Blue-Footed Musings

SMELL:

• I made basmati rice today. I love the way it smells as it’s cooking.
• The first dandelion bloomed today, and I held it up to my nose. I never realized before that dandelions have their own smell. It’s just not as strong as the scent of certain other flowers.

TOUCH:

• The weather is finally warm enough to go outside without a jacket, but the ground is still pleasantly chilly against bare feet.

SIGHT:

• Wild turkeys walked past our house this afternoon.
• The daffodils and hyacinths are coming into bloom.
• There is a bird nesting on the downspout near the corner of the house. Every time I walk past, he freaks out and zooms into the woods.

TASTE: I ate part of a navel orange this morning. It was delicious and sweet. Did you know that the cluster near the navel is actually a second orange? Food for thought.

HEARING:

• The peepers are peeping like mad, singing their spring song.
• Yesterday someone mentioned A-ha’s “Take on Me.” It got thoroughly stuck in my head, so I listened to it on my streaming service today. It’s still a great song, one of the best from that era.

As a child, I was never able to solve the Rubik’s Cube. Today I solved the smaller version with four squares per side. I was so pleased with myself that I shouted a celebratory “Woohoo!” and startled the children.

Truth is, I’ve always been slightly ashamed that I not only couldn’t solve the Rubik’s Cube but also didn’t care enough to learn how to. Solving the little one makes me feel a little less losery. And, since I had told my husband that I was certain I could solve it, and since he had expressed some, shall we say, skepticism, solving it was a sweet victory indeed!

Last Saturday I took the kids to an Easter egg hunt. It was a sunny day, the kids found a lot of eggs, and Livia got to play with her best friends from school. We had a good time.

But April is the start of tick season and since we had all walked through grass during the hunt, I decided to wash our clothing when we got home. Big mistake. When I opened up the washing machine, everything I had washed in that light-colored load was tinged with purple. Purple! How could this happen?

Well, at the Easter to-do, the kids ate some cookies, and I grabbed a napkin with which to wipe the crumbs off their faces. There wasn’t a trash can handy, so afterward I shoved that vividly purple napkin into the pocket of my brand-new jacket. I’m usually good about checking pockets before I throw things into the wash, but I somehow forgot to check that particular one. Oops.

I think it’s fair to say that clothing ought to be truly purple or not purple at all, never merely purplish. A touch of purple just makes things look dingy. My brand-new jacket and shirt, plus several other assorted garments, are now an ugly, not-quite-purple color. Chlorine bleach doesn’t work well here (thanks to the metal content of our well water), and the non-chlorine bleach that I tried was ineffective. The clothes will never look quite right again.

Who would have thought that one forgotten 5×5 square of disposable paper could be so destructive?

At 7:50, the time to which the alarm on my clock-radio is set, the local radio station is in the middle of announcing the obituaries. Death is not the subject I want to wake up to. It’s also not something I’d want to listen to while drinking my morning coffee, or during a morning commute, so I do not understand why the radio people have it scheduled so early. Death can wait at least until lunch, don’t you think?

Anyway, I’m going to have to change the settings on my clock-radio!