped-in water.

I guess rural residents are sort of like the Pacific islanders whose homes are threatened by rising ocean levels. Global warming has more immediate impacts on us than on city dwellers. 

Dry weather leads to worries about running out of water, whereas this is much less likely in a city like Salem -- where there are multiple options for keeping water flowing to its residents. 

I'm not saying that city folks don't care about global warming. Naturally they do. Rural and urban people just experience the current drought conditions in most of the western United States differently.

Which makes it kind of strange that rural residents, who are considerably more conservative than urban residents, tend to downplay the seriousness of global warming, even though they're more likely to suffer from devastating wildfires, dried-up wells, and other manifestations of steadily rising greenhouse gases.

We have a mixture of native and non-native plantings in our yard.

I like the Oregon Grape that was growing under two large fir trees when we moved to our house in 1990. Since, I've planted more Oregon Grape in that area, which doesn't get watered by our sprinklers.

The several inches of rain we got is good news for the plants in our yard. However, hot weather is coming in a couple of days. 

I'm hoping that our wells make it through summer. And that the next water year, which begins October 1, will be considerably wetter than normal. That's needed to make up for the recent dry years.

The Willamette Valley isn't in as bad a drought as California and the southwest are enduring. I'm thankful for that. Having lived in Oregon for 48 years, it just feels strange to be worrying about a lack of rain, since usually Oregonians complain about too much rain.

How to get voice recognition working on LG TV

I'm enjoying our new LG television, which we got about two weeks ago. So far there's only been one glitch, and one annoyance.

The glitch was the voice recognition button on the remote for our OLED55C1PUB model stopping working, after it functioned fine initially. 

I kept getting the error message, "A temporary issue has occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please try again later. (200)" But after later arrived, the voice recognition button still didn't work. 

A phone call to LG customer support led to a solution, though it took quite a while (three transfers) before I finally was able to talk to someone who deals with LG televisions. Not exactly the greatest support phone system.

After initially being told that it might be necessary to reset the remote, something I didn't want to do because it was difficult to pair the remote with our DirecTV system, I was given an easier procedure.

(1) Unplug the TV.
(2) Press the power button on the lower front center of the TV for 5 seconds.
(3) Plug in the TV.

Gee, I wonder why I couldn't think of that. So obvious... (not!)

That did the trick. Since, voice recognition has worked fine. 

By the way, it helps the customer support person if you have the correct model number for your TV The receipt we got from Video Only made a "1" look a lot like an "I," so I kept saying OLED55CI (as in eye) instead of OLED55C1 (as in one).

Unable to find our model, the support person eventually told me to press the mute button three times, which brings up a screen that has the model number and other useful info about the TV. Again, who knew?

The annoyance is how ads periodically appear on our LG TV. Not ads from a sponsor of a television program. Ads coming from businesses that must pay LG for the right to annoy people who just paid $1,500 for a new TV and now are forced to endure ads.

I poked around in Settings for a while tonight and may have found a way to turn off ads. I'll update this post if that approach worked. If it doesn't, I'll phone LG support and complain about ads appearing on our TV.

Californians are one reason Oregon lumber costs so much

Having moved to Oregon from California 48 years ago, the statute of limitations, non-native variety, seems to have absolved me of criticism for where I came from before living in what obviously is the best state in the nation.

So now when I hear that those damn Californians are to blame for some Oregon problem, I feel totally comfortable chiming in with criticism of those misguided neighbors to our south.

Today Laurel, my wife, and I headed off to Parr Lumber in Salem to check out samples of composite decking from Trex and TimberTech. 

Our large cedar deck needs work, which all wood decks do. As someone knowledgeable about decks recently told me, "Wood decks look great after you stain them. For about six months." 

Having stained our deck every few years since we bought our house in 1990, I agree with that sentiment.

The last time I stained it was in the fall of 2017, and it definitely is looking poorly. That's one reason Laurel and I are looking into the cost of replacing the deck with composite boards and metal/wire railings.

While Laurel was comparing color samples of composite decking material, I talked with a Parr Lumber guy about various subjects, including why the cost of lumber has increased so much. 

I told him that I was clueless about this happening, not having needed to buy any boards or plywood for quite a while, until I started seeing Facebook posts similar to this:

The one I remember showed a stack of plywood and said, "Just found a dozen sheets of plywood in my garage. Willing to trade for a 2020 Ford F-150 pickup."

I thought that was kind of a stupid joke until a friend said that they'd bought a few boards to make some steps for their yard, and it cost them $70.

Anyway, the Parr Lumber guy had a few interesting observations.

He said that California builders are driving to Oregon and bidding up the price of lumber here, then taking their priceless (almost) cargo down south where million dollar homes are in the moderate price range.

A bit of Googling I did couldn't confirm this, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.

The guy added that whereas local mills used to supply most of the lumber sold in Oregon, now it's more difficult to buy from them, since so much of their product is going out of state to people willing to pay a high price.

I said that the Trex web site says composite deck boards cost more than wood boards, but have various advantages over wood. I asked if this was still true, or if wood was more expensive than composite.

He gave me a Parr Lumber Decking Price sheet.

It shows 1 x 6 cedar decking at $4.43 per foot. The top of the line Trex Transcend 1 x 6 composite decking is $4.29 per foot. So it does appear that wood and composite are now roughly equal in cost.

Our new LG TV has artificial intelligence. But I hold the remote.

Jim Ramsey, a long-time friend, deserves a commission from Salem's Video Only store. 

When I told Jim that I'd just bought the newly released Apple TV device that streams Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a whole lot more in 4K, he said, "But now you need a 4K television."

Well, damn. I hadn't thought of that. 

We had a Samsung television that was working fine, though it had started to seem a bit dated. But until we ditched our crappy CenturyLink DSL, the only so-called "broadband" option out here in rural south Salem, for the hugely faster Starlink satellite internet (thank you, Elon Musk!), we didn't have the internet speed to make 4K streaming an option for us.

So with a Memorial Day sale in progress at Video Only, off my wife and I went yesterday to check out what TVs can do in 2021.

I was clutching a printout from Consumer Reports of the top-rated 55 inch televisions that had an LG model rated #2, just one point behind a more expensive Sony model. 

Pleasingly, the guy we talked to at Video Only -- Lucas Weimer, the Sales Manager -- told us he owned that LG television and liked it a lot.

Even better, he said that the Consumer Reports ratings were from 2020 and the 2021 LG televisions are even better. Plus, if we weren't going to mount it on a wall, we could save several hundred dollars by getting the tabletop model.

It didn't take much for Weimer to sell us on the LG OLED55CIP. It was $1,500, three hundred less than the LG list price and the Amazon price. I liked Weimer's casual, competent, low-key approach to making the sale. 

Of course, we basically were sold on this television once we saw the excellent OLED picture and heard its impressive sound. 

It fit nicely into my Subaru Crosstrek. Once the LG was set up at our home, it was time to put it through its paces. At my age (72), I remember well how simple televisions were for most of my TV-watching life. Which, basically, is my entire life.

You turned it on. You turned it off. You changed the channel. You changed the sound. That was about it.

Oh, except when I was young, growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where the only channels came over the air from Fresno or Bakersfield, fuzzily, to change the channel I'd have to climb a ladder and get on our roof to turn the antenna this way and that while my mother yelled through an open window, "looking better, no; go back, that's worse; OK, guess that's the best picture."

So back then my mother served as the human intelligence which led to our black and white TV being (barely) watchable.

Now, our new LG is brimming with artificial intelligence, based on a description of our model on the LG web site and my initial forays into the guide to features that I've been making my way through using the remote control.

For example:

Ooh! Deep-learning algorithms. Now we're talking! 

But I want more than just an artificial intelligence (AI) that automatically adjusts the picture and sound. How about a television that knows me so well, it automatically presents me with what I'll enjoy watching most when I turn it on. 

Such a TV is coming. I just probably won't live to see it. 

Though I've only had a day so far to learn what our new LG television is capable of, it seems clear that increasingly, the line between smart phones, computers, and televisions is blurring. 

Eventually the only difference between them may be the size of the screen. Otherwise, televisions will be as connected to the internet as smart phones and computers, while those devices will have the same entertainment capabilities as televisions.

Regarding the OLED thing, I didn't really know what it was yesterday when we bought the television. I just knew that Consumer Reports had said it was a desirable improvement over LED technology, so I wanted it.

Turns out, from an informative CNET article, that back in late 2019 at least, LG was the only television manufacturer making OLED screens, which stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. 

The LG web site talks trash about those archaic LEDs.

The CNET article says that "infinite contrast" may seem like an overstatement, but actually it isn't.

