Life

Our family is carefully planning the holidays. For my wife’s birthday we went and saw her parents. They stayed in the dining room near the gas fireplace while we stayed near the open patio door. Masks were worn except for eating and drinking. For Thanksgiving, we’re planning on hosting one brother and his two kids. Outside, with a heater attached to a propane tank. Maybe two. And, for Christmas, maybe it’s all via Zoom. That’s not traditional or even fun but if it keeps people alive, well, it’s worth it. ...

Rt.live shows the Effective Reproduction Rate, or Rt, for the whole US and specific states. The rate for Oregon started high, came down, went up a little, came down, and is now going up. What’s really scary is My oldest is doing her freshman year of college online at home. My other two are doing their high school classes 100% online, including Intro to Industrial Arts for one and Band for the other. With the onset of bad weather, it’s been weeks since we had somebody over since we can’t socially distance in the house. ...

Gilbert Heights Elementary School Grade 6 1973-1974 Top row: unknown, John McIntosh, unknown, unknown, unknown, Liz Silva, unnknown 3rd row: unknown, Lisa Mullen, unknown, unknown, unknown, Ray Teuber?, unknown 2nd row: John Speck, unknown, me, Pat Dye, unknown, unknown, unknown, Mrs. Margeson first row: Denise Buckley, unknown, Charlotte Trapp, unknown, Debra Halvorsen?, Jim Greenslade We moved and changed school districts the year before. So I only had year at Gilbert Heights Elementary School before this photo and a year after. Still, I’m surprised I can’t remember more names. ...

There’s an excellent article that goes deep into the specifics of refilling your tank versus just exchanging it for a different Blue Rhino[1] tank. The article was written in 2013 but pretty much everything holds up. The price of propane has actually gone down in 2020 to less than $2/gallon Basically it comes down to this: Do you want to refill your tank and save $8$11? or Would you rather go to a nearby store and just exchange tanks? ...

It was both a sad and happy Halloween here in Portland. Our youngest teenager is almost 15 so we definitely didn’t have a lot of cute costumes. There were no worries about meeting up with friends to go trick-or-treating. In the end, we had two people come ring our bell so we could send candy down the chute. What made it happy was walking the dog leading up to Halloween and Halloween Eve and seeing the precautions people were taking: there were candy chutes, there were paper bags (didn’t rain here!) or plastic bags with candy inside set out, and more complicated measures for distributing candy in a socially distanced way. ...

Before we got married, my wife’s brothers and sister gave us a BBQ grill as a present. I also inherited two propane tanks from my dad. In doing some reading on re-filling propane tanks, it turns out that every tank has a date code on it. For example, this is the tank that came with the grill: Date Code of January 2001 We were married in July 2001 and the tank was made on January, 2001. ...

Right now, if you give blood, the Red Cross will test it for Covid-19 before distributing it. They say it takes about 1-2 weeks for the results to come back. It took a little longer than that for the email to come but I was also not expecting anything but negative. Still, good to know.

This year we had the worst forest fires that I can remember. Things were bad 3 years ago, when teenagers playing with fireworks set off a forest fire 40 miles from Portland. Soccer games and other sports were cancelled because of the extremely poor air quality. But this was worse. The farm where my grandfather and father lived was classified as category 3, meaning that everyone was to evacuate immediately, for several days. The house where my parents-in-law was classified as category 2, meaning that they were to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The smoke and the worry was causing so much stress that they moved to stay with a grandchild. ...