Blue-Footed Musings

I keep a collection of small vases so that I’ll always have a place to put wildflower bouquets when I get it into my head to pick them. Right now I’m using a glass vase that I got from IKEA. It’s about 3-and-a-half inches tall. In it are fleabane, pink, red clover, two unidentified yellow flowers that sadly dropped most of their petals almost immediately, and a Queen Anne’s lace bud.

• The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is a common mistake in statistical reasoning. As Wikipedia explains, it “arises when a person has a large amount of data at their disposal but only focuses on a small subset of that data,” like a metaphorical “person from Texas who fires a gun at the side of a barn, then paints a shooting target centered on the tightest cluster of shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.” I find the concept fascinating. I just know there’s a good story idea lurking in there. Beyond that, it’s a good thing to know so that one can be on guard against it.
• Quote from The Toll by Neal Shusterman: “A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe. You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.”

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>