Blue-Footed Musings

A few weeks ago I saw a new (to me) retina specialist. He said that I’m not a good candidate for surgery, that he would not prescribe the medicines I’d been taking previously because he doesn’t think they work for my condition, and that consequently there’s nothing I can do to prevent further vision loss. It’s hard to hear that. When I was taking the medicine, at least I felt like I was doing something that might help. Now I don’t even have that little pretense of control and sliver of hope that the medicine represented.

• I finally got my permanent crown. After all the torture of the prep work in August, I was relieved that the final part of the procedure was quick and painless (whew!) and now I can chew on both sides again (yay!). The dentist says I don’t have to take any special care with it and can floss without fear, which is a very nice change after 20+ years of babying the old one.
• Amazon has a sick amount of information about me. While hunting on the Amazon website for something else, I came across a page with a literal list of the information they’ve gleaned, such as “Has a tea collection,” “Consistently purchasing fantasy book series,” “Learns and plays keyboard music,” “Goes hiking and day trips,” and so forth. They don’t have everything quite right, but they’re more right than wrong. I feel both seen and watched.
• A couple of weeks ago I picked up a couple of tiny acorns that were prettily colored in red, orange, and yellow and left them on my desk. A few days later, they’d both turned classic acorn brown. It makes sense that acorns ripen, just as children grow up, and it’s sort of sad and the opposite of sad at the same time. There’s plenty of fall color outside now, though, and I particularly like the bright and varied shades of the sassafras.

I forget if it was last year or earlier this year, but at some point my husband started seeing spotted lanterflies on the other side of town. We knew then that we’d soon see them here, and now we finally have. Almost everyone says one ought to kill spotted lanterflies on sight, and that’s what we did with the two we found, but it felt mean and futile. It was also very difficult! They’re fast and very alert, and they jump like grasshoppers. Honestly, I’m not sure that killing them is worth the effort or the bad feelings, and I may not bother next time.

I just found out today that there were more layoffs at work, including three (!) from my department. I’m still employed and grateful to be, but I feel bad for the ones who lost their jobs. I’m also feeling shell-shocked. I’d known there would be more layoffs eventually, but they gave us no warning that the time had come.

We’ve known for a few days that a nor’easter was approaching. Today we can sense its imminent arrival. The sky is overcast, the wind is gusting, and there’s a feeling of instability building in the atmosphere. I walked for a mile outside, and it was invigorating. The rain hasn’t begun yet, but I should start filling up water bottles and getting our flashlights ready soon.

Surprisingly there are still a few open houses scheduled for Saturday. I’m almost tempted, even knowing how the weather’s supposed to be, but I told my hubby that I wouldn’t make him leave the house this weekend. I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Lake News, though. Storms don’t necessarily stop people from listing houses. I expect the new listings to slow to a trickle by mid-October, but for now there’s still the hope that the perfect lake house will appear on my Zillow feed at any moment.

The summer is over. So too the traditional lake-house shopping season. Several unsold properties have already gone off market, quietly putting themselves away until next spring. But a surprising number of houses have come on the market recently, the sellers trying to take advantage of the year’s last window of opportunity: early fall.

Last week a real beaut showed up on Zillow, and it was within our price range. I called up the Realtor right away and scheduled a viewing. We arrived before she did, and the moment we stepped into the back yard, I could hear the water lapping on the shore and felt an immediate calm. The house was a classic 1940s-era cabin. I loved almost everything about it, even its dinky kitchen and its shabby old furniture, which was to be included in the sale. Being there was like stepping back in time to a safer, quieter way of life.

The house was only a seasonal, and it would have to remain so, we decided, due to its alarmingly steep driveway and total lack of other parking. That I wasn’t keen on, but I could have lived with it and all of the cottage’s visible flaws, because it had three reasonably-sized bedrooms that all had lake views, and the plot had both shade and sun, plus privacy and a level, sandy approach to the water. It was amazing.

But we looked a little deeper and found some hidden issues. It had a shallow well (which means it pulls lake water), and it needed a new septic system (because the current one was both outdated and located close to the lake, which isn’t allowed anymore). The small plot left few options for placing the new septic, and the relocation might have required the well to be moved, too. We knew from visiting another cottage with similar issues that the fix could cost a small fortune.

