Been a long couple of days. The Boss has had some busy days at work, the kids' school activities have shifted into "full-speed ahead" mode, the van went on the blink (again), and I went back to the eye doctor.
I should have known we were headed for trouble when the van only required $500 worth of repairs to pass registration. Friday night, the Boss got in the van after work and the engine wouldn't even turn over. We just replaced the starter motor two years ago, so she figured it was a dead battery and got a jump start. She came home, parked it, came inside to get me so we could go to the store, and by the time we got back out it was dead again. We got a neighbor to help us jump start it again and drove it down to Checker to get the battery checked. Just for gee-whiz, because we replaced that a year ago as well. The test said the battery was fully charged and fine.
Normally a mechanic telling me something is fine would be great news, but this time...not so much. The Boss has a kid that works part time for her who is a mechanic during the day and he's going to look at it tomorrow.
I'm going to weigh the cost of repairs against the price of a half stick of dynamite and a tow truck to take it into the West Desert. ARGHHHH!!!!
The laptop screen is still on the fritz, and that is going to require a temporary hiatus on the blog while the computer is sent to Bombay or Mumbai, or wherever the heck Laptop Hell is located. Why can't things break down one at a time?
I have an idea of having guest bloggers while I'm offline, I'll let you know before I shut it down. There is one story in particular that I am chasing that frankly outdoes everything I have ever written about, including "Dad Has Two Heart Attacks".
Peff had a funny the other night. We were watching this show on PBS called Cheese Bites, an interesting show where they highlight a type of cheese, show how it's made, how it came to be, the difference between good stuff and bad stuff, etc. This week was on that nasty, drippy, half rotten looking French cheese Camembert. My second favorite line was from the show itself, when the voice over said that good Camembert should "taste like cooked cauliflower and smell like God's feet".
Am I the only one who wants to know who established the baseline on this characteristic? How do they know, and who would want to eat something that smelled like any one's feet? Ick!
But it was Peff who had the line of the night. After watching the segment on how they make Camembert, he turned to the Boss and asked "When do they put the bears in?"
Hilarious. How Willy Wonka-esque. Whipped cream needs to be whipped with real whips, poached eggs aren't poached unless they are stolen in the dead of night, and real Camembert cheese MUST be made with real bears!
Awesome.
After the show, the Jazz game started. I watched Krylo Fesenko get dunked on, miss a shot, throw a pass out of bounds, play matador defense (OLE!!), all in the first minute. I sent a text to T that said, "Fesenko is a Lummox (A Lummox is the worst insult imaginable for a wrestler. Lummox is worse than fish, worse than wuss, and worse than sloth) For the Jazz to have even a prayer, D-Willy is going to need to drop fifty."
Ok so it was thirty three and fourteen assists, but somehow the Jazz pulled it off. Fesenko even played solid enough defense for the rest of the game for me to remove the Lummox tag, at least for the time being. Game three is Friday.
Yesterday, I was sent to a new eye doctor. I spent a year and a half ignoring the Boss, my mother, my mother in law, pretty much everyone that knew me. Now I don't often brush off the advice of my mother, or her in-law counterpart, and I brush off the Boss even less frequently. But I had put my foot down on this one. I could "Wait and see what happens" without needing a to drop a copay. I wasn't going back.
Until the subject came up within my dad's earshot over Easter weekend. "You get your butt back to the doctors, and you do it now" he said in a tone that I remembered from my days as an idiot teenager. I made the appointment the next day. You don't ignore dad unless you have brain damage...or wish to obtain it.
So yesterday was the day, and after four hours, two receptionists, a ream of paperwork, one tech, two doctors, and an eye chart that I couldn't even see, they confirmed that I am, indeed legally blind.
It's never a good sign when the first words you hear when the tech looks at your eyes is "Wow".
Less good is when the first doctor says, "Huh. I'm gonna wait until the other doctor comes in to have a look at this".
The punch line is when the specialist and the head honcho doc comes in and says "Oh, my."
For the next hour, the doc's used a microscope, a tiny scalpel, and the smallest tweezers you ever saw to snip and then remove the rest of my stitches from the transplant. Imagine covering a racquetball with a nylon and then plucking at it with tweezers, and that's kinda the sensation going on. I cannot describe the will power required to see that blade come up to and onto your eyeball. You find yourself really hoping that the doc took it easy on the coffee that morning. You really, really want to pull your head away from the microscope base. The pain wasn't that bad, at least not at first. Just the thought.
When I get the shots, it hurts the most during the shot itself and in the first few minutes afterward. The rest is kind of like a dull echo. With this, the flinching was tough to suppress, but the pain wasn't too bad.
Until I got home. It was like watching a Fran Drescher marathon. It was annoying at first but you could mostly ignore it. After a while, you find yourself really distracted, and the next thing you know you are grabbing a deer rifle and looking for a clock tower to climb. By 6 last night, I was not a happy camper.
After they pulled the sutures, they gave me a prescription for the same eye drop steroids I'd been on before and told me...(wait for it)... to come back in two weeks.
Some struggles are eternal.
The van will break down, my kids will say funny things for me to write on this blog, the Jazz will find a way to disapoint me, and two weeks from anytime, I'll be at an eye doctors.
Count on it.
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