HinesSight

Regence and Salem Health are in an annoying contract dispute

Recently I got a not-so-cheery letter from Cheryl Nester Wolfe, President and CEO of Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics.

She informed me, along with many thousands of other people in Salem who get their health insurance through Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon that Salem Health's contract with Regence expires on December 31, 2024 and "despite repeated attempts to negotiate a new contract for 2025, Regence refuses to agree to fair market terms."

Wolfe put most of another sentence in boldface to draw attention to it.

This means that as a patient, you will likely be responsible for a greater portion of the costs of your care at all Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics locations after December 31, 2024.

Yesterday the Salem Reporter had an informative story about this dispute, "Salem Health seeks 35% increase from Regence in insurance coverage dispute." Here's how the story begins:

Thousands in Salem may not be able to get in-network care at Salem Health next year due to a contract dispute between the hospital system and insurance company Regence BlueCross BlueShield.

Both sides say the disagreement, centered around how much the insurance company pays Salem Health to care for patients, may be insurmountable. 

Salem Health is seeking a 35% increase in the amount it bills Regence when members go to the emergency room or have surgery at Salem’s only hospital.

Hospital leaders said that’s necessary to keep up with inflation, while Regence said it would drastically raise premiums for members.

If a deal isn’t settled, Regence patients would pay more out-of-pocket for appointments, surgeries and care at Salem Health’s hospitals and clinics.

Federal law protects patients from paying out-of-network prices for emergency care, including airlifts.

This is really annoying. I'm on Medicare, so have the Regence MedAdvantage plan. The monthly cost is reasonable, $72 a month. I've been happy with the plan, which I've had for ten years, ever since I became eligible for Medicare.

I got a MedAdvantage plan in part because just before I turned 65, I semi-jokingly asked my Salem Health family physician if she was going to kick me out after I had Medicare, since I knew that medical providers complain about Medicare's reimbursement rates. She said that her clinic loses money on regular Medicare visits but they break even, or maybe a bit better, with MedAdvantage. 

Today I phoned Regence, being more than a little concerned about the statement in the Salem Reporter story that the disagreement between Regence and Salem Health may be insurmountable. The open enrollment period for MedAdvantage plans ends December 7, so I wanted to start looking into other options if Regence and Salem Health can't agree on a 2025 contract.

The woman I talked with at Regence was pleasant and seemingly knowledgeable. She told me that contract disputes happen all the time between insurance companies and providers, but usually they aren't as public as this one. She said that if Regence doesn't have a Salem Health contract by November 18, I think it was, they'd have to send out a letter to their Salem customers stating this.

I told her that since my deadline is December 7 to sign up for a different MedAdvantage plan, that's cutting it kind of close. She then told me that between January 1 and March 31 Medicare allows one switch of MedAdvantage plans, which often occurs because someone chooses a new plan during the fall open enrollment period, then finds they don't like that plan.

This applies even if no change has been made to a MedAdvantage plan. Meaning, I could dump Regence and enroll in a different plan between January and March. However, she added that the change doesn't take effect until the first of the next month after a change is made, which means I could have no MedAdvantage plan at all for a while if I switched from Regence early next year.

I don't want to run that risk, given the ever-present possibility of a serious accident or illness popping up. So I'm strongly leaning toward switching to a different MedAdvantage plan prior to December 7. My wife has Providence MedAdvantage through her PERS retirement health plan. She likes Providence, though no insurance plan is perfect.

Understand: I don't trust either Regence or Salem Health.

I told the woman at Regence who I talked with today that this reminds me of the disputes that regularly surface with DirecTV, which we have to use because we live in a rural area lacking cable. When, say, ESPN goes off the air due to a lack of a contract, DirecTV says it is because ESPN is being greedy, and I should complain to ESPN. Of course, ESPN says it is because DirecTV is being greedy, and I should complain to DirecTV.

My attitude is that I don't care who's at fault, I just want ESPN back so I can watch sports. Likewise, I don't care who's at fault between Regence and Salem Health, I just want health care.

It's crazy that even after joining Medicare, I still have to deal with corporate contract disputes. Our country's health care system is screwed up. Even if we had Medicare For All, so long as the profit motive dominates, patients are going to suffer from giant corporations arguing about how much money each of them is going to make. 

2024 Salem Art Fair is much improved from 2023

The Salem Art Fair and Festival is on an upward trajectory, according to my decidedly personal opinion.

After going to the fair every year since I moved to Salem in 1977, enjoying the shady setting under the large oaks in Bush Park, in 2022 the fair had to move to a big grassy field with little shade because the oaks were being damaged due to soil compaction.

The title of my July 15, 2022 blog post expressed how I felt about the change: "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now." It was uncomfortably hot out in the sun, and the layout of the artist booths was much more confusing than the old layout: semi-circles branching off a central paved path.

The fair improved in 2023, as I noted in another blog post. I believe the booth layout was close to how it was this year, with most booths in a large circle surrounding the big grassy area. But the temperature was in the mid to high 80s on Friday, the day my wife and I went in 2023.

This year the Salem Art Fair dates changed to mid-September, the 13th, 14th, and 15th. Great decision. Having the temperature in the low 70s in the afternoon caused us to enjoy the fair a lot more than in the hotter previous years. Moving the main stage and food court from the north to the south end of the grassy field also was a plus.

Made it easier to hear music and get something to eat or drink after entering the fair. I took photos of some other improvements.

There were more booths under trees, which was pleasant -- especially for people with limited mobility. When we were looking at booths in the big grassy area, I overheard a woman using a walker say to her friend, "It's difficult for me to get around on this grass; I'm tired." The paved path under the trees is way more walker and wheelchair friendly. 

Again, I realize that the fair had to be moved from under the white oaks. But just being near some trees somehow makes booths seem more, well, artsy. 

The beer and wine area is more centrally located now. And it isn't "walled off" from the rest of the art fair, as it used to be.

I guess there's no way to make the big grassy field look like anything other than what it is, but at least it wasn't a hot big grassy field in September. Still, I can picture street performers doing their thing in this area, entertaining fairgoers with juggling, mime, hoop tricks, and such, much as a few musicians were singing and playing elsewhere with a collection plate for donations.

A copper booth looked warm and bright.

This booth looked cool.

My child-raising days are long past, as are my daughter's. But maybe I'll live long enough to be able to buy a cute children's sweater if or when my granddaughter has a child.

It was nice to see "This is Kalapuyan Land" signs scattered around the fair, reminding us of the Native Americans who were here first. 

This year I actually bought some art at the Salem Art Fair. Usually I'm just a browser. But the Mercurial Art booth attracted me. I browsed at first, then after my wife and I got some cold drinks, I went back and bought one of the fused glass creations. At the moment I have it next to a reading light in my office, since the tree leaves show up best when lighted.

If I understood him correctly, Leonard Tinnell, the artist, told me that the rock holding the fused glass via a slot cut into the rock was deposited by the great Missoula Floods that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age. That's how the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Washington was fashioned, with the floodwaters reaching the Willamette Valley, where Salem is. 

Here's a description of the fused glass art from the Mercurial Art web site. 

Crushed glass (also known as frit) and glass powders are used to paint the imagery of a grove of trees in the changing seasons. Starting at room temperature, the glass is heated in a kiln to a process temperature of 1500 degrees, then cooled through several annealing zones back to room temperature. Multiple firings result in more complex geometric designs using cut sheet glass, or by slumping the glass into a mold to achieve the curve of a plate or bowl.  

Bound Salem Weekly issues now can be seen at Willamette Heritage Center

Salem Weekly, our city's much-beloved (and for some conservatives, much-hated) alternative newspaper that published from April 2003 to October 2018 still lives on in a certain sense -- thanks to Jim Scheppke, a retired librarian who led an effort to have almost all of the Salem Weekly issues professionally bound, then donated to the Willamette Heritage Center, where they can be reviewed by the public.

Yesterday afternoon some people with ties to Salem Weekly and the binding project met at the Willamette Heritage Center to admire the volumes. We chatted about how much Salem Weekly meant to us, expressing thanks to Scheppke and A.P. Walther, the Salem Weekly publisher, for preserving the issues with the help of some donations from Mark Wigg and me.

Jim Scheppke and A.P. Walther

We had to wear archival gloves while thumbing through the Salem Weekly issues. They can be viewed by anyone. All you have to do is contact Kylie Pine, Curator of the Willamette Heritage Center: 503-585-7012, [email protected]

Kylie Pine (standing)

Helen Caswell, who died fairly recently after a bout with cancer, got much praise at yesterday's gathering. Helen wrote so many stories for Salem Weekly, she used at least four pseudonyms. She and Walther were the beating heart of Salem Weekly. Their hard work and dedication will aways be remembered by everybody who knows how much the paper contributed to Salem.

I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly from May 2013 to May 2015. They're available in a Hinessight blog post, "Here's all of my Strange Up Salem columns." Naturally I perused the issue where a column first appeared, which merited a cover image.

Brian Hines

Until yesterday I didn't know who had drawn the hand holding a pen, which has a sort of nicely creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it. Walther told me that Sarah Torres drew the image, which wasn't used for its initial purpose, then was retrieved by Walther for the cover, which he designed. 

Here's a closeup of the cover. My first column was called "I Know What You Want." It started with:

At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach.

What I’m talking about is a stranger Salem. Meaning, a city with sights, sounds, people, places, and other delights that make us go ooh, ah, and give me more rather than ho-hum, so lame.

On November 23, 2018 I wrote a blog post, "Salem Weekly closes down. Sad day for our town." For sure. The Statesman Journal is a poor excuse for a hometown paper: few local stories, no letters to the editor, no opinion section. 

Wikipedia's Salem Weekly page describes how the publication got started, which originally was called Salem Monthly.

The Salem Monthly traces its origins to a coffee house in downtown Salem, Oregon known as the Coffee House Cafe. Dating back to the mid-1990s, the Coffee House Cafe served as a popular meeting place and hangout for Salem's youth culture. In its later years of operation, the cafe began publishing a newsletter to engage customers in Salem's community and cultural affairs. Inspired by the reaction to the cafe's newsletter, cafe owner A.P. Walther decided to start up a publishing operation for an alternative newspaper in Salem, Oregon.

I've stopped using Grubhub and DoorDash after two restaurants asked me to

Live and learn. Until recently I'd never used restaurant ordering apps on my iPhone.

Old-fashioned guy that I was, I'd phone a restaurant and call in my order. But then I decided to join the 21st century, so I installed Grubhub and DoorDash. 

Not knowing any better, I figured that restaurants liked these apps. Or at least, they were okay with them as alternative ways of getting orders from customers other than their own web sites.

So for the past few months I've been using Grubhub and DoorDash to order from three restaurants in south Salem that I'd gotten into the habit of picking up food from on Friday afternoons, rotating my orders between them. 

No more. Because staff at two of the restaurants have told me they'd much prefer that I order from their own web site rather than an app.

This past Friday I learned from a restaurant employee that Grubhub jacks up the price of the dish that I'd ordered to $18 from the $15, I think it is, that the restaurant charges. And that's for a pick-up order, not a delivery order.

Curious about why the apps are disliked by restaurants, I Googled "why restaurants don't like grubhub doordash." Wow. A lot of horror stories popped up.

A Reddit post said:

Many restaurants hate the apps because the apps often list the restaurants without their consent, with inflated prices, overwork their staff and subject them to pushy, impatient drivers, and cause customer complaints about inflated prices on the platforms that aren't even the restaurants' doing. When you order directly from a lot of restaurant's websites, you get their actual price and their driver. Not saying it's always this way, but poke around on this sub and you will see what I'm talking about. This note is not from a restaurant that uses the Big 3 to fulfill their direct orders.

A CNN story said:

Restaurant operators complain that third-party delivery providers like Seamless, DoorDash and Uber Eats are prohibitively expensive. These platforms offer a way for customers to order from local restaurants, process restaurant payments and provide contract drivers to pick meals up from restaurants and deliver them to customers. For these services, they often charge restaurants around 30% per order. But profit margins in the restaurant industry are often razor-thin, so these fees can wipe out the restaurant’s profits or put them in the red. And if they choose to outsource delivery to these platforms, restaurants also hand off valuable customer data and control over how delivery orders show up at their customers doors.

But I wasn't using the apps for food delivery, just for ordering, since I'd pick up the food myself. Even so, the two Salem restaurants who asked me to stop using the apps said that they are hurt by Grubhub and DoorDash. 

 

The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation

Thanks to a story in the Statesman Journal, I learned that Salem's first psilocybin service center has opened on State Street. It's aptly named The Psilocybin Center. 

Husband and wife Sammy Kahuk and Dina Odeh have opened Salem’s first psilocybin service center, and a second location is being licensed.

The Psilocybin Center at 2585 State St. offers personalized “psychedelic mushrooms” sessions to anyone over the age of 21 for behavioral or physical health conditions or for spiritual or recreational purposes.

It took me a while to find the web site for The Psilocybin Center, but once I did, I was impressed. 

So much so, this afternoon I made an appointment to talk with Sammy Kahuk next Tuesday via an online video chat that takes fifteen minutes. I'm assuming he'll ask me some questions, and I can ask some of my own. 

Like, how much the sessions cost, information that I didn't notice on their web site. My leaning is to go with the middle Moderate-High Dose option below. Microdosing seems too little for me; a Hero Dose session seems a bit too much for me at the moment.

I say "at the moment," because like many people my age (I'm 75, a baby boomer), I had quite a few psychedelic experiences during some of my college years -- 1967-68 -- with LSD, mescaline, and, yes, psilocybin. 

Some of those, most of them, really, were in the "Hero Dose" range, especially when I took LSD. Walls would melt and shimmer with color. Reality was transformed into a magical mystery tour, to not coin a phrase. 

But I'm kind of wary of jumping into a really intense psychedelic experience right off the bat, since doing this at my age could be considerably different from doing it at 19 and 20.

My primary motivation now is what Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind refers to as shaking up the snow globe. My mind has fallen into some senior citizen habits that I'd like aid in revising, which psychedelics are great at. In college, everything was fresh and new, so my psychedelic experiences just added fuel to that already flexible fire.

