Month: September 2026

September 28, 2026 – A Tackle Box Idea

September 28, 2026 /

I am pretty proud of my boy. He is working to find his place in life. Like many recent high school graduates, he is finding that life isn’t quite like he imagined or the picture that was painted. Of course, he has a lot of me in him and there is a lot of dreamer in him. I get stuck in my toolbox fantasy where some day I am going to do this or that when I have the thing I need.

Last weekend he spent three solid days bushwhacking and trying to catch a steelhead. This is something that I always wanted to do but there always seem to be more important things, like excuses. He wasn’t successful but I think he learned a lot and I think that he will be back. That leads me to why I built this ‘tackle bucket’.

I started putting this bucket together in mid winter. At that point, I had visions of surf fishing this summer. I thought our house closing in February and then March was imminent and we would be all moved in and ready to go. A big motivator for me was I have other dreams as well, like digging for clams. I thought that maybe I could cast a device called a crab trap out and let it soak while we were digging clams. The bucket was a device to hold the catch.

This is one of those posts that I actually had planned to write in May before I suspended things. It just kept getting kicked down the line as I continued to add more tackle. Now that I am trying to get things more regular again, meaning more routine writing I thought that I would finally finish this thing that has been in draft state since April.

My bucket organizer obsession goes back to the turn of the century. I actually got my first bucket organizer as a wedding shower gift. My dad had one in the early 1990s and my first impression was how he used it. It was more like a carrying container. You put the tools that you thought that you needed and took it to the work. This is how I started as well.

I found out that as I had more than one project going, I wanted a hammer here as well as there and so I thought, I will build a dedicated tool bucket. That way I will have everything I need and I would still have other tools back at the house. These things get very heavy when you start filling them up with lots of steel tools. So, the heavier it got the more likely I was going to leave the bucket where the work was.

That worked pretty good until it didn’t. What I mean by that is my first bucket was a general carpentry bucket. But then as I started to do more electrical and plumbing, I wanted specific tools for that kind of work. I added more buckets (or bags) that were more task specific. My original thought was that these would be trade specific and that would augment my first bucket. But, what I quickly found out was that it would be a lot easier to buy another hammer rather than carry an 80lb bucket of tools containing a hammer.

Today, I have multiple tool containers. One is a carpentry bucket, one is an electrical bag, one is a plumbing caddy, one is for painting, one is for masonry and one is a supplementary fastener bag. They are all largely self sufficient. I have to say that one I reach for the most is the electrical bag. I use it for data as well as high voltage stuff. Sometimes I grab it if I want some tools because it is significantly lighter than my carpentry bucket.

If you are caught up in ogling my CLC Wild River organizer, you should know that I bought this off of Amazon at a reasonable price. I do believe that it “new” old stock as I cannot find any reference in the CLC catalog. Custom Leather Craft or CLC is another competitor to Bucket Boss. While I believe that Bucket Boss was the originator of the bucket style organizer, there are many, many competitors.

Fiskars purchased Bucket Boss in 1996 and significantly expanded their product line. They capitalized on fishing, gardening, automotive industries etc. However Fiskars sold Bucket Boss to a holding company in 2003. Since that point, their offerings have been significantly paired down to the most popular products. One current alternatives available on online is sold under the brand KastKing and marketed for ice fishing.

At this point, I do not plan on ever doing any ice fishing. I think that you can find some of that if you head to eastern Oregon but generally, it doesn’t get cold enough here. So, I added a Plano bucket cover/organizer. It has compartments that I put lead weight in but it also doubles as a seat. Home Depot sells an actual swiveling bucket seat. I bought it but I have not tried it. My thought is that I could put the seat on a second bucket when we really do go clamming. That being said, I would rather have the utility of extra storage rather than the more comfortable seat. However, if you look around you can find even thicker padding options than the Home Depot seat if comfort is more important than utility.

There is a place to add a bait or filet knife. There is pouch that is pictured as a pole holder but an ice fishing pole is two feet long, I don’t see strapping in a nine footer. I put a leader keeper in there. That way I can pre-rig my double hooks for the inevitable snag. There are two pockets for those clear tackle organizers of which I have added both. I keep hooks and swivels in there now. I have plenty of room for expansion but I kind of have a theory. What works in certain waters works. There is no reason to buy a bunch of lures without a clue about the effectiveness. I will simply add stuff over time based on what I expect to work by word of mouth or experience.

