The best place to live

Instead of spending any time focusing on Pink Slip this weekend, I did other stuff.

I got all the pictures up in the living room, including my wonderful new gallery wall.

You really can’t see what’s there, but everything means something to me. There’s a painting that my sister-in-law Betsey did, and one of Fenway Park done by a guest of St. Francis House. There’s an Irish blessing – in Irish – calligraphied by our Irish friend Lorraine. There are items from our travels – Ireland, Paris, Prague, Budapest.

Opposite the gallery wall is my fireplace. As you can see from the stuff in the fireplace, I don’t actually use this as a fireplace. In nearly 25 years, we had exactly one Duraflame fire in there. Oh, well.

Other than getting most of my stuff on the walls, I hosted a birthday luncheon for my sisters and cousins – one of my cousins is the birthday girl, with a milestone birthday this year. This got me to finish knocking my living room into order, which mostly meant getting those pictures up. Now, other than for the gaps where the register grilles will go, the empty space where the steer horns from my grandfather’s saloon will soon hang, and one of my aunt’s beat up old dining room chairs that I have to spruce up and recover the seat of, the LR is pretty much done. Oh,I forgot. I should get a little table to put my CD player on – rather than the tray table where it’s currently perched. (One thing about renovating, it’s definitely a one-thing-leads-to-another-purchase type of thing.) Anyway, having the banshees over for lunch forced me along pretty much completing the living room move in.

Having folks over for lunch also got me to finally figure out how to use the new induction cooktop. Easy-peasy. And I figured out the oven while I was at it. So I’ve now used all the new appliances. Good for me!

After lunch, I went back up with my sister Trish to her new place – she has recently moved – where she made a family favorite (chicken goulash) and we got further caught up on House of Cards. We spent Sunday playing with her dog and working around her new house, getting a few things squared away. (It really is a never-ending process. I hope to have the final boxes emptied by Christmas, and then, in the new year, tackle all the closets and drawers I’ve rather haphazardly thrown stuff into. Trish has a larger house and more stuff, so her full move in will take a while, too.)

When I got home (after stops at Home Goods and The Christmas Tree Shop – never enough stuff, I say), I just had to watch a bit of the incredibly crappy Patriots’ game.

None of this left me with much time to ferret out a topic for today’s Pink Slip.

Oh, I have a few up my sleeve, but none of them managed to engage my exhausted mind.

And then I came across one of those stupid list of the best-to-worst. This one was of the mot livable states.

Such lists tend to be so arbitrary, so subjective, so incredibly ridiculous. Yet when they confirm our biases, ain’t life grand?

Life satisfaction in a given state is often based on highly subjective measures — whether the climate is nice, whether friends and family are present, and other factors. While a connection to a place can often be based on intangibles, a good quality of life in a given state is largely predicated upon a few key factors. The levels of poverty, education, and health can largely capture living conditions in a state, which tend to vary considerably across the country.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed statewide social and economic measures to rank each state’s living conditions. Massachusetts, home to one of the nation’s wealthiest and most highly educated populations, leads the nation. Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, trails the other 49 states.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there are plenty of people in Mississippi who believe that the Magnolia State is the best place to live. The best place to live, for most of us, is the place where we actually do live. But me, I’m plenty happy to live in Dear Old Massachusetts, and to have it confirmed – however ridiculously – as a great place to live. Where I do, happily, In my almost-done-being-reno’d condo.