Even that we might have managed in other circumstances, but the cottage was being sold as a 3-bedroom and the town had it listed as a 1-bedroom–a discrepancy that could have caused issues later–and the seller had set a Sunday deadline for offers. That deadline left us with no time to talk Town Hall, septic installers, our lawyer, or anyone else who could have helped us to understand what we might be getting ourselves into and what contingencies we’d need to put in our offer. If only we’d a had a few more days! But we didn’t, and we couldn’t afford the risk, so we had to let it go.

By Monday it was listed as “sale pending.” I’d known it would be, but I’m nonetheless a little heartbroken, and I’ve nicknamed that lake house “The One That Got Away.”

Marshall has shown little interest in college. I think he’d rather go than not, the alternative being to get a job immediately after graduation, but he doesn’t want to do the legwork of finding schools and applying to them. I’ve been pushing him, though, and we now at least have an understanding of what he’d like to study and a small list of potential schools. We also know how and when to apply. That’s all good.

But I’m suffering from some major sticker shock. I knew college had gone up significantly in price, obviously. I hadn’t realized quite how much. Each school we looked at was more expensive than the next (my alma mater’s current price tag, which I looked up purely for ha-has, is $98,419 per year. JFC.). The schools all say that most of their students get some form of aid, so presumably we’d pay less than the full amount, but the numbers are still appalling.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Oscar Wilde

Wilde sure got that right. I’ve always felt that way, particularly about financial documents and receipts, which experts warn must be carefully disposed of. As a consequence, there were years during which I kept all my documents and receipts. I mean literally every single one, including the trivial ones, rather than figure out the best way to get rid of them. They were all sitting in a box that was taking up too much space in my home, so finally I started looking through them and disposing of them individually. I found all sorts of interesting things among them, including . . .

• The receipt for my piano. OMG, I spent more on it than I had remembered!
• The contract for my wedding photographer.
• ATM receipts from England.
• A Columbia House bill. I bought so many CDs from Columbia House back in the day. It was stupid at the time, given how little money I had, but it left me with a great CD collection.
• A 2005 packing slip from Miles Kimball for extra apple peeler blades that I probably still haven’t used, though I still have the peeler.
• A check register for Dime Bank. I have fond memories of the old Dime Bank near my parents’ house. It’s where I got my first savings account as a child, and I had a checking account there when I first got out of college. It was bought out by a series of larger banks, though, and who knows what the bank name is now.
• A spending receipt from one of the cruises we took. It’s all bar drinks and bingo.
• An envelope from the business in VA where my hubby used to work.
• Printouts from the eBay auctions in which I bought my antique glass candy containers. I can see now exactly how much I paid for each one. They haven’t increased in value and in some cases may even have decreased. That’s probably because they originated in the 1920s-1940s, and there are fewer people now who would find them nostalgic. Oh, well. I still think they’re cool, especially Willys Jeep.
• The vet bill from when my cat Zoulie jumped off the deck and broke her toe.
• A receipt from the big Yankee Candle store in South Deerfield, MA, which my mom and I used to visit annually near Christmastime. Good memories.

It was fun finding all those things. But, some of the receipts had become sparkly. That’s not a good thing. Apparently it happens to some receipts when they get old, and ideally one ought not to touch them. I started wearing gloves to handle the stuff in the box, but eventually I wondered if I ought to handle any of it at all, let alone shred it. So, ultimately I shoved the remainder back into the box to be disposed of in an alternative way. However, I did get rid of a lot of stuff, and I feel like I accomplished something while also taking a fun little trip down memory lane.

• I really need to remember not to read articles about climate change. Also, no articles about anything that might mention climate change. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I care too much.
• Music composition hasn’t been going as well as I’d like. I’ve been working on the same piece for months. I can’t seem to find a solution to the problem I’ve set for myself. But, I feel like I’m learning how to “inhabit” a piece–how to speak its language and extend its vocabulary–and that is enough to make me feel like I’m moving forward. For now.
• I find that I like coconut-based yogurt alternatives. Surprising.