The Google reviews for the center are all highly positive. Here's a sampling.

 

Statesman Journal screws up Salem's Tuesday ice storm forecast

I'm seeing a pattern here. Last Saturday I wrote a post, "Portland's Channel 12 gets Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong."

My gripe was that Channel 12's Mark Nelsen said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain on Saturday, January 13. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021. 

Actually, the National Weather Service was forecasting much less freezing rain for the Salem area.

That turned out to be correct, as there was little freezing rain in our area on Saturday, with no power outages, so far as I know. So Nelsen broadcast a sensationalized forecast that freaked people out, but didn't come to pass.

Fast forward to Monday, January 15, when another ice storm was being forecasted on Tuesday.

Basically the same thing happened with a Salem Statesman Journal story by Zach Urness. I made a screenshot of how the online story started out, because I suspected Urness also was sensationalizing the impact of the storm -- probably for the same reason Nelsen did, to garner more audience attention. You know, clicks, which generate advertising revenue.

As you can read below, Urness claimed that the National Weather Service was forecasting from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice for the area from Salem/Corvallis up to Portland. The Statesman Journal headline spoke of a major ice storm being likely for the Willamette Valley on Tuesday.

Actually, that wasn't true. Urness should have checked more National Weather Service sources than merely talking with the National Weather Service forecaster quoted in the story and including a NWS graphic that was on the site formerly known as Twitter, and he should have included details in his story about the amount of freezing rain being forecast for Salem.

This is what the National Weather Service web site was forecasting for Salem on Monday, when the Statesman Journal story appeared online. The Tuesday ice accumulation was shown as 0.1 to 0.3 of an inch possible, with less than 0.1 of an inch added Tuesday night.

So there wasn't a quarter to three quarters of an inch forecasted for Salem, as the Statesman Journal story implied. The amount being forecasted was a bit more than a tenth of an inch to a bit more than three tenths of an inch. In reality, on Tuesday the Salem area got around a tenth of an inch, to my understanding. That was the case at our house in rural south Salem.

It also appears that Urness either didn't read the National Weather Service Ice Storm Warning issued at 2:26 pm on Monday, January 15 or he didn't pay attention to it. Though it came out before his story was published, the Ice Storm Warning said that Salem and other central/south Willamette Valley cities could expect total ice accumulations of one tenth to two tenths of an inch.

That's less than the quarter of an inch that Urness said in his story was the low-end of the National Weather Service forecast, which obviously wasn't true.

All in all, then, this was shoddy reporting by Urness. He created a lot of anxiety among the (thankfully few) Salem residents who still read the Statesman Journal by failing to present all the facts about how much ice was being forecasted by the National Weather Service for our area. Which is too bad, because I enjoy Urness' stories about the Oregon outdoors and he's a good writer.

Portland's Channel 12 got Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except for Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CASA of Marion County helps children in an inspiring way

Last Thursday CASA of Marion County had their annual luncheon in downtown Salem's Reed Ballroom. Vanessa Nordyke, CASA Executive Director, invited my wife and me to the event, which is both a fundraiser and an opportunity to showcase what CASA does.

I was somewhat familiar with CASAs (Court Appointed Special Advocates) because my daughter, Celeste, had served as one in Orange County, California. But I didn't even know what CASA stood for until the luncheon.

I came away highly impressed. A page in the event handout describes how CASA of Marion County helps foster children.

A You Tube video I found on the CASA of Marion County web site shows how important a CASA volunteer can be in the life of a foster child.

At the luncheon, I was deeply moved -- almost to tears -- when a girl who had been helped by CASA of Marion County spoke. She started off by saying that this was the first time she had spoken to a group outside of school. 

That got a big round of applause from the luncheon attendees, which was followed by more applause during her talk, and then a standing ovation at the end. Pretty cool response for the girl's first public speaking experience. 

I can't remember all of the details of her lousy upbringing by a dysfunctional mother, so I won't attempt to describe them. What stuck in my mind was when she said that her mother didn't believe it was important for her to go to school, so her mother would pull her out of school for months at a time.

Eventually she was adopted, something that scared the girl at first. However, her foster parents treated her well for the first time in her life, and the CASA volunteer helped make her foster experience even more positive.

Even with all the problems she faced prior to being adopted, the girl said she ended up with a 3.96 high school GPA, I think it was, and because the first person in her family to go to college. What really got to me, and the other luncheon attendees, I'm sure, was the girl's statement that her tribulations ended up making her stronger and more resilient.

Listening to her talk, I couldn't help but think of my own struggles as an adolescent caused in large part by my divorced mother's alcoholism. It was just me and her facing her demons, and I didn't know how to deal with that. A supportive girlfriend with a normal family helped me through some tough times.

So while my situation in high school wasn't nearly as bad as the girl's, I could relate to her struggles caused by a mother who wasn't capable of being the parent the girl deserved. Growing up is tough enough without parental dysfunction making it much more difficult.

It was wonderful to learn how CASA of Marion County is helping foster children in our area. My wife and I, along with so many others at the luncheon, were pleased to make a donation to the organization. Consider doing so also.

Ron Eachus has died. He served the world well.

Thank you, Rachel Alexander of the Salem Reporter, for writing a marvelous tribute to Ron Eachus: Ron Eachus, "incorruptible" consumer advocate and activist, dies at 76. Here's some excerpts that give a feel for this remarkable man.

Ron Eachus, a steward of civic life in Salem and former utility regulator known for his “bulldog-like tenacity,” died from a heart condition on Saturday, Oct. 14, while hiking in Bhutan.

He was 76.

Eachus worked for over 20 years as an Oregon’s public utility commissioner, earning a reputation as a fierce consumer advocate while helping steer Oregon toward a focus on energy conservation to meet electricity needs. He became an international expert in utility regulation who helped many former Soviet countries transition to privately-owned utilities.

Friends and colleagues described a life filled with public policy and adventure, from his days organizing protests against the Vietnam War as University of Oregon’s student body president to more recent work leading Salem City Club.

“He always did work in the public interest,” said John Savage, the former director of the Oregon Department of Energy, who worked closely with Eachus and ultimately became a good friend. “He had fervent convictions, that was Ron. And he acted on them.”

...After college, Eachus worked briefly for U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver, a Eugene Democrat, but hated being in Washington D.C. He returned to his home state and was elected to the Oregon House, serving from 1985 until 1987. 

Eachus resigned midway through his term after being appointed a state public utility commissioner. He held the job until 2001 and moved to Salem soon after his appointment.

...Eachus wrote a column for the Statesman Journal on politics and also wrote for Salem Weekly.

...About five years ago, he joined Salem City Club, a nonpartisan civic group that presents public programs on issues of concern. He was in the middle of his third term as president.

“Ron was on top of everything, much more than any president I know in recent memory,” said Russ Beaton, who will serve out Eachus’ term as interim president.

...Eachus was an avid whitewater rafter who traveled the Rogue River many times and made trips to Alaska and the Colorado River.

Andie Andeen, a close friend, assumed he got into the sport while living on a rural stretch of the McKenzie River outside of Eugene as a student.

She asked him once for his thoughts on living outside the city, expecting him to say something profound about rural life.

“His comment was simply, ‘It was hard to organize protests,’” she said.

...Eachus had no spouse or children but was surrounded by friends in Salem. Andeen and Savage are organizing a public memorial. 

Eachus loved Bhutan and was interested in Buddhism, spending time with monks on his most recent trip.

“The fact that he died where he did and was able to be part of a ceremony with the monk body is poetic,” Andeen said.

I didn't know Ron well, but encountered him now and then when our activist lives intersected. Mostly we agreed on issues. Even when we didn't, I found Ron to be a likable guy whose passion for making Salem, and the world, better was evident.

The last time I saw Ron was two weeks ago, when he presided over a Salem City Club meeting. He was his usual positive self. It was sad and shocking to learn of his death. Still, given Ron's love of the outdoors and of travel, dying while hiking in Bhutan was a fitting way to go.

Five miles from Salem city limits, our neighborhood is unserved by broadband

Our neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, is only about five miles from the city limits of Salem, Oregon's capital. So it isn't like we're in Outer Mongolia -- though when it comes to broadband access, we might as well be.

For one of the things I learned by my phone conversation with a guy from the Oregon Broadband Office today, is that our neighborhood is unserved by broadband according to the federal definition: 

An unserved location is defined as a broadband-serviceable location that the Broadband DATA Maps show as (a) having no access to broadband service, or (b) lacking access to Reliable Broadband Service offered with - (i) a speed of not less than 25 Mbps for downloads; and (ii) a speed of not less than 3 Mbps for uploads; and (iii) latency less than or equal to 100 milliseconds (NOFO Section I.C.dd).

We definitely qualify as unserved, since the only non-cellular, non-satellite option our neighborhood has is crappy CenturyLink DSL, which at our house offered dismal speeds of 6-7 Mbps download and 1-2 Mbps upload.

Until Starlink came to our rescue when I was chosen to be a beta tester for this SpaceX satellite internet service. Currently it costs $120 a month for speeds that vary. At the moment I'm getting 104 Mbps download and 18 Mbps upload.

The Oregon Broadband Office guy I spoke with after I emailed that office with questions about their grant program for improving broadband in our state said that he has CenturyLink in Portland, I believe, and pays $30 a month for 200 Mbps download speed.

(He'll go nameless in this blog post, since I didn't take notes on our conversation, so don't want to run the risk of saying something that doesn't completely match what he told me. Which doesn't include the definition of "unserved" because I could check that out with some Googling.)

I was told that satellite internet isn't part of unserved and underserved broadband locations since it's available everywhere, for a steep price. And cellular broadband typically doesn't qualify since often the speed isn't reliably above 25 Mbps download.

It was a pleasant conversation for me because it gave me a chance to vent about our neighborhood's broadband woes. I told the guy that while I'm not religious, our talk sort of felt like my brief experience as a childhood Catholic when I'd go to confession. Except in this case I was complaining more than confessing.

For our neighborhood only had dial-up internet until late 2007, when I managed to bring DSL to our area by writing a pleading letter to the CEO of Qwest, which later became CenturyLink. I talked about that success in I'm the DSL King of the World!

This occurred after a Qwest broadband manager told me that even though our neighborhood was just a few miles from Bunker Hill Road, where DSL existed, Qwest would never bring DSL to our area because it would cost too much.

Then after the manager heard from the Qwest CEO, I got a phone call from him saying that, lo and behold, we'd be getting DSL. Now, I told the Oregon Broadband Office guy, I heard from the Marion County broadband coordinator a few years ago that CenturyLink is saying the same thing about bringing fiber optic broadband service to our area of about 150 homes. It'll never happen. 

The (possible) good news is that thanks to grants from both the Trump and Biden administrations, Oregon will be getting quite a bit of money to bring broadband to unserved locations like ours. I was told that $100 million from the previous administration is arriving soon, with more to come.

I was told that companies which receive contracts to expand broadband access are expected to contribute some of their own money to the project. Which is fair, because they will be the ones getting the monthly subscription fees after broadband comes to an area.

I'm hoping this will happen sooner rather than later for our neighborhood. Starlink works well for us, but it's expensive. I'd love to have fiber optic service rather than satellite internet. What's frustrating is how poorly the free market works when no broadband providers are willing to service an area like ours.

Fast reliable broadband isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. For work, for education, for entertainment, for keeping in touch with the world. 

Fairly soon, I suspect, it will be a necessity for television watching in rural area lacking cable when DirecTV and Dish go under, though they could stagger on for a while longer by merging, since they're losing customers rapidly.

With no satellite television, streaming via broadband will be the only option for many rural residents.

CarMax beat Capitol Subaru's offer on my 2020 Crosstrek

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

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

Your way on the parkway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My southern California daughter found downtown Salem cool

Last week my granddaughter, Evelyn, and daughter, Celeste, spent three days with us, having come up from their home in Laguna Niguel in Orange County so Evelyn could go on a tour of the University of Oregon. She'll be a junior at Mater Dei High School next year and is considering the U of O for college.

Here's Evelyn, Celeste, and me on the Minto-Island bridge at Riverfront Park, photo courtesy of my wife, Laurel.

Celeste lived in Salem from 1977 to 1990, when she graduated from South Salem High and headed off to the University of Arizona -- fulfilling her nefarious goal of having me pay out-of-state tuition for four years after she was born and raised in Oregon (albeit at a much lower rate than college costs these days). 

We stopped by the house on Hillview Drive that my first wife and I bought when I started working for the State Health Planning and Development Agency. It looked much the same. Celeste wanted to show Evelyn the steep hill she walked up after the school day was finished at Salem Heights Elementary School.

One afternoon we headed to downtown Salem. Celeste had spent a lot of time there during her high school years, calling herself a "mall rat." Naturally she'd seen downtown on previous visits to Salem, but it had been a few years since she'd been there.

I was curious how someone from southern California, who travels a lot both in this country and internationally in the course of her work as the Sales Manager for Silhouette, a designer eyewear company, would look upon downtown Salem.

Well, Celeste was impressed. (Patrick, her husband, couldn't make the trip, having just started a new job as manager of a Baccarat store; if you're looking for a $800 caviar bowl, look no further.)

We started off with lunch at the downtown Venti's. I had one of the best grilled cheese sandwiches in my life. All four of us enjoyed our meal. Then we walked across the street to the Reed Opera House. Celeste remembered it well from her high school days.

Evelyn and Celeste loved the Dark Wash Vintage Co. In the photos above Celeste is wearing a Saturday Night Live t-shirt she found there. The Awkward Peach Boutique also was a hit with them. 

Heading down Liberty, we stopped at Sewell Sweets for dessert. At the end of the block, The Freckled Bee drew us in. Since all four of us are progressives, we liked the sentiments in the store windows. Like:

It was great to see downtown Salem through the eyes of my daughter and granddaughter. I tend to take downtown for granted, since I'm there so often attending my thrice-weekly Tai Chi classes at Pacific Martial Arts on Court Street.

Celeste and Evelyn helped me better understand what downtown has to offer, partly because they drew me into shops that I haven't gone into on my own.