There is a carabiner on the side. I added my leader rolls but I think it is originally for a towel or gloves. My leader may end up somewhere else as a towel is a good idea, but I will have to battle test it first. And finally there was a pocket that is designed for a battery powered aerator (bait). I currently do not have anything in it but it would be a good place to put you phone or wallet.

One last thing that I added was a TEC products replacement bucket handle. I reused a bucket that has been sitting around. While buckets can be pretty tough, sunlight is pretty hard on that handle material. I recently put one on my primary tool bucket as well. It seems to help carry the very heavy loads more easily and it certainly beats a plain wire. These can be added with or without the original plastic sleeve on the handle. I have tried both.

End Your Programming Routine: Buckets and fishing are very frequently linked together. I don’t think that this is the best solution for every situation. For instance, this takes up a lot of space so I think there are better options for a boat. But if you were going to sit on the bank, instead of taking a chair, tackle box and cooler, this is kind of all in one. It seems like the bee’s knees to hold clams while you have a line out at the same time. Obviously I am speaking from theory here but it sure seems like it will work.

September 23, 2026 – This Summer I Lost My Home, Truck, Dog… and Now Cat

September 23, 2026 /

I certainly don’t mean to come off as ungrateful. For the most part, I have a pretty good life. It is now officially Fall and I was thinking about my Summer. I realized I could make a country song about it. Of course, there is a little bit of sarcasm to it. I really didn’t lose a home, I traded it. Like I posted last month, this move is going to set me back years in terms of organization an getting settled in. That is a slow go.

But I really did lose my truck. This picture is from June when my pickup suddenly stopped running in a busy intersection. I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment over an hour from home. At that time, I thought that this is a temporary setback. There were a few things that I wanted to work on anyway like the constant engine ticking. I suspected that it was some broken manifold bolts and that was a job that I was really not going to take on.

About a week later, I got a call from the mechanic saying that the engine was seized. I said give me an estimate so that I can decide if it was worth moving forward. Weeks turned into months and that was OK since I was stuck in financial limbo anyway. I couldn’t spend money or use credit until my house sale was completed.

Getting an estimate took so long that I started investigating myself. I had second thoughts about whether this mechanic was competent in the first place. I called local part stores about crate engines and all signs pointed to buying a remanufactured engine from Ford at a price of $5000. By the time you add labor and incidentals like belts, filters, etc. we were talking over $7000. That was too steep. I can buy a running version for half of that with significantly less miles as well.

As a result of financial analysis, I made the call and surrendered the title last week. I have to say that I was kind of down. I purchased that vehicle over 23 years ago. We drove from South Carolina back to Oregon in 2004. It was my daily driver until 2016, that is when I got my Mustang. All my kids drove it until last year. I was looking forward to getting it back and doing some work on it before we started talking about moving.

This is just one memory, I remember putting my kids in the back when they were babies. We always went to the same gas station in town. They grew up and started driving to the pickup to that same gas station on their own. I could have sunk the money in and I probably would have if the price was half of the estimate but this is smarter even if I was sad.

I know that I have been pretty lucky. I never had any problems with that pickup until the last and final one. I also am lucky because I haven’t had a car payment since 2020. When I sold my Mustang, I only had paid off vehicles. I also know that my Navigator is on its last legs. It has 265,000 miles on it and is on the verge of being loved to death. So, a replacement vehicle is coming onto the horizon.

You already know all about my dog. What you don’t know is that she was knocking on death’s door a couple of weeks ago. We had scheduled a follow-up veterinarian visit on recommendation of her diagnosis and the new vet offered steroids. It has helped a lot in that by the time we met with the vet, she had not eaten in a week. Now she is eating twice a day and wanting more. This is not going to prevent the ultimate end but it is allowing us to enjoy what time we have left.

That same week that we got the news about our dog our cat went missing. As of this moment, it has been about a month. On the last night we saw him, my wife said that she heard a terrible scream. We found out a couple days later that there has been a cougar alert in the area. Given that he has never been gone longer than one day, I am reasonably sure that we will never see him again.

I didn’t have quite the same relationship with the cat that I do with the dog. I did appreciate his instincts however. We found a dead mole in the grass a few days before his disappearance. In my observation, not all cats are good cats. Even the good ones take a couple of years to develop. I guess that this is the hard lesson of city moving to the forest. I never considered this to be a risk, but now I know.

