Grab a chair and a couple of root beers...

First off, I want to thank everyone who replied to my last post. Your support is so greatly appreciated. It's like having a whole bunch of shoulders to lean on, and that is very, very comforting, indeed!

My dad is doing some better, though a few of the things Mom has told me has me worried. Of course, I am completely unable to say anything about them to her, because if she knew about them, she'd start worrying, too, and I am unwilling to disturb her peace. The good news is, the suggestions I have made to my sisters, especially the Blonde Sister (who seems to finally recognize that I do manage to give good advice from time to time), has borne fruit, and my parents are now having someone from Eldercare Services come in once or twice a week to check on them and do things for them, like wash dishes, clean the bathrooms, etc, that they have trouble doing themselves. There also will be a therapist coming in once a day to give my dad "walking" therapy, taking him on little turns around their backyard, supervising him on their treadmill, etc. This is a great weight off my mind, as this means there is one more person checking on them, an objective eye that isn't blinded by love and the unwillingness to see that our parents are aging, and getting frail. And maybe the therapist can help convince my mom that Meals on Wheels is exactly what they need. Every time I've suggested it, she says, "Oh, I can cook just fine, don't waste it on us, let them take care of someone who really needs it."

*snorts*

We will see what we will see!

In other news, I finally saw the eye doctor today, and I will tell you, the last time I went for a vision checkup was around 1989-90. Back then, I had to have my eyes dilated, as well as numbed, and then endure having this thing pressed against my eyeball while a light was shined into it, to measure the pressure inside my eye. I was part of an on-going family study for glaucoma, which runs in my mother's family. My mother has it, and is slowly losing her vision to it, despite two surgeries specifically for her glaucoma, as well as another for cataracts. At this, she is doing better than her two of her aunts, who lost their vision completely in their seventies and were totally blind before they were eighty. I knew things had changed in eye exams, but not how much.

The Husbandly One took the day off so he could drive me, as I knew driving is nearly impossible with dilated eyes (I've tried to do it before... it wasn't pretty), and I had no intention of driving to San Marcos and back with my vision more impaired than it is.

First off... they didn't dilate my eyes.

Second off... they didn't put numbing drops in my eyes, either.

Third off, they did test my eye pressure, but not by putting something on my eye while shining a painfully bright light into it. Nope. What they did was... blow a puff of air into each eye.

lddurham, fear not. It is not painful, nor excruciating in the least.

I did get an indication of how bad my vision is, though, when they sat me in a chair and had me read letters mixed with numbers.

It was sad. Truly, truly sad. Auntie got them all WRONG!!! Who knew 4's looked so much like A's? Or T's and 7's look so close?

Auntie has presbyopia, which means I need glasses. And I took brumeux77's advice and got progressive lenses. I was also assured that should I want to try them later, I will be fitted for contacts, as well.

I may do that, but first, the glasses.

I got those flexible frames that will hopefully survive the worst punishment I can put them through, thin wire glasses, though I did want to try frameless, but... they won't hold my lenses, though they're the thinnest lenses possible for my vision. I go through an embarrassing amount of sunglasses, because they get sat on, stepped on, flung against walls, twisted... very rarely by me. In fact, the sunglasses I had for the longest time, a pair of el cheapo Wayfarer knock-offs I got at the Mercado del Sol in Houston, lasted for nearly seven years. They got stepped on, sat on, run over by a car, slammed into a door, dropped from a second floor balcony onto a flagstone courtyard, nicked by a knife someone threw at me during a fight at a club (don't worry, dears, Auntie was fleeing with her friends, dragging them along, and she ducked and never, ever went to that club again), and those sunglasses never got scratched, never lost their shape. I was beginning to call them the Sunglasses That Would Never Die... until after THO and I got a puppy when we were first married, a goofy Labrador Retriever puppy who chewed them to pieces in ten seconds flat.

*sigh*

And no, I was not tempted to get that same type of frame, because honey, the frames that look so cool as Wayfarer sunglasses? When you make them into regular glasses? Well, when you're in the military, they call them "BC Glasses." BC as in... Birth Control. As in, you wear those glasses, you ain't gettin' any. Unless you know someone with a glasses fetish for that particular frame. Otherwise, you ain't gettin' laid. Ever.

Anyhow, I should be getting my new glasses by either the end of this week, or early next week. YAY! It'll be nice to be able to read street signs again without having to ask Miss Priss, "Are we at Slaughter Creek Lane yet?" or, "Is that the exit for Sixth Street?"

By the way, I found out my itchy eyes aren't itching because of my allergies. Well, not directly. They're itching because they're DRY! Apparently, my thyroid medication, and the Singulair, as well as the Zyrtec-D I take for my allergies and asthma, are drying me out, which I knew, but as well as drying out my skin, they're also drying out my eyes So I now need to use eye-drops about three times a day to lubricate my eyes.

Okay, so now something ELSE I have to remember to do every day? Oh well, it is what it is! At least I know why now, instead of wondering if it was just allergies out of control!

Well, time for Auntie to turn in. And in case I haven't said it before, thank you all for being my friends.

*gives you all a great big Auntie hug*