Oleg Foksha clued me in to what it's like to be a Salem builder

As I said in a post a few days ago about the 2023 Tour of Homes for the Salem area, I had an enjoyable conversation with Oleg Foksha when my wife and I visited a beautiful Foksha Homes house in southeast Salem.

Before too much time passes, I wanted to share what I remember from that conversation. Foksha is the president of the Home Builders Association of Marion & Polk Counties and an experienced builder himself obviously.

My wife and I started talking with Foksha when we asked some questions about the Tour of Homes house, and mentioned how we appreciated the large trees on the property. I then said that it irked me when builders in Salem cut down most, or all, of the existing trees in the course of developing a property.

That led Foksha to explain to me the hurdles builders face these days. I can't remember everything he said, but here's a few highlights.

His main point was that it's tough for a builder devoted to quality to make a decent profit. Foksha decried large national or regional firms who build "cookie cutter" houses in the Salem area. He said that Foksha Homes is small and family-owned.

I was told that Foksha Homes needs to price a house at about $700,000, I think it was, in order to make a profit of $65,000. Out of that he has to pay his employees and the owners of Foksha Homes a decent wage.

There are so many rules and regulations that have to be complied with by a builder, Foksha said. He noted that in older parts of town with fairly large lots and back yards, there's now an ability to build several story apartments or condos -- which can irk the people living in a neighborhood who thought its character would remain the same after they bought a house there.

Anyway, I came away from our conversation with a better appreciation of what it is like to be a builder in Salem. Because the Home Builders Association leans decidedly conservative in its political stance, and I'm a progressive, I've tended to look at builders through that lens.

But being able to hear Foksha describe his life as a builder opened my eyes to the difficulties he and his fellow builders face. And that's a good thing, given how many divisions there already are in our country between people who judge each other without really understanding what it's like to be the other person.

Photos of the million dollar houses in 2023 Tour of Homes

Last Saturday my wife, Laurel, and I toured the most expensive houses in the 2023 Salem-area Tour of Homes. Naturally we figured they'd be the most interesting, since money talks when it comes to home design.

Our first stop was the $1,586,016 (nice precise cost) house on two acres near Jefferson offered by Bergby Construction. It's a 3,947 sq. ft. one-level.

The living room had a clean modern look.

As did the kitchen.

Out back a very large water feature was partially filled. Laurel believes this area is groundwater limited, which made us wonder how neighbors on other small acreages were going to like having this home's well used to fill the pond and keep it full during dry months.

We'd love to have a covered outdoor seating area like this, but our 1973 house was built way before such was fashionable. 

The walk-in shower actually was a walk-through shower.

Past the walk-through shower were not one but two large walk-in closets. We were envious, since our closets are only suitable for being walked into by very small animals.

In the utility room there was a washer, dryer, and something else. It seemed to be some sort of device for dewrinkling clothes, maybe? Never seen anything like it before.

A great feature of the house was a separate living area the size of many stand-alone houses. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms.

In this area a walk-through shower leads to a toilet.

Then we visited a $1,650,000 house with 2,513 sq. ft. on Coates Crest Way offered by Foksha Homes. We liked this home more than the Jefferson house, largely because of the more attractive setting.

This countertop in the living room was striking. Really unusual. It looked like it was shining with light.

Which it was, being backlit with LED lights.

I also liked the look of this unusual bowl.


A retaining wall looked much better with blocks that appeared more rock-like.

Here's a wide view of the back-lit counter and dining area.

You can either watch TV or flickering flames. Or both.

An outdoor seating area has a nice view.

A walk-in closet was attractively designed.

The master bedroom has large windows well placed to reveal the beautiful surroundings.

I talked with Oleg Foksha, the builder, for quite a while. I'll share what I remember of our conversation in another blog post. Foksha shared what it is like to be building houses in Salem these days, given all of the land use rules he has to comply with. I enjoyed our conversation.

Salem Art Fair 2023 improved from last year, but still lacking old fair energy

Friday my wife, Laurel, and I went to the Salem Art Fair in Bush Park. Last year I wrote about the drawbacks of the new location mostly away from the large shady oak trees, which was necessary because of damage being caused to the trees.

On the positive side, some of the problems I noted in "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now" have been addressed, at least partially. But I also still agree with a follow-up post I wrote, "Salem Art Fair should move to Riverfront Park." 

Here's some photos I took at this year's Art Fair. I'll use my comments on them to talk about what's been improved from last year, and what's stayed the same.

As we entered Bush Park after paying at a gate, once again I was struck by the lack of intimacy that marked the Art Fair under the sheltering oak trees. Being met by a very large open area exposed to the sun (temperature was in the mid-to-high 80's on Friday) didn't fill me with enthusiasm for the event.

The children's area to the south of the large open area looked more appealing, with the backdrop of large trees. We skipped that area, heading to the first artist booths at that end of the fair. For a while I felt enthused about being at the fair, enjoying the booths and lingering at some.

It was nice to see a woman with a good voice playing her guitar at a shady location. The Art Fair needs more of this: solo entertainers sprinkled throughout the fair. We dawdled here for a bit, since shade is rare at the new Art Fair location. I'm quite heat tolerant. My wife, less so. But as we walked around in the hot afternoon sun, our desire to dawdle dwindled.

I'd drunk 16 ounces of water just before going to the fair. But I was drawn to head toward the main food/drink area at the north end of the fair after viewing just a small number of booths, because the sun and heat was getting to me. And like I said, I tolerate heat better than Laurel does.

The new main stage at the back left of this photo didn't attract nearly as many people as the old main stage did. The reason, pretty clearly, is that the area near the old stage was largely shaded and the new area is in the direct sun. Some people were sitting under awnings listening to a performer, but there wasn't room for very many.

After we speed-walked our way through the artist booths because of the sun and heat, finding the new layout easier to navigate (last year's layout made it difficult to determine whether some booths had been missed), Laurel sat down in the shade while I explored the part of the fair nearest to where the old fair used to be located. This additional children's area was pleasant, being under trees.

I felt a pang of regret for the loss of the old location when I saw a barrier fence along what used to be the main corridor of the Art Fair, filled with visitors and brimming with energy. Now it was mostly empty. (Note the angry owl warning sign on the right; that brings back memories.)

There were a few booths along the main paved trail. I figured that maybe these didn't need a vehicle to transport the art so they could be near the oak trees. Regardless, I enjoyed this taste of the old fair location.

And there were some food/drink trucks along the path. Again, this made me feel good because it reminded me of the old art fair vibe.

I found Laurel near a stage where dancers were performing. In the shade, of course. 

Leaving the Art Far, this woman asked us if we wanted to sign the petition requesting a referendum on the employee payroll tax recently passed by the Salem City Council without a vote of the people. I had to tell her that we live outside of the city limits so couldn't sign the petition. I definitely support the referendum, though, I said.

Photos of Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis releasing Great Horned Owl

Last Friday my wife, Laurel, and I attended a Wings and Wine event at Cubanisimo Vineyards in West Salem.

The main focus of the "wings" part was the release of a Great Horned Owl that had finished its rehabilitation and was ready to be returned to the wild by the folks at the Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis.

Join us for a memorable and unique opportunity to witness the remarkable journey of a rehabilitated Great Horned Owl as it takes flight and returns to the wild! This patient arrived at our center from West Salem, orphaned, hungry, and in need of help. We were unable to reunite this nestling owlet with its parents, so the journey of raising them to be wild began! Want to learn how we accomplished this patient’s successful rehabilitation story? On Friday, June 23rd at Cubanisimo Vineyards, 1754 Best Rd NW, Salem, OR 97304, you and your family can witness his return and learn how from 5:30 – 8:30 PM. 

Before I share photos of the release of the owl, here's some photos I took prior to the release when Chintimini staff showed off a couple of falcons and answered questions about the birds and their care.

I can't remember the name of this little falcon, so let's just call it Little Falcon. However, when it opened up its wings, it looked a lot more falcon'y.

The other falcon brought to the event was a peregrine falcon. It was much larger than Little Falcon. Wikipedia says that peregrines can achieve speeds over 200 mph when they dive, making them the fastest animal on earth. Its talons were scary looking. I asked if it needed to have them clipped. The answer was yes, since while a falcon is being rehabilitated, it isn't landing on rocks and such that keep talons shorter in the wild.

After drinking wine and admiring the falcons, it was time for the release of the Great Horned Owl. Since the orphaned owlet had come from West Salem, we were told that it was appropriate to release it in West Salem.

The owl had been put in a large cage as it grew up, which enabled it to fly around and practice hunting skills. Nonetheless, a Chintimini staff member said that it was impossible to predict what would happen when its cage was opened, as sometimes a bird will just sit there rather than fly off.

Us viewers of the owl release were given one task to do: stay silent. No talking before the release. No cheering after the release. The Great Horned Owl didn't need any distractions. Here we all are waiting expectantly.

The carrying case had to be unsealed, which entailed some cutting of zip ties, or whatever was holding the case shut.

The staff didn't need to worry about the owl remaining in its cage. It flew off like a rocket as soon as the door of the container was opened. You'll have to imagine a Great Horned Owl in rapid flight, as my iPhone 14 and my reflexes were utterly incapable of capturing the moment.

Since there were so many avid bird watchers at the event, that explained the impressive cameras I saw some people carrying. Perhaps an expert photographer caught the owl in flight.

Here's where the Great Horned Owl headed off to so quickly, one of the tall fir trees adjacent to the vineyard. Interestingly, as soon as the owl landed in the trees, a blackbird flew from the vineyard to the owl's location. I recall that staff said blackbirds are territorial. But since the owl is much larger than a blackbird, it wasn't going to feel threatened.

Videos and photos of 2023 Salem World Beat festival

The World Beat festival is always one of my favorite events in Salem. This year it didn't disappoint. I went this afternoon, Saturday. There's another day to the festival, so go on Sunday if you can.

It's a marvelous celebration of diversity.

I love how the booths -- and the people attending to them -- run the gamut of the world. Asia Pacific, European, Africa and Middle East, Americas. There's food, crafts, clothing, and performances representing each of these festival areas.

The Main Stage Amphitheater is where the biggest performances are. I happened by when an Aztec Dance group, Ameyalmatzatl Citlatonal, was just entering the stage. Here's a video I made of the colorful smoke-filled ceremony that preceded their true dancing.

I also took some photos with my iPhone 14 which turned out pretty well, given that I wasn't super close to the stage.

I also enjoyed watching the Miz La Fontaine Bollywood dancers. I love the music, energy, and style of Bollywood. This routine that I made a video of has a bit of disco feel mixed in at one point. I can't embed it in this post for some reason, maybe because the music was copyrighted. You can watch it on You Tube.

This booth caught my eye. Some kids were enjoying it also.


lt seemed like there were more people at the World Beat festival this year. But I recall that last year it was hotter, while today it was very pleasant, around 80.

I rarely eat crepes, but near the end of my World Beat visit I couldn't resist trying the Red Berry from this Eugene-based food truck. What I learned is that when a just-made crepe is handed to you all folded up in a cardboard cone, it's damn hot. Also, that eating a rolled up crepe can be messier than consuming one on a plate. Fortunately, the red berry stains on my lime-green t-shirt came out after some scrubbing when I got home .


l enjoy walking through this red structure that contrasts so nicely with the green trees. Reminds me of how my t-shirt looked after eating the crepe, now that I think about it.

Just as I thought, the 1970s were wet in Oregon and recent years dry

Having reached the age when I'm inclined to talk about the "good old days" as if they were truly good (usually they weren't), I'm understandably cautious about claiming that Oregon was much wetter when I moved here in 1971.

That's sort of like us old folks blabbing on about walking to school in the snow while those dang young'uns nowadays get driven in heated vehicles. OK, I grew up in a part of California where it never snowed, so that's a bad example for me.

But I do have distinct memories of much more intense rain here in western Oregon during the 1970s and 1980s compared to now. Storm after storm would roll in from the Pacific, causing it to rain for weeks on end sometimes.

That happens rarely now. Not at all in recent years. At least, that's how I recall things. So to check my memory, I fired up Google and asked "has Oregon weather changed since the 1970s." Here's what I found out.

Regarding precipitation, the section on drought in the Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment report of January 2023 contained this interesting chart.

It shows how precipitation in Oregon compares to the 1901-2000 average for every water year from 1895 to 2021. (I'm pretty sure the water year is from October to September.)

A green bar means precipitation in that year was above the long term average. A brown bar means precipitation in that year was below the long term average. The 1920s and 1930s were decidedly dry. This coincides with the dust bowl in the midwest, a horrendous drought.

The 1970s were quite wet in Oregon. Seven of the ten years were above the long term average. The 1980s had six years above average, and the 1990s six years above average, with 1996 being the wettest year ever. I remember 1996 well, as the very heavy winter rain caused two very large oak trees on our rural property to topple over.

By contrast, the 2000s were very dry in Oregon, with only one year out of ten having above average precipitation. The 2010s saw six wetter than average years. But so far in the 2020s, both 2020 and 2021 were drier than average, with 2021 being the fourth driest year since 1970, over 50 years ago.

The report says, "In 17 of the last 23 water years, Oregon’s precipitation was below average." So yeah, Oregon has been getting drier.

Regarding temperature, not surprisingly the Stacker web site shows Oregon as warming 1.8 degrees since 1970. However of the 48 states that have state-level temperature data (Hawaii and Alaska don't), Oregon ranked 46th in temperature change.

Meaning, every other state in the lower 48 other than Washington and Idah0 has experienced a greater increase in temperature than Oregon. So that's a benefit of living in the Pacific Northwest. We're getting hotter, but not so much comparatively. Salem, though, apparently has been experiencing more of an increase in temperature than Portland or Eugene.

Check out slides of the exciting re-development of Truitt Brothers cannery

There's some really encouraging stuff happening in Salem's urban core. Hey, at some point we may not need to feel like the boring-by-comparison waypoint between Portland and Eugene.

That was the upbeat message I got at today's Salem City Club program about the development of downtown and riverfront properties.