OLED TV marketing often claims "infinite" contrast ratios, and while that might sound like typical hyperbole, it's one of the extremely rare instances where such claims are actually true. Since OLED can produce a perfect black, emitting no light whatsoever, its contrast ratio (expressed as the brightest white divided by the darkest black) is technically infinite. And contrast ratio is arguably the most important aspect of picture quality.

 

DirecTV wireless setup on Genie DVR overly confusing

It's been a while since I've bashed AT&T's DirecTV.

This doesn't mean that I like the crappy satellite television service any more than I did before, just that nothing additional that I detest about DirecTV has come to mind.

My previous frustrations still hold true. Local channels disappear regularly. The user interface sucks. DirecTV still doesn't carry the PAC-12 Networks. 

Today I was able to add a fresh irritation: how astoundingly difficult it was to get back the internet connection on our Genie HR44 receiver. 

I don't even know why we need an internet connection, since so far as I can tell, we've never used it. But it bugged me to see oft-repeated error messages pop up about the lack of an internet connection.

About three months ago we ditched our horribly slow CenturyLink DSL for much faster Starlink satellite broadband. (I'm a Starlink beta tester.) So that explains why our DirecTV receiver didn't have an internet connection.

I figured it would be simple to click on Menu, then Settings. And it was.

What happened after that was the frustrating part. No matter whether I clicked on a Reconnect option, or on the Internet Setup option, I couldn't find how to select our new Starlink wi-fi. 

Well, I did see it once as I went around and around the confusing menu options, but couldn't locate it again.

DirecTV kept checking for an internet connection, not surprisingly couldn't find one, and then told me to check with my internet provider about the lack of a connection.

I kept thinking, "It shouldn't be anywhere near this damn difficult." After all, I'm knowledgeable about setting up wi-fi networks. I have no problem getting my computer, iPhone, and iPad on Starlink. 

But DirecTV had a deeply unintuitive approach to reconnecting to the internet.

Which fits with the poorly designed menu system our receiver has generally, something I wrote about in "July 2018 DirecTV update changes user interface from bad to horrible."

Eventually I gave up and decided to call DirecTV support. That also turned out to be much more difficult than it should have been.

A support phone number isn't easy to find on the DirecTV web site. Eventually I found a number to call. That turned out to be a general AT&T support number.

I could barely understand the first person who answered my call. Eventually I conveyed that I had a DirecTV internet problem, not a different kind of AT&T problem. That led me to being transferred to someone else who still wasn't a DirecTV support person.

After being transferred a second time, I finally got someone who handled DirecTV internet problems. This time I ended up on a screen that showed an Ethernet connection, which I'd remembered encountering before. 

The person I was talking with said, "Yes, you should be using an Ethernet cable." I told him that we'd never used one before. Then I noticed the option to set up a wireless connection, which I'd been looking for all that time.

After that, it didn't take long to get Starlink set up to be the wi-fi network for DirecTV. As I was doing this, I had to listen to the support person tell me some "great news." 

That turned out to be an offer for AT&T to become the entity that takes care of all our computers, laptops, tablets, and such for an extra $12 or so a month. It took me a nanosecond to say, "No thanks."

The last thing I want is to have anything more to do with AT&T, since they've botched their ownership of DirecTV.

Memo to future self: Why our ten acres captures me

I'm 72. For thirty-one years, since 1990, my wife and I have lived on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon.

Well, for the first few years we had five acres.

But when the lot next to us became available, we bought it -- not wanting to run the risk of someone cutting down beautiful large firs and building a house there.

I've been the one in our marriage who has been more eager to move to a house in town as we've gotten older and our property feels increasingly like a pain to maintain.

However... that one word says a lot. Because we're still here. For some good reasons.

Ten days ago I had hernia surgery.

Not being able to do most of my usual exercises and chores for a while, I've been going on an extra one mile nature walk in the early afternoon to supplement my usual two-mile hilly dog walk on a road in the late afternoon. 

Being mildly depressed at the restrictions on what I used to be able to do during the six week surgery recovery period, I was pleasantly surprised at how much better I felt walking on our ten acres.

Nature is a great healer. 

And I feel deeply fortunate to have such beautiful natural surroundings right outside our front door. My post-surgery walking through our property to Spring Lake, a nearby nine-acre community lake, has, at least for now, changed my attitude about wanting to move.

In case staying here at our age, and older (sadly, we won't be getting younger), ever comes to feel like a bad decision to my future self, I took some photos today of how my daily nature walk looks.

Here they are, along with some narration.

My walk starts from our back yard. This old oak, probably well over 200 years old, lost two large limbs in a February ice storm this year. But it's still alive and growing. The oak is a good friend who I'd miss a lot if we ever move.

This path leads to our "other" lot, also known as the Rose lot, because way back when, Mrs. Rose owned it before she sold it to us. 

There's a mix of large firs and medium-sized oaks on the Rose lot. We've left it almost entirely natural, so it has a different feel from the lot our house is on, which gets mowed in places.

In warm sunny weather, like today, these trees feel all friendly. In cold dark winter weather, they can feel quite creepy. I like both sorts of feelings.

Trees have so much character. They all have their own personality. As with the oak in our yard, it's easy for me to feel like they're my friends -- albeit occasionally creepy friends.

The Rose lot trail curves around until it reaches our house lot near Spring Creek. We planted these redwoods maybe five years after we moved here. I look forward to seeing them grow even taller.

Looking up toward our house with some mowed areas. 

The trail heads down a slope toward Spring Creek. Laurel, my wife, has put in stepping stones for when the trail is wet and slippery. 

There's a little creek somewhere under all the ferns and other vegetation. It runs strong in the winter. Now, it's just a trickle, given how record-breaking dry spring has been in northwest Oregon.

We planted redwoods on the other side of the creek also. 

The trail on our property leads to one of the community trails on easements that are on most of the lots here in Spring Lake Estates. This is called the Evergreen trail, for an obvious reason.

Gnarly bent old trees appeal more and more to me as I become increasingly gnarly, bent, and old. This giant fir on our property close to the easement never fails to awe me. 

The variety of greens on the Evergreen trail are spectacular. Deciduous vegetation blends with evergreen vegetation in a multitude of ways.

Approaching the lake, the trail passes between some trees that feel like sentinels to me.

Spring Lake appears after the trail wends its way out of the woods. There's something calming about a calm lake, not surprisingly.

Someone planted irises near the edge of the trail that circles Spring Lake.

The lake looks different every time I walk around it. Also, the same.

A gnarly old damaged oak that's still oak'ing along. Naturally, I love it.

Water lilies, like lotuses, have that rooted in mud with flowers in the sun vibe. One of the more philosophical flowers.

I like to see young people fooling around on the dock, having a good time. Wholesome fun, to complement their unwholesome fun at other times and places.

I grew up in Three Rivers, California, which featured the Kaweah River running through it, fed by cold snow melt from the Sierra Nevadas near Sequoia National Park. So playing around in water was a big part of my youth. It's nice to see young'uns doing the same thing.

Walking around the lake back to the Evergreen Trail reveals a different perspective on Spring Lake. I believe the  bright dot in the boat is an inflatable pink flamingo, but maybe this was just a flashback from my LSD days in college.

There's a large collection of wild rose on our house lot. 

Speaking of our house, as I neared our home Laurel was working on the second row of three wood racks we got to hold a copious amount of oak logs that were split for us by workers who cleaned up tree damage near our house from the ice storm.

We also presciently had a large oak cut down in the dog yard behind Laurel, as it had branches overhanging our roof and side deck. There's a good chance some or all of it would have fallen on our house during the ice storm, so we felt good cutting it down, though it always hurts some to kill a tree.

Anyway, this was my walk today. Which will be my walk tomorrow, and the day after. The older I get, the more I appreciate the nature that surrounds us.

And by us, I don't mean just me and my wife. I mean everybody. We're just fortunate to be surrounded by more of nature than most people have nearby. 

That's a big reason -- really the only reason -- why I won't be surprised if Laurel and I are still living here when we're much older than we are now. I used to wonder why old folks were so reluctant to leave their difficult-to-maintain homes.

The walk I went on today offers up a big reason why.

My robotic hernia surgery goes well. Behold one incision.

At the age of 72, I'm no longer an adult surgery virgin. 

Up until today my only surgery was a tonsillectomy that was so long ago, I had to say "I don't know" when asked about the date of previous surgeries. Probably I was four or five.

All I remember about it was ether being poured on some sort of cloth, then put over my nose and mouth. 

But now I have a blog! (three, in fact) So I can go beyond the usual verbal "let me tell you about my surgery" -- a sure-fire conversation stopper, especially if an old guy is talking to a younger person.

I can write about my surgery. And share a photo of one of my three laparoscopic incisions. 

Not too gross, right? And by viewing it in a blog post, you're saved from me pulling up my shirt and making you look at it in person.

I'm a bit leery of being too enthusiastic about how little pain I feel about seven hours after the operation, since the anesthesiologist told me he puts some painkillers in the anesthetic "cocktail."

