SUNDAY 13 FEBRUARY Lanny Lane was an idiot, and I'm glad he's been snuffed --- Thinking ahead to this Thursday, when my first cataract removal is scheduled. Not looking forward to it so much as just acknowledging it's approach
I had laser cataract surgery done to both eyes in mid 2018. Had specialized lens put in that cost us some $2,000 for each eye. My cataracts were bad, and even new prescription glasses didn't help. Had three different eyedrops to use, plus swim goggles to wear in the shower. Now, today, vision is completely/100% 20/20 vision. Color more vivid than I ever thought they be! For close-up/small print reading, have to still wear reading glasses, but for distance reading, with the new specialized lens in each eye, no problem at all. Like my hip replacement in 2005, sure glad I had the laser cataract surgery done.
Thanks for the encouraging words! I'll just be getting the basic inoculars, which will supposedly bring me to 20/40, before 'correction.'` Same vision as 20+ years ago, up until progressive lenses started making my life hell. :--D
TUESDAY 15 FEBRUARY I have no idea why there are so many people in my house at this point. Not just the 'kids' but a couple of spouses as well. Possibly they were all drawn here by the perverse Trifecta of Super Bowl and Valentine's Day and this old man's submission to a long-overdue medical procedure Lots for them to talk about! Like how much of a hazard I've been, and for how long, careening around in a Magoo manner, out on the streets. Also of keen interest is when I'm going to sell this place and relocate to more suitable quarters. Opinion on the matter is diverse, with my daughter adamantly opposed to a sale, and my older son's wife equally in favor of it. The DIL is also the most patronizing of the bunch, and the most intrusive. Too bad I taught my boys to respect, and defer to, even the most obnoxious of women Time now for my four-times-a-day-pre-surgery eyedrops. And no, I do NOT need any help!
WEDNESDAY 16 FEBRUARY I admit that my original purpose in setting up an account here was to create a space in which to comedically inflate my own disgruntlements about entirely personal things. Seemed like fun, to return to my teenaged self, holed up in my room, secretly railing against the obtuseness of parents. "To Be Adult Is To Be A Dolt!!!" (0_0) That the 'parents' in this time and place are in fact the 'children' was enough of a joke to entertain me for, literally, a day and a half. I'm now bored with it, and ready to swivel to my default position, which is that I'm more than pleased with the way my kids turned out. The 'boys' are GenX, but --- unlike many of their peers --- are not in thrall to video games and comic-book Universes. Nor do they linger in my basement and attic, unemployed and aggrieved. My Millennial daughter has fluttered home a few times, but has now found her feet All of three of them, as normally flawed as they might be, have made the best of their strengths. If anything undoes them, it won't be a lack of intelligence or will, but rather the insane trajectory our so-called civilization has taken In truth, I fear for them, and for the one grandkid they produced. I won't be around to see how they fare in the longer term. They and I have always been science-fictionally fixated, and have a realistic view of the probable dystopias that lie ahead --- primary among them the rise of authoritarian demagogs, and the subsequent fall of human decency and common sense and Democracy in any form
SATURDAY 26 FEBRUARY Got my space back! Handily resisted various silly ideas posited by some of my kids. Besides me selling the house, which is obviously too big for one person, there was a near consensus on the dire need for a SmartTV in the den, if not several more in each of their old bedrooms as well, which in my opinion would negate the whole purpose of us gathering together here in a family manner. Wouldn't let them pin me down on a timetable for the next cataract removal. I'm thinking that it could be put off indefinitely, since with the Bad Eye now the Best, and with that Eye oddly amped-up for distance and midrange vision by the old prescription glasses I have no intention now of crushing, there's no need to take any immediate action at all. Better to not bring the topic up for discussion. Sufficient unto the day is the nagging thereof! --- Too bad the current news isn't as easy to defuse and evade. A sort of Wag-the-Dog sense of unreality has crept in from all sides. Does Putin's claim that Russia was 'promised' no NATO expansion into former Soviet states back in the 90's have even a nugget of truth, or is it entirely fabricated? Who knows! The matter was definitely discussed thirty years ago, but was then left ambiguously hanging. Good thing that my sweet 'guests' departed before the invasion conclusively began, and sparked a lot of less-than-conclusive yapping at the dinner table and out on the porch. While my kids are sensible, thinking individuals who know better than to totally buy into the blather of any news source, the Daughter-in-Law is sadly inclined to give way too much plausibility to the energetic narrations of Fox News and the Alt-Truth Websites cobbled together for profit by who-knows-who Weird, to watch self-labeled conservatives struggle to spin Trump's praise of Putin in a positive direction! Unless of course the videos of Trump's declarations are all Deep Fakes, put forth by the Deep State. In which case I guess all bets of all sorts are now off! --- Having said how happy I am to have my house back, it's also true that I'll be even more happy when my sister arrives tomorrow. We're twins, which made for a variable dynamic when we were eight years old. By then, I'd transitioned into the stage where girls are 'icky', which was empowering at school, but very isolating in the neighborhood. On our block, there were numerous girls my sister's age for her to hang out with, but the only boys available were the much-younger brothers of those girls. Which left only two choices! Either I could become the autocratic leader of a bunch of first-graders, and encourage the little snots in hilarious, anti-social behavior, or else I could try to impress my sister and her friends with my superior knowledge of bugs and outer space No internet back then! All wisdom had to come from paper books, which triggered our shared, lifelong love of reading
SUNDAY 6 MARCH Had a pretty good time this week! Didn't so much share childhood memories with my sister as pick apart the inconsistencies between our various versions of them. Funny thing that I'm still surprised to be reminded of how much more strictly she was monitored and controlled by our parents than I was. There we were, exactly the same age, maybe eight or nine, discovering superhero comic books and leaving Donald Duck behind. She'd buy a Superman for a dime and I'd buy something 'darker,' maybe something with wild wolverines in it that I don't remember much now, and it would be her bland choice that got reviewed from cover to cover by our mom, looking for anything unsuitable for a sweet little girl to read. Of course we traded off, and read each other's stuff, as a matter of course. We soon learned to be sneaky, thanks largely to that wolverine thing being confiscated when our dad caught her with it. Told him it was mine, but it still got put in the trash. Almost half of my pathetic allowance, WASTED! But at least it was my sister who got the scolding, not me. --- And then there was the news to consider! I'm pretty sure that Trump is right when he insists that WWIII wouldn't now be in progress if he were still in office. Well, duh! If Trump were still in Power, and still signaling an eagerness to weaken NATO, Putin would probably now be taking a more patient stance, just sitting there, smirking his disdain at the West, laughing as Trump continues to pick away at all our alliances, and leaves us isolated and ripe for the picking. --- Less grim but more personal is the legal action being threatened against me! Turns out that the fake surname I took here belongs to some Real Life Guy who lives in Orlando, Florida, and he's really ticked off! So I'm gonna have to cease and desist! Really disappointing, but hilarious to my sister, who's suggested that I use her first name (which is Gwen) as my last name, creating a weak little pun that I'm actually starting to like, the more I think about it.