The speakers were Jordan Truitt, who used to be plant manager of the Truitt Brothers cannery just north of downtown, Jim Vu, board president of the Salem Main Street Association, and Shelly Ehenger, Urban Development Program Manager for the City of Salem.

In this post I'm just going to share the Truitt presentation. I'll discuss what Vu and Ehenger had to say in another post.

Truitt showed slides of the current plan to refashion the cannery into a vibrant mixed use development. I took photos of the slides. He started off talking about an invisible barrier between downtown and north downtown, which the cannery project will help erase.

The slide below shows the big picture of the cannery property.

The cannery property has a long history. It was first used as a cannery in 1917. The Truitt family took it over in 1973.

This was a touching slide of a multigenerational family connected to the cannery.

Canning used to be a really big deal in Salem.

Until it wasn't. Truitt said that pears from Hood River ended up costing twice as much as a can of pears from China.


After this bit of history, Truitt shifted to talking about plans for the property.

There would be true riverfront dining on a structure extending over the water.

Plenty of housing, along with retail shops.

A soccer stadium is being considered. I don't think this is the best use of the riverfront property. But I'm not a big soccer fan.

In a Zen-like comment, Truitt said "the train is the train." Adding "it will always be there."

Here's how people can help make the project become a reality.

It won't be easy. Truitt said this would be a $170 million development, with all the complexities that come with such a large project. 

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.

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.

Why Salem snow has been so much less than Portland snow

Last night on the 11 pm news on KGW, Matt Zaffino said that Salem and the rest of the central Willamette Valley would get the most snow on Wednesday and Thursday. 

At that time Portland wasn't even under a Winter Weather Advisory, which was issued only for the Central Willamette Valley and South Willamette Valley until 10 am on Thursday.

But if you've been watching the evening news on Portland television stations, you know that the Portland area has been getting a lot of snow. Here in Salem, hardly anything so far.

On the 6 pm news today, Zaffino explained that the weather system has unexpectedly stalled over the Portland/Vancouver area, with a counterclockwise circulation creating especially high snowfall in Multnomah County, while Washington County hasn't been getting as much snow.

Recently the Portland office of the National Weather Service issued some Twitter tweets that describe what is going on.

By contrast, at our home in rural south Salem it snowed pretty heavily early this afternoon, but only a little bit stuck to the ground, and it is all gone by now. This photo was taken around 1 pm today.

Nothing like what Portland has been getting. This precipitation map from my Clime weather app reflects what the National Weather Service tweets said. At the moment snow is falling well north of Salem, while Salem is in a rain zone. (Clime calls my location "Sunnyside" for some reason.)

But Salem could still get some fairly significant snow. My AccuWeather app is forecasting a total of about 1.4 inches through Thursday at 1 pm. If so, that's not a big deal, especially compared to what Portland is having to cope with. The app shows a 30% probability of 2-4 inches, though.

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.

Salem City Club examines struggles of local journalism

Today's Salem City Club program featured two local journalists, Les Zaitz, editor of the Salem Reporter, and Dick Hughes, who used to be the editorial page editor for the Statesman Journal and now is a freelance journalist.

The title of the program was "The Truth -- An Endangered Species?" But since journalists deal in the truth, and local journalism is struggling, Zaitz and Hughes made clear that the question really is whether local newspapers and other news sources are endangered.

Hughes started off by sharing some disturbing statistics. (Hopefully I've got them mostly right, since I'm just a blogger with terrible handwriting who now has to try to read his scribbled notes.)

Fifty-six percent of people say they aren't willing to pay for online news. Since 2005 a quarter of the nation's newspapers have been lost. Oregon has lost a lot; I recall it was a third. The Statesman Journal recently laid off education reporter Natalie Pate, having cut newsroom staffing by two-thirds. The pages of the Statesman Journal are laid out in Phoenix, Arizona. The Statesman Journal is printed elsewhere, which helps explain why our daily newspaper contains news that is mostly a day late.

Zaitz began his remarks by saying, "We're all in trouble. Any questions?" Thankfully, he expanded on that conclusion. 

Zaitz noted that media are a check on government power. When government controls information, it controls the people. Sadly, though, only 34% of the public trusts the media, with 38% not trusting the media.

There's a political divide here. Seventy percent of Democrats have some trust, while five-sixths of Republicans don't trust the media. Gosh, I wonder how they came to that conclusion. Methinks it has a lot to do with the guy Biden defeated in 2020.

Another reason this number is so low, Zaitz theorized, is that cable networks have betrayed America. Their mission is to present our country as being in a constant state of crisis, as that keeps people returning for their latest dose of gotcha journalism, which is always looking for scandals and corruption.

Zaitz sees the New York Times and Washington Post as contributing in their own way to the downfall of journalism, since he considers that opinions enter into their news stories. I subscribe to both the Times and Post, and sort of see what he's getting at, but I find that the line between a reporter engaging in wise analysis (good) and biased opinionating (bad) to be blurry.

There are fewer journalists than ever in this country, Zaitz said. That means fewer editors also, and reporters need to work with editors for a quality product. This is one reason journalists are making more mistakes now. 

Since journalists believe in truth, accuracy, and fairness, mistakes bother them. Journalists should be transparent, admitting to mistakes when they occur. Zaitz urged people to let a reporter know if they got something wrong. 

In the question and answer period, Zaitz and Hughes agreed that it's a problem when Google, Facebook, and other internet news sources borrow stories from newspapers and other media without paying for them. 

Zaitz noted in response to a question about the Salem Reporter's effort to get documents from the City of Salem about a payment made under suspicious circumstances to a retiring police department employee that charging an exorbitant amount for public records is almost the same as denying the request.

I asked a question of Hughes about why the Statesman Journal did away with the opinion section completely, even though seemingly that section would largely write itself through letters to the editor and guest opinions.

Hughes said that the newspaper's reasoning could have been that people don't want to be told what to think, though this strikes me as an exceedingly lame excuse, given that no one is forced to read opinion pieces, just as my wife never reads the sports section.

I find the lack of an opinion section to be a huge loss for the Statesman Journal. I still pay $10 a month for an online subscription, since 33 cents a day seems about all the Statesman Journal is worth these days.

As Hughes said in response to another question about reading things you disagree with, sometimes you agree with what you read on an editorial page and sometimes what you read makes your blood boil. Which is as it should be.

But not in Salem, since neither the Statesman Journal nor the Salem Reporter has an opinion section. That's one reason why I have an online subscription to the Oregonian.

A core message of Zaitz and Hughes is that when it comes to news, basically you get what you pay for. Journalists can't work for free. I'm pleased to pay for a subscription to the Salem Reporter because it does a good job with local news. I'm less pleased to pay for an online subscription to the Statesman Journal, because it falters with local news.

So whenever possible, pay for the news you're getting. If everyone comes to think that they should be able to get news for free from the internet, that really will be the death knell for local journalism.

Saffron Supply Company lives on in new location

A few days ago the Salem Reporter had a story about demolition beginning on the building that used to house the Saffron Supply Company and Union Gospel Mission. 

That saddened me. At the time I'd forgotten that Saffron Supply wasn't going out of business, but had moved to 1450 Front Street NE. Indeed, the Saffron Supply web site now shows their new location. 

That makes me happy. 

I first started going to Saffron Supply after my wife and I moved in 1990 to a house in rural south Salem. It needed a lot of work, including drainage from the gutter down spouts. 

That required multiple trips to Saffron Supply, where the helpful staff pointed me to the flexible plastic pipe, both perforated and non-perforated, plus connectors, that I needed to accomplish my rainwater flow improvement job.

This photo I found on the Saffron Supply Facebook page of their old location captures the wonderful spirit of this pleasantly old-fashioned hardware store. 

In 2004, soon after I started this blog, I wrote about a plumbing-related visit to Saffron Supply in "I'm the king of the world!" I called it that because my handyman skills are limited, so when I'm able to accomplish a repair, I get excited!

This is how the post started out. 

King of the world, that’s who I am all right, in my own mind at least (where it counts). For I have replaced a rusted-out leaking drain on our laundry room sink, notwithstanding my normally plumbing-challenged handyman skills. There was something tremendously fulfilling about successfully dismantling the decrepit parts and installing the fresh new parts, adding the dollop of plumber’s putty, tightening the, um, whatever-you-call-its that needed to be tightened, turning on the water, and hearing the water run down the drain with nary a drip.

The list of those I’d like to thank for enabling me to achieve this marvelous accomplishment is short: the great guys at Saffron Supply in downtown Salem, that’s the beginning and end of it. This is the sort of place that can’t be allowed to disappear in the shadow of all the Lowes, Home Depots, and the like. I shamefully admit that I have a fondness for the bright lights, neatly stocked shelves, and cheerful employees at the Lowe’s store here in Salem.

But when you don’t know much about plumbing, and are carrying a plastic bag filled with a bunch of dirty, broken plumbing parts that no longer are plumbing for you, a place like Saffron Supply is where you want to be. It looks like it hasn’t changed much in decades. Wooden bins are filled with mysterious plumbing and electrical parts. When you pay, a pad is pulled out and you get a handwritten paper receipt. No women were in evidence, either staff or customers. I was careful not to wear a batik shirt last Wednesday, knowing that I would be entering the plain denim world of Saffron Supply.

Like a real man, I forthrightly admitted my ignorance right off the bat. I held up my bag of parts and said, “Whatever all this stuff is, it isn’t working any more.” I then made a concise plea for help, making sure that I threw in the phrase “plumbing-challenged” several times. The Saffron guy then took over. He walked over to one of the wooden bins, pulled out a shiny new thing-a-ma-bob and said, “This is what you used to have.” Wow! So that’s what it used to look like thirty-three years ago when our house was built! He then grabbed various other connectors, seals, and what not, and put together a perfect replica of the drain that used to drain before it stopped draining.

So thank you, Saffron Supply, for staying in business. The helpful expertise of your staff is what Salem needed in the past, needs now, and will need in the future. Your history is impressive. Wow, since 1910, 112 years. Here's a screenshot from the Saffron Supply web site. 

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. 

Russ & Delana Beaton's 61st anniversary celebration

Tonight Russ and Delana Beaton celebrated 61 years of marriage at the Willamette Heritage Center's Dye House. Their children, Lynn, Alan, and Brenda, organized the event in a masterful fashion.

Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent. 

After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about Russ and Delana. When a microphone was put in my hand, I said something like this:

Russ and Delana strike me as the nicest people I've ever known. I'm sitting at a table with three retired Willamette University professors. [Russ, and I think Delana also, taught there for many years.] Because I'm political and like to dig for truths under the surface, I asked them if in their experience, the Beatons really are as nice as they seem to be. Each of them said, Yes, they are. The only negative thing I heard from their Willamette colleagues was, Sometimes they can be too nice. Which doesn't seem like a flaw to me. Not at all. I only wish that one day someone would say about me, "He was too nice." For sure, this will never happen.

There were lots of stories and anecdotes about the accomplishments of Russ and Delana. They've changed so many lives for the better. To give a couple of examples -- and there are many more -- Russ was instrumental in getting Oregon's highly successful land use system off the ground, and Delana has been a tireless advocate for homeless people in Salem.

Here's some photos of their wedding 61 years ago that I captured via my iPhone. 

 

It was a beautiful celebration for a beautiful couple. In a world with so much negativity, it felt healing to be in at atmosphere of well-deserved unalloyed positivity toward the Beatons and how they’ve helped others over so many years.

Near the end, Russ said "usually such praise is only heard at your funeral." Originally scheduled for last year, but Covid led to a postponement. Russ did mention that they were married in 1961, so he saw a certain symmetry in celebrating their 61st anniversary now.

Failing Statesman Journal fires two experienced journalists

As the Statesman Journal sinks further into a journalistic abyss of mediocrity, sadly its cruel corporate overlords are dragging down highly competent staff in another round of firings. The Statesman Journal staff directory hasn't been updated yet, so via these screenshots let's have faces and titles to go with the names. Currie was one of the four members of the Newsroom Leadership. Since Salem is the Oregon capital, and Radnovich was the reporter for state government/legislature, naturally the non-geniuses at the Gannett Corporation picked him to be fired -- a dumb move if the Statesman Journal wants to be a quality newspaper, which obviously isn't the goal here.

Saving enough money in newsrooms to pay for the outrageous salary of the Gannett CEO and board members does seem to be the goal. 

Don Currie's firing elicited some especially strong feelings since he had worked at the Statesman Journal for 27 years. 

Gannett believes that lowering the quality of its local newspapers by firing experienced journalists is going to help somehow. Hasn't worked so far. Won't work in the future.

Gannett, the country’s largest local news chain, is in a tailspin. The publisher of some 200 daily papers reported a significant loss in the second quarter — $54 million on revenues of $749 million.

According to Rick Edmonds, who analyzes the media business for Poynter, the company is either down or missing its targets in digital and print advertising as well as print circulation. The sole bright spot: a steady rise in paid digital circulation. Extensive layoffs are on the way. Edmonds quoted a memo from Maribel Perez Wadsworth, head of the media division, in which she said: “In the coming days, we will … be making necessary but painful reductions to staffing, eliminating some open positions and roles that will impact valued colleagues.” It’s hard to see how shrinking an already diminished product is going to help.

So we here in Salem need to get used to the idea that one day there won't be a daily newspaper in this town. Or if the Statesman Journal staggers on, it will be as a walking dead pale shadow of what newspapers used to be and still need to be.

 

Salem Art Fair should move to Riverfront Park

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

This makes a lot of sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This booth also caught my eye.

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

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

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

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

My photos and commentary on Salem 2022 Tour of Homes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurel liked how the kitchen lights had no visible bulbs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A gloriously-written ode to bicycles in The New Yorker

The May 30, 2022 issue of The New Yorker has a terrific book review by Jill Lepore that is a whole lot more than a typical review, since Lepore describes her love affair with bicycles in the course of describing Jody Rosen's "Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle."

I encourage you to read the entire piece. But if that link doesn't work for you (I'm a subscriber), here's excerpts from what was called Easy Rider in the print edition, and the title below online. The New Yorker has some of the best writers anywhere. Lepore is no exception. 

