Blue-Footed Musings

In the news earlier this year: actress Michelle Trachtenberg died at just 39 years old.

When she was first introduced as Buffy’s younger sister Dawn on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was a shock. Buffy hadn’t had a sister before. Suddenly there Dawn was being annoying and putting a cramp in Buffy’s style. But she grew on me (as younger sisters grow on their older siblings, one hopes). And I always thought, even when she was annoying, that she radiated an inner light. What a shame for that light to be extinguished so soon.

Over the last few months, I’ve been doing some legit spring cleaning, including deep dives into messy drawers and cabinets. In most cases, I knew exactly how much stuff I’d find when I went looking, but there were surprises. For example, I wasn’t expecting to find 9 hairbrushes in a bathroom drawer (which meant that technically I had ten, since I keep one on the counter for everyday use).

OMG, who needs 10 hairbrushes?

I also found five each of nail and toenail clippers, not to mention four tweezers. I just kept reaching into the drawers and pulling out more. It was crazy. They were all mine, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d managed to acquire so many. I couldn’t even give them away to my hubby or kids, because they all have their own sets. And what was worse, when my husband realized that I was decluttering, he handed me another full grooming set to get rid of–like I needed more!

It was easy enough to dump the majority of the hairbrushes, but I struggled to dispose of the clippers and tweezers. Though they’re metal, durable, and sanitizable, charity organizations don’t want them. I ended up keeping most of them, because they were functional and it seemed too much of a shame to consign them to the landfill. They don’t take up much space, so I guess it’s OK.

My decluttering skills hit a peak as I attacked my clothes drawers. I convinced myself to get rid of nearly everything that I don’t wear anymore, whatever the reason. I kept only what fit well or was just a tiny bit tight. I ended up donating two large trash bags of clothes (25 pounds’ worth!).

But all of that pales in comparison with the big decluttering event to come soon. My husband recently finished the built-in bookshelves in our living room. The paint needs time to cure, so we’re going to wait a few weeks before putting books on the shelves. July 4th will be “Book Liberation Day,” when we take our books out of the many boxes we’ve got stored around the house and finally put them on the shelves, where they belong. Getting rid of the boxes will be a decluttering in and of itself, but if we’re good, we’ll sort through the books and get rid of the ones we really don’t need.

My husband upon seeing the Poland Spring truck headed up our neighbor’s driveway: Why does our neighbor get spring water delivered when she literally has an artesian well?

My husband, popping his head into my office about 60 seconds later: You know she’s broke, right? [extra context: bottled water is just one of several premium services that we know she pays for, and though we try not to be nosy, we can’t help occasionally wondering how she manages to afford so many luxuries on a single income. Hell, we wonder how anyone is managing to afford anything these days . . . .]

It’s impressive how the bottled-water industry has managed to convince people that water pumped out of the ground in a faraway place, dumped into a plastic bottle, and then driven hundreds of miles down a highway is better than water pumped directly out of the ground beneath your feet and into your water glass.

But it could be that our neighbor simply doesn’t like the way the well water tastes, in which case I’m sympathetic. Our well water tastes good most of the time. But, as the weather gets warmer the water gets warmer, both as it’s coming out of the ground and as it sits in whatever container you’re drinking it out of, which brings out a metallic tang. Often I deal with that by adding fruit-juice concentrate to my water. My go-to juice is sour cherry, but pomegranate and aronia berry are also good. I add just enough to give the water a hint of sourness and cover up the metallic taste (now that I think on it, this is probably why some people add lemon slices to their water, but oddly enough I can’t stand lemon in my water). The juice concentrate is dark in color, and even a small quantity turns the water red. The kids and I call the juiced water “blood.” I also recently purchased an insulated water bottle. It keeps the water, which I always get from the fridge rather than the tap, cold for longer. Neither juice concentrate nor insulated water bottles come cheap, but hopefully they’re less expensive than spring water deliveries.

