So… it’s been a weird progression over the last few years. First, I find out my eyes are getting worse and go to get a new prescription for my glasses. The optometrist tells me I have cataracts but can correct for them with lenses in the meantime. Then it progresses to even worse and I get my optometrist to schedule me for surgery. We don’t bother upgrading my prescription because, well, my eyes would just quickly get worse and the money would have been wasted.
Over the six months waiting for my surgery my eyes do get steadily worse. Pretty soon my prescription glasses don’t seem to make much difference at all. Then, at my eye measurement appointment, the doctor suggests I simply get some cheap drug store reading glasses. I take her suggestion and find reading glasses with a +2.0 rating allow me to read again. Joy! Sure the frames are kind of small and the arms dig into my head above my ears, but it’s a small price to pay to be able to read again.
Then, the surgery, and my left eye clears up like never before. I haven’t seen this clearly since I was in my twenties. It’s glorious. The doctor tests me the following morning and says, for distance vision, I have 20/20. For close up work, though, they’re completely unfocused. I definitely will need reading glasses.
Now, however, the cheap reading glasses I got from the drug store only let me read when the book / computer / text / whatever is fairly close to my face. Working on a computer at a table becomes awkward again. I have to drag the monitor close to my face for the text to become clear.
Today I went back to the drug store willing to pay another thirty to forty dollars to find the right quasi-prescription that lets me read at arms’ length.
My discovery? The more powerful the prescription, the closer the text needs to be. So, after trying a few on, I discover that a prescription of +1.25 is pretty good. They don’t go lower than that, though, so I hem and haw a bit. I don’t want to spend money if a slightly lower prescription would work better. I decide to leave it alone for a while and try again later.
Then, as I’m walking home, a thought occurs to me.
My original glasses were actually pretty weak. I seem to recall the optometrist saying they were barely a +1. I go home, I put them on, I sit at my computer.
Perfect. Well, maybe not 100% perfect, but definitely workable. I can now work on my computer with the screen at slightly more than arms’ length away. And the frames fit comfortably!
The experience was nerve wracking and terrifying. While there wasn’t any actual pain there was a little discomfort and the glaring knowledge that someone was cutting into my eye.
I arrived very early. The doctor’s office called on Saturday to let me know my appointment had been rescheduled from 8:15 to 11:45. They had some patients who were diabetics and since we’d all have to forgo eating from midnight on they wanted to get those people in first.
While I appreciated the need it did kind of screw my plans up a bit. Tony was going to pick me up afterward but he had a voice gig scheduled for the afternoon and wouldn’t be able to make it that late in the day. That’s not what screwed me up, though. What screwed me up was the mental blank I went through when I called the cab company to schedule a pickup time. My brain stalled at “eleven” and didn’t fill in the “forty five” so when I added a little extra time to compensate for potential cabby incompetence I decided an hour would be safe. I scheduled the pickup for ten. The ride was maybe fifteen minutes. I was an hour and a half early.
Luckily for me the nurse checked with the doctor and they managed to get me in early anyway.
Which is good because the whole appointment took nearly two hours and the majority of that was waiting for the next series of eye drops to be administered. The actual surgery itself took all of ten minutes and I was out of there five to ten minutes afterward.
The first forty five minutes was spent sitting in a waiting room full of geriatrics swapping stories of their latest ailments, playing Sudoku on my iPod, wearing a generic blue disposable hair net (yes, even though I’m bald and, no, they didn’t require me to cover my beard… go figure) and a set of disposable booties covering the soles of my shoes. The booties were supposed to cover my whole shoe but they barely stretched far enough to reach over the edges. I guess old people have small feet.
Most everyone had someone with them to drive them home, but visitors weren’t allowed in the pre-sterile environment… at least no longer than it took to drop their father/uncle/mother/aunt off with the nurses.
Rumor had it there was a coffee shop available in the building next door. I’m guess that’s where most of the family chauffeurs waited out their time.
After three sets of four eye drops my left eye was starting to feel a little numb and I was taken into the quasi-sterile environment where they laid me down, attached a heartbeat monitor to one of my right fingers and a blood pressure cuff to my left arm and let the machines tell them how I was doing. After ten or so minutes of that the anesthetist put a drop in my eye that stung like salt water but only for the few seconds it took to take effect. Then she put two globs of gel onto my eyeball, spaced a couple of minutes apart. It felt funky… like when you’ve got pink eye but without the pain or itch. By the time they lead me into the now-we’re-actually-sterile surgery room I couldn’t much tell if my left eye was open or closed.