Currently I'm helping Salem Bike Vision with their proposal to build a network of protected bike lanes in Salem via a petition. Please sign it. As you'll read below, riding a bicycle is dangerous business in a country dominated by cars and trucks. Cyclists need all the protection they can get.

Bicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system. More people get places by bicycle than by any other means, unless you count walking, which is also good for you, and for the planet, but you can travel four times faster on a bicycle than on foot, using only a fifth the exertion.

People all over the world, and especially outside Western Europe and North America, get to school and work, transport goods, cart passengers, and even plow fields with bicycles. In many places, there isn’t any other choice. Bikes are cheap, and easy to fix when they break, especially if you can keep track of your Allen keys and your tire levers. Mine are on the breakfast table, because, at the moment, I have a bike stand in the kitchen.

For every car on earth, there are two bikes, one for every four people. (I refuse to count stationary bikes, including Pelotons, since they go nowhere.) “We live on a bicycle planet,” Jody Rosen writes in “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle” (Crown), a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic stories.

But roads and parking lots and entire cities are still being built for cars, even though they’re wrecking the world. Or, as bicycle advocates would have it, riffing on Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” two wheels good, four wheels bad. Two wheels are better than two wings. In a contest of humans against all other animals in the efficiency of locomotion, humans on foot are about as ungainly, or gainly, as sheep. Condors come in first. But humans on bicycles beat even birds.

...In 1899, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. Henry Ford’s Model T made its début in 1908. The next year, only a hundred and sixty thousand bicycles were sold in the U.S. In the absence of bike lanes, cyclists in all states but one have to follow the rules of something known as the Uniform Vehicle Code, first adopted in 1926.

Like jaywalking, a crime invented by the automobile industry to criminalize being a pedestrian, the U.V.C. treats bicycles as cars that go too slow. “It shall be unlawful for any person unnecessarily to drive at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic,” the U.V.C. decreed in 1930. E. B. White was among those who protested, calling for “a network of permanent bicycle paths.” (Many paths were built under the direction of Robert Moses.)

...By the nineteen-fifties, when the League of American Wheelmen disbanded and bicycles were excluded from many roads (including all of the new federal highway system), bikes had been reinvented as toys, child’s play. Grownups drove cars; kids rode bikes. Girls were supposed to ride girls’ bikes, although when, at age twelve, I inherited a girl’s three-speed Raleigh, I decided I hated girls’ bikes.

Twelve was when I first started to see clearly the price you had to pay for being a girl, the vulnerability, and right about then I got more scared of cars, too. A boy in my sixth-grade class was killed riding his bike home from school. I covered the frame of that feckless three-speed Raleigh with black duct tape, to make it meaner.

It’s bad enough being powerless, because of being a kid and, on top of it all, a girl; it’s worse when the adults are riding around in cages made of three tons of metal. It felt then, and still feels now, like being a bird flying in a sky filled with airplanes: the deafening roar of their engines, their impossible speed, the cruelty of steel, the inescapable menace, the looming sense of catastrophe, your own little wings flapping in silence while theirs slice thunderously. Black duct tape is no defense, and no disguise, but it was all I could find in the kitchen drawer.

The first time I was ever hit by a car, I was riding home from school on a robin’s-egg-blue Fuji ten-speed. I’d painted it polka-dot, strapped a milk crate to the back rack, and duct-taped a transistor radio to the crate, so I could listen to Red Sox games. Maybe I was distracted: ninth inning, pitching change. I don’t remember.

A station wagon hit me from behind; I broke its windshield, bounced off the hood, and tumbled onto the road, into oncoming traffic. I remember lying on the pavement, unable to move, watching a truck heading straight at me. Swerving to avoid me, it ran over my bike. A few minutes after I was taken away in an ambulance, my father happened to be driving by, on his way home from work, and saw my unmistakable polka-dot bike on the side of the road, its frame crushed and mangled, the milk crate and the transistor radio smashed. He fainted at the wheel and nearly crashed, too.

I’ve been hit more times since—doored, mainly, though that’s enough to cost you your life if you fall into traffic. J. K. Rowling’s left stiletto once nearly ended me; she swung open the door of a stretch limo and stepped out, pelican-legged, just as I was cruising by. I veered into traffic to avoid running over her foot and almost got mowed down by a bus. It doesn’t matter how cautious you are on a bike. Cars and trucks can kill you just by bumping into you. People in my city are killed by trucks every year.

...The biggest bicycle boom in American history, after the one in the eighteen-nineties, took place in the nineteen-seventies, even before the gas crisis. On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, bicycling activists staged protests all over the country. In San Jose, they buried a Ford. Later, in Chicago, they held a “pedal-in.” Bike sales rose from nine million in 1971 to fourteen million in 1972, and more than half of those sales were to adults.

Time announced a national bicycle shortage. “Look Ma, No Cars” was the motto of the New York-based group Action Against Automobiles in 1972. “Give Mom a Bike Lane,” a placard read at a bike-in rally in San Francisco that year. The following year, as Carlton Reid reported in “Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling” (2017), more than two hundred pieces of bike legislation, including proposals to establish bike lanes, were introduced in forty-two states.

In 1972, 1973, and 1974, bicycles outsold cars. Within a few years, though, the automobile lobby had bulldozed its way through state legislatures, and most proposals for bicycle infrastructure had been abandoned; by the time I was in college, in the nineteen-eighties, the boom was at an end.

...The latest bicycle boom began with the pandemic. In March of 2020, New York City declared bicycle-repair shops “essential businesses.” Pop-up bicycle lanes opened in cities all over the world. Roads were closed to cars and opened for bicycles. In the U.S., more than half the bicyclists riding for the first time during the pandemic, or returning to it, were women.

More people riding bikes meant more bicycle accidents—the rate of them doubled. More than a quarter of cars that hit and killed bicyclists left them there to die alone. Bike lanes, bike shares, new bike-safety laws: the rate of bicycle fatalities keeps going up all the same. Cars and trucks refuse to yield. The bike boom of the pandemic, Rosen argues, was a lot like the worldwide rewilding. Bears on street corners, cougars on cul-de-sacs, bicycles on highways. These things happened. Briefly.

“Traffic, for all intents and purposes, is back to about 2019 levels,” the head of highways in my state declared in June of 2021. The cars came back. By the end of that year, the bicycle boom had gone bust. “I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware . . . how far behind we are on bicycle and pedestrian safety,” Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, said. Republicans warned, “Democrats are coming for your cars.” No one is coming for your cars.

Meanwhile, I am avoiding the inevitable e-bike. I still ride my very, very old Bad Boy, slowpoke and getting slower every year, towing a trailer to carry books, a radio bolted to the handlebars, rusting.

Sign my petition to support protected bike lanes in Salem

Yesterday I started a petition that asks the Salem, Oregon City Council to support a proposal by Salem Bike Vision to build a network of protected bike lanes in our city.

You can sign it by clicking this link. Here's what the petition says.

Riding a bicycle in Salem should be much safer and more fun than it is now. Sign this petition to urge the City Council to add protected bike lanes to the projects in a $300 million community improvement bond measure.

I'm excited about this Salem Bike Vision proposal. A "bike lane" consisting of white lines on the edge of a busy street is no substitute for protected bike lanes that separate cyclists from traffic with a physical barrier.

A protected bike lane network can be built for $10-15 million. Adding this to the bond measure won't increase anyone's taxes, since the measure replaces an earlier bond.

Sign now, because the Salem City Council has to finalize what's in the community improvement bond by July 2022. To learn more about the proposal, Google "Salem Bike Vision" and head to their web site.

Three people have taken the lead in coming up with the plan for protected bike lanes: Virginia Stapleton, Ward 1 City Councilor; Ian Davidson, President of the Board of Directors for Cherriots; Dylan McDowell, Vice Chair of the Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board.

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.

Statesman Journal eliminates opinion section. I'm irked.

I've been a subscriber to Salem's Statesman Journal newspaper for 45 years. The paper has always had an opinion section. 

It's been my favorite part of the Statesman Journal. I enjoy reading letters to the editor. I like to peruse guest opinions by local people. Syndicated columns interest me. So do editorials written by newspaper staff, even when I disagreed with them -- which was frequent over the years.

But yesterday Cherrill Crosby, the executive editor, wrote a piece saying that the Statesman Journal is doing away with the opinion section. The reasons were lousy. 

Crosby claimed "this content does not resonate as it once did with audiences." Well, neither do newspapers as a whole. I wasn't aware that the job of newspapers is to only publish what the greatest number of people want to read. Silly me. I thought news was what newspapers were all about.

A big part of news isn't purely factual. It is interpretative, putting things into a broader context, viewing news through a lens that goes beyond who/what/when/where/why. 

That's what opinion pages have always done. Yet Crosby and her bosses at Gannett don't care about that. They aren't interested in providing the best journalism. They care only about generating enough eyeballs on Statesman Journal content to support their advertising rates.

Crosby said, "Opinion content is often cited as the reason for canceling a subscription." OK. And now I think you're going to find that a lack of opinion content also is a reason for canceling a subscription.

What's bizarre about this screwy decision is that the opinion pages can cost very little. Dump some of the syndicated columnists if you want to save money. Ask people in Salem to submit more letters to the editor and more opinion pieces.

After a bit of editing, you've got an opinion section written by citizens who aren't paid a dime by the Statesman Journal. And it adds local content to a newspaper that currently has very little of it, being mostly a rehash of USA Today.

But Crosby didn't go that route.

Instead, she chose to dump the longstanding tradition of an opinion section entirely, rather than updating it to be more appealing to readers of the paper. Judging by comments on Crosby's announcement, many subscribers aren't happy with her decision. Here's a few of the comments.

This is a blatant attempt to silence readers and guest opinions. Misinformation as the reason to stop the opinion page is a very lame excuse considering almost all of Statesman Journal's articles aren't even fact-checked by a copy editor or editor. Copy editors were part of Gannett's massive layoffs in the past decade. Let the reader decipher whether it is opinion or fact. Also if it is so unpopular then why does Time magazine have 12-16 pages of articles in a section titled "The View?" Here lies the Statesman Journal ... may it rest in my kitty litter box.

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So another way to silence the voices of the SJ readers and our communities. So sad.

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My Grandfather was part owner of this newspaper long ago and he must be spinning in his grave to see how bad this rag has become since it was swept up in Gannett's game of Pac Man in the newspaper consolidation industry. (If I wanted to read USA Today I would have subscribed to that.)

 

I wonder what the "real" reason is that brought you to this decision, and doubt seriously the one given. I find it odd timing, since we are in the throes of possibly the most important election in my lifetime.

 

Gannett presents the news like a tabloid and pushed that format down to all its owned subsidiaries. Unfortunate for all who consume the news.

 

I find it amusing that those still wearing their red hats still think this paper is too "liberal." Sure it is, if you are used to the "Daily Stormer" or FOX for your "news" consumption. I find that this paper leans middle-right (like it's parent company.)

 

It would make more sense to turn off comments on individual news stories and continue with an opinion section. One more reason to dump my over priced subscription and go to a local independent news service. The Gods of journalism are weeping.

Protected bike lane network proposed for Salem

I'm super-excited about the very real possibility that fairly soon Salem could have more than 55 miles of new protected bike lanes -- which now basically exist only in Minto Brown Park and a few blocks of downtown.

This photo showing a protected bike lane elsewhere comes from a must-see web site that describes the Salem Bike Vision. At least, you must see it if, like me, you enjoy riding a bicycle but aren't wild about riding your bike in Salem on paths that are either nonexistent or consist of painted lines on the edge of a busy road.

Here's a map of the proposed bike network.

Read the press release below to learn more about the interconnected bike network. "Interconnected" is a key word. It drives me nuts when I hear people say things like, Salem doesn't need protected bike paths because I hardly ever see anyone using the one downtown.

Well, that's because the one downtown is only on a few blocks (purple in the map above). So you can't safely get to those few blocks, and once there, you can't get anywhere else on a protected bike path. Build a network of protected bike paths and they'll be heavily used, for sure.

If you want to see the protected bike paths built, email city officials at [email protected] ASAP. As noted in the press release below, the City Council will be considering projects to include in an upcoming bond measure at meetings on April 4 and April 11.

Say you heartily support the proposal to use existing infrastructure to create the protected bike lanes, and want to see money for this in the bond measure.

Here's a copy of the March 24 press release.

Community Leaders Unveil Vision for Unified Bike System in Salem

The comprehensive system would provide more than 55 miles of new protected bike lanes and paths including a North-South and East-West bike routes with connections for all residents to safely travel throughout the city.

Salem, OR - Community leaders serving on the City Council, the Cherriots Board of Directors, and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board have jointly released a new vision for an interconnected bike system for the future of Salem.

The comprehensive bike network would utilize existing infrastructure in a way that will provide unprecedented access and direct routes for residents traveling by bicycle. Most importantly, the vision would ensure protected bike lanes that allow riders of all ages and skill levels to feel safe and comfortable.

By 2035, estimates show as many as 60,000 new residents will move to Salem. Meanwhile, new housing developments are pivoting away from car infrastructure and encouraging residents to use bikes and public transportation. Community leaders say it is imperative that the City plan for this growth with a safe and efficient system for all residents to travel the city.

“I constantly hear from residents and Neighborhood Associations that they want more bike lanes in Salem,” says Salem City Councilor Virginia Stapleton, who represents Ward 1. “This plan provides a unified and safe way to connect the entire city.”

The City of Salem is currently exploring a $300 million Community Improvement Bond and building their list of projects, which presents a unique opportunity to place a down payment on the transportation system of the future.

This plan coincides with historic increases in gas prices, leaving many residents unable to affordably travel throughout the city. A comprehensive bike system would offer a safe, affordable, and carbon-free mode of transportation that is unaffected by fluctuating gas prices.

The plan would establish designated North-South and East-West bike routes throughout the city,with numerous connecting routes leading to businesses, neighborhoods, parks, and other landmarks. The new protected bike infrastructure could be built affordably by avoiding costly land acquisition needed to widen roads.

