My wife, Lenie, has been practicing Christmas carols on our home piano for a couple of weeks now, and today she accompanied the Gold Beach High School choir on the piano as they went door to door serenading local businesses in Gold Beach. Only three of the local businesses, BHM, the Senior Center, and Shore Pines Assisted Living, which is a retirement home, had pianos so Lenie sang with the choir on the other stops.

The choir visited nine businesses. The last was Subway, where they literally sang for their lunch as Subway provided the group with a discounted six-foot-long Subway sandwich and free chocolate chip cookies for their efforts.

The group tried to sing at the local courthouse, but a clerk made them leave because court was in session, presided over by just-elected Judge Jesse Margolis. So they went across the street and serenaded Judge Margolis’s father-in-law, Dave Little, at the Curry County Title company. Dave will no doubt scold the young judge.

Great sounding choir. They’ll sing Christmas songs for the whole community, while the high school band plays carols, Thursday evening at the school gym. This is yet another nice little slice of small town living. Gold Beach newcomer Michael Reetz will conduct the choir and band. Reetz is adapting himself nicely to Gold Beach, doing his part to help make the community an even better place.

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Ever since they can remember, my three sons have walked out our gate at this time of year to search for “just the right” Christmas tree in the mountainous woods that surround our home. Today they made their annual trek to bring home this year’s tree. We’ll decorate it tomorrow.

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A hornet’’s nest can be a scary thing to capture, especially if you’ve ever been stung by a hornet. But when you have three young teenage boys, you always have volunteers to do most any dangerous job. All three of my sons volunteered to coordinate the capture of the big hornet’s nest we found in their clubhouse. The hornets in it were sluggish due to the colder weather, but they still moved around outside the nest menacingly.

The boys donned all sorts of long-sleeved clothes and full-faced head gear to protect themselves. They may be brave, but they’ve not stupid. My nerves were on edge as I watched them. Jake scraped the nest off with a drywall trowel and quick let it drop into a plastic bag Robby and Sam held below it. Fearless! Well, sort of! They had rehearsed a carefully choreographed evacuation plan. Here’s the wikipedia site about hornets. Our hornets don’t look exactly like any of the ones shown. Ours are bigger, longer, with more disjointed bodies. They remind me of invading aliens in my worst nightmare.

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I’ve just about finished establishing my new overflow firewood storage area. It’ll hold a little more wood than I thought — at least 6 cord. Since I can already store about 4 cord under cover, and my average winter use is about 2 cord, that will give me about 5 years worth of firewood storage, 2 years of which will be under a wood roof and the rest under a tarp. Not bad!

I gave up using my chainsaw to get out the stumps and roots in the middle of the spot I had chosen for the overflow area. There were too many rocks and dirt embedded in the roots. A running chain just needs to touch dirt and it’s dull. So I hired a neighbor, Shawn Crouse, to bring up his stump grinder and take the whole mess out.

A stump grinder is one of those super nifty machines that have an ingenious, but simple, design. Made by Carlton, it weighs 1600 pounds and its 27-horsepower motor turns a grinding wheel that contains 20 carbide teeth. The set of teeth cost a hundred dollars to replace but Shawn said he can get through about 10 big stumps with one set. Rocks tend to dull the teeth. He operated it with a remote control attached to a long cord so he could guide the action of the grinding wheel up close. One carbide bit worked its way loose during the grind so he had to stop and replace it.

  Once he was done, my sons and I laid out the rest of the skids on the ground and over the steel fence posts I put up on either side. This will keep the wood contained and off the ground. It’s nice to have a good use for the stacks of skids I have around here. Every time BHM gets in a shipment of magazines or anthologies, they are on skids (pallets), for which the magazine is charged $17 each. Highway robbery? I agree. I’ve given lots of skids away, burned some, and my kids have used them to build a clubhouse. This project used up 22 skids.

