Steve Fernlund and The Long Way Home

This week I’m writing about short-term vacation rentals (STR) and their impact on prices in the local housing market. It’ll take a long way home to get there, so bear with me if you can. Try as I might, I could never understand Twitter. It sucked me into a time-stealing scroll through the outrageous and the boring each day, and I never figured out how to “post” anything or gather a “following.” I'm not an influencer. So when it was taken over by one Elon Musk, a highly overrated businessman, and his villainous friends in the private equity world, I closed my account and spent that hour of Twitter each day doing something more productive. Then, another nefarious capitalist, Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta, started “Threads,” an online clone of Twitter. Once again, I struggled to figure it out. Eventually, I garnered 36 followers, quite a few more than I have with this column, yet far from the number of followers the so-called influencers have. Last week I “re-posted” a missive on Threa

My loyal readers, family, and most of my friends know that I am not undecided about how I will cast my vote for president this year.  My decision, already made, is about more than party, believe it or not.  My grandfather, who died before I reached puberty, passed on a valuable message that I’ve carried for more than six decades. He’d say, “No matter what, leave things a little better than when you found them.” That’s why the “leave no trace” ethic of the BWCAW and golf courses appeals to me.  I haven’t been in the BWCAW since the early 1970s, but I have spent a fair number of hours on golf courses. Golfers know that a well-hit ball leaves a divot and a ball landing on the green leaves a mark. The ethic is to repair your divot/mark and at least one other. Leave the course better than you found it.  During and after the most recent presidential “debate,” the media brought together panels of undecided voters for before-and-after consultations. Most of these folks' comments indicate t

Who remembers the late Gilda Radner, playing  Roseanne Rosannadanna on Saturday Night Live and proclaiming, "It's always something!" Radner, a baby boomer herself, helped my generation convey our sense of frustration with constant challenges or problems.  Those words have echoed around the Fernlund household for many weeks now as we attempted to resolve a plumbing issue that should have been relatively simple, according to YouTubers.  It all started a couple of months ago when we noticed the outflow of water from our Kohler kitchen faucet was diminishing. Like our eyesight fading and hearing going away, it was a slow but deliberate process. It might be something that I, the least handy of handymen, could fix.  The plumbing, electrical, and most other infrastructure in our house were DIY years ago, so with a house like this, it’s always something. We dove into the internet world of problem-solving. Many YouTube experts reported a similar flow problem (as an older person, I

Northshore Journal   Reading books is my favorite pastime, mainly because I can do it while I’m eating, drinking, or smoking a pipe.  On the other hand, I should never review books. The following mentions a book and some themes but isn’t a review. But this book is unparalleled if you're seeking a mind-bending exercise that will leave you questioning the very fabric of reality. Several years ago, my friend Joel asked me to join a business consulting firm he started in Portland, OR. The firm served clients in the freight transportation industry, a business I knew more than a little bit about. I’d known Joel for a long time. We “came up” in the freight brokering business during the heady years of deregulation in the 1980s. Mutual respect made working together a rewarding experience. Joel’s management and consulting philosophy centered on the science of quantum physics. This science attempts to explain how the universe works at the smallest scale. It deals in probabilities and observat