But so far I haven't even felt the need to take a Tylenol, much less one of the Hydrocod-Acetamin pills I was prescribed on an "as needed" basis.

The right side of my abdomen is sore -- which isn't surprising, since my large inguinal (groin) hernia was on that side.

My Salem Health surgeon, Dr. Hsinchen Lin, used robots to aid in the laparoscopic procedure. I've read that robot-assisted surgery has some advantages over plain old laparoscopy. Hopefully one of those benefits is less post-surgery pain.

The most stressful part of the surgery was waiting for it to start. 

My wife and I arrived right on time for the 11:30 am check-in at Salem Hospital. And it didn't take long for me to be ushered into the surgery prep room, where I got to put on the charming backless gown, get my vital signs checked, have an IV started, and chat with several friendly nurses.

Since my surgery was scheduled for 1:30 pm, I optimistically thought that I'd be home before too long.

That happy thought lasted until around 1:45 pm, when I was told that due to the previous surgery taking longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for another hour. This was the toughest part, since I already was getting tired of the decidedly non-ergonomic hospital bed I was on.

Way too soft. No back support. My sciatica-prone right leg wasn't having a good time. 

What saved me was a nurse disconnecting the IV tube in my left arm so I could use the restroom conveniently located right next door to the room I was in.

That solved a couple of problems.

I got out of the damn hospital bed and could stretch my legs. And since I have to use an intermittent catheter to pee, my bladder having gone on strike four years ago, I didn't need to worry about going through a semi-lengthy urinating process right after the surgery.

And the nurse told me that surgeons want the bladder as empty as possible prior to surgery, given the  proximity of the bladder to the hernia location.

(The anesthesiologist had pointed out what I already suspected. Just as when you go to sleep, the body's peeing and pooping functions are basically put on hold during anesthesia.)

Anyway, it feels good to have the surgery done with. It'll take six weeks to get back to 80% normalcy, Dr. Lin said.

But I'll be able to lift no more than 10 pounds between now and then, so light exercising will be possible, along with my usual two-mile hilly dog walk in the late afternoon after a few days of shorter walks.

I really appreciated how smoothly the Salem Hospital surgery process went, leaving aside the unavoidable delay in my surgery time. The nurses made me feel well-cared for. My wife and I had a very enjoyable conversation with the first RN who looked after me.

Having a surgery is stressful. Being able to chat about subjects totally unrelated to what I was about to go through helped a lot to keep my mind from obsessing about what was to come. 

Time will tell if I continue to have minimal post-surgery pain.

Regardless, I'm happy that things went as well as they did. Dr. Lin had said that I might need four incisions, given how large my hernia was, so I feel fortunate that I ended up with three, her original prognosis.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention a tip that might benefit others who need hernia surgery. About ten days before my surgery I had a rare bout of constipation, perhaps caused by stress, but maybe not. I'm a vegetarian, so constipation hasn't been a problem for me.

At any rate, I found that MiraLax, a mild stool softener, ended up working best for me. It takes several days to work, so I was glad that I'd started taking it before the surgery. Straining to have a bowel movement is a post-hernia surgery no-no, which is why a stool softener was included in my discharge instructions. (Heavy duty pain medications cause constipation.)

But since they take a while to do their thing -- softening the stool -- to me it makes sense for someone scheduled for a hernia surgery to start taking MiraLax prior to the surgery. It comes in powder form that's dissolved in liquid, so less than the recommended amount can be taken.

Yesterday I was told that if I use the Hydrocodone I was prescribed, I should increase the amount of MiraLax I'd been taking. But since I don't need that pain reliever, I'm sticking with the usual MiraLax dosage.

My office looks more Zen after painting forced it on me

I wish I could say that my many years of daily meditation led to an enlightenment experience that caused me to drastically simplify the office where I hang out in our house.

(By "hang out,"  I mean that this is the one room where I get to decide how it is furnished and decorated. Elsewhere, my wife calls the decor shots, mostly because she is better at this than I am.)

However, what actually happened is that last week we had three rooms painted by Apex Paint and Remodel, who did a great job. 

One of those rooms was my office.

It had wallpaper dating from when we moved in some 30 years ago. For some reason we decided to replace kid-room wallpaper with adult-room wallpaper, rather than having my office painted, which in retrospect would have made more sense.

Anyway, I had to get everything out of my office -- kind of a strange term for a retired guy's room where he doesn't even keep his computer -- before the wallpaper removal and painting could begin.

Believe me, there was a lot of stuff to move. Including a lot of books.

Laurel, my wife, tells me that I love clutter. Actually that isn't true. It's more that I'm comfortable with clutter. I'll blame it on my mother, which is easier than blaming it on myself.

My divorced mother was even more of a bookaholic than I am. (She also was an alcoholic, but that's another story.) Piles of books were all over the house I grew up in.

Me, I just had piles of books in my office. The rest were in bookcases.

I was able to start moving stuff back into the office while the Apex Paint and Remodel guys were finishing up the other two rooms. On Friday I asked one of the crew to take a look at the office.

"Thanks for giving me this opportunity to start fresh," I told him. "I'm taking a Marie Kondo approach, only bringing things back to this room that give me joy, that make me feel happy. If you'd seen what it looked like before, you'd know what a big change has been made here."

Philosophically speaking, which is how I frequently like to talk, this empty room experience points to the benefit of emptying out now-and-then, whether this be a physical or mental turn toward an embrace of a form of nothingness.

When we start with a blankness, it's necessary to decide what it really needs to be filled with, and what is extraneous. With my office, I was able to choose between truly satisfying items and what had crept into the room through an unthinking "might as well put that here."

Here's photos of the result, taken today after pictures had been added back to the walls.

Most of our house has natural wood walls and ceilings. I like the wood, but having off-white paint in my office rather than wallpaper markedly changed the look and feel of the room, brightening it considerably, not surprisingly.

The panther had to stay. I sit in the chair during my morning reading/meditating time. The red fan is part of my collection of Tai Chi fans. I don't know how to use them very well, but I enjoy the resounding "clack" they make when opened and closed with a flick of the body.

The Apex guy I showed my office to also was a long-time martial artist. He admired the Japanese katana swords, so I explained how the one on top in the wooden scabbard was made by a skilled fellow student.

It took me quite a while to rearrange the books, which are my core "meaning of life" collection.

I gave Taoism the top left honor, with Buddhism taking the top right shelf. Lower down is philosophy and a variety of mystical/meditation books, including what remains of my Rumi books, which used to number in the dozens.

Atheism occupies another shelf, with neuroscience on the adjoining shelf.  I humbly (yeah, right) put books I've written on the bottom shelf along with mindfulness books and more neuroscience titles.

To astound my wife, I left the bottom left shelf empty so my balance board could fit in there rather than leaning against the filing cabinet, where it had resided for several years.

I really like the view out of the window, especially when the Japanese Maple has leaves, as it does now. 

I got this photograph at the Salem Art Fair from someone who took it in China. The artist told me that he encountered this man on a mountain that had a Taoist monastery, I think it was, at the top. I love the image of a old Chinese guy pleasantly walking along a decidedly scary path. 

Beautiful reflection of how life should be lived. On the edge; hanging on to necessary support; smiling at the abyss that awaits us all at some point. 

I vacillated on putting my black belt certificate back on a wall. Eventually I decided that since it means a lot to me, and I like the design of it (which generally doesn't include a reflection of me taking a photo of it),  I should put the certificate up.

The style was a mixed form of karate of the Korean variety. My instructor was eclectic, having trained in numerous martial art styles, but his focus was on the Chun Kuk Do Korean-based, American hybrid style founded by Chuck Norris.

It feels good to inhabit an office cleared of clutter. My wife probably is wondering how long this will last. Well, I'm wondering also. I've already fought some temptations to put back some extraneous stuff.

So far I've won that fight. Time will tell if that continues.

Blog blast from the 2005 Statesman Journal past

Tonight Laurel, my wife, found a clipping from the August 12, 2005 Statesman Journal. Wow, there I was in the "Got Blogs?" story by Angela Yeager, looking 16 years younger than I do now.

Naturally my first thought was, I've got to write a blog post about how blogs were looked upon back in 2005. 

Yeager did an excellent job at capturing the excitement of the Dawn of Blogging. Below you can read her entire story, which I was pleased to capture with my halfway decent touch typing skill.

My second thought was, I wonder if Google still looks kindly on my blog post about washing lettuce that Yeager mentioned in the story. Sadly, that post has disappeared from a "wash lettuce" search. At least, I gave up looking for it after going through 10 Google search pages.

But the post lives on in all its 2004 glory. So you can still check out "American Splendor/I learn to wash lettuce." Hey, that post has faded from Internet fame, but I bet it still is the only blog post about washing lettuce to mention comic book artist Robert Crumb.

