March 2017 – robinchartier

Like sands though the hourglass . . .

if you’ve been following The Days of My Eyes saga, you’ll remember when we last saw our hero, I had been up to my eyeballs in drama, trying to get my brain to work with these pesky little films that are supposed to sit on my eyes and make everything clear.

Lucky for our viewers that Josh has been away for two weeks, so the latest episode of our drama was captured in real time. The case of the kidnapped contact:

Oh my white knight! What a hero. Just as Bo rescued Hope and John saved Marlena, Josh was there to save the day . . . or just make my day worse.

I start freaking out that my contact has actually migrated inside my skull, even though my knowledge of anatomy and physiology knows that shouldn’t be possible. My real life experience has shown me that these contacts are wily little buggers that will take every chance possible to cause trouble, so I can’t be sure that it hasn’t taken up residence inside my head.

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Thankfully Josh returned to talk me off the ledge before I started jamming my thumb under my eyelid searching for nothing.

All’s well that ends well, right? Except for the fact that I’m flying through sets of contacts like they’re changes of clothing. So far I’ve managed to make each pair last a week instead of a month. That is not great for my budget, but my eyes are always happier when I put in a new pair. They’re fancy like that.

So is there a resolution to the Missing Contact Mystery? Did our hero really go all day and not realize she was missing a contact? Did she lose it when crying over tangled computer chargers and headphones at work? How bad is her vision? Don’t worry, there’s no cliffhanger today . . .

Ah yes, there she is. Hiding inside the lid of the lens solution bottle. I can’t even.

I’m seriously considering switching over to a monocle.

A random collection . . .

1) My coffee has tasted salty the past 3 days. Salty enough that I’ve tossed it after a few sips. If I were in America (and making my own coffee) I might worry that odd tasting coffee means I’m pregnant, but here I figure Nanny must be making it differently. It’s either the new brand of coffee that we bought or the water. Last night I filled the coffee maker with filtered water from the cooler and ta dah! No salty coffee this morning. Nanny must have started using tap water. Now to try and explain and pantomime my request so she goes back to using the good water. The tap water doesn’t normally taste salty (it’s all desalinated water), but it must be reacting with the coffee in a strange way. Ick.

2) I woke Camille up this morning and told her to get dressed and then she could come to my bed to snuggle (as she does every day). I went downstairs to let the dog outside and come back in to find her stomping around and kicking a shoe left on the floor in the entry way. “What are you doing?”

“You said we could snuggle!” she shot back at me, accusingly. Oh, Lord. What am I going to do with this girl? I guess Princess Camille came into my room to find that I wasn’t underneath the sheets and had a morning meltdown. I pointed out that she didn’t want the dog to poop all over her stuff and I’d be happy to snuggle with her if she stopped being nasty. The morning was redeemed, and I gently helped my little stick of dynamite off to school (after snuggles, of course).

3) My house looks like the house at the end of ET — taped up floor to ceiling, carpets rolled and wrapped and hoses and men in jumpsuits all over the place.

Practically the same . . .

They spent all day yesterday cleaning the air conditioning ducts upstairs and will come back today to tackle the downstairs. I’m not kidding about the comparison to ET — a friend drove by yesterday and texted me, “What is going on at your house?!” They didn’t tent the outside, but the plastic sheeting, compressors, and other equipment are spilling out onto the sidewalk. I’m a little surprised it wasn’t done before we moved in, but things don’t always make sense here. I’m happy we’ll be breathing cleaner air afterward and that I don’t have to supervise any of it because I’m at work all day (someone from the housing office is here instead).

4) Josh is in CA, snowshoeing with the Emiratis. They are doing cold-weather training and he is checking in on them. In case you were wondering (like I was) if they are doing cold weather training because we plan on invading Russia, the answer is NO. It turns out that the purpose of cold-weather training is to build mental toughness, which made sense to me as soon as Josh said it.

Now he is in 29 Palms waiting for some meetings which will begin as soon as the group can drag themselves away from shopping in Beverly Hills to come join the conference. I’m imagining Pretty Woman, Middle East style.

5) One of the perks of my job is my fabulous assistant. She comes in a few afternoons a week and assists with scanning returns and wrapping the cords on the chargers.

She loves doing all of it and begs to help me close up for the day by putting away the equipment and locking all the cabinets. By the end of the year I’ll be able to sit back and read while she works.