Fall is also football season and we are about a month into it already depending on how you measure it. I have never played football but my nephew did and it is common knowledge that a day or two after the game is film day. Film day is when you review every detail of the previous game in hopes of identifying things to work on as well as the things that went right. Clearly, not every team/staff is equal in using that information to improve. Just like in life, identifying problems is only part of getting better. I cant say that I would have done anything different only that the result is not how I would script a ‘good summer’.

End Your Programming Routine: I think that I have told this parable before but it is worth repeating. Lobsters become very vulnerable when it is time to molt. But, without taking that scary step to grow a larger shell, they are never able to grow to full potential. I think that we as humans sometimes are so scared of pain and risk that we get stuck in our potential to do more. Of course I did not want that day to come when I signed over the title for my pickup. But, this is the step to next pickup to go another twenty plus years.

September 15, 2026 – Was It Just Me Or Am I Just Getting Old?

September 15, 2026 /

Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. For those of us that were around, it was an extremely impactful event. I was at a class learning about Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) in Charlotte, NC. We didn’t have a phone or access to constant media and so news mostly came through the grapevine. Somebody called the office and was notified by a coworker. It wasn’t until my drive home after work that I got some talk radio input about what was actually happening.

I spoke to my wife before I left and she had heard in kind of the same fashion that I did. We met at home around typical dinner time and turned on the TV. A fellow co-worker from Oregon was working his notice and moving back home called me. His TV was already packed up and asked if he could come over and watch the news. Of course we said yes, we were a country in shock and looking for answers.

The vision I will never get out of my head was the guy that decided to jump to his death from Tower 2 rather than get burned by fire. It was the front page picture on the Charlotte Observer the next day but of course it we saw the video on the news. For some people, it was so devastating that people like Peter Jennings of ABC news took up smoking again to die from lung cancer four years later.

I will never forget that the world almost stopped. The stock market took a week long hiatus and NFL games were cancelled. Of course all flights were cancelled for three days and even my wife was dismissed from work for the remainder of the week. The roads and skies were quiet, the weather was pleasant and it was just dead still.

I of course continued my class and my business didn’t stop. But, the company owners did something that almost everyone felt. They handed out bumper stickers that said “Proud to be American”. Overnight the American flag was added to every car and displayed home. I kind of felt like if your flag wasn’t visible, you were subject to ‘stink eye’ and your patriotism was in question.

There was a lot of anger. In my circle, blue collar South Carolina, revenge was highly desired. I personally felt like there was nothing to justify killing 2000 innocent civilians but I could certainly understand the anger towards the United States for imperialism, political manipulation and pseudo subjugation. There was also a lot of complicity. People were so shocked and even unified that they were willing to give up first amendment rights in the name of empathy. They accepted creation of Homeland Security and voluntary vehicle searches at the airport.

I don’t like a lot of what happened post 9/11. I don’t like the Patriot Act, the growth of government for false security or an 18 year war of futility. But you cannot beat the feeling that we as a nation had on September 12th. We were truly indivisible as people.

The event of September ended the lives of 2977 people. It effected an unofficial count of 4000-5000 people from secondary illnesses. 7073 soldiers were killed and 50,563 wounded in the middle east conflict as a result of vengnece. 7800 military contractors were killed and 1464 allied troops lost their lives in the conflict. It is estimated that nearly one million civilians died from the warfare. Another estimate of 500,000 cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) were resulting from service. I personally know of one suicide resulting from post war PTSD but I am confident that have been many more.

What I really wanted to talk abut today was the lack of remembrance. I saw a handful of articles on my Windows newsfeed but nothing like I was expecting. I thought it was going to be all day long, but it really wasn’t. I suppose I cannot blame people for not being to relate. It is like my relationship to December 7, 1941. That was something that happened 34 years before I was born. I wasn’t there, I didn’t live through it. How can I possibly relate?

I will live the rest of my life with the image of the office worker jumping out of the window. But, I was 26. My Dad is 80 now, my in-laws both passed on. We are quickly getting to the time that we were too young to be impacted or too old to do anything about it. The deeply personal impact it once had has faded with time.

End Your Programming Routine: Yes, we have a lot of problems and many of the are self-inflicted. New York City elects a self proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist and socialist and then wants to complain that he attends the 9/11 commemoration. We keep thinking that if we vote harder, this problem will get resolved. We forget those days like September 12, 2001 when we were all proud to be American regardless of how we got there. That is the spirit of Do Things that Matter.