Regarding the other bloggers mentioned in this piece, www.williambragg.com still exists. Way to go, William! Hopefully college student at the time Stacy Austin is still blogging, but I have no way of knowing for sure.

Here's the Statesman Journal story.

Brian Hines has written and published several books during the past 15 years, but felt his work was disappearing into a black hole.

The Salem resident has found another way to reach a much wider audience with his words -- through his two Internet blogs, HinesSight and Church of the Churchless. 

Blogs, or web logs, started in the early 1990s as an offshoot of Web sites. Most were just personal diaries where bloggers could post their intimate thoughts and feelings.

But as Internet popularity rises, so has the use of blogs to do everything from covering political events to posting favorite recipes. The uses are endless, and the popularity of blogs is skyrocketing.

How many people are blogging is a question of debate. A site such as Technorati, a service that tracks blogging topics and trends, estimates that there are 12 million blogs worldwide, up from 100,000 in 2003.

BlogHerald, another blogging tracking site and news service, estimates there are 60 million bloggers.

Hines, 56, said his blog grew out of his growing frustration with the publishing world. He moved to Salem with his wife, Laurel, and the couple reside in a 10-acre country setting south of Salem with their dog, Serena.

His books, including a 2004 meditation on the Greek philosopher Plotinus, seemed to disappear as soon as they hit the shelves.

"The silence is deafening," Hines said over an ice tea at his home.

"With blogs, you write something that takes maybe a day and then it's gone. It belongs to others then. And unlike a novel, within minutes you have instant feedback. You realize you've touched someone."

Hines estimates he gets about 1,000 page views per day on his HinesSight blog, which is daily reflections from his life on "HinesLand," his nickname for his home.

HinesSight is where readers can go to find Hines writing about everything from the best way to get rid of yellow jackets, to the dog parade in downtown Salem, to arguments with Laurel on the proper methods of washing lettuce.

One of the big draws of blogs over a regular web site is that blogs register much higher on search engines such as Google.

For instance, type in "wash lettuce" on Google, and the second highest hit is Hines' blog on his lettuce washing debate with Laurel.

Hines' other blog, Church of the Churchless, takes on more serious subjects such as spirituality, meditation and faith, and only gets several hundred page views a day.

For a writer such as Hines, blogs are heaven sent.

"The frustration of writing books is you spend so long on one piece of work, and then you have to depend on someone else like a publisher to get it out there," he said.

"With a blog, for free or for $100 a year, you've got the whole world at your fingertips."

Citizen journalism
Frustrated writers aren't the only people who use blogs though. Bloggers were at both the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions last year, writing every detail of the political parade on their blogs. This kind of citizen journalism is rising quickly -- resulting in conservative blogs, liberal blogs, blogs for anarchists, Libertarians, Greens and everyone in between.

A search on Orblogs.com, a site where Oregon-based bloggers can register, turns up hundreds of entries. Amateur film critics post their reviews of movies they've seen, music lovers list favorite songs to download or albums to check out and members of the Pacific Northwest Fiber Bloggers post pictures and tips on their latest knitting projects.

If you have an interest or political view, you are guaranteed to find a blog somewhere by someone who shares your view.

Then there are people such as Salem resident William Bragg. A traveler sho works for Willamette Academy, Bragg, 37, and his wife Jeani Bragg, moved to Salem in 1999 so she could take a job at Willamette University. He started his blog, www.williambragg.com, as a way to stay in contact with his friends all over the world.

"I'm just really bad at staying in touch with people," he said.

"I have friends and family everywhere, so it was just an easy way for people to drop in when they wanted and see what was going on with me."

Bragg said he doesn't get too personal on his blog -- the site is too easily Googled.

He posts funny articles that he thinks his friends might be interested in, and sometimes posts on his own favorite subjects -- youth issues, education and the Boston Red Sox.

His entries on the Red Sox were so easy to find that when the team won the World Series last year, he was called by East Coast newspapers to comment because they needed a fan living in the West.

Sometimes the ease of finding a certain subject can be misleading. Bragg said he commented on his blog one time about a guy participating in Klingon Karaoke who had the name Jigar Mehta. People who were searching online for a Miss Norway contestant from Iran who was disqualified for acting in porn movies ended up on Bragg's site, much to his surprise. A fellow blogger clued Bragg in -- apparently "jigar" is also a term for a sexy Iranian female.

Bragg says he also uses his blog as a way to post his photography, which has started to gain some attention. 

He said he has had exhibits at coffee shops in Salem, but also is getting nice feedback online.

Freedom of expression
While his own blog is not updated daily and is more for fun, Bragg says he has friends who are blogging professionally. Some bloggers are finding advertisers for their blogs, or ask people to donate money to them.

And some are getting co-opted by corporations. Bragg said he has a friend who used to write a daily blog about the bands he loves. That music lover still writes that blog -- but now is getting paid by a record company to talk up bands signed to that particular label.

Bragg thinks the democracy of  blogs will only continue to make them popular.

The accessibility can't be beat. Sites such as Blogger.com are free, while ones such as Typepad cost $5 to $9 per month.

"There's nothing romantic about what I'm doing and what other people are doing," Bragg said. "A lot of it is ego. But I think any new form of communication, especially one that gives access to those who wouldn't have it otherwise, is positive.

Hines said he sees a danger when people are only getting information from blogs that agree with their particular life perspective.

For instance, a self-professed liberal such as Hines can post comments on a conservative blog, but he said his comments are deleted immediately.

Staying connected
College students also have found a home on blogs, where they can post personal information, as well as write about their interests.

Stacy Austin, 21, is a political science major at Oregon State University. She writes a personal blog, as well as one related to her summer internship with PolitiCorps, a division of the progressive organization Oregon Bus Project. Austin said she has been using computers since she was 7 and sees blogs as a natural extension of the Internet.

"In the future, blogs and Web sites will be synonymous," she said.

"People always ask me, 'Why do you blog?' You can't really understand unless you blog yourself. They build a community. People who build blogs feel connected. People who read my blog tend to be female and in college. I've had fathers e-mail me and say I remind them of their daughter, that reading my  blog is like connecting to their kids."

Hines said those kinds of connections is the reason that blogs will continue to proliferate.

"In a way, it's a gamble because you're opening yourself up," he said.

"On the other hand, you see these aspects that everyone has strange ideas and no one is 'normal.' You start to realize that the weirdest thing is to be completely normal. It can be a profound experience to realize you are not alone in this world."

Goodbye, print Statesman Journal and Oregonian. We went digital.

Today was a day that I never thought would arrive -- the day my wife and I decided to stop getting home delivery of the Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian.

Given our age, early 70s, we grew up reading newspapers printed on dead trees that crinkled when you turned the pages.

Laurel and I both like print newspapers. 

But we also like seeing the Statesman Journal and Oregonian in the paper box at the end of our driveway. And increasingly, that wasn't happening.

Our neighbors reported the same thing was happening to them. So even though I registered a complaint every time this occurred, which was often, the delivery still was erratic.

Plus, for four years I've subscribed to the online editions of the New York Times and Washington Post. 

I find it easy and pleasant to read those newspapers on my computer, iPad, or iPhone.

So it finally dawned on me that I could do the same with the Statesman Journal and Oregonian, though neither has a web site as clean and easy to navigate as the Times and Post.

Thus today I phoned customer service at the Oregon newspapers and changed our subscriptions to digital only. 

That resulted in big savings. The Statesman Journal went from $59 a month to $10. The Oregonian went from $54 to $23. 

Bottom line: instead of paying $113 a month for the two papers, now we're paying $33 -- $80 a month less. 

It felt like a bittersweet moment, talking to the customer service people. I've gotten home delivery of the Statesman Journal for 44 years, ever since moving to Salem from Portland in 1977.

Holding a newspaper in my hand as I eat breakfast has been a part of my life for much longer. As long as I can remember, actually. 

OK, as a kid I probably focused on the comics. Which is still one of the favorite parts of the Oregonian for my wife, in large part because of Pearls Before Swine, a pleasingly acerbic comic strip.

After I switched to digital only, I couldn't find the comic strips on the Oregonian's oregonlive.com site. I also couldn't find the TV sports listings that I frequently refer to in the print paper. 

But after logging into my Oregonian account I found the e-newspaper that looks just like the print newspaper, insofar as a paper on a screen looks like a printed paper.

That solved the problem of comics and TV sports listings. (The Statesman Journal also has an e-edition, but I prefer the Oregonian for everything other than the few Salem stories in our local newspaper.)

So right now I have no regrets about going all-in on digital newspapers. Should mention that I also subscribe to the digital Salem Reporter for about $8 a month.

