Blue-Footed Musings

One of my shoulders has become higher than the other. That’s a bad thing. I have also developed chronic pain in the lower shoulder, which is also a bad thing. I asked my doctor what I ought to do, and she suggested a posture-correcting brace, and OMG, do I ever feel old. Posture-correcting braces are no fun to shop for either. One brace that I looked at was advertised as “a perfect gift idea” (yeah, it’s not). And the one that said “fully adjustable and comfy” was the one that looked most like a torture device. That’s the one I bought. If I have to suffer, I might as well go full-on masochistic.

• On Twitter I recently discovered a Britishism that I hadn’t seen before. The word was “cagoule,” which is apparently a type of jacket roughly synonymous with what we’d call a “windbreaker.” As is always the way with new words, once I saw it in one place it immediately popped up in another, in this case The Great British Baking Show.
• I was standing outside the front door one day, minding my own business, when a hummingbird approached the feeder. It paused a moment when it saw me standing there, then continued to the far side of the feeder. Finding the feeder empty, it flew back toward me, and, hovering in the air, it looked me dead in the eye and yelled at me in hummingbird speech. I didn’t understand the words, but I got the message. I went back inside and instructed my husband to fill up the feeder ASAP. Now the hummingbirds have food again, and they have not harassed me since.

There are times when describing the weather as “baking” is not hyperbole. It’s 98 outside right now, says our outdoor thermometer (edit: it’s actually 99.5–the temperature went up while I was writing). You can feel the heat blaring off the roads and rocks. I’m half tempted to crack an egg on a rock to see if it would cook, if only because I’ve never tried that experiment before. I’m glad that the sun is back, and it felt good to be outside for a few minutes, but I couldn’t tolerate the heat for long. While I was out, I saw a big green dragonfly and some scorched plants, which together with the high temperature made it seem positively July-ish. I don’t care what the calendar says. It’s summer now.

P.S. As of 2:15 p.m., the temperature is over 104. Our thermometer might be exaggerating slightly (if it’s catching sun), but the temperature is decidedly not June-ish, and I am not loving it.

Screen-free evenings are creating new habits and patterns in our lives. Now, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we can’t just settle in for another evening of mindless streaming, social media, or video games. We have to find other ways to amuse ourselves. We’ve done a lot more reading. We’ve also had a lot of family game nights. Last Thursday’s game was Bananagrams, a game which is a lot like my day job. After we were done playing, Marshall and I built a word grid together that included references to “Star Trek” (such as the word QUADRANT crossing ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, and DELTA) and words from his recent science classes (such as ORGANELLE and CYTOPLASM). I thought that this was more fun than playing Banagrams by the rules, and for us to enjoy the game more as a family we need to adapt the rules so that we are working together rather than against one another.

The pattern of screen-free evening shows itself in our Internet usage, my husband reports. It’s also starting to show itself on my blog. My husband asked how I’d managed to a post book review on a Tuesday. The answer is that I had scheduled the post in advance. Between work and screen-free evenings, I don’t have much time for writing blog posts during the week, so I have to write them on the weekend. When scheduling posts for the week, I rarely get past Wednesday, so Thursdays and Fridays tend to be left empty.

It will be interesting to see if these new habits and patterns continue. Screen-free days are sometimes difficult for all of us. There are times when the kids complain, and that’s frustrating. I feel their pain. I really do. I sometimes find screen-free evenings to be difficult, too, and I’ve tried to make the kids understand that. Screen-free evenings are not some terrible parental method for torturing children. They’re good for all of us, and we all need them.