Life in General

American crows live 7 to 8 years, on average. I wonder how many of the crows around our house have lived that long? How does one tell the age of a crow? According to Google’s AI, a crow’s age is revealed in its eye and mouth color, feather quality, and behavior. But those attributes give only a range of age; a limited estimate, at that. My curiosity is not strong enough to merit any more vigorous research, so I will leave it at that. Is there anything that interests me enough to utterly and completely capture my interest, pushing me to seek answers to my questions in favor of food or sleep?

+++

Is California really “safe and warm?” Were the Mamas & the Pappas truth-tellers, or did they sing their hopes and dreams, abandoning reality in favor of comfortable fantasy? Fortunately, my life does not depend on getting a reliable answer to those questions. But what, then, DOES it depend on? A miraculously capable oncologist, perhaps?

+++

The population of Hot Springs Village, when I moved here in 2014, was said to be around 13,000. This week’s Voice newspaper reported the population is roughly 17,000. That population increase of 4,000 (almost 31%) is readily reflected in the volume of cars on Village streets and roads. New home construction seems to have been following the same pattern since the COVID-19 pandemic ceased being an immediate existential threat. Anecdotally, based entirely on my unscientific observations, younger non-retirees appear to constitute a greater portion of the population today than in 2014. The future is impossible to accurately predict, but I suspect growth will continue; probably at a higher pace. The cost of living—especially the relatively low cost of housing and the low property tax burden—enhances that likelihood. Housing prices in the Village have climbed steeply since the pandemic, but not as much as in Dallas, where I lived before moving here. We sold our house in Dallas in 2014 for $331,000; today, various estimates put its sales price at $640,000 to $676,000, around double. When my first house in the Village sold around four years ago, it had risen in actual value (per sales price) by almost 56% from the time I bought it, seven years earlier. That increase was propelled in large part by lower interest rates and high demand, brought about in part as a consequence of the pandemic. What, if anything, does all this mean? Hell if I know. But I know this: I am glad Dallas is not in my future.

+++

Late yesterday afternoon and into the evening as darkness fell, we sat outside on the deck, sipping wine. It was the first time in many, many, many months that we took full advantage of our location overlooking the forest; well over a year, I think. Sitting outside in a quiet, peaceful, beautiful setting as the sun dropped beneath the horizon was incredibly calming; relaxing in the extreme. The unseasonably warm temperatures, coupled with the fact that I felt an unusual and long-lasting burst of energy, made the experience feel absolutely delightful. But much cooler weather will arrive around Thanksgiving, according to forecasters, so I might not feel inclined to try replicate those moments; at least not in the immediate future. I am glad we let yesterday’s circumstances inflict such pleasantries on us. Today’s chemotherapy treatment is apt to rob me of much of my energy. The probability is high that I will again soon feel uncomfortably cold in an environment in which temperatures drop below 80°F. There I go again; allowing anticipation sully the appeal of the present. I must train myself to fully engage with the moment, when the moment is so refreshingly pleasurable!

+++

Card games have never held much appeal for me. In fact, I actively avoid playing them. Games far more to my liking include Wordle (very similar to the 5-Letter Word Game my mother taught me to play and enjoy when I was a child, but juiced-up by technology), Words with Friends (WWF), Sequence (which I haven’t played in quite some time), and (on occasion) crossword puzzles. Lately, I have been spending far too much time with WWF, sometimes playing six or eight “hands” simultaneously with a single opponent, then moving on to several other opponents with each of whom I am playing a similar number of “hands.” The games keep me occupied, though I tend to get annoyed with WWF when its creators refuse to accept perfectly legitimate words. My annoyance grows when those same game stewards willingly accept completely bogus combinations of letters as “real” words, for which their in-game dictionary conveniently has “not yet” included a definition.  And that exhausts the subject.