Thus I'm getting a healthy dose of daily news for not a whole lot of money per month: $15 New York Times, $15 Washington Post, $10 Statesman Journal, $23 Oregonian, $8 Salem Reporter -- $71 a month total.

That's just $12 a month more than I was paying each month for Statesman Journal home delivery. Going digital is a lot more cost-effective, for sure. 

I suspect print newspapers will become extinct before too long. Us baby boomers probably are the last generation to have a longstanding love affair with holding a print newspaper in our increasingly wrinkled hands.

Young people probably can't understand that infatuation, having grown up with smart phones and other electronic devices in the same way us old folks grew up with paper, pencils, and slide rules. 

(Google "slide rule" youngsters, if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Been married for 31 years today. But I'm not great at proposing.

In 1990 Laurel and I got married on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. Great decision.

I've never forgotten our anniversary, not even once in the past 31 years, because an image of green beer always makes me think, "Time to get flowers and a card!"

Shock (not). We looked much younger when we were much younger. Our wedding was at the house we'd bought a few months before in Spring Lake Estates, where we're still living.

My only regret about our wedding was how I'd botched my marriage proposal. On the plus side, it was spontaneous, though I'd been thinking about it for some time.

On the negative side, the proposal was so wishy-washy, Laurel paused for a few seconds after I'd stammered out what I had to say, then said, "Um, are you asking to marry me?" 

Naturally I responded with an emphatic "Yes!"

Not to excuse how I screwed up what could have been a much more magical moment for Laurel (she hadn't been married before), but the proposal was an improvement from my first marriage.

That took place when I was 22 and still in college. I don't recall ever proposing to Sue.

Somehow the decision to get married just happened -- unless the psychedelics I'd taken in my college years caused me to blank out on how we ended up getting married in a Palo Alto park by the crazed Greek Christian yoga teacher we'd been taking classes from, with sitar and tabla players from the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music.


Laurel and I got married in a more traditional fashion -- albeit by a Unity minister who we'd only met once before, and who had to keep referring to a piece of paper to make sure she had our correct names.

The cake had a leaning tower of Pisa feel to it. No big deal, though we were a bit nervous about the whole thing falling over before it could be eaten. Which didn't happen.

There's tricks to chainsawing that I don't know

I'm a chainsaw middle schooler, I suppose. Meaning, I've learned quite a bit over the 25 years or so I've occasionally used a small Stihl chainsaw on our property in rural south Salem.

But in no way do I feel totally comfortable with a chainsaw.

A feeling that I was reminded of today when I tackled a challenging tangle of logs that had fallen during the recent ice storm on a common property trail that runs behind our property to Spring Lake.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to stop by Ace Hardware and discover that they finally had some chainsaws in stock after being sold out after the ice storm. I had my eye on a larger Stihl chainsaw with easy start and a quick chain adjuster that doesn't require tools.

So I walked out with an 18 inch MS 251 CB-E. It's in the foreground above, with my old chainsaw behind it. (I'd recently had Ace Hardware replace a broken chain on the old saw, and they flipped the bar as you're supposed to do, which is why the "Stihl" now is upside down.)

Reading the MS 251 instruction manual last night, mainly to learn about how easy start and the quick chain adjuster worked (really simply, pleasingly), I couldn't avoid seeing the many warnings in the manual about all the ways a chainsaw can kill or maim you. 

That led me to order the helmet with ear protection and a visor perched in-between my two chainsaws. Amazon offered next day delivery so I was able to use the helmet this afternoon. I'd always worn leather gloves and eye protection, but having the helmet on made me feel even better.

My wife walks to the lake most mornings. She said it was difficult to make her way through the fallen trees and branches. Though I didn't take a "before" photo, my chainsawing definitely made it a lot easier to walk this part of the path.

The MS 251 Stihl chainsaw worked fine after a few stalls, probably caused by it being brand new. It cut through fairly thick logs with no problem. However, I had some difficulty with the chain getting stuck -- my biggest fear when using a chainsaw (other than being killed or maimed).

This happened two times. It was near the end of a cut of a log that was laying either on the ground, or just barely off the ground, preventing me from making a cut on the underside. 

Here's a similar log that I had cut almost all the way through, then abandoned when I could feel the shifting large log start to bind the chain. Since it was laying on the ground and easy to step across, I didn't want to take the risk of having my new chainsaw get stuck on its maiden cutting voyage.

I'm sure there are You Tube videos that would show me how to deal with this issue. The photo above shows the basic problem. 

The instruction manual illustrated what I already knew from my previous chainsaw experience. When a log is curved, as this one is, you're supposed to make a first cut on what the manual calls the compression side.

Meaning, the side that is going to be compressed when the log is cut through. In this case that's the top of the log with the inward curving shape. Then you make a second bucking cut on the tension side, which would be the bottom of the log.

Problem is, the manual shows a log extending over a slope with the bottom of the log easily reachable.

In this case, I couldn't get the chainsaw under the log, since it is laying on the ground. So I left this log alone, being worried that if I tried to cut all the way through from the top, I'd have a stuck chainsaw.

Likely there's a fairly easy solution to this problem. I just need to find it.

Walking back to our house, I took some photos of downed trees on our property that show how long it is going to take to clean up all of the damage from the ice storm.

These trees on the easement trail await someone with a bigger chainsaw and more expertise. We can walk over and under them. Horse riders will have more of an issue with them.

Some redwoods we planted a long time ago (in background) did fine in the ice storm. Other trees, not so much.

There's a lot of damage along the creek that leads to Spring Lake.

Soon after the ice storm we cleared a tangle of branches that prevented us from walking across the creek. Getting them to a burn pile will take a lot more work.

This sort of sight is repeated all through our ten acres, except right around our house, which is looking pretty much normal with the help of Noberto Flores and his crew.

At least this downed tree is close to the field we use for burning in the spring and fall.

Laurel, my wife, has created some wood art in our yard by arranging cut pieces of large oak branches. The giant mushroom is fake.

We'll have plenty of firewood once the oak is seasoned.

Even after quite a bit of what went through a chipper has been spread around, there's still a big pile left.

The chips make for an attractive path, and don't seem to bother dog paws.

Tree cleanup guys are the new Salem-area heroes

Ah, what a difference it made to my mood having tree debris from the recent ice storm cleaned up from our rural south Salem yard.

We'd done a lot of picking up small branches ourselves. And I'd been able to cut some larger limbs with my small 16-inch chainsaw.

But there was no way I could handle the big limbs from a giant oak that fell on our lawn. That required a bigger chainsaw and younger muscles than I possess.

So for almost three weeks my wife and I have been staring at a mass of tangled branches whenever we looked out of our living and family room windows.

That was disturbing, in part because one of the branches had landed on one of our favorite trees, a large Japanese Maple with purple leaves, leaving only a jagged remnant of the trunk.

Every time I looked in that direction, I'd think of the tree that no longer was there -- how beautiful it was for so many years, and how long it will take for a replacement tree to reach the size it was.

Thus it lifted my spirits today when Noberto Flores and his crew came out with a wood chipper and chain saws to deal with our branch mess. 

We've had Noberto do a lot of work on our property: pruning, dead tree cutting, walkway renovation, putting pavers and a retaining wall in our dog yard, removing brush around our house for wildfire purposes.

But I don't think I've ever been as happy to see Noberto as I was this morning. He did most of the chainsaw work himself, while his guys hauled stuff up to an area near the chipper.

Here's photos of what their hard work produced.

I neglected to take "before" photos. So just envision lots of downed trees and branches and you'll have a sense of what we've been looking at since the ice storm.


Or imagine these piles at the turnaround area of our driveway scattered across the 
"after" photos above.

Noberto even was able to get what's called a widowmaker branch down from one of the two large fir trees that overlook our house. 

I have no desire to make my wife into a widow, given what that would mean for my remaining life span (zero), so every time I walked under that branch I wondered if I'd hear a crack before it fell.

Noberto threw a line over the top of the branch, then was able to pull on it until it hit the ground. Not on my head, or anyone else's head, an excellent outcome.

After he'd cleared our top priority area, Noberto and his crew turned to the many oak trees that surround our house, looking for broken branches.

They found a lot today, so the chipping is going to have to wait for their next visit, maybe tomorrow.

Here's Noberto working in a tree near our well enclosure.

I don't like to stand on the top of a tall ladder, especially when it is against a tree. However, Noberto has been doing this work for many years, so he's confident in what he's doing, while I'm not. 

During his lunch break I thanked Noberto for making our yard look more or less normal again. I told him that even though we have many trees on our natural ten acres, thousands, I'm sure, it hurts to lose a tree that you love.

He agreed, noting that in the city people may have just one or two large trees on their lot. If one of them was lost in the ice storm, that's a big emotional hit -- way bigger than we've endured, given that we're surrounded by trees in all directions.