September 1, 2026 – One Last Sunset

September 1, 2026 /

I have written about my dog Raya from time to time. She is a Covid dog, we recieved her in the early days of the lockdown June 2019. We had already paid a deposit for her in December 2018, long before the craziness of the period were known and it was trendy to get a dog since everyone was home without anything to do. Because of that, she spent her first year pretty isolated from the world except for interaction with the family.

Little did I know that isolation made her pretty skittish. I remember the first vet trip, we handed the vet tech the leash on the sidewalk and she was drug into the clinic while we waited outside. Because of that, she was initially labelled an ‘aggresive’ dog and required a muzzle for the first three years. Time has gotten her more accustomed to strangers and my trip to the vest last week there was no mention of muzzle at all.

Speaking of trips to the veterinarian, we observed some pretty rapid change of behavior about two weeks ago. My wife took an impromptu trip to the local casino and I was sleeping. I left the bedroom door open because that is what I do when she is gone at night. About three in the morning Raya started whining. I thought that my wife had finally arrived home but when I got up, she tore downstairs and so I followed. Quickly, I got the point that she wanted to go outside. I didn’t think anyone was outside because Raya typically barks rather than trying to get confrontational. But I watched out the window just in case there was a bear or a prowler or something nefarious. I saw her immediately run to the grass to urinate.

That was odd but I didn’t think anything of it. Once does not make a trend. But two days later, we noticed that she had not ate at all. I feed her every morning but some days she didn’t eat all of her food, so again I didn’t think anything of it. We thought maybe something had gotten into her bowl, so we cleaned it. I dumped the food and started with a fresh portion. Still no interest. Another day goes by and she still hasn’t eaten.

We were in the middle of deciding to make a food brand change because of conversations with our new vet about the early death of Snow Flake. So, we decided to get new food and go ahead and make the switch. A new bag, a new brand something was definitely wrong. We couldn’t get into the new vet so we made a call to the old vet to get her checked out. My wife thought that maybe she had a urinary tract infection. Other that drinking a ton of water and not eating regular food she seemed fine.

The vet took a urine same and drew blood. We went home with the understanding that we were going to be back in town two days later to pick up any prescriptions that we needed after our scheduled dentist appointment. We got the call late the next day that this was no urinary tract infection but kidney failure, potentially cancer. There was nothing that could be done.

I want to go back to late 2023. My wife was feeling pretty cruddy and spent a whole Christmas vacation (two weeks) in bed. Raya was right there as if she knew. She would lay by the bed all day long while my wife was feeling miserable. We both suspected cancer had returned but it was the sixth sense of the dog that seemed remarkable. Raya seemed to have the ability to know that things were seriously not right. Now it seems the tables have turned and we were not really in tune with it.

I have to say that this sucks. I never expected to have a dog live forever but I certainly didn’t expect that six years was going to be her lifespan. It doubly sucks considering our previous dog Snow Flake died prematurely at about seven years due to a heart defect causing overheating. I was hoping that she would live more like ten years. I was also hoping that I would observe that she was getting older and that there was a decline causing acceptance that she had lived a full and happy life. I certainly didn’t expect that I thought she was happy one day and dying the next.

I will tell you what hurts the most. I have accepted that she is going to die soon and of course I do not like it. But that we are her everything, she still is trying to do her job. The Burmese in her is watching the flock and keeping them all together and safe as she is declining each day. We are trying to get the call out to the kids and people that might want to say their goodbyes while each day it gets harder and harder.

We will make the call to euthanize if or when we see that it is appropriate. But it begs the question of when is it appropriate? The first couple of days we were hoping for a miracle. We are quite the opposite of cruel. Today she has spent most of the day laying on the floor, but when you approach she starts wagging here tail. The picture in today’s post was from last night at the beach. She was running as if nothing was wrong.

Both my wife and I think that it is cancer. I can feel some lumps in her throat in the area that I would call lymph nodes and I haven’t ever felt. I did some quick research to find that lymphoma can occur in up to 25% of all Golden Retrievers. How ironic is that that Raya was by my wife’s side the entire lymphoma treatment in 2024 and now she will be a victim of that herself.

End Your Programming Routine: I know, dogs are very personal. People that love their dogs that often make no or even negative impression on me. So I get it if this kind of falls on deaf ears, but it is a personal tragedy for me. I thought I would never care about a dog like I cared about Snow due to her very loving personality. I will admit it took me a couple of years but now I think Raya has brought something Snow never did, a loyalty to family first. Although you are not gone yet, you will be missed.