Related: I read an article about microplastic recently. Of course there’s microplastic in bottled water, but it’s also found in a lot of tap water. And although nobody knows what effect microplastics have on the body, pretty much everyone agrees it’s unlikely to be good. The focus of this particular article was about an interesting thing that scientists have discovered about microplastic in water. Apparently, boiling the water in a pot–if it’s hard water that contains calcium–causes the plastic to bond to the calcium, leaving the plastic stuck in the scale that’s left behind on the pot. That is, boiling gets the plastic out of the water. Given how annoying hard water is sometimes, it’s nice to finally hear something positive about it!

My husband had meant to mow the front yard, which as I mentioned previously has become totally cloverized. Somehow he didn’t get around to it. Now we have a glorious flower-studded lawn, thousands of bright white flowers like stars in a sky of green. The bees are loving it. My husband and I have gone outside several times to watch them buzz around. There aren’t as many as we would have seen when we were kids, but there are more than we expected. I’ve asked my husband not to mow again until the flowers turn brown.

The air outside our house has been beautifully perfumed lately. At first I thought it was just the clover, but as the scent became more and more intense, I wondered it if included something else, perhaps wild roses. We don’t have any wild roses growing in our yard. However, in the woods behind the house, mostly hidden from us by various trees and shrubbery, there used to be a huge, vertical mass of them. While looking out the bathroom window the other day, I caught a glimpse of white, so I know it’s still there. The last time I saw it clearly, it was as tall as the house. I imagine it eventually growing to surround us, like the wall of roses around Sleeping Beauty, and that doesn’t seem like it would be entirely nice.

But I do love the wild roses, as invasive and prickly as they are. I try to get over to the library’s nature trails every year while the roses are in bloom. I went on Thursday. The roses had mostly gone by, so I didn’t get the “snow in June” effect, but they still smelled lovely.

While I was there, the temperature was in the high 80s. If the day hadn’t been a breezy one, I might have melted out there in the woods (June is the new July, it seems). But I survived. According to my pedometer, I walked 3,000 steps, or about 1.25 miles. I saw a bunny, a squirrel, wild roses, buttercups, wild irises, and some white flowers that I have yet to identify. There is a spot along the trail where there are three bars of varying heights for pull-ups, etc. Nobody else was around as I happened to be walking by the bars, so I stopped and tried a dead hang, which I’d read was good exercise. It didn’t feel good, though. My hands and shoulders were like “WTF!”

Farther down the trail, I spoke with an older couple who wandered by as I was taking pictures of those white mystery flowers. They wondered what it was I’d been photographing, so I told them, and the man and I chatted a bit about flowers. The man compared me to another walker passing by–a guy who was obviously a serious photographer, given that he had a real camera outfitted with a giant lens–calling him a “fellow bird-watcher, or whatever.” ;P

Lately I’ve started taking daily walks again and even taking the occasional picture, though now I use my phone rather than my camera. I would like to post the pictures, but I can’t figure out how to get them off my phone right now. In the past, I’d simply plug the phone into my computer and copy the pictures over. That doesn’t work anymore. In a pinch, I’d e-mail the pictures to myself, but that also isn’t working now.

If I were the only person to have these sorts of problems, I’d crack it up to being a curmudgeonly Xer in a Zoomer’s world, but my husband says it’s not just me. Tech companies are always changing things for their own nefarious purposes. Sometimes those changes destroy functionality that we depend on.

Big Tech giveth, and Big Tech taketh away.

Though I sometimes pass myself off as technology-averse, I’m not really. I just wish that technology would stand still for a minute, because I have better things to do than to keep relearning tasks that I mastered eons ago. Maybe it’s easier for the young folks who have grown up in a constantly changing environment. They’re used to the sand shifting beneath their feet. But for those of us old enough to remember solid ground . . . .

Oh yes, I really am a curmudgeonly Xer.

But I will figure this phone thing out. I always do. And a moment later the technology will change again.

<sigh>

My husband and I were unsuccessful in our attempt to seed the front yard with grass a few years ago. Still, some grass did grow, and the yard didn’t look too bad last year. This year, though, the wild plants have come back gangbusters, particularly the clover. The clover doesn’t look very neat, but it’s lush and green and beautiful in its own way, so I guess I don’t mind.