Seeing a fallen tree laying in your yard for days on end is sort of like having a dead body in your living room. You want to start forgetting about the death, but that's tough to do when the deceased is so visible.

So many thanks to all of the tree crews, both private companies and public workers, who have been working so hard since the ice storm to restore some normalcy to our hard-hit area of the Willamette Valley.

You're deeply appreciated. 

PGE tree clearing crew were artists at what they do

Yesterday a Portland General Electric (PGE) tree clearing crew was working in our neighborhood prior to the restoration of power following a massive ice storm.

We and our neighbors had been without electricity for 11 days at this point. So it was a joy to finally see PGE repair activity occurring.

Laurel, my wife, had noticed a PGE truck in the driveway of our neighbor to the south on Lake Drive in rural south Salem, where a tree was in contact with an electrical line.

She walked over to talk to the crew to make sure that they knew about a similar situation on our property. Some large branches were leaning against the line that leads from a power pole near our house to the house just north of us.

After she showed the crew chief where the problem was, he walked back to his truck and led the other two crew members to the location.

I decided to watch them do their tree clearing thing. The photo below shows part of the tangled maze of branches that had come down in the ice storm. Our neighbor's house is visible on the right.

The fence between our properties was intact, though a gate had been knocked loose. 

The other two members of the crew followed the chief's lead. I was impressed by the light-hearted energy of all three PGE employees. It was late in the day, about 4:30 pm. They'd been working long hours for many days. 

Yet they joked around, kidding each other. It was apparent that they had a lot of respect for the crew chief -- well-deserved, as I'll describe below.

It turned out that the crew chief, whose name I didn't get, had worked for Elwood's Tree Service before PGE. My wife and I have used Elwood's often on our ten acres. The crew chief remembered coming out to our property several times.

I didn't take photos of the initial part of the tree clearing effort.

That started with the crew chief picking up a rope with a loop at the end, swinging it around his head like a cowboy steer roper, and throwing it high up toward the end of a large branch, or tree, that was leaning against the electrical line.

He got the loop over the top of the branch on the first try. Really impressive. Then he threw the rest of the rope over the line. From there he and a crew member were able to pull on the line and get the branch, or tree, to topple safely. This is the crew chief.

That left a couple of other branches that were leaning against the wire. If you look closely the wire is visible about a third of the way from the top of the photo below, angling upward.

It was interesting to listen to the discussion as to how to deal with the branches. One of the crew members pointed to a branch and suggested they do that one first. 

But the crew chief said, no, no. Thinking several moves ahead like a chess master, he pointed out how difficult it would be if they dealt with that branch, then the other one. I didn't follow the conversation all that clearly, since I was standing a ways distant.

What impressed me was how the crew chief was able to size up the various aspects of the branch problem and quickly figure out the best approach. 

The photo below shows him using a long pole saw to remove a "hanger," I think they called it, that was keeping the large branch dangling on the wire.

I then made a video of the final stage of the branch removal. At one point you can see the dangling branch pushing the wire back and forth. My wife was watching from closer to our house.

She could see our power pole swaying, which shows how heavy the branch was. I was worried the electrical line was going to break, but they must be pretty darn strong, since it didn't.

This wasn't an easy job. There was no way to get a truck with a lift anywhere near the electrical line, so all they had to work with was a chainsaw, rope, and the long extension pole. 

Since a PGE guy in a truck had told my wife that power can't be turned on to a house if a branch is touching the line, we were deeply appreciative of the tree crew doing what they did, when they did it -- an hour or so before power came back on in most of our neighborhood.

We had to wait for power until this morning, along with three other homes in Spring Lake Estates.

PGE getting well-deserved ice storm criticism

First off, I want to say that I'm as thankful as anyone for the PGE crews that are working to restore power to the hundreds of thousands of Oregonians who are without electricity after the recent massive ice and snow storm. 

But I'm a believer in the middle way: give credit where credit is due, and assign blame where blame is due. PGE deserves some of each.

(PGE stands for Portland General Electric, not to be confused with PG&E, Pacific Gas & Electric, a Calfornia utility.)

My main gripe with PGE is their decision to stop giving estimates for when power will be restored to an outage area. My wife and I lost power around 8 pm or so last Friday, February 12. 

When I reported the outage via the PGE phone line that night, the automated message said that power could be restored at 6:30 pm on Saturday. On Saturday, the message said 6:30 pm on Sunday. On Sunday, the message said 8:45 am on Monday. On Monday, PGE stopped providing any estimate of when our power would be restored.

That's crazy. You'd think that as more information was learned about outages in Oregon, PGE would have more accurate estimates of when people would have electricity back. But the opposite happened.

That's highly unusual.

Living as we do in rural south Salem for the past 31 years, we've experienced many power outages. Not once has PGE failed to provide an estimate for when power would be restored. Often that estimate was inaccurate, but it sure makes us feel better to know that our neighborhood is on a schedule for repair work.

This screenshot shows what PGE currently is reporting for our address -- four freaking days after our power went out.

Let's decipher this lack of pertinent information, which so far as I can tell is similar to what PGE is reporting for most people in Oregon who lack power.

First, the cause wasn't heavy snow. It was ice. If you think this is a minor quibble, look to the bottom diagram that leads from "Power Out" to "Power Restored."

PGE makes it seem like after a crew was dispatched, the cause was determined. Well, it doesn't take any investigative work to figure out that the ice storm in our part of Marion County caused the power outage. 

The real question is what happened during the ice storm that caused the outage in our area of 503 customers affected. I can only speak about our specific neighborhood of about 95 customers in Spring Lake Estates.

Every day I walk our dog past a downed power line on Lake Drive, our street.

I can see that a big tree near 10161 Lake Drive collapsed the power line when it fell during the storm. The line snapped. Part of the line is on the ground. Some of the line is suspended about six feet over a Lake Drive lane.

I've talked with a PGE employee who answers the downed power line option on their phone system. I've told her what I just said above. I've pointed out that the poles on both sides of the downed line are intact, so seemingly it would be pretty easy to reattach a line between the poles.

Yet so far there's been no sign of any PGE activity in our neighborhood. 

So what's up with that "Crew Dispatched" item in between "Power Out" and "Cause Determined"? It's clear that dispatched means something different in power company lingo than in ordinary English. 

To most people, including me, when someone is dispatched to a problem, like a police officer responding to a 911 call, it means a human being is in motion to handle whatever needs to be dealt with. But here's how Duke Energy defines that term.

Dispatched/Assigned: A repair crew has been assigned to restore service and will proceed to the location as soon as the crew is available. Enroute: The crew is on the way to make repairs. Onsite/Arrived: The crew has arrived at the location where repairs are needed.

PGE must use the same definition, since like I said, there's been zero sign of repair activity at the downed lines even though a crew has been dispatched. So it appears that our neighborhood outage is on a PGE list for some repair work at an undisclosed future date.

When will our power be restored? PGE says in the screenshot, "Not available at this time." Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Could be a month from now. 

If PGE knows, they sure aren't telling. And that irks a lot of other people besides me. 

The Portland General twitter account has been sharing tweets like this one from this morning.

I enjoy swiping right on my iPhone and reading responses from Oregonians. Some thank PGE for working to restore power. Others are critical. Here's a sampling of those.

Regarding that last tweet from Poonam, this morning I called the PGE outage number and waited on hold for 12 minutes until a live human being came on the line.

He was polite, unrushed, and refreshingly open with me. I appreciated that a lot.

After he listened to my gripe about PGE not having any estimate for when our power would be restored, and talking about how difficult it is for rural residents lacking generators who have wells that don't function without electricity, he said that he agreed with me. 

Here's how I described our conversation in a post this morning on our neighborhood's Facebook page.

I talked with a PGE customer service guy a little while ago. I expressed my frustration at how PGE no longer is giving estimates for when power will be restored to an area. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday there were estimates. Starting Monday, those stopped.

 

He agreed with me that it would be good if PGE could just say something like, "Our best guess is that your power will be restored in a week if everything goes as planned." He said he'd pass my concern on to a supervisor.

 

I mentioned that a PGE spokesman has said it could be "many days" before power is restored to everybody. OK, but what does that mean? FIve days? Two weeks? A month? Two months? it's hard to plan to survive this outage without at least a general sense of how long our electricity will be off.

 

The PGE guy said that major transmission lines are a big problem. Those need to be fixed before power can be restored farther down the line. I came away feeling like I'd been heard, though we still have no idea when Spring Lake Estates will get power back.

 

Lastly, being a progressive, I rarely agree with Republican politicians. But state House Republican Leader Christine Drazan has an excellent idea, according to the Oregonian. The Oregon legislature shouldn't resume until all Oregonians have power.

 

Oregon House Democrats have been discussing with Republicans whether [to] resume operations Wednesday. The caucus and some caucus members have used social media to express their concerns and share information to help Oregonians affected by power outages.