Instead, by right-sizing travel lanes the City will have room for protected bike lanes. The end result will be safer streets for all modes of travel,including car traffic.“Cherriots has many exciting projects in the works to increase public transit options in Salem,” said Ian Davidson, President of the Board of Directors for Cherriots. “But a truly integrated transportation system means we must also invest in bike infrastructure that both an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old are comfortable riding in. This plan achieves that.”

The City of Salem is also considering the Our Salem Plan and recently adopted a Climate Action Plan. Both of these strive to make Salem more livable and climate friendly in preparation for the future. Transportation remains the largest source of planet-warming pollution in Salem as well as the whole state of Oregon. Increasing residents' access to carbon free transportation options will help significantly reduce emissions.

“The past two years of the pandemic have shown us the importance of making long-term investments in our community,” said Dylan McDowell, Vice Chair of the Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board and a member of the city’s Climate Action Task Force. “Salem has an abundance of parks and green spaces, and a unified bike system will mean that residents can safely go from home to work to natural areas without worrying about traffic or parking.”

Salem residents are encouraged to visit Bit.ly/salembike for more information about the proposed bike system and to sign in support of this vision. City Council is expected to consider a list of bond projects at its April 4th work session and April 11th Council meeting. Residents can send written comments to [email protected] or sign up for verbal public comment at both meetings.

About the Authors
Virginia Stapleton is the City Councilor for Ward 1
Ian Davidson is the President of the Board of Directors for Cherriots
Dylan McDowell is the Vice Chair of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board

I'm an old man who wears purple

It was a good day for me to wear purple. But I didn't know that when I chose a jacket to wear on a decidedly cold February day here in Salem, Oregon.

It felt like a Patagonia jacket day.

I have quite a few colors. Green, orange, black, blue, gray, and my very first Patagonia jacket, a purple one that I got for half price, probably because Patagonia had figured out that not many men wear purple.

I like the jacket. I like purple.

However, the first time I wore it to my Tai Chi class, someone said, "You're brave," because the color isn't what most men wear. So now, in a (very) mild case of PTSD, every time I look at the jacket I think of that comment.

I also can't help but think of the poem by Jenny Joseph whose famous first line is, "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple." Hey, what about old men? Can we also wear purple?

Well, obviously we can. And today seemed like a fine day to wear purple on my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping expedition. 

In the morning I'd started to re-read Anthony de Mello's book, "Awareness." He was an iconoclastic Jesuit priest who, according to the back cover, mixed Christian spirituality, Buddhist parables, Hindu breathing exercises, and psychological insight.

The book starts out with:

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

l feel more awake and alive when I wear my purple jacket. The color jolts me out of my usual slumbering routine. So reading de Mello helped spur me to go with purple. I had some matching Allbirds shoes.

Walking to my car, a feeling popped unbidden into my mind. Too much purple. You're overdoing it. The old purple jacket PTSD again. I shut up that feeling by asking myself, "Do you enjoy wearing a purple jacket and shoes?" "Yes," said the voice that speaks inside my head.

Case closed. Decision final. This old man was headed to Trader Joe's clad in purple.

Shortly after I entered the store, heading for the organic raspberries, I saw a female employee wearing a purple tutu as she stocked the refrigerated fruit shelves. I felt like telling her that we needed to form a purple club.

Soon it dawned on me that all of the Trader Joe's employees were wearing tutus. When I got to the checkout line, I snapped a photo.

I told the man wearing the purple tutu that the store dress-up day made me feel good about choosing to wear purple myself. He then clued me in to what the day was, which, if I'd given it a bit of thought, I guess I could have figured out myself.

"Today is 2/22/22. And it's a Tuesday. So Trader Joe's is celebrating all these twos by having staff wear tutus. This date won't happen again for 400 years." (In 2422.)

I felt much more comfortable in my purple jacket and shoes as I went to several other stores to complete my grocery shopping. Which is strange, since there's no reason I should ever have felt the least bit uncomfortable.

I enjoy seeing people wearing colorful clothes. I like it when women dye their hair purple, or blue, or whatever.

So why, at the age of 73, when seemingly I should feel free to do whatever the hell I want, given that there aren't all that many years left to live my life in any fashion, there's still a self-conscious sense when I put on my purple jacket?

I'm not sure. Maybe we all feel a need to both stand out from the crowd and blend in with the crowd, and those conflicting impulses pull us in different directions depending on our mood and surroundings. 

On my Strange Up Salem Facebook page, I use a photo I took at the wonderful Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, outside of Eugene. It shows one of the exuberant parades that wind through the fair periodically. 

At the Oregon Country Fair, a counter-culture celebration, it's impossible to feel like you're wrongly dressed, given the astounding variety of dress (and undress) by those attending. 

Trader Joe's helped me remember that doing what you feel like doing, which includes dressing however you like, is a pretty good general guide for life -- with the caveat that sometimes you have to do what demands to be done, even if you don't feel like it.

I told the purple tutu clad employee who checked me out, "Seeing how you and the other staff are clad today, I feel underdressed." He said something like, "Here at Trader Joe's, you can wear whatever you want. That's partly why I enjoy working here so much."

And why I enjoy shopping there so much.

For the love of dog, pave the Minto Dog Park parking lot!

Laurel Hines, my wife, is on a canine crusade to get the City of Salem to pave the horribly decrepit parking lot next to the Minto Brown dog park.

As Laurel describes in the message below that went to city officials yesterday, the parking lot is unpaved, muddy, and full of water-filled pot holes. Every other heavily used area in the Minto Brown park has a paved parking lot.

But not the dog park. 

If you agree that the parking lot should be paved after reading her message -- which includes photos showing how bad the lot is -- send an email to the Mayor and City Councilors urging them to pave the lot as soon as possible: [email protected]

Dear Mayor and City Councilors:

The City of Salem is not being fair to Salem’s dog owners! There is only one usable dog park within the city (minus an apparently small dog park only for small dogs far off on the other side of the river in West Salem). The very small and unkempt Cascade dog park is not currently open. Having only one dog park for all of the main part of Salem is a shame! 

The Minto Dog Park, our only dog park, is beloved and highly used all year around, but the parking lot has long been a muddy, rutted mess in the wet part of the year. It is the ONLY area of the park without a paved parking lot. For years we have been told that the lot will eventually be paved, but that never happens. 

Therefore, the only place to let your dog chase a ball, exercise with your dog off leash, or let it socialize with other dogs, involves a very muddy experience for you, your dog, and your car. Your car’s alignment may also take a beating from the deep potholes.

Also, in the past, the big loop trail dogs and owners use within the dog park has usually been mulched, but that hasn’t happened this year. It is currently so muddy and puddled, that walkers avoid it and trample the grass nearby instead, damaging the grassy areas. 

The parking lot has been full on recent weekend days in January that I have been there, (and quite full  even on weekdays when not raining). It is severely rutted, puddled, and dirty. Dog owners have nowhere to clean off their dogs (or shoes) before putting them back in their cars. Entrances from the field back into the lot are wet, sticky mud. 

MANY COMPLAINTS TO THE CITY

I have asked a number of other Minto Dog Park users if they have complained to any city staff about these issues. Many claim they have complained over a number of years, and all said they were frustrated that it seemed to do no good. 

When I first called the parks department myself, over 6 years ago, I believe, I was told the same thing others are still being told: that the City is aware of the problem, and that plans were in the works to do something about it. But nothing ever happens other than the addition of a water spigot and designated handicapped parking spot several years ago. At least they service the ugly portable potties. 

OTHER CITIES PUT OURS TO SHAME IN DOG PARK SENSE

The Portland area dog parks that I have visited put ours to shame, as does the Keizer Rapids dog park. Most others have rest rooms nearby and fenced areas. Salem’s Minto Park has a big advantage in size and the walking/jogging path within the dog park, but not in facilities or maintenance. All the other dog parks I have been to, other than the Independence dog park, at least have paved parking lots. 

Most Minto Dog Park users like the big dog area, with plenty of room to throw balls a long distance to exercise dogs, to let dogs run and play in a large area, and the circular path to walk or run with your dog. Most Minto Dog Park users probably prefer having no fence, so that only trained dogs are brought to the park. That factor seems to lead to fewer problems with aggressive, out of control dogs. 

But, we sure would like a decent parking lot and mulched paths, and maybe some decent restrooms. 

SMALLER YARDS INCREASE NEED

With new homes being built with smaller and smaller yards, the need for dog parks to exercise dogs has increased. How can you throw a ball or frisbee very far to exercise a large dog in a tiny yard? Leash walks aren’t enough exercise for many active breeds, especially those who need their chase instincts fulfilled by chasing balls, or playing with other dogs. 

DOGS NEED SOCIALIZING AND EXERCISE

Much recent documentation and knowledge has emerged that dogs who socialize with other dogs and other people, and get needed exercise and stimulation, are usually less dangerous, destructive, and problematic. Due to this, Willamette Humane Society and other shelters began having play groups for shelter dogs, even using them therapeutically to assess and improve dog’s behavior and well being. 

INFORMATION FROM SALEM PARK MAINTENANCE

On January 26th, I spoke to Jake Snell, the head of maintenance for Salem Parks. He said that the parking area has been periodically graded to reduce ruts (but not lately), and that the need for paving has been discussed but is not in the purview of park maintenance. He said it would be a capital expense requiring extra funding. He did not know why it was not paved long ago when the other areas were, but did say that new regulations would add some to the cost. 

He said that in the past, the path mulching was done by volunteers, but due to the pandemic or whatever, no volunteers have come forward to do it this year. I asked why the city could not pay to have that done, since there are some piles of chips already available from tree work. He seemed to say that it could be done if they now waited until a drier period to not cause more damage applying the mulch, (however, I saw some recent tractor markings on one trail, but no mulch). 

He did say that although they can’t erect permanent outhouses at the dog park due to it being in a flood plain, they could erect the wood structures around the portable potties that the other parking lots have. 

IN SUMMARY

Don’t dog park users deserve at the very least a paved parking lot and bark mulched walking path? Haven’t we dealt long enough with having the dog park be the only unpaved parking lot in Minto Brown when having pavement is even more important for leaving a wet muddy area with a dirty dog and muddy shoes? It would not be a huge expense for the City of Salem. 

Why after all these years, is it still the only highly used Minto Park area with such a horrible parking lot? Why are the portable potties not surrounded by the wooden structures like the other areas? Why can’t the city have the maintenance crew mulch the trails?

I would really like some answers to those questions.

Sincerely, Laurel Hines

Below are photos from a January 20, 2022 day at the Minto Dog Park. The first three are of the rutted, puddled dog park parking lot. The second is the muddy walking path. The last photo is of the paved lot just inside the Minto Park entrance about a mile from the dog park area, to show how different a paved lot was on the same day. 

(Imagine the difference of being able to change shoes, wipe and load up your dog on such nice dry pavement like that paved lot at the east entrance of Minto Park, as opposed to the puddled muddy ruts at the dog park lot)

 

Yelling at a grocery store clerk isn't cool. They're Covid heroes.

When I was ready to checkout after grocery shopping at the South Salem Fred Meyer store today, there were long lines at every register.

I picked the most promising line. There were just a few people ahead of me.

But one of them was an older woman who not only wasn't wearing a mask, she had a humungous amount of groceries and other items piled high in her cart.

That worried me. However, I figured that it wouldn't take very long for the clerk to handle her purchases, and those of the woman just ahead of me.

I was wrong.

For one thing, it turned out that the maskless woman was buying even more items that I originally thought. She must have had a hidden compartment in her cart, because she kept piling stuff on the conveyor belt beyond what I thought was possible.

Plus, I was too far back to hear the details of the problem that arose when it was about time for the woman to pay, but I could see the clerk reach for her phone -- which usually means a manager is needed.

It was. I'm not sure why. Maybe a dispute about the cost of an item.

Regardless, the manager's involvement took more time. All told, I guess it took at least ten minutes for the clerk to checkout the maskless woman. She ended up paying well over $400, I recall.

The woman ahead of me didn't have nearly as much stuff, so I thought it wouldn't be long before I got to the head of the checkout line.

Wrong again.

This time the reason for calling a manager had something to do with the price of a big package of Brawny paper towels. I got the impression that the woman wanted a sale price for an individual roll to be applied to each of the dozen or so rolls in the package, or something like that.

At first the clerk tried to calculate what the cost should be by using her touch screen. Then, confused, she asked a manager who was standing nearby for his help. He told her she should cancel the original paper towel purchase and enter a new price.

That didn't work either. 

The clerk picked up the phone, asked for the manager, and tried once more after getting some additional instructions about what to do. Still no luck. So she had to call the manager again.

By this point I was getting irritated. Not at the clerk. At the woman who was adamant about getting a lower price for the Brawny paper towels. The line had gotten longer behind me. Clearly the clerk was getting stressed at not being able to figure out how to put in a different price for the paper towels.

I toyed with the idea of telling the woman that I'd be glad to give her a few dollars if she'd give up on trying to get the reduced price.

Upon further reflection, though, it seemed like this wasn't wise, so I just kept adjusting my posture to look as irked at possible at the woman who was holding up the long line of shoppers behind me just so she could save a small amount of money that maybe she wasn't really entitled to anyway.

Then I heard one of those shoppers yell at the clerk. I couldn't tell what was said, just that it was a complaint about how slow her line was moving. The clerk politely said, "I'm doing the best I can." Which, she was.

The manager had to come back one more time to help the clerk adjust the paper towels price. She told him, "I don't know how to do this very well. I've got to learn how to do it." The manager was supportive. "Hey," he said, "we're not on strike, which is good. Don't worry, you're doing great." 

(Fred Meyer stores in the Portland area went on strike recently, but it only lasted a day until an agreement was reached.)

My checkout went smoothly. I told the clerk, "You deserve an easy customer after your previous two." When she handed the receipt to me I patted her shoulder and said, "Thanks for what you're doing. Much appreciated." I heard the man behind me say something similar as I left the checkout line.

We've got to remember what a tough job grocery store clerks have had in the almost two years since the Covid pandemic hit. They've got to stand there, facing irritated customers, some of whom refuse to wear a mask, not knowing if they're going to become infected during their shift. 