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The hummingbirds seem to be leaving our area. I’m assuming they are migrating but it is kind of early. I wonder if we’ll have an early winter. We keep three feeders outside the kitchen window, as Lenie and I both like to watch them. I take care of the feeders, mixing four parts water to one part sugar, then boiling it for a couple of minutes. They’re beautiful birds and very self-sufficient. You don’t have to worry about preventing them from migrating by leaving full feeders out too late in the season. Hummingbirds know when to migrate, their internal clocks being triggered by the growing shortness of daylight hours. They can usually avoid our cats, although once in a great while a cat will succeed in catching one. They are very pleasant to watch as you do the afternoon dishes, which often falls to me since I work out of the home office while Lenie goes to the Gold Beach office. There are lots of sites on feeding hummingbirds: Operation RubyThroat and Bird Watchers are only two of many. Hummingbirds are like colorful carp in a pond, put there by Nature to take your mind off the ordinary things of the world. You can’t help but study them and lose yourself in the natural world. They are both frenetic and serene, with their wings beating and sounding like tiny little helicopters, yet remaining nearly motionless in space as they sip the nectar from the feeder. You have ample time to study their colorful plumage, just as you have time to study the magnificent colors of a slow moving carp in a pond. This is the natural world’s transcendental meditation. No mantra required. A publishing tip — Efficiency Expert John Silveira, BHM’s senior editor, has been staying at my home for a week or so. Yesterday he was making a cup of coffee using a one-cup Melitta cone and paper filter. First he set up the cone and filter, then ground the coffee in a small cutting grinder. As he poured the ground coffee into the filter, he remarked, “You know, an efficiency expert would tell me how I’m doing everything wrong. I should have put the water on to boil first before doing these steps.” Only then did he put water in the kettle and set it on a stove burner to heat. I laughed because I was making the same mental observations of his actions. Silveira, who has known me for 43 years, probably deduced what I was thinking as I watched him. You see, I am an efficiency expert. Not by training but by birth. I could have told Silveira the exact steps to take to make his coffee in the shortest time possible. I do everything that way, whether it has to do with publishing BHM or running my life. No matter what task I approach, I quickly size up the steps to accomplish it, then prioritize the steps and do them in the most efficient order and manner possible. I do this without any effort, and no one ever had to teach me how to do it. It is simply the way I am. I am hard-wired from birth as an efficiency expert. This is a very fortunate attribute for me because I am a magazine publisher. If a publisher is not an efficiency expert, he better hire someone who is and can train him because a publisher has too many tasks to accomplish in a day to go about each task in a roundabout way. There are companies who hire themselves out as “efficiency experts” to other businesses. For a fee, they’ll examine every facet of your business operation and show you how to save time, thus money, in your operation. This is especially valuable in assembly line type operations where every movement of an employee performing repetitive tasks can usually be improved upon so the employee, and thus your company, can produce more product. Very often, it is worth hiring such experts. The service is less valuable for a magazine like BHM because the printing of the magazine is already farmed out to an efficient printer who has installed the best efficiencies in order to be able to compete for our business. What remains of our publishing operation involves a lot of thinking, and thinking is difficult to corral, especially as BHM tends to think “outside the box” of traditional publishing. If you are contemplating becoming a publisher, determine if you are a natural efficiency expert. If not, you’ll need to acquire this critical attribute unless you want to end each day with many tasks left undone.