 

Drazan said Tuesday the focus should stay there. “We need to keep our focus on serving constituents and the most vulnerable while we await power to be restored. Our work in the legislature should come back online once the power does.”

 

UPDATE: I've gotten some comments on Facebook about this blog post that spurred me to write this response:

 

I said in my blog post that I respect the crews who are working. It's PGE management I don't respect. If you'd read my post before commenting on it, you would have seen that I made ZERO criticisms of the crews working to restore power.

 

I live in a rural area where everyone has wells that need electricity to work. So many people don't have water. I read their comments on our neighborhood's Facebook page. They're very disturbing. Naturally my wife and I have offered to provide water to people, since we have a generator.

 

It is much more difficult to plan for dealing with this outage when PGE persists in not providing even a rough estimate of when power will be restored. Many people out here have livestock, like horses, llamas, and goats. They need water also.

 

When PGE keeps people in the dark, communication-wise, it hurts peoples' ability to cope with the physical dark every night without electricity. 

Our dog is enjoying no electricity. Me, not so much.

Out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, we've been without electricity for two days after a big ice storm caused trees to topple and electrical lines to crumple.

My wife and I sleep in different bedrooms. We have a wood stove, but the heat from it doesn't reach to where I sleep.

I toughed out the first night without electricity, though naturally my room was much colder than usual, Last night I decided that I'd sleep on a blow-up bed. I put it in the living room, which is close to the wood stove in our open-plan house.

Our Husky mix, Mooka, greeted me in the morning. (She sleeps in an area close to my wife, so Mooka gets up when Laurel does.) It took our dog about three seconds to decide that the best greeting would be to jump on the blow-up bed, with me in it.

Since, Mooka has rarely left the bed. It's her new favorite place. So at least our dog is enjoying what comes with no electricity.  Me, not so much.

Being a modern liberated couple who disdain traditional sex roles, we've been equitably sharing the additional work that comes with non-electrical life after an ice storm.

After we get up, Laurel brings in firewood from outside to keep the wood stove going that day. Then she makes a fire with newspaper, kindling, and small pieces of wood. After that, she tends the fire until it is going nicely and starts to heat the house.

Me, I go out to the carport and turn the start key on our generator. Then I make my breakfast and relax, having done my part to keep our household running smoothly. Like I said, Laurel and I share household chores equitably.

Oh, forgot to mention that last night Laurel found the box in our garage that the blow-up bed was in, brought it inside, plugged in the pump, filled up the bed with air, and made the bed with sheets and two blankets.

I then turned down the bed coverings before I went to sleep. Again, we have a 50-50 marriage.

However, when it comes to outside work, I do 100% of the tasks when it comes to using our Stihl backpack blower and chainsaw -- both of which came in handy the past few days given how many tree limbs came down in our large yard during the ice storm. 

Yesterday I saw that the quart of chainsaw bar oil was almost gone. So this morning I set out on a mission to drive into Salem and get more bar oil, along with filling up two empty five gallon gasoline cans in case we need to use our generator for another few days.

There was a bit of a line at the south Salem Shell gas station I always go to. The attendant said that people had seen on the news last night that a long line had formed at a Woodburn gas station after the ice storm.

He added, "There's plenty of gas, though." I noted that the same thing happened with toilet paper last year when Covid lockdowns led to panic buying, quickly adding that I really did need gasoline for our generator. He agreed.

I neglected to mention that when toilet paper became available again last spring, or maybe it was early summer, I went overboard and bought so much that we're still using it up. The attendant made fun of someone he knows who acquired such a supple of toilet paper, it had to be stored in their garage.

Which is where we keep some of our supply -- another thing I didn't mention.

When I went to Ace Hardware for the bar oil, I immediately noted that the parking lot was unusually full. When I got inside, a line of people waiting to check out extended almost all of the way to the back of the store. 

Soon I found myself at the end of it, clutching a gallon of chainsaw bar oil. 

This wasn't panic buying. It was people getting what they needed to cope with the ice storm. The guy in front of me with the baby carriage had bought a chain saw. I heard him tell a salesman that he needed one long enough to cope with a large tree that had fallen down.

When I got home, I did some additional driveway blowing, branch hauling, and chainsawing of branches. Well, until the chain fell off my saw, which not surprisingly put an end to my chainsawing.

I'm pretty clueless about chainsaw maintenance, so my plan is to take it in to Ace Hardware tomorrow, a Stihl dealer, and hope that even though chainsaw sales have been brisk, chainsaw repair and tuneups won't take all that long.

Regarding tonight, I'm going to do my best to avoid having to sleep on the dog bed while Mooka sleeps on the blow-up bed. A handful of dog treats should do the trick at luring her off my bed -- my go-to dog training device.

Photos of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021

l've lived in Oregon for 50 years. I've seen plenty of freezing rain. But I've never experienced anything like the ice storm that struck northwest Oregon yesterday. 

Here's photos that I took this morning as my wife and I surveyed the damage to our property in rural south Salem, which was considerable.

The ice was amazingly thick. Up near Lake Drive this twig had ice the width of my index finger, about 5/8 of an inch. 

The walkway outside our front door was littered with fir branches. Trees and shrubs were bending over from the weight of the ice.

There was a certain beauty to the ice. But the damage it did to our yard was anything but beautiful. 

The saddest sight was seeing several large limbs that had fallen from a white oak that was more than two hundred years old, according to an arborist. It's the centerpiece of our yard. Hard to believe that it had survived so long, only to be decimated yesterday. Hopefully it will survive, though I have my doubts.

The oak branches littered the lawn in front of our deck. We'd heard loud crashes while watching TV last night. (We have a generator, as our power had gone out.) It was too dark to see what had happened. In the morning, we knew.

Some oak branches, along with other tree debris, had fallen near and into our water feature. A bird bath was frozen.

A bird feeder was festooned with icicles.

The brush and trees on the path that leads to Spring Creek were a vision in white. But after I'd seen what the ice had done to the big oak, I looked upon the whiteness as malevolent. Of course, nature doesn't have intentions, so that doesn't make sense. I still felt that way, though.


Imagine how much force it takes to split a thick branch from the trunk of a tree. Ice is powerful.


Last year we had a fairly large oak removed from our dog yard because it was so close to our house -- a fire danger, with branches overhanging the roof. I was glad we did this, since it could have caused considerable damage if the ice had caused it to topple over. 

We were fortunate to not have any large branches strike our roof or deck. Not as fortunate was a beautiful large purple-leaved Japanese Maple that was struck squarely by one of the heavy fallen oak branches. All that is left of it is the dark piece of trunk in the middle of the photo. Sad. It was my wife's favorite tree in our yard.


Many branches from two tall firs at the bottom of our driveway were scattered about. But the firs did much better than other trees with the ice, probably because fir branches bend so easily. Oaks are strong, but rigid. "Be like water," I recall Bruce Lee saying. Good advice for both trees and us humans.


A bunch of branches were strewn around the turnaround part of our driveway. 


Brush near the upper part of our driveway was oozing ice.


Since our driveway is "Y" shaped, I had two choices as to where to park my Subaru Crosstrek near Lake Drive. (Our steep driveway is partly shaded, so I was worried that freezing rain would linger on it, making it difficult to get out after the storm ended.) Not surprisingly, I chose a location with no overhanging branches. Turned out our driveway wasn't icy at all, strangely.

It was great that the two tall firs that tower over our house made it through the ice storm with minor damage. I was sleeping in a room that could be under them if they toppled over, a thought that occasionally went through my mind last night.

Seeing the large oak in our back yard so damaged is a recurring pain. It is entirely possible to have an intimate relationship with a tree. I know, because I've had many conversations with what I've called my Old Friend. 

USA broadband sucks. In rural south Salem, it sucks more.

Having fast internet no longer is a luxury, if it ever was.

A year into the Covid crisis, it's clear that access to genuine broadband -- defined by the FCC as at least 25 megabits per second download (25 Mbps) and three megabits per second (3 Mbps) upload -- is a necessity. 

Distance learning can't happen without it. Working from home can't happen without it. Keeping in touch with friends and family can't happen without it. Streaming entertainment can't happen without it.

OK, I've exaggerated a bit. 

Those things can happen with slower internet. However, I speak from experience when I say that it is much more difficult to do them when you have a 6 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload speed (6/2 in broadband shorthand). 

That's what I've had to deal with for many years out here in the "wilds" of rural south Salem, a whole six miles from the city limit of Oregon's capital.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the 157 million people in the United States, almost half the population, who don't have the 25/3 speed that separates genuine broadband from crappy broadband like our DSL that arrives at our house over a copper phone line that is almost fifty years old.

About two weeks ago I was chosen to be a beta tester for the Starlink satellite internet system. It's a project of Elon Musk's Space X company. Starlink is working well for us, by and large. 