I also got to spend the afternoon with Calvin yesterday while he had several free periods. He sat behind the desk with me and worked on a powerpoint presentation that I needed to create. I joked that I was outsourcing the work, but the person pointed out that in this case it was actually ‘insourcing.” I’m happy to have so much talent on my team. His powerpoint slides were great — way better than I would have created, and he showed me the best places to find free images and icons so I can use them next time. Now if he can teach me how to make a decent infographic that doesn’t look like 5 year old pasted it together, I’ll be set. What am I going to do next year when he isn’t here . . . ?

6) Our family does a big March Madness bracket pool (Hicks Picks/Hix Pix) and Camille was to fill out her bracket so I could submit it for her. She wanted to know which team Steph Curry was on so she could pick them as the winner. When I explained that he plays in a different league (NBA Golden State Warriors) she lost interest and decided to go with a random, computer generated bracket. She’ll probably win.

7) I went to a school fundraising dinner/auction event where people were bidding (and paying) $6,000 dollars for a reserved parking spot at school (among other things). Since the bidding was happening in AED I had to pull out my currency exchange app as the numbers kept going up and up . . .

Yeah, I’m not a high roller like that. I can’t imagine having that kind of disposable income. I didn’t get my hair or nails done, I wore a dress that was a hand-me-down that has hung in my closet for over 6 years, and I borrowed Camille’s play purse to use as a clutch. Hey, it worked and it was free. I had a fun night, even if I didn’t get to play with the big dogs.

I’m confident as I get older that she will make sure I’m still looking good. She’s very serious about makeup and made sure I put on eyeliner and mascara. And she needed some herself, of course. She thinks I should have long hair, because long hair is prettier (don’t even start Dad), but short and easy is the way I roll. She’s also made me promise to take her to Paris before she graduates from High School. I’m living with a 20 year old woman in a 6 year old body . . .

Clear eyes, full heart . . .

I have been pretty sure that I need something a little stronger in my contact lenses — I can read much easier, but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m looking at 11 or 1 or if I typed “living” or “lliving,” which stresses me out. I can’t go through life with uncorrected typos! Besides, I’m not eagle-eyed yet, so there’s certainly room for improvement.

Josh took me back to the eye doctor over the weekend (same place, different doc) to see what kind of adjustments they could make to my prescription. He gave me a sheet of text in graduated decreasing font and asked me to read what I could. I could comfortably read the 3rd from the bottom, but told him I had to concentrate to read the one below that. I figured that would clearly explain the depths of my deficiency and that he would save me from my obvious blindness, but instead he said, “That’s good!” Wait, what? There’s still 2 whole sections of unexplored text that I am limited in seeing . . .

I was a bit like a junkie, begging for a fix, “Can’t you give me something a little bit stronger? I know from reading on the internet (thanks, Dr. Google) that if you adjust my distance prescription that it can actually sharpen my reading focus. I want to read the smallest print.” Meanwhile Josh picks up the paper, examines it and says, “Oh yeah. I can totally read the small one.” Thanks love. It’s so great to be married to a younger man.

The Dr. explained something about me being young and not wanting to overcorrect. He suggested if I wanted to read the smallest print that I could easily use reading glasses. Ick. Seriously? Isn’t that the whole point of stabbing myself in the eye every day? To get away from having to put extra objects on my face to see?

But he did offer me some advice: give it time. The type of contacts that I have require the brain to learn how to use them optimally. There’s reading power in the middle and then another ring of reading power further out . . . he said those nerve pathways between the eye and the brain can take a while to sort out. And a few days later, I can grudgingly admit that he was right. Once I set my mind to the fact that this is all the help I’m going to get, when I can’t read something as clearly as I’d like, I’ve been focusing more on the center and moving closer and further away to get it to come into focus — putting my eyeballs through vision bootcamp. Suck it up and stop being lazy. It actually has been working. My eyeballs are starting to get with the program.

I’m also getting better at getting my contacts in and out, though I did have to hunt around the bathroom again yesterday when one stuck to my eyelash and got flicked into the air. It feels like hunting for invisible gold coins since each one that I lose is flushing $25 down the toilet. I finally found it stuck to the side of my face wash. Score! Money in my pocket . . .

For all the hassle and expense, it’s still worth it. When they are in properly, not sticking to my eyes, and focusing well, it’s almost like I’ve got my 35 year old eyes back. Can’t lose.

