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MUSCLE MEMORY? REMEMBER THEM

Muscle memory is a warning of what you didn’t do today. Nothing is sore, nothing feels stretched, and you’ve got an inner-thigh cramp you rubbed out. That the cramp hit the evening of a big family dinner downtown Portland with a belly-dancer working the room shouldn’t matter. It just looks suspicious, as you were reminded […]

CANNON BEACH MOODS OF AUGUST 2025

MOVING ALONG BUCKET LIST: #1 KEEP GOING

Moving along means picking up and going? Not exactly. What goes and what stays is not the question of the moment. Just pick yourself up. Sounds easy? Not for everyone. But that bucket list is calling.

MODERN CONCRETE FOR A MODERN WORLD

Modern concrete is the second most used resource behind water? It sounds impossible until you look around, until you drive around, walk around. Concrete buildings, concrete highways, concrete sidewalks. You can’t eat it, drink it, but we can’t live without it. We live in concrete, and if you’re in the wrong business, you might get […]

MATERIAL WORLD, AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT

Mashing two words together to make ‘material world’ brings up a long list of ongoing problems, some more distressing than others. Scientific American shares this story from 2020:   Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world’s biomass in 1900 to on par with […]

LIFE STACK GETTING HEAVY? THEN WHAT

I call it the life stack, all the stuff you look at every day, all the crap that just sits there. You look at it in passing. It’s not crowding you, not taking space better used for something else, but it carries reminders. Eventually you sound like someone who said, “I’ve had this hanging on […]

MY TOGETHERNESS: HOW IT STARTED, HOW IT’S GOING

My togetherness started in my mom’s backyard with the girl in the blue summer dress, the one she wore when I first saw her. We seemed to get along okay in NW Portland, so I took a flier and had her meet the family. Everyone was in Eugene for my granddad’s visit from Texas. My […]

TIME TOGETHER IS NEVER ENOUGH, SO MAKE PORK BUTT PLANS

Our time together is limited, we can all agree on that, but limited by what? Together or not, our time is always shorter than expected. We get sick and die; we have an accident and die; we do nothing and still die. So why not make plans in the meantime?

GROWING UP AMONG TOUGH PEOPLE HELPS

The best thing about tough people is how nice they can be. Lucky for me, I grew up near a tough town, Coos Bay. One of my North Bend classmates said he started telling people he was from Coos Bay because he got more respect. People know Coos Bay for its toughness, North Bend not […]

THE ART AND CRAFT OF DODGING RESPONSIBILITIES

Dodging responsibilities for a picture is not what my pal Bill Shonley and I do. He’s met a ton of people so getting a shot was no big deal. To him; it was a big deal to me. It’s one of my favorites. We’re both Blazers fans, though I’ve cooled off since Big Red took […]