Blue-Footed Musings

What made today different from other days?

• I saw a cardinal.
• I took a walk on the road. I don’t do that often, so it was different. But the experience reminded me of why I so rarely do that. And I have a message for the people who call to or holler at women who are walking on the side of the road, and that message is “You suck.”
• Marshall got his second dose of Covid vaccine. Now he’s just two weeks away from immunity.
• I let Livia make dinner. She declared that she wanted to cook. And if someone wants to cook, they ought to cook, I say.

• It’s summer now and the stress is low, but soon I will have to rise early in the morning and send the children back to school as if I were a capable adult and as if the world had returned to normal. Only I’m not and it hasn’t. Eek.
• Today as I was going through the piles on my desk, I found a note that I had written down on a piece of paper. It said, “When you think about where you plan to be in twelve months from now–how imaginative is it?” I don’t know if this was a quote or if I was asking myself that question, or both. It seems like a question worth answering, but my answer is not very promising, which was perhaps the point of writing down the question to begin with. I rarely think about what my life will be like in a year, but when I do, it looks the same as now except the kids are bigger. Totally lacking imagination. That needs to change. So too does my bad habit of leaving cryptic notes on my desk.
• It amazes me how nearly every time I encounter a new word and investigate its meaning, I will then encounter the word again almost immediately. Today’s word was “transhumanism.” I heard it first in a video clip of a speech by a religious nutjob. I encountered it later in an article in The New Yorker. What are the odds of that happening? Pretty small, I would think. I will take this as a Sign from the Universe that I am meant to know the word.
• No, I don’t actually believe in Signs from the Universe. I just like the idea of them. So I pretend they’re real. And maybe in doing so I make them real. Or not. Who knows?

• My New Yorker subscription has run out. I am surprisingly sad about this. Each issue is chock-full of good stuff, such as cartoons, crossword puzzles, and interesting articles. But, these things come at a cost. In terms of price, The New Yorker is ridiculously expensive. It also arrives weekly, which is far too frequently for me to keep up with it. It steals reading time that would otherwise go to Smithsonian and Rhode Island Monthly, leaving those publications neglected. So, I will probably have to settle for digital access. That is, unless I am offered another subscription at a no-brainer discount price, in which case all bets are off.
• The weather is getting in the way of my walks. It always seems to be muggy, buggy, oppressively hot, and/or pouring. Though the skies have been mostly gray, there has been a bright side to the situation. The excessive rain has kept our stream running merrily along at a time when normally it would be dry. I am delighted by that.
• Summer comes with bug bites. This has always been the case, and it always will be. Consequently I am willing to accept a certain number of them, barring tick bites, without complaint. But, lately I have been getting eaten alive, and unfortunately that affects my sleep, because the itching wakes me up in the middle of the night. The more bites I get, the worse my allergy to them gets, which means bigger welts and worse itching. I need to be a little more careful about what I wear outside, and when and where I walk. I may even have to consider using a mosquito repellent (if only it weren’t as repulsive to me as it is to mosquitoes!).

“You snooze, you lose.” I have noticed that this is particularly true about wildflowers. Violets have spoiled me with their long blooms times. They last a week or two, and because they don’t all bloom at exactly the same time, violet season lasts for a month or so. Most flowers have much briefer lives. I almost missed the blue-eyed grass entirely. I checked on it a couple of days after taking pictures of it. It had already gone to seed. If I hadn’t known where to look for the seed pods, I wouldn’t have noticed them. The plant could have gone through its entire life cycle unobserved. I also nearly missed the bloom times for partridgeberry and St. John’s wort. The area where those plants all grow is right next to the woods, deep in Tickville, and at this time of year, mosquitoes are thick in the grass. It’s almost impossible to go up there and not get bitten by something. So, I don’t visit it often, and who knows what other beautiful flowers I might be missing.