They laid me down on the operating table and attached a heart monitor to one of my left fingers and the blood pressure cuff on my right arm. At the time I had no idea why they needed to do this twice, or why they switched sides for it. Perhaps they were looking to average out the readings, I theorized. In any case the right blood pressure cuff had issues with the size of my arm. The Velcro kept releasing as it pumped up. They eventually got it properly secured and were then able to begin surgery.
I was awake for the whole thing and trying very hard not to panic. I kept reminding myself that if I moved I could screw up the whole thing. They had an intensely bright light for me to focus on but given the way they moved my eye around I think they told me to focus on it primarily as a way of giving me something to do.
They covered my entire face with a sterile cloth that had an aperture in it for the eye. They attached some kind of spreader between my eyelids to keep them apart and, I suspect, to also immobilize my eyeball. I’m not one hundred percent sure but it did seem that my eye stayed remarkably still despite my inclination to roll it around in a frenzy.
The whole thing had an x-files-alien-abduction-to-the-probe-ship feel to it. I could catch a glimpse of various instruments being used on my eye, a flash of light off of something metallic, a vaguely circular disk like object, a flash of blurred hands or fingers. The actual incision was entirely painless but it did not help that the cutting instrument had a dentist drill sound to it. I knew it was the cutting instrument because each time it wined there was the slightest pressure and my vision became briefly clouded with red before being washed away.
Part way through it all the blood pressure cuff was auto-inflated again. I wondered about that briefly but then reasoned that they were probably keeping periodic tabs on my vitals throughout the procedure. Then it occurred to me to wonder if the heart monitor was giving away my level of panic. I could just barely hear it beeping in the background. I tried to figure out if it sounded fast or not but I hadn’t thought to note what it had sounded like before, when I was… well, not calm, but less panicked.
Just as I was starting to wonder how long I would be able to keep my composure, it was done. Devices were removed from my eye and the sterile face cover, which had a self adhesive ring around they eye, was pulled off quickly like a band-aid. In truth that was the closest to pain I got through the entire procedure. The plaster cast of my face we did over a decade ago had been far more painful, I can assure you.
I was led out to yet another sitting room, told to take off my hat and booties, and given about an ounce of orange juice and a couple of cookies.
The clarity was staggering. I just kept looking around the room at everything. The bright colors, the crisp edges… it was all so fascinating. The best analogy I can give is switching from a poorly tuned VHF TV to a brand new High Def. At least… for things three or more feet away. Anything closer than that simply becomes a blur. A bright, colorful blur, but still a blur. The reading glasses I got from the drug store still help with that, but I know I’ll need significant reading glasses once all this is over.
The doctor stopped by to check on me before I left and asked me to tell him how many fingers he was holding up. I told him and he nodded, “Well, that’s about the best you can expect from today.”
“Are you kidding?” I said, “This is the clearest I’ve seen in years!”
He grinned at that. “Well, then, it’ll just get better from here.”
It’s amazing the things you don’t realize you need until you don’t have them. Like oven mitts. Who ever things about oven mitts until you need them? I don’t. I find myself standing in front of the stove with a hot pan waiting to be pulled out and the sudden realization that I’m going to need something to protect my hands, namely Oven Mitts.
I didn’t have any oven mitts. I went shopping on Saturday and now I do.
I have a single Pac Man oven mitt:
Dig the map laid out in his mouth
wacka wacka wacka wacka fruit!
And I bought a Penguin Oven Mitt:
Yo. How ya doing?
But I didn’t stop there. I also found the absolute best, most perfect salt and pepper shaker combo in the world. He’s a robot!
Teeny super little guy!
He’s so awesome! His head is for salt and his body is for pepper. They’re held together by rare earth magnets.
The eye measurement was… odd. Most of it simply involved staring into some device with a light at the center while it flashed and strobed other lights into my eyeball. One measurement, however, used sonar and involved having a cup placed against my eyeball and then filled with liquid. A very odd sensation to say the least.
My surgery is now a few hours less than two weeks away and I’m dying to see it done.