Yes, most of us feel stressed around the holidays, especially this year, with the highly contagious Omicron variant lurking around. But this isn't an excuse for yelling at a grocery store clerk. They're Covid heroes.

I liked Dave Chappelle's Netflix show, transgender jokes and all

Usually a joke is just a joke. Let's not over-think it, folks. Standup comedians are supposed to push the boundaries of what's socially acceptable.

And, naturally, be funny doing so.

Dave Chappelle's new Netflix show, "The Closer," succeeds on both counts in my obviously personal opinion. 


Others disagree. That's fine. If they feel that Chappelle was unduly nasty toward the LGBTQ community, with his special focus on transgender people, they're entitled to their own obviously personal opinion.

Me, I don't expect comedians to be paragons of virtue. I want them to make me laugh, cause me to look at life in an off-beat fashion, lead me to see familiar things through the lens of a comedic mind.

Tonight I finished watching The Closer. I enjoyed all 72 minutes of it. Having heard about the controversy over Chappelle's treatment of gays and transgender individuals, I was prepared to not like the show.

Instead, I didn't hear any jokes that made me think, Chappelle went too far. 

I must have a lot of company, since The Closer has a 96% positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course, I suspect many, if not most, of those who decry Chappelle's insufficient wokeness haven't seen The Closer.

They just know it's bad, because others who lack a sense of humor and want everybody to conform to their rigid view of What Can Be Spoken In Public told them to be outraged by what Chappelle says.

He ends with a moving story of a transgender woman who comes to his smaller shows in the Bay Area and laughs uproariously at his LGBTQ jokes. Having learned that she has attempted standup comedy, he invites her to open for him in a larger venue.

She bombs for 45 minutes. But she finds a seat in the front row and watches Chappelle's routine, rather than slinking into a dark corner as most comedians would.

Chappelle's telling of this story was both funny and moving.

He says that she'd been drinking quite a bit. Throughout his routine the woman and he engaged in banter about transgender issues. She turned out to be really funny. Just not during her 45 minutes on stage.

The audience was laughing. Chappelle says it was a great experience for him to have the back and forth with his transgender friend during his routine. 

When Chappelle started getting criticized on Twitter by LGBTQ activists, the transgender woman stood up for him. That caused the activists to go off on her. 

Six days later she killed herself. 

Her supposed tribe, the LGBTQ community, had turned on her because she wasn't sufficiently fanatical in her devotion to their ideological purity. Instead, Chappelle said that she was a member of his tribe, the tribe of standup comedians who honor unfettered speech rather than political correctness.

Chappelle says that the transgender woman told him that she didn't want to be understood by him. She wanted him to respect her struggle as a human being:“I don’t need you to understand me, I just need you to believe… I’m having a human experience.” Beautiful. 

Everybody struggles in one way or another. Everybody faces challenges.

Blacks. Whites. Everybody. Men. Women. Everybody. Straight people. LGBTQ people. Everybody. Religious people. Atheists. Everybody. Democrats. Republicans. Everybody. Old. Young. Everybody. 

I loved watching the faces of Chappelle's audience smile and laugh during his show. Sure, there were a few serious-looking faces. But clearly his diverse audience was enjoying Chappelle's skillful comedy.

We've got to be able to laugh at each other and with each other. No exceptions.

Blacks can make fun of whites. Whites can make fun of blacks. Straight people can make fun of LGBTQ people. LGBTQ people can make fun of straight people. Men can make fun of women. Women can make fun of men.

Nothing and no one should be off limits when it comes to comedy. If you're easily offended, don't watch edgy standup comedy.

And don't expect that those of us who enjoy a good laugh are going to take your outrage at a comedian who pushes the limits as anything other than an absurdity that deserves ridicule.

Comedians are equal opportunity slaughterers of sacred cows.

And I say this as a vegetarian. If you're a Hindu who doesn't like references to sacred cows, lighten up. If not in this life, hopefully you'll be reincarnated as a standup comedian.

Might as well end by plugging my 2017 idea for a Salem "Mingling of the Tribes" roast/fundraiser that has so far garnered precisely zero enthusiasm from anyone but me. Oh, well. These blog posts bombed, and likely so would my own standup routine were I ever to attempt one.

Salem should have an annual political roast: "A Mingling of the Tribes"
"Mingling of the Tribes" effort could help to heal divisiveness in Salem

UPDATE: The morning after I wrote this, I came across a couple of stories about Chappelle and humor. The Economist has a good piece, "Dave Chappelle for gender realism." Excerpt: 
Download Dave-chappelle-for-gender-realism

Mr Chappelle is of course foul-mouthed and shocking. He delivers an anti-Semitic one-liner in his show, chuckles as his audience gasps, then repeats it slowly, three times. Transgressing public mores, to deliver laughs, or social insight, or just to make people squirm and wonder why, has been the dominant tradition in stand-up ever since Pryor put a match to institutional racism, too. This reflects a singularly American set of conditions: high levels of social tension, a dominant place in popular culture for the most persecuted group and strongly protected free speech. Mr Chappelle, who, like Pryor and Mr Murphy is African-American and a master of many forms of comedy, calls stand-up his favourite form and an “American phenomenon”.

Because of its connection with social justice, most standup comedians, especially black ones, are of the left. But, again, the phenomenon must be edgy to be funny. So no whites are excluded from Pryor’s or Mr Chappelle’s racially loaded critiques, including the sympathetic left-wingers laughing wanly in their audiences. And that dramatic tension, between performer and fans, has increased in recent years as the activist left has increasingly presumed to police speech. A declaration in 2014 by Chris Rock, another top black comedian, that he could no longer perform for college crowds because they had become “way too conservative…[in] their willingness not to offend anybody,” was a signal cultural moment. For Mr Chappelle, who was in the process of relaunching his career around that time, it was also inspiring.

He does not seem transphobic, in fact. If his comedy has a moral theme it is that everyone is flawed and everyone should be accepted. Its force lies in showing how quickly that truth is lost when group politics takes hold. Mr Chappelle has spent much of his career railing against racial injustice. Pointing out the equally manifest reality that women lose out when sex is redefined as a state of mind is consistent with that record.

Even when justice is served—as in the advance of gay rights—his subversive mind ponders why such progress is not general. “Why is it easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it is for Cassius Clay to change his name?” he asks. “Empathy is not gay. Empathy is not black. Empathy is bisexual. It must go both ways.”

And an interview of David Sedaris in the New York Times Magazine, "David Sedaris Knows What We'll Laugh at When No One is Judging," is pertinent to the controversy over Chappelle. Humor isn't something we can choose. We find something funny, or we don't. But as Sedaris says, societal restrictions can cause us to stifle our mirth for fear of seeming politically incorrect. Excerpt:

Do you think much about what you can and can’t get away with? People say, “I can’t believe what you say onstage,” because you can’t say anything anymore. I mean, I love an old-fashioned vulgar joke. There is a joke that I’ve been reading onstage: A woman wakes up on her 40th birthday, and she goes to the drugstore and says: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The druggist says, “36?” She says, “I’m 40.” Next she goes to the butcher shop and goes: “Today’s my birthday. Can you guess how old I am?” The butcher says, “32.” She goes, “No, I’m 40.” She goes up and down Main Street. Nobody comes close to guessing her age. She gets in her car and goes to the gas station. Says to the guy, “Can you guess how old I am?” He says, “I can guess your age and your birthday. But first you have to let me fondle your breasts for a while.” She says, “OK.” Then after about five minutes, he says, “You are 40 years old, and your birthday’s today.” “How did you do that?” He goes, “I was in line behind you at the butcher shop.” The audience gives the biggest laugh from that line. But first the audience makes a noise when the gas station attendant says, “You have to allow me to fondle your breasts for a while,” and she says, “OK.” Whereas 20 years ago, her agreeing to it would have just been accepted as part of the joke.

Are you finding that the gap between what people will laugh at and what they would admit to finding funny is getting more pronounced? You know what was interesting? I did a bookstore event the other day, and I read the funniest bits from the diary.

I got nothing. Nothing. Then people said afterward, “My face hurt from laughing.” I said: “You weren’t laughing. I was here, you know.” But you turn the lights off? In a theater, the lights are all the way down, and people will laugh.

Because people behave differently when they’re not worried about any social consequences or judgments? Yeah. Especially if you’re in America and race comes up in any way, the audience freaks out. So Andrea, the woman who assaulted me, was Black. When I shape that into an essay, I think it’s important. I was let into the foyer of a building I don’t live in; that had everything to do with me being white. If you have a character who’s Black and is not a virtuous character, the audience freaks out, because they think: If I laugh, does that make me a racist? If I don’t like this person, does that make me a racist? It’s something I’ve noticed for years. The audience freaks out, and it’s by and large a white audience freaking out, and it gets worse with every passing day.

A look at how Covid was handled in Marion and Polk counties

Today the Salem City Club meeting featured a Zoom program, "Lessons Learned Combatting COVID in the Mid-Willamette Valley."

The Salem Reporter has a good story about the program.  So I'm going to focus on how I viewed what the speakers said.

Here's a screenshot of two of the speakers, Jacqui Umstead, RN, Public Health Administrator for Polk County Health Services (top) and Katrina Rothenberger, MPH, Public Health Director for Marion County Health & Human Services (bottom).

They came across as caring and competent. Almost always that's the case with public health workers. We're fortunate to have them as key leaders in the 18-month battle against the pandemic.

I haven't been impressed with how the Marion County Board of Commissioners -- three Republicans -- have handled Covid-related affairs. They've resisted the governor's public health orders and have expressed skepticism about vaccine mandates.

So Rothenberger deserves a public health medal for doing her best to get Covid under control in Marion County, since she has had to balance the politics of keeping the Board of Commissioners happy while doing what was needed based on evolving scientific understanding of the pandemic and orders from Governor Brown.

At the end of this blog post you'll find screenshots of the slides that Rothenberger and Umstead shared. Some of the content of the slides will seem cryptic without their narration, but you'll get a feel for the lessons they learned during the Year and a Half of Covid Hell.

One clear lesson I want to emphasize is how public health and prevention needs to be a much higher health care priority. It's crazy that our country has spent trillions of dollars dealing with Covid, yet an investment of mere billions would have gone a long way toward making the United States much better prepared for dealing with the pandemic when it hit our shores.

I'm reminded of a recent New Yorker article about how Costa Rica vastly improved the health of people there by taking a public health community-based approach toward health care rather than a treatment approach centered on individual problems.

Sure, treatment is necessary when prevention fails.

However, the United States is way over-balanced toward expensive medical care rather than disease prevention. The speakers noted that the first few months of the pandemic were really tough for their understaffed/underfunded public health departments until money started arriving from the federal government.

The third speaker was Cheryl Nester Wolfe, RN, MSN, NEA-BC, President and Chief Executive Officer, Salem Health. 

In a way Salem Health is the flip side of the public health departments. Lots of money. Lots of staff. High visibility. Focused on treatment rather than prevention. However, the vaccination clinics Salem Health organized at the fairgrounds were absolutely key to getting Covid under control this year -- before the Delta variant got things out of control again.

Wolfe shared this slide that shows Salem Hospital's Covid patient census since the start of the pandemic. The yellow line is breakthrough cases that had to be hospitalized, which I gather are a subset of the blue line showing all Covid patients.

She said that 91% of Covid patients are unvaccinated. 

Wolfe said the hospital was extremely busy prior to the pandemic, which had led them to plan for additional beds. When Covid hit, hospital capacity was stretched even thinner, at times surpassing 100% of traditional capacity, as shown in the figure below.

She correctly noted that Oregon has one of the lowest (maybe the lowest) ratio of hospital beds per 1,000 population in the country. So just as the pandemic showed the downside of "just in time" supply chain/inventory management, which leaves little margin for error when unexpected events happen, the same is evident with hospital beds in Oregon.

(I bear some responsibility for this, since many years ago I worked for the State Health Planning and Development Agency, which handled requests from hospitals to expand capacity and services, something we planners were very cautious about in order to keep costs down. That was good, but sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.)

During the question and answer period I submitted a written question about why Marion and Polk counties have vaccination rates quite a bit below the state average of 68% with 1+ dose. Marion County is at 62% and Polk County is at 61%. But the moderator wasn't able to ask my question before the City Club meeting ended.

As noted above, I suspect that a lack of strong support for vaccines by conservative county commissioners is part of the reason for Marion and Polk lagging the state average. There's surely quite a few other reasons also, though.

CovidActNow.org has a nice compilation of Covid-related data for the entire United States. Here's how that web site discusses the vulnerabilities of Marion County. As you can see, they cite "Minorities & non-English speakers," "Population density," and "Housing and transport challenges" as the three Very High sources of Covid vulnerability that lead to an overall High rating.

Having three clueless county commissioners isn't one of the criteria, though I think it should be.

Here's the slides that the county public health directors shared.

 

Oregon's changing demographics -- a Salem City Club talk

Today it was refreshing to hear Ethan Sharygin speak to the Salem City Club about Oregon's changing demographics. As befits the Director of the Population Research Center at Portland State University, Sharygin was 100% factual and 0% political. 

These days that ratio often is completely reversed, especially when the fact-challenged side of the political spectrum is doing the talking. So my mind relished the data-filled slides Sharygin shared. Because of Covid, we met via Zoom, which made it easy for me to grab screenshots of most of his slides.

In the course of introducing Sharygin, Russ Beaton made an interesting observation about how things have changed in Oregon during the past 133 years. In 1888 the Oregonian newspaper expressed a hope that the wealth of rural areas spills into the cities. 

Now the situation is pretty much the opposite. 

Oregon's population has been growing at 1% a year recently, while the United States as a whole has been growing at 0.7%. This enabled Oregon to snag an additional Congressional seat, leaving us with six rather than five.

I wasn't aware that generally the rate of population growth slows as the population increases. The figure above shows that Oregon's growth rate has been declining over the past 110 years. The 1900's and 1940's were marked by rapid growth in Oregon, while the 1980's saw slow growth. The gray circles are other states. In the 1900's some states had close to 8% annual growth. Recently, most states cluster around 0 to 2% annual growth.