There are occasional interruptions and marked variation in download/upload speeds.

That's to be expected of a system that is still under development. At the moment I'm writing this blog post with a Starlink speed of 34/7. That download speed is lower than it usually is, but at least it is within the bounds of the 25/3 broadband definition.

My wife and I could afford the $499 Starlink purchase cost, plus $99 for a roof mount.

When testing is over and Space X starts charging the expected $99 a month fee, we'll be happy to dump our CenturyLink DSL and pay about forty dollars a month more for much faster broadband (likely at least 150 Mbps down and 10 up).

However, that's too much for many Americans. Broadband, like health care, shouldn't be available only to those with the ability to pay the full cost of it.

Our country needs to set a goal of making broadband available to everybody within a fairly short period of time, like five years. Hopefully the Biden administration will make this part of a program that modernizes our crumbling/inadequate infrastructure, which includes broadband access.

As noted before, I live six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital. A few years ago the average download speed in Mongolia was 5.25 Mbps. That's close to the 6 Mbps we've "enjoyed" (not!) from our DSL. 

So it isn't an exaggeration to say that in rural south Salem our internet speed is about the same as if we were in Outer Mongolia. 

That would be funny if it didn't reflect a huge problem: the unfair gap between broadband have's and have-not's in our country. This is partly due to the high cost of broadband, but in many or most cases it is a question of availability. 

Like lots of people who live in a rural area, we have exactly zero choice when it comes to an internet provider. I know, because I've checked out every possibility and come up with nothing other than the crappy DSL we suffered with prior to Starlink coming into our life. 

No cable companies out here. No fast cellular internet out here (we don't have a line of sight to a cell tower). No fiber optic out here. 

Again, this isn't literally Outer Mongolia, but it might as well be. We're a few miles from Oregon's second largest city. Yet until Starlink came along we were doomed to "broadband" with a speed less than 1/4 as fast as how the FCC defines that term.

I'll end by describing what life is like at 6Mbps for those who have never experienced internet at that speed.

In short, you do a lot of waiting.
Want to read a news story? You click on the link and wait. Want to upload a video to You Tube? You wait a really long time. Want to watch a movie on Netflix? Often it starts, then you wait while the video buffers (a few minutes later this may happen again). Want to download an operating system update? When Big Sur was available for my MacBook Pro, it took 12 hours to download; it failed to install the first time, so then it took another 12 hours to try again.

I'm 72. I'm retired. I'm not working from home or going to school from home.

So even though I'm a writer with three blogs and hate how much time I've wasted because of our slow DSL, I feel even more sorry for those whose job or education is made much more difficult by the lack of fast broadband. 

This needs to change. President Biden and Congress, do something about it!

 

 

 

Honey-Do is a great Salem handyman service

Today I was impressed again by the quality work that Laine Larson did for us via his Honey-Do Handyman Service. Laine is a neighbor, so during a dog walk this afternoon I took this photo of the back of his trailer so I could share it in this laudatory blog post.

For many years Laine was a State Farm Insurance agent. Now he's into the handyman thing, and doing it very well. My wife and I have used him for several projects that exceeded my decidedly minimal husbandly handyman capability.

Laine is very easy to work with. Honest, straightforward, pleasant, reliable. I'll describe what Laine did for us today, as it reflects why a handyman like Laine is so valuable. 

As I described in a recent blog post, the Space X Starlink satellite internet system  that I was selected to be a Beta tester for is working well for us -- hugely better than the slow CenturyLink DSL that we've had to endure at our rural south Salem home where prior to Starlink there haven't been any viable broadband alternatives (our DSL isn't really broadband, not with a speed of 7 Mbps).

So I phoned Laine and told him that we needed to have the cable secured from the Starlink dish on our roof down to the spot on an outside wall where a hole needed to be drilled into our living room, where the Starlink router was located.

(During our initial test of the Starlink we'd left a sliding door slightly ajar so the cable would fit through it.)

I'd gotten a Cable Routing & Wall Penetration Kit from Starlink, but I'd noticed that the description of the kit started off with, "Designed for customers with prior internet cable routing experience and installation; must be comfortable drilling through walls."

Well, I had zero internet cable routing experience and wasn't comfortable drilling through walls. Which caused me to call Laine.

When he came to our house this afternoon I showed him what the kit contained: a spade bit, drill bit, cable routing tool, silicone sealant, grommets, and wall clips. The screw-in clips were to hold the cable in place along the fifty feet or so between the Starlink dish on our roof and the router in our living room.

Laine took the clips up on the roof, but he ended up not using them. Instead, he had a more elegant solution -- a coax cable staple gun that used an oval-shaped staple. 

This turned out to be the only way the cable could be attached at the top of the slanted roof overhang above our deck, since a cordless drill wouldn't have had enough room to drive in the screw that holds a clip in place. Plus, the clips would have been a lot more visible than the staples,

So not only is Laine a skilled handyman who can do what you want done, he also can come up with better ways to do what you want done. 

When the cable routing kit arrived from Starlink, I looked at the instructions and thought, "Maybe I could handle this." But what I correctly suspected is that complications would arise that I wouldn't know how to handle, and Laine could.

Give him a call if you're in the Salem, Oregon area and need a handyman: 503-931-8822

My first Starlink beta test: fast but loses satellite connection

Yesterday the long-awaited box from Starlink arrived after I'd been notified that I was able to be part of the public beta test for this groundbreaking effort to bring broadband to underserved areas via thousands of low-altitude satellites. I happily paid for the equipment.

Naturally I was eager to open it up. At first glance, I wondered if somehow they'd forgotten to put the equipment inside.

But no, the goodies were under the cleverly fashioned plastic cover: satellite dish, tripod, router,, and cables.

Showing how old I am (72), I looked around for an installation manual. Then I realized that the sum total of the instructions included in the box were on the sheet that caught my eye when I first opened it up.

So I gathered that you set up the dish, plug it in, then fire up the Starlink app I had on my iPhone. Pleasingly, all the cables and power supply were already inserted into the proper places in the pieces of equipment. 

Since I hadn't gotten the roof mount I'd ordered, and it was nighttime anyway, the only viable option I had for testing the Starlink was to set it up on a small table on our upstairs deck. 

It faces north, where the Starlink satellites are located currently, so that was good. Not good were the many nearby oak and fir trees on our property in rural south Salem, Oregon. Thus I wasn't expecting much from this first test, since our roof has a considerably better view of the sky than the deck.

Getting Starlink up and running was very easy. After plugging the equipment in, and giving the router time to set itself up, I was asked to provide a password for the Starlink wi-fi network. Then I watched the Starlink app as the dish tried to connect with the satellites.

It took a few minutes for a connection to be established. That was exciting, since given the rather crappy location of the dish, I was worried that no connection at all would be possible. 

The app asked me to do a speed test. I did several of them.

They ranged between 26 Mbps and 14o Mbps. Here's a screenshot of the fastest result, which thrilled me -- since our horrible CenturyLink DSL is hugely slower. The second speed test screenshot is from this morning when I was using the DSL wi-fi.

Starlink

CenturyLink DSL

Aside from the much faster Starlink download and upload speeds, it's interesting that the Starlink latency (definition here) is so much lower than the DSL latency, even though obviously the Starlink signal has to go into space and back.

I guess having our internet connection start and finish via copper phone lines isn't so great, something I already knew after suffering through many years of DSL.

Unfortunately, the marvelous Starlink connection only lasted a few minutes before, I assume, a satellite signal was obstructed by the trees. Sometimes the connection was restored quickly, but sometimes it took quite a while. This wasn't surprising, given the location of the dish on our deck and the proximity to the afore-mentioned trees.

The Ridgeline Roof Mount I ordered a few days ago should arrive next week. That will allow me to try placing the Starlink dish in various places on our roof, since the mount is secured by the weight of concrete blocks or bricks rather than being fastened in place by screws.

I suspect the reliability of Starlink will be greater once the dish is on the roof. However, I've checked for obstructions via the Starlink app. One oak and three firs appear to be obstructing a totally clear view of the northern sky, so there's a decent chance we still will have connection interruptions.

Starlink support FAQs say that as more satellites are launched, obstructions will be less of an issue. If we still have a problem with losing the connection after the dish is on the roof, my plan is to ask for advice from Starlink support staff.

Should we have the large trees cut down (they're on our property, a benefit of living on ten acres), or is there a decent chance that upcoming satellite launches will cause any dropped connection problems to fade away? 

Regardless, I'm confident that Starlink will become our conduit to genuine high speed broadband. I'm beyond tired of having to deal with CenturyLink DSL. I've enquired as to whether we ever will get fiber optic out here in the "wilderness" five miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital. 

A CenturyLink manager said, no. The day we can ditch CenturyLink can't come soon enough for me.