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It’s hard to imagine a more carefree youth than my three boys and their friends have in this remote country setting near the southern Oregon coast. They have no city attractions to distract them from the fun and adventure of interacting with Nature. Not only are they far removed from the bad side of urban civilization, but they are often face to face with Nature and all its delightful displays of the wild and unexpected. I’ve talked a lot about the Rogue River near my home with its great salmon and steelhead runs, its miles of wilderness beauty and swimming spots, and its ferociousness if you are a boater and make the wrong move. But the Rogue is only one of several rivers around here. The favorite for my three boys is Pistol River, which is located only a few miles from our home. It has sand dunes that often block its outlet to the Pacific Ocean, and that has a special attraction for them. The backed up river this year unexpectedly formed a 1/2-mile long huge pond. They spent the weekend down there. My sons and three of their friends took Jacob’s four-man raft, inflated it with a foot pump on the beach, and pretended they were George Washington and his army crossing the Delaware. Once they landed on the opposite sand dune their game morphed into many other games, one after the other, as fast as their imaginations could carry them. They rafted, swam, even snowboarded down some dunes into the river. (Only mountain kids would think of bringing snowboards to the sand dunes.) They were soaked, sandy, tired, and happy at the end of each day. I was with them for both Saturday and Sunday but stayed on “the road” side of the river, intending to read a book. But I had my old 10×40 power Zeiss binoculars with me, which meant I could not only enjoy watching the kids, but I could look for whales. I spotted a pod of greys just beyond the dunes, about a half mile from what will become the river mouth when the rains begin later this month. What a sight! They were rolling in the kelp and blowing water 20 feet in the air. The whales just seemed to be hanging around, taking their time migrating to their calving grounds in Baja California in Mexico. I never got any reading done. It will be another few weeks before there is enough rain for the river to break across the sand to the ocean. The river is always changing. It’s outlet to the sea can vary by nearly a mile from year to year, so there is usually a long spit of sand for us locals to walk on. Often, after school, my boys like to stop at the Pistol River sand dunes to play. At low tide, they walk across the little tributary to Pistol River to the dunes; at high tide, they take off their sneakers and wade across. I walk on the beach, enjoying the sea air. I never get any reading done. Pistol River is a great place — an innocent and timeless place for kids. Jake, my oldest boy, turned 16 today. But he’s still a little kid in this type of country. There’s no hurry to grow up when you have places like Pistol River.

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Two of my sons are cross-country runners, one at the local grammar school and one at the local high school. I began training with Jake, the high schooler, but I ride my bicycle while he runs. Lenie has now joined us, alternately walking and jogging. Yesterday, as Jake ran off down the lower logging road, Lenie and I walked the upper one, which has turned into a beautiful young cedar forest with trees between 8 and 12 feet tall. Just about five years previous, I had walked up the same logging road with a friend who was a committed environmentalist as well as a writer for the magazine. The forest had just been felled and my friend could not hide his disgust at what he perceived as widespread environmental destruction by a logging company. I tried to explain to him that the logging represented a good use of forest land, and that I was familiar with the practices of the local timber company, Southcoast Lumber, and they did things correctly, namely, they logged, then burned, then replanted according to a very long-term logging schedule. “They have an economic stake in taking care of this land,” I said. “Thousands of homes will be built from the timber, then in another 20 or 30 years, they’ll log again and repeat the process.” I tried to explain to him that even the burning they do after logging is good for the land. “Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem of these forests. What could be more environmentally responsible than that?” He dismissed my explanation, as I knew he would. He was one of those environmentalists who seem to treat their beliefs as a religion. He blocked out explanations that showed timber companies doing any kind of enlightened logging. He simply looked at the denuded land and saw its ugliness. He couldn’t see the productive beauty that was eager to spring up as new trees. For him, logging was simply bad! Now here my wife and I were walking through this beautiful new forest. The logged timber has long ago become new homes. The land sloped away from us to the Pacific Ocean, and we could survey miles of new trees leading to the ocean. But I could see this in my imagination five years ago, amid the heaps of stumps and slash. Why couldn’t my environmental friend see that this was a responsible use of land, not a rape of a forest. Would he acknowledge it even now? I’ve lost track of him so I can’t ask him. I’ve met a lot of people like this. They are committed to a line of thought, and no amount of reasoning will sway them from their beliefs. And their thoughts DO become beliefs, as far as I can tell. Thought and reasoning implies listening to alternative views as you search for knowledge. Beliefs imply that you have reached your decision. There is no more room for talk. Too many environmentalists have become “true believers,” rather than pragmatists looking for sensible solutions to environmental problems. They have become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Companies like Southcoast Lumber are part of the solution. They are making money by caring for their forests. We’ll cut our Christmas tree out of this new growth of forest when there’s snow on the ground. We take care to cut out a crowded tree to help the timber company improve the new forest. Reminds me of a Robert Frost poem: Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though, He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. … I’ll skip to the end: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

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