Blind as a bat

That’s a bit of hyperbole, but my old lady eyes are really getting the best of me. I don’t like having to work to read so I wear reading glasses, which in turn, makes it impossible to read without them. I notice it especially at work where I’m on the computer or having to read the numbers off of a barcode or missing the sharpness on a student’s school photo when I’m looking someone up to identify them.

I’ve realized if the body composition fairy came to visit and gave me one wish, I wouldn’t choose to erase the wrinkles on my face or smooth out the lumps on my torso and legs. Declining hearing has it’s inconveniences, but that’s something I’d be happy to live with if it meant that I could get new eyeballs (Yes, I know that it’s actually a lens problem, not an eyeball thing). There is nothing like the magic of being able to see clearly all the time. Too bad I took it for granted for 39 years . . .

Anyway, this reading glasses thing has gotten old because I read all the time. Even if I’m not reading books, I’m reading the computer screen, my phone messages, the ingredients list on a food item, the dosage on the children’s Motrin bottle (impossible — even with my +1 reading glasses I still have to have one of the kids read the tiny print for me.)

I have reading glasses stashed all over the house, but invariably I can’t find a pair. I might end up with 3 at work and none at home or none in my purse when I get to work — don’t laugh, but that day I actually had to take pictures of things with my phone and zoom in to get by.

It has been bothering me so much that I have been telling Josh that I want him to take me to the eye doctor so I could get a contact for reading and then use my other eye for normal vision. Yes, I suppose I could have taken myself to an eye place, but since he has 1/2 a lifetime of glasses/contacts/eye exam experience and I haven’t, I thought I should go in with my local expert. Plus, he’s way better at interpreting accented English. I think he finally took me seriously when I couldn’t find my nightstand glasses and had to have him read a text for me off my super big screened phone. The next day we were in the mall for something else and he marched me straight into the first optical shop that we saw.

The doctor/optician talked me into getting bifocal contacts because she didn’t like the one eye thing. Something about too much pressure on one eye and no pressure on the other? . . . whatever. Just let me see again. I did the nifty computerized eye exam and second guessed my way through all the “which one is clearer?” questions. So stressful — I’m not sure which one is clearer or not. Maybe . . . number 1?

A week later my order came in and then I was magically able to see! Um, no. I’ve spent a week fooling around with these suckers, and while I know I’m headed in the right direction, there have been a few bumps in the road.

First of all, I went home and prepared to put in my first eyeball. I fished around in the saline pocket . . . nothing. What, did I get an empty one? I held the container up to the light . . . I can’t see anything in there. Of course I also can’t really see anything up close anyway, thus the need for contacts in the first place.

Oh, there’s this paper-thin dragonfly wing stuck to the tip of my finger — wait, that’s my contact?! So I guess it was in there, but so thin I couldn’t feel it, and so blind that I couldn’t see it. Good thing I didn’t lose it in the process of trying to find it. With the lens perched on the tip of my finger, I proceed to mash it into my eyeball unsuccessfully for the next 20 minutes.

I finally got them both in, but still couldn’t see any better than before. The doctor told me that they would have the reading portion at the bottom of the lens and that they were weighted so they would rotate into position on their own. I rolled my eyes up and down, back and forth, but couldn’t find any spot on the lens that would give me extra power for reading. Grrrr.

An aside: After 3 days Josh figured out (thanks Google) that my brand of lenses aren’t the kind that the doc described. Instead, they have rings of magnification that your brain learns to use as needed. That would have been nice to know before I about set myself crosseyed and poked myself in the eye a hundred times trying to figure out where my reading spot was.

And my right eye hasn’t been all that happy with its new “best friend.” It has been red and scratchy no matter how many times or different ways I try to put the contact in. I was so happy when I finally made a breakthrough:

Yes, it fell out of my eye somehow and fat chance of ever finding it again. Good thing I have a whole pack of lenses, but at this rate my 6 month supply is going to last 2 weeks.

After a week of experimenting I can say that they do help me read better, but I need them to be a bit stronger. Printed text is still a bit fuzzy and reading numbers ends up being an educated guess (which is an improvement over a wild guess, but still). So back to the eye doctor this week. Hopefully I can explain what kind of improvement I need and have them work. And have my eyes be happy at being blanketed all day. Even with gummy feeling eyes and endless eyedrops and partially blurry vision, it’s still WAY BETTER than keeping track of glasses.

Next I will need science to invent an easy lens (or eyeball) replacement process and then have surgery to fix it for good, but at least I have the option for contacts until they invent my robotic eye.