Blue-Footed Musings

I recently saw an article ranking each U.S. state on the percentage of residents with BAs. It’s interesting. I grew up in the state ranked 7th, went to college in the state ranked 1st (48.3% of MA residents have a BA!), and currently live in the state ranked 14th. I have a BA, as do many of my friends and family members. To me, college is a rite of passage and I expect that both of my children will go. But it is clear that people in some states (notably West Virginia, which ranked 50th) either have less access to higher education and/or value it differently. And news reports suggest that attitudes toward higher education have begun to sour, even in states such as MA, partly due to the exorbitant cost of a four-year degree and the ensuing student debt, partly due to politics. Each year’s batch of high-school graduates will be smaller now (the so-called “demographic cliff”). And then there’s AI stealing away so many of the jobs to which college grads once aspired. All of this will likely lead to fewer college students, more colleges going out of business, and a less educated populace. I wonder how each state’s BA percentages will change in the coming years.

• I’m not really the schadenfreude type, except those rare occasions when a certain malicious person gets mad over having been thwarted. That always brings a smile to my face. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often.
• I have now looked at roughly a million lake houses and spent more time on Zillow than it took to build the Panama Canal. Livia says I belong on My Strange Addiction.
• Yesterday afternoon there was a sudden BOOM that shook the entire house. My husband and I were so surprised that we each went looking for the other so that we could talk about it. He thought a tree must have fallen. I thought it was thunder. We looked outside. Nothing seemed amiss. So we went our separate ways again and forgot about it. Later I noticed a news update on my phone mentioning a loud boom. So I looked it up and OMG it was caused by a meteor!!! How crazy is that?

Last weekend my friend and I were talking about drought, and I commented that my area was probably one of the few parts of the U.S. not in drought. Apparently I spoke too soon. The state of RI issued a drought advisory a few days ago. Given all the snow we had during the winter and the steady march of rainstorms since, it’s hard to imagine how we’re that dry. It’s raining right now, actually. But I understand what drought means and how what we see of the weather doesn’t necessarily give the full picture. It’s scary to have drought in the spring when it ought to be wet, and knowing that there’s still the searing heat of summer to come.

I know it’s crazy, but I continue to shop for lake houses. In fact, one day I got so excited about a lake house in New Hampshire that I convinced my husband we should go look at it. But, ten minutes later my common sense kicked in. It was the property tax that got me. Over $11,000 in 2025. OMG, that’s onerous! That much tax on a primary home would be tough to bear. On a second home? Impossible.

But the heart wants what it wants, and no matter how many times I come to the conclusion that I can’t afford a lake house, I can’t let the dream die. So last weekend I convinced my hubby that we should go see a house in western Massachusetts, where property taxes are more reasonable. To be clear, I’d never make a realtor show me a house I had no intention of buying. This was an open house, though, and open houses are another matter.

The house had a lot of things going for it, its location being the primary one. It was on a lovely, good-sized lake and placed high above, where the views were amazing, and where flooding wouldn’t be a concern. It had a lot of downsides, too, the price being the biggest. They’d recently dropped their asking price, actually, but I suspect they’ll have to drop it more before they sell. We arrived just before the end of the open house, and there was only one other name on the sign-in, suggesting that interest is limited. We were somewhat interested, but we’d never be able to offer anything close to the asking price. Plus, the house needed updates and had some bathroom/kitchen issues that I’d never be able to tolerate unless we got a really good deal on the price.

None of that really matters, though, since we aren’t ready to buy a house. The value in seeing it and, I hope, additional houses later this season, is to get an idea of what’s out there. To figure out what we like and don’t like. To decide where we might want to settle in a few years, after the kids finish school. Because that time is coming fast, and then we’ll have nothing keeping us here but habit. It would be good to have a plan and a destination already in mind.

My shoulder diagnosis is in. I have a torn labrum. It’s not the “Tom Brady” kind, but rather the “Old Lady” kind. That is to say, it’s a degenerative tear. In a way, that’s a good thing, because it means I didn’t bring this upon myself through a specific activity. In another way, it’s a horrible thing, because it means my body is just plain wearing out and at any moment I might become incapacitated due to nothing more than age. But, at least in this case there is some good news: a torn labrum can be fixed surgically.

Now I have to decide if I want the surgery. I think I can use my experience with my knee as my guide. I injured my knee when I was in middle school. After the swelling went down and the pain stopped, it seemed to be okay, but over time it proved to be unstable. I stopped doing things that required knee stability. It affected how I lived my life. Over time it got worse, eventually requiring surgery. Since the surgery, it is much better than it was, but it often hurts when I walk. All of this might have been avoided if I’d had surgery immediately after the injury. But, I didn’t know I had a torn meniscus or how it would affect my knee over time. Even if I had, surgery probably wouldn’t have been an option back then.