A side benefit of my measurement appointment, however, was some advice the doctor gave me. She was talking about after care for my surgery and I asked her about how I would go about getting my prescription updated for my glasses. I was wondering of I would just get one lense done at a time as each eye was operated on. She advised against it. Apparently it takes up to six weeks for eyes to fully heal and settle into their final shape, so getting a new prescription any time before that would be premature and, probably, a pretty big waste of money. Instead, she said, I would be better off just buying a pair of reading glasses from the rack at the drug store for a temporary crude fix until my eyes were ready. Just take in some reading material and try glasses on until I could read with relative comfort.
Of course, I thought, how simple.
I took that advice and put it to use today. The prescription I picked out is, naturally, much stronger than my regular glasses… +2 in both lenses… but I can read, and that’s the important bit. I can read normal text and even some small text. This will go a long, long way to making the next two weeks much more bearable, and all for the cost of a night out at the movies.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been learning the computerized systems at work. As I’ve done so I’d swear my eyes have grown steadily worse. By the middle of last week I was forced to use the computer at work with my left eye shut just to keep my right eye from overcompensating for it. It was literally the only way I could read the text on the screen. And you’d think keeping one eye closed is a simple thing, but I suggest you try it for an hour or so. The accumulated strain results in a spectacular headache. Luckily simply relaxing with both eyes open can ease that ache considerably, but as soon as you have to go back to working with one eye that headache comes right back at full force.
Today I’ve been using my computer for a few hours with the reading glasses on and while I can feel the muscles in my eye having to work and re-work at focusing, I haven’t developed a headache yet. Best of all, I can read everything.
Yesterday was the first test of my apartment’s social functionality. I had a group of friends over for gaming around the big black table and I have to say it was a fair success. I may need to invest in some tv tables to give people a little more space for their stuff, but it seems like my place may become gaming central for our group since I’m centrally located.
I spent last night playing poker. I did not do well, financially, but the big blind was fifty cents so I didn’t lose a whole lot. I actually had myself ahead for about an hour in the middle there but then started really getting dumb with the mistakes and tanked quickly afterward.
I will never play “for real” in a casino where the money is considerably harder but I have spent more for an evening’s entertainment so I feel more or less alright about it.
I did feel rather awkward at times as I’m very new to the game and made some clear “newbie” mistakes. It didn’t help that said mistakes then played on my usual insecurities making me feel even more awkward leading to me making even more mistakes. I’ve really got to watch that spiral.
And I think my tactic of telling stories as a method of introducing myself to a new social circle actually worked against me for once. I suspect I was starting to annoy some of the other players.
Anyhoo… onward and outward, I guess.
The job continues to be great and I continue to feel incredibly grateful for it, every day. Even moreso on the weekends as I now have them off (except when extra work is necessary) and can co-ordinate with others for social activities.
Not that I’m actually doing that yet, but the potential is there. So far I’m just going along with other people’s plans, but at least I can *do* that now.
In other facets of the same situation, I’m now struggling with a decision that was so much easier a month ago. I have been pursuing the opportunity to go back to school this fall. Everyone I know has been very positive and encouraging about it, expressing how happy they are that I’m taking positive steps. That has been good.
But now I have a relatively good job. Not a *lot* of money, but at least something I can live on, doing work I enjoy for a company I honestly believe in. In order to continue my school pursuits I would have to quit that job, and chances are I would be looking to work somewhere else once my education was done. At least given the education I’m aiming at now.
So… do I ditch the hand I have now for a potentially great hand, or do I stick with the good and comfortable hand I’ve been dealt? There’s no guarantee the new hand would work for me, there never is, but rationally it makes a certain amount of sense.
On the gripping hand I could explore other educational directions, ones that fit better with, and perhaps augment, the job I find myself in right now. An appealing option, but I haven’t even worked in this business for a month yet and it seems foolhardy to adjust my life / career directions based on a few short weeks’ worth of experience. I haven’t even played directly with the product yet.
Hm, I think I may have just found a direction to move at least in so far as exploring more information. More information is a good thing, more often than not, and will provide me with a more confident decision in (hopefully) the near future.
On the purely frivolous side I’ve bought myself an iPod touch (or an “iPad mini”) and have been loving it. I would have gone for an iPhone instead but I only just started a new 3 year contract and therefore would not have qualified for the slightly less insane price. The Touch is doing a marvelous job so far.
