InMotion

  My wife Carol and I have always been contrarians regarding menu planning for Thanksgiving, being intermittently vegetarian all our adult lives and almost always featuring menus not including turkey on Turkey Day.   Carol has supreme confidence in whatever she gets involved with, I have supreme anxiety about achieving success in whatever I do. You know how they say “just get out there, you’ll be fine”.   Well, I have gotten out there numerous times where I have experienced it being Not Fine, which seems to confirm my fears.   I am fairly certain that this is a circular logic bullshit loop, but I digress… WARNING: the following includes details of a disturbing culinary misadventure.  But hey, I say read on because this is how we learn!  Take the path less traveled!  OK, enough of that. But I do feel better now. Living in New Orleans inspired me to learn how to make a Cajun-style gumbo. I use skills learned from a cooking class at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum combined with

  Greetings blogsters!   It’s been over two months since my last post.   I’m not on the success track outlined by blogger gurus (optimally it would be 2-3 posts per week).   But this is this, so I am happy about that. I hope you find here something funny, useful, goofy, or just of interest to you. As long-time readers know, I often write about my uncomfortable moments, so here I go again. We’re still in the plugging-in phase of our lives here in Salem, learning the layout of the city and arranging to meet new people, perhaps find some new friends.   Combining a social event with biking is a nice option for us newbies. The local bike club arranges regular weekly rides on weekends and a few weekdays. Riders meet at a local parking lot and bike out from there as a group.   This last weekend saw Saturday as likely to have the most favorable weather and so I showed up for that ride instead of the Sunday which I’d done a few times.   A gentleman I hadn’t met asked me about the black fuzzy

  Discussed in this post : struggles we face; shirts; memory; live music. I hope the hyperlinks work for you and the pages are still up, there are some sweet ones here.  My last blog post was almost 2 months ago.   My wife and I are moving into a new home so stress is high, even as we are enjoying much about the process. And our new home is wonderful.   I’m dealing with some hopefully minor health issues, but it’s requiring seeing a bunch of doctors.   Aging is getting to me.   It’s been really hard to “find time” to write.   As usual, this is the best that I can do.   In order to post I have to stop editing. Here it is. The next paragraph is not what I originally wrote. That one just disappeared mysteriously; this word processor is freaking me out.   It seems to do what it wants to do, and what it wanted to do this time was destroy a paragraph.   I thought I could retrieve it with CTRL “Z” but it didn’t work this time.   Maybe what comes next will be better.   But man, I didn’t ne

  I read three articles from recent issues of The New York Times Magazine that blew me away.    In “I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning”, Sophomore Year in a Pandemic (NYT Magazine, 5/16/21), Susan Dominus offers us a deeply moving detailed report on her 8 months spent with a group of high school sophomores and their families and teachers. If you are like me (late 60’s in age, retired, financially secure, healthy, lots of friends and family, able to exercise with joy outdoors alone), then you may also be awe-struck by how different this last 15 months has been for most other people.   Different in a challenging way (I’m tempted to say different in a bad way, although hopefully many of these other people will find the “bad” to have been “challenging” in that the lessons learned bring deeper understanding and insight into how to live and survive. It’s also true that bad things happen to good people. But I struggle to just accept that it’s happened, whatever it is. But this philosophizing is n

We are living just west of West Salem in the Lodge, our pet name for the 22 ft. single axle “Bambi” Airstream Sport that we have used for spring, summer, and fall travel since 2017. Living in it because we sold our condo in New Orleans, and our home in Salem is under construction.  There are delays. We thought we’d get in by this time, but now even the middle of June is planned but questionable. I worry about residency status for driver license and all that kind of thing, and feel as if my creative spirit is a bit tamped down as I worry, worry, worry. Also my aging body is doing stuff that adds challenges (knee, throat, brain). I am making do and it’s all manageable. I hope to post again soon. In the meantime, a little story.  Yesterday was as fine a day weather-wise as is possible. Carol and I decided to drive 4 miles from our RV park to the West Salem Safeway parking lot to avoid the busy traffic on the highway, unload our bikes, and ride along the Scenic Bikeway north of Salem for a

  My wife and I are moving from New Orleans, where we’ve lived for the last several years, to Salem, Oregon where our youngest son and his wife live. The very last stop we made on our way to the I-10 West on-ramp was to our USPS branch. I felt a little weird doing it, but I wanted answers.   Did I get them?   Here’s the story. Even before the pandemic, something was not quite right with our mail delivery.   We would go a few days with no mail, and then perhaps a week.   We’d get some magazines all at once, sometimes 2 issues of Time (different weeks) delivered on the same day! Scottie our condo mate found out that Bennie our mail carrier had retired, and substitutes were filling in until he could be replaced. OK,   I could live with that for awhile.   But then, we went 10 days without mail. I couldn’t just keep waiting, so I biked on over to USPS Bywater which is our collection and distribution branch to find out what gives. The Bywater Branch is a dark and somewhat dismal place a

  Check out this temp graph (you have to scroll down to the figure), remembering that Mardi Gras was Feb. 16! This year, the Year of the COVID, featured many challenges and disasters.   Deaths and indignities and a New Orleans Mardi Gras that was the coldest on record since 1899, when it was ONE DEGREE colder.   What the fuck does this mean?   Well, in a time of intense challenges: the “uncovering” and widespread acknowledgment of systemic racism and persistent white supremacist attitudes, persistent beliefs and behaviors promoting climate change, widening polarity and animosity between political partisans, and a shocking display of willingness to subvert democracy on the part of millions and millions of Americans, it means that we need to chill and get clear about what “the next right thing” is.   Click on that link to find an episode of the podcast Invisibilia   that I found especially inspiring last year, which dropped in late March just as SARS-CoV-2 was beginning it’s conques

  A few months ago, a friend and I were discussing the the speed with which the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was invented, tested, manufactured, and licensed for use. She was contemplating holding back and waiting rather than getting a dose as soon as her turn came. That we have a vaccine for a disease we only started being concerned about less than a year ago is unheard of. Remarkable, amazing, spectacular, revolutionary. But is it also scary?   Does the happiness associated with such a miracle give way to doubt, suspicion, and anxiety? I had been following the vaccine for COVID-19 story closely, and although I always have some suspicions when it comes to organized medicine and drug manufacturers, I had very little such skepticism in this case. I noticed that after a couple minutes, I started feeling a bit angry. I wanted to share with my friend my joy about the end of this horrible plague being in sight, while my friend was manifesting anxiety that if shared widely could lead to signif

  New Orleans!   It’s been home for my wife and I since late 2017, but we’re moving to Oregon, and that means decision time on possessions. We’ve got two big billowy down-alternative comforters at The Palace (our ironically ostentatious name for our condo) and Carol put one of them in the discard pile.   She wants to give away or toss most of what we have and reduce our belongings to only the essential and the dear, then outfit once again on arrival in Salem. She assumed Goodwill wouldn’t take it, and it was headed to the landfill.   I guess that would not be too heinous since it’ll break down easy, certainly compress down when wet. But I felt sorry for the thing, and wanted to find it a home, comforting nice people who shop at Goodwill.   A couple weeks ago when I took it there to attempt a drop-off, they said they’d take it but would much prefer it being washed first since someone (ahem) likes to keep his shoes on when watching TV from bed.   Thereby hangs a tale.   It’s no surprise