That’s how this shoulder problem is different. I know exactly what’s wrong, and I know how bad it can get. Though my shoulder has felt better lately, simply demonstrating my range of motion to the doctor yesterday made it hurt for hours afterward, a reminder that the pain can start again at any moment. And, through my experience with my knee, I know how that’s likely to affect my life. I will limit the use of my arm and avoid certain activities. And because the shoulder has already caused me so much more suffering than the knee, I won’t merely be wary of using it. I’ll live in constant fear of a flare-up.

I don’t want to live like that, and I don’t have to. The surgeon who fixed my knee also does shoulder surgeries. I’ll call him next week.

It’s a common coping mechanism to look for things to like in a situation that you hate. That is, we all need our silver linings. So naturally I was searching for something good to be said about the changes happening at work, and I thought to myself, “Well, at least I won’t have to write those stupid blurbs anymore.”

Not long after finding that tiny sliver of silver, I got an e-mail from my boss telling me that some of those blurbs might end up being done as new material after all. Seriously? The Universe just keeps laughing at me.

• One evening we decided to go to my favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner, but it was closed when we got there. As in permanently closed. Apparently the owner hadn’t bothered to pay his taxes and the government seized the property. Wow. Fortunately Google was able to point us to another Mexican restaurant in the area. The food there was fantastic. The restaurant itself was far too busy and loud for my tastes, so I doubt we’ll ever eat there again, but I would totally get take-out. In the same general area there were some other restaurants that looked interesting. We may have give those a try someday, too.
• At work the new schedule finally came out. My part of the schedule was little changed except that I’d lost some time previously allotted to documentation. The final project assigned to me was still slated to end in September. Meanwhile, several other people’s schedules had been extended into 2027. I wasn’t sure if I could read anything into that, but for a moment I got a little teary-eyed thinking that it might really be the end. I sent an e-mail to my boss asking if I ought to be concerned, and I later found out that one of my coworkers had done exactly the same thing at the same time (her schedule ended in November). We were both told that our schedules would be extended soon. Whew.
• It doesn’t take much to make me smile or laugh these days. It could be anything from the sight of violets in yard to a video of Obama and Mamdami singing to children. Still, if I’m honest, there don’t seem to be enough smiles to make up for all the awful crap going on in the world.

Livia and her friend were supposed to get together last week to bake a cake, but their plans fell through. I invited Livia to bake with me instead, and she said yes. We decided to try Vóvó’s recipe for biscoitos. Vóvó had given the recipe to me over the phone some time ago. She just called me up one day out of the blue and told me to grab a pen. She said she knew that she wouldn’t be around forever, and she wanted to make sure we had her recipe.

I was never certain I’d gotten the quantities right, so I didn’t know how well the recipe would work. At first we followed the recipe exactly, but we started tweaking it along the way. We found that the oven temperature was too high, the cooking time too long, and the dough a little too dry. We adjusted the temperature and timing, and for the last batch we added more milk.

The end result was a perfect biscoito, just the way Vóvó used to make them. And in tweaking the recipe we’d adhered to Vóvó’s own philosophy. She told me repeatedly that adjustments might be needed. As she put it, “We have to learn these things for ourselves.” She had the best attitude about cooking.

Vóvó doesn’t bake anymore. She is very old now, and her mind wanders. She is not the person that she used to be, and that makes me sad, but it helps to know that her recipe, her cooking philosophy, and her love will always be with us. I just wish she could know that we’d tried her recipe, because I think it would make her happy.

I’ve had several MRIs in the past, including one of my head, so I knew it was confining, but my recent shoulder MRI was the worst. They bundled up my arm to immobilize it, then they added padding on my other side to immobilize me. I am not claustrophobic, but being wedged in there like that was almost enough to make me so. They’d asked what music I wanted to listen to through the headphones. I said, “Classic rock or pop.” What I got was a bad collection of 80s metal. Fortunately I could barely hear it over the MRI’s racket.

I won’t know what the MRI revealed until my follow-up with the doctor, which is scheduled for this coming Friday. In the meantime I’ve been thinking about how I might respond to whatever she tells me. Months ago, I felt I’d probably get surgery if it were an option. Now I’m less sure, because my shoulder has been feeling better. I think that’s due to weeks of propping my arm on a pillow while sleeping and being careful about how I move it while awake. I don’t baby the shoulder per se, but I don’t go out of my way to exercise it, and I try to avoid movements that I know will aggravate it. Every once in a while I’ll walk my hand up the wall, just to make sure I still can, and I don’t shy away from tasks that involve lifting and carrying, because those typically don’t cause any pain. Now my shoulder doesn’t hurt nearly as much. I’ve also regained some range of motion. Hooray!

That said, it’s certainly not fixed. I vacuumed the living room yesterday and that did hurt. So the biggest question is, can I live with the way my arm is now? Another major question is, can I find a way to exercise it that won’t cause another flare-up? I’ll need to build up my arm muscles if I don’t want to face more trouble down the road, so that’s an important consideration.

Marshall is home! He spent his April vacation in Spain and Portugal. I am proud of him for going, but I am even more relieved that he’s back.