My mom and I got on the topic of clover when we spoke last weekend. She said, “You could always find the clovers with extra leaves. Have you found any among all those new clovers yet?”

As a matter of fact, I have! Just yesterday I picked a four-leaf clover and put it in a small vase on my desk. When I first went into my office this morning, it looked sad, all folded up on itself. But after I’d been in there for a while with the light on, I noticed that it had opened itself up again, like a flower reacting to the sun. Cute.

A few weeks ago, I happened to look out my office window and saw a cop car on my driveway. That was unusual, so I went downstairs to check things out. By the time I got to the front door, the policeman had already driven back toward the road, where a fire engine suddenly flew by with a lout blat. Hmm. I stepped outside, and the air reeked of smoke. Alarming.

I went looking for my husband, and when I finally found him, I told him that I thought there was a fire nearby and that the cops were trying to figure out where it was. We walked into the kitchen together, and that’s when we noticed that the backyard and woods beyond it were hazy with smoke. There was so much smoke around that it took us a while to find where it was coming from, but we finally discerned a plume rising over the hill to the side of our house, seemingly from the area in which a few of our neighbors live. We put on some masks and walked up the hill to see if the neighbor’s house was on fire. It wasn’t. The smoke was coming from further away, thankfully.

Now knowing that the fire wasn’t right on top of us, we didn’t feel like we were in any immediate danger, but we kept tabs on it. We also kept our windows closed and our air purifiers on. Eventually the fire ended (thanks to the fireman who had been fighting it) and the smoke dissipated. All was well, and we were finally able to relax again.

But it did leave me with a thought. Obviously forest fires are a threat when you live near the woods. However, it’s now occurred to me that we’re not merely near the woods. We’re surrounded by them, and our road is also wooded on both sides. That could be, in certain circumstances, perilous. So I’m considering whether there’s anything I might do to prepare for such a risk.

As happens nearly every year, not long after finding the first violet of the spring, I found the first tick. It was hanging out on the wall in the foyer. Presumably it had been carried into the house on someone’s shoe. I used a tissue to pluck it off the wall. Then I took it outside, where my husband ground the nasty bloodsucker into the driveway.

A couple of days later I found a little green grasshoppery bug on the rim of a drinking glass in the kitchen. Another interloper! In this case, I took the glass outside and gently transferred the bug from the glass to the grass.

My son, if he had seen what happened to the tick, might have argued that it wasn’t the tick’s fault that it had evolved to suck blood. And I would have had to concede the point. But I am a practical person, and I follow a practical rule for creepy crawlies: if you’re dangerous to me, I’ll be dangerous to you, but if you’re cute and harmless, then I’ll be cute and harmless, too. It’s only fair.

This big news this week is that our main healthcare provider is going out of business. The entire practice, which covers 25,000 patients between its adult and pediatric branches, is closing up shop due to a combination of staffing issues (i.e., doctors are retiring in droves) and low insurance payouts.

My husband and I were blissfully ignorant about this at first. We didn’t get the e-mail announcement, and we didn’t catch the story on local news. Thank goodness for my SIL, who was all in a tizzy over it. She passed the news on to us, giving us a chance to compete with the thousands of other parents who were racing to find a new doctor for their kids. Fortunately, we found a practice that had room for them (again, thanks to my SIL).

As for my hubby and me, it may be more difficult. We had already had some trouble finding doctors. For example, I haven’t had a “real doctor” in years. All of my care has been handled by a string of PAs. My current one isn’t my favorite, but she’s competent, and I haven’t had any complaints. However, I had wondered if either the practice was trying to save money by using PAs, who are presumably cheaper, or if they couldn’t find enough doctors. Now it seems that both things may have been true.

The real concern is that this happened at all. We’re talking about a large, successful, well-respected medical practice. If they couldn’t keep going, then other practices may soon meet the same fate. I’d heard warnings of a looming crisis in healthcare, so I was aware that it could happen. I just didn’t expect it to strike so soon and so close to home. But it confirms what I’ve known for a long time: the healthcare system is broken. And given all the upheaval in this country right now, things will almost certainly get worse before they get better.