While Oregon grew faster than the nation as a whole from 2010-20, Washington, Arizona, Idaho, and Utah grew even faster. But, hey, we whipped California's population growth ass.

Some demographic truisms are obvious. Population change is a function of births minus deaths, plus net migration. This chart shows that net migration is a volatile factor in how many people Oregon gains or loses each year. In the 1980's Oregon's population declined in three years, largely because of people leaving the state. In recent years net migration into Oregon has been going down.

This slide shows how Oregon's race/ethnicity breakdown changed from the 2010 census (left column) to the 2020 census (middle column), with the right column showing the difference between 2010 and 2020. The white population declined from 79% to 72%. Hispanic/Latino rose from 12% to 14%. Black/African American rose slightly from 1.7% to 1.9%. I don't understand the combinations of races data very well, so will let that part of the slide speak for itself.

Compared to rural areas in other parts of the country, the population in rural Oregon has been holding up fairly well. Only one county lost population, Grant, while Deschutes (where Bend is) grew the fastest. Marion County grew by 10%. Sadly, in the competition for Oregon's second largest city after Portland, Eugene (176,000)  beat Salem (175,000).

Looking at the Salem Metropolitan area, the population 18 and older increased from 74% to 76%, with a corresponding decline in those under age 18. Vacant or seasonally occupied housing units went from 6.6% to 4.7%, putting pressure on housing affordability/availability. However, Sharygin noted that the average household size has been quite steady, which apparently indicates that, say, there aren't large numbers of young people living with their parents because they can't find a place of their own.

In the Salem Metro area, the white population declined from 71% to 64%, while Hispanic/Latino increased from 22% to 25%.  The Black/African American population rose slightly from 0.8% to 1.0%.

The next slides are data from the American Community Survey of 2% of the United States population, which replaced the census long form.

Sharygin highlighted that Californians migrating to Oregon are most likely to settle in SW Oregon and Deschutes County. Overall, 46% of Oregonians were born in Oregon. I'm part of the 22% who were born somewhere other than Oregon, California, or a Pacific region state (in my case, Massachusetts). Sharygin noted that there has been a decline in migration from Mexico.

The BIPOC population (Black, Indigenous, other Person of Color) percentage is much higher among younger Oregonians. Sharygin didn't discuss the reason for this. Likely it has to do with birth rates and migration patterns. 

The life expectancy at birth for Oregonians is 82 years for women and 77 years for men. Fortunately for us 72 year old men, the life expectancy for those who make it to my age is higher. The Covid crisis should result in a further flattening of the life expectancy curve. 

The U.S. birth rate is 1.7 per woman, while Oregon's birth rate is 1.5. This puts pressure on programs like Social Security that assume population growth.

Redistricting relies on census data. This slide shows three House districts in the Salem area with their 2020 population, which needs to be equalized.

This is one proposal for redrawing the district boundaries to get an approximately equal population in each district. 

Sharygin ended with this slide, which shows where people can get more detailed census data and redistricting maps.

Five reasons to buy Kelly Williams Brown's new book

I buy and read lots of books. So many, I deserve a bookaholic diagnosis.

But at first I had some reservations about getting a new book by Kelly Williams Brown, the Salem author who wrote Adulting (about becoming a grown-up) and Gracious (a modern etiquette book of sorts).

Even though I admired the writing Brown did when she was a Statesman Journal reporter, I figured that regarding Adulting, I was already so grown-up I have one foot in the grave, and regarding Gracious, I'm at the age when you just feel entitled to act however you damn well please -- because of that one foot in the grave thing.

Easy Crafts for the Insane, though, appealed to me instantly.

Not because I have even a slight interest in crafts. Because I have considerable experience with mental illness. (The book's subtitle is A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things.)

Aside from being raised by an alcoholic mother who drove me crazy once I reached my teen years, and struggling with various anxieties for much of my life, I was diagnosed with a serious depression about four years ago. 

However, you can be perfectly mentally healthy and still hugely enjoy Easy Crafts for the Insane, even if you couldn't care less about crafts. 

Here's five reasons why.

(1) Brown is an amazing writer. There are many sentences in this book that I would die for, if I didn't already have one foot in the grave. (Have I mentioned that before?) Like, "After all, I was a 31-year-old crone wandering through the world, my very footsteps turning fertile soul to ash. My uterus, I assumed, had dried up like a tumbleweed and blown away; surely it was rolling through Montana by now." I'm so envious that she can toss out lines like that, because I could write for a million years and never say something so perfectly.

(2) Honesty bursts on every page. No doubt some of the stories in this book are embellished to some extent. Or, a large extent. Doesn't matter. What matters is that Brown unfailingly comes across as being honest about the ups and downs in her life that ended up with her being admitted to a mental hospital after attempting suicide. She has an amazing ability to see herself and others clearly, though for all of us, in retrospect most things look less murky than they did in real time.

(3) Great insights into women. I've been married for 49 years, which would qualify me for a Golden Anniversary soon aside from the minor detail of needing to combine years spent in two marriages (18 + 31). Even so, women are still a mystery to me. That's why I enjoyed the "girl talk" in the book as Brown describes her relationships with female friends. It was a treat to feel like an eavesdropper on what women talk about when men aren't around. 

(4) Brown pulls no punches. Yes, she says that the names of people have been changed to protect the innocent. Along with the guilty. Yet I liked how she didn't change the names of two local hospitals. "So I will say this again, as everyone had always said it to me: If you are in Salem and you get injured, go to Silverton Hospital. The 30-minute drive is worth it!" Read the book and you'll learn why she had a good reason to say this.

(5) It's a book like no other. OK, I really am not qualified to make this claim, since I neither read memoirs, nor craft books. However, I'm confident that no one has written a book that simultaneously is... highly humorous, deeply moving, filled with step-by-step instructions to make various crafts, and carries the reader through the ups and downs of a woman's life in a gripping fashion.

During my morning reading time, usually I read from two or three books. But as soon as I started Easy Crafts for the Insane, this was the only book I wanted to read.

It was like Kelly Williams Brown opened up the top of her head and let me rummage through her mind, exploring the nooks and crannies of a creative psyche that was capable of great accomplishments and equally great downfalls. 

This was a gift from Brown that I'm deeply grateful for. Her book has helped me to take my own troubles less seriously. Or at least, to be better able to smile some through my tears even if I'm not able to laugh them away.

Black Butte Ranch roads have lessons for Salem streets

Salem, like almost all cities, isn't a pleasant place to drive around in. The exceptions are quiet residential neighborhoods where the speed limit is low, 25 mph or a bit higher, and the streets are narrow with plenty of trees.

That's why the roads in central Oregon's Black Butte Ranch, where my wife and I have owned a 1/4 share in a vacation house for about four years, can teach Salem streets some valuable lessons.

Wikipedia says that the permanent residents in Black Butte Ranch only numbered 366 in the 2010 census. But "During the peak tourist season, the population, including guests who do not own property but are renting residences within the community, is estimated to rise to 5,000."

That's considerable. and the many residences in Black Butte Ranch require the same services as any other place. Trash trucks. Construction equipment. Fire engines. Everything that a community of just about any size needs its roads to accommodate.

Yet driving around Black Butte Ranch is highly pleasurable, as is bicycling. Here's some photos taken near our house that explain why.

The speed limit is 25 mph. There aren't any painted lines on the roads, except for bike paths that sometimes run along a road. And in places there are delightful tree islands where the road splits around them. 

I love how there aren't any reflective markers on this side of the trees to warn drivers of what's ahead.

There aren't any reflective markers on the other side of the trees either. Whenever I approach these trees, I'm jolted into increased awareness of my driving, a very good thing.

Same is true of not having lines down the middle of the road. When two vehicles approach, each has to adjust to the other -- rather than assuming that if I'm on my side of the road, everything is fine.

Behold! Cars do just fine driving on a low speed limit road with no lane markings, no side of the road markings, and large trees in the middle of two traffic lanes.

Lastly, most of the pedestrian/bicycle paths are separated from roads. (See bike path on the left.) This makes walking and biking around Black Butte Ranch safe and pleasurable. 

Obviously it wouldn't be possible to transfer how Black Butte Ranch handles its roads and bike paths directly to Salem. But it sure would be nice if the City of Salem adopted the same basic principles:

-- Keep speed limits as low as possible
-- Preserve trees and other aspects of nature whenever possible
-- Have dedicated bicycle paths wherever possible rather than painted lines on a road

Oregon is becoming a climate change hellscape

We're not quite there yet, thankfully. Oregon hasn't transitioned from a wonderful place to live into a hellscape -- "a harshly unpleasant place or environment."

But the handwriting is on the global warming wall.

Today my daughter, Celeste, her husband, Patrick, and my granddaughter, Evelyn, arrived to visit us at the Black Butte Ranch house that we have a 1/4 share in. 

They're from southern California, though Celeste was born and raised in Oregon. 

Chatting with them as we ate pizza and salad outside at the charming Lakeside Bistro, I pointed out how little snow there is on the Three Sisters mountains, and the smoky haze that probably is coming from a giant Klamath County wildfire in southern Oregon.

Both the missing snow and the wildfire are related to the drought conditions facing Oregon,

The snowpack is much below normal, with less precipitation overall and with what does fall in the mountains being abnormally tilted toward rain rather than snow. The Klamath region is in an exceptional drought. The Oregonian story linked to above says:

Trees, brush and other fuel in the area are so dry that embers can immediately ignite them in the full sun and even in the shade, Saalsaa said.

“It’s a very scary fire,” he said. “It’s moving so fast it’s creating its own weather climate.”

The wildfire has grown from 16,814 acres on Thursday to 47,554 acres Friday, 76,897 acres Saturday and 143,607 acres by Sunday morning.

Yesterday I drove from Salem to Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon. This was the first time since the massive Santiam Canyon wildfire in September 2020 that I'd been in that area.

It was shocking to see how little remains of Detroit. I also was surprised at how the views had changed from Highway 22. With so many roadside trees burned in the wildfire, then removed, the landscape was much more open. Detroit Lake was considerably lower than usual, given the drought.

While eating dinner, I told my daughter and her family that this has been a disastrous weather year for our part of Oregon.

First came the wildfires in the early fall of 2020. Here's how I described this photo in a blog post.

Yesterday I took this photo at 9 am while standing in our almost pitch black driveway. 

Smoke from what now is called the Santiam Fire was so thick, blown by the east winds in the direction of Salem, where I live, that the sun was completely obscured. All that could be seen in the sky was an eerie red glow. Later in the day it was still strangely dark, which made me think darkness at noon.

Then came the February 2021 ice storm. We were without electricity for 12 days. Along with so many other people, our property suffered a lot of tree damage. We've still got quite a bit of debris to clean up on our ten rural acres.

Last month Oregon broke all-time high temperature records. And not by a little, by a lot. Salem hit 117 degrees, the same as the record high in Las Vegas.

It's damn clear that the climate is changing due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

The most disturbing thing is, the worst is yet to come. Oregon has endured gigantic wildfires, a highly destructive ice storm, and record-breaking temperatures in just the past ten months.

But by and large the world has just been giving lip service to tackling global warming.

So it looks like things are going to have to get much worse before politicians, policy-makers, and the general public wake up to the need to dramatically alter humanity's carbon footprint.

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.

No mask, no problem -- only if you're vaccinated

Obviously there's a lot to like in today's CDC guidance that fully vaccinated people don't have to wear a mask or socially distance both indoors and outdoors, with some exceptions.

We're tired of Covid restrictions. We want life to get back to normal. We're weary of being afraid of coming down with COVID-19 just because of breathing some infected air.

Governor Kate Brown wasted no time in saying that Oregon will follow the CDC recommendations. 

Today the CDC issued new guidance for lifting mask and social distancing requirements for fully-vaccinated individuals. It is yet another sign that, if we all continue to do our part, the pandemic is coming closer to an end.

Starting today, Oregon will be following this guidance, which only applies to fully-vaccinated individuals. That means Oregonians who are fully-vaccinated no longer need to wear masks or social distance in most public spaces.

Sounds good. But a Willamette Week tweet contains a caveat.

Well, to adapt the (somewhat erroneous) "Houston, we have a problem," Salem, we're going to have a problem. 

Lots of people here don't want to be vaccinated, resist wearing a mask in indoor public places, and bristle at being told what to do Covid-wise.

So I sympathize with stores, restaurants, and other businesses who try to make sure that everyone who enters their establishment without a mask has been vaccinated. 

If they simply ask people at the door, "Are you fully vaccinated, with two weeks having passed since your last shot?," there's no way to tell whether someone is being truthful.

If they ask for a completed vaccination card, many people won't have it with them. Or they could brandish one of the fake cards that are available online.

If they decide it's too much trouble to check their patrons' vaccination status, this undermines the ability of fully vaccinated people to not wear a mask.

Why? Because no vaccine is 100% effective at stopping a Covid infection.

When vaccinated people are together, the risk of coming down with COVID-19 is minimal. But throw in a bunch of unvaccinated people, and the risk rises. (Though perhaps to less than 1%.)

Right now I'm going to be reluctant to go maskless in a store.

I'd rather go through the small discomfort of wearing a mask than increase my chance of getting sick. When most people in the Salem area are fully vaccinated, upwards of 70% ideally, I might change my mind.

I'd feel fine going maskless in a store if I could be sure that all the other customers also were vaccinated.

But unless Oregon mandates some sort of foolproof vaccination passport, a low probability, I'd rather wear a mask and be safe, than not wear one and be (hugely) sorry I got COVID-19.

The frustrating thing is how much easier it would be if everyone would just get a damn Covid shot. They're safe, effective, and widely available now. No waiting. No cost. 

Yet here in Salem we've got a thriving community of irresponsible people who ignore Covid public health measures and wrongly feel that they have a right to put others at risk by not wearing a mask or socially distancing.

The Peoples Church has the dubious distinction of having the largest workplace outbreak in Oregon, 87 cases so far. Yet the pastor vows to keep on with packed, maskless, in-person services. 

Yay, Salem! We're #1 in COVID-19 religious idiocy.

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.)

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.