This was one of the machines we used to have at work. It used a 45 watt laser to cut out card stock and other materials used as parts for the various kits our company sells. In this short video you can see it cutting out custom panels for the Pumlanterns kit.
I reference this machine because, sadly, it has met with a terrible end. We were all busy moving boxes and shelves out of the old workshop today when a couple of people started sniffing and asking around if anybody else smelled smoke. I smelled it myself as soon as I was asked but couldn’t tell if it was coming from the outside or the inside.
When the boss was asked he immediately leaped out of his chair yelling “the laser!” and ran to the machine shop where the above machine was billowing out smoke. He doused it quickly with the fire extinguisher, putting it out almost immediately, but by then the damage was done. The materials within had been burning for a while but the machine’s venting system had been efficiently venting all the smoke outside so we didn’t detect it until the heat actually started to melt the vent hose.
This is all that was left:
That bubble held the fire in pretty good, actually
See that burnt bubbly shape in the top right corner? That’s the lid. To get a comparison, the video I shot above was filmed through that lid.
The rest of the day wasn’t nearly as eventful, thankfully, and nobody was hurt. The fire trucks arrived pretty quick, called automatically by the security company that detected the fire. It’s sad to have to test your security system like that, but it’s nice to know that it works. The only hitch was that the security company didn’t get hold of the owners as quickly as they’d liked because all the office phones had been packed away. But they did get the boss on his cell phone and were able to confirm the fire truck’s approach by the encroaching sirens they could hear as they talked with him.
While things could have gone better, they also could have gone a lot worse. Today we almost completely emptied the old shop. Tomorrow we unpack in the new shop. Despite equipment fire we’re actually ahead of schedule.
I woke with a lot of positive feelings this morning, even if I was dragged out tired. I went to bed at 11 but didn’t really sleep until nearly 2 or 3 in the morning. I’ve been working night shift for so long my body doesn’t know how to go to sleep at a reasonable hour anymore. Still, I did my best to force it. I laid in bed forcing my eyes closed even as my mind spun on too many thoughts to follow. Eventually something like sleep settled in.
I was up on time and got everything ready on time. In fact I was up a little too early. I could have slept for another half hour and still made it out of the house on time. Starting at 9 is going to take a little getting used to.
The drive to work was prophetic. I’d left my iPod in the car the night before and when I started it up I left our crescent to the buildup of Boston’s “Long Time”. I hit the first power chords just as I turned onto Bradbury drive. I had to remind myself that I was still in a playground zone and stomping on the gas would be a Bad Thing but by Hawking’s Chair I wanted to. I sang aloud to the music, even though the lyrics weren’t always quite relevant.
It’s been such a long time
I think I should be goin’, yeah
And time doesn’t wait for me, it keeps on rollin’
Sail on, on a distant highway
I’ve got to keep on chasin’ a dream
I’ve gotta be on my way
Wish there was something I could say.
It just felt good. Finally employed at a place that I knew I’d enjoy working, full time, daylight hours. It’s staggering how much you miss that regularity when you’ve not only lost it, but have begun to feel you might never, ever have it back.
It’s only been the first day and I barely know anything that’s going on but I enjoyed what I was doing, even the most repetitive and menial tasks felt… useful.
The workshop reminded me a lot of the back room of my mother’s shop. It had a lot of the nailed-together functionality with years of accumulated history evident in every corner. The company is owned and run by a husband and wife team. The kids come to the shop after school and their dogs hang around all day. They have a young pup, just 8 months old, who’s positively vibrating with energy and constantly bringing toys to our laps to try and get us to play. The older dog doesn’t play as often but the two of them play tug of war quite often.
It has a comfortable, homey feeling, something very few other jobs I’ve ever had could provide. It feels like it could be… comfortable.
I suck at sales. I’ve never been very good at it. As I ruminate about it there are two main reasons, in my opinion, I suck at sales.
Wait… that’s not quite right. I don’t suck at sales… I hate intensely dislike doing sales. The two reasons remain the same, the difference is they’re no longer faults, In My Humble Opinion, they’re simply personal traits.
First: I cannot fake enthusiasm.
I can’t fake any emotion, honestly, but enthusiasm is one of the important ones in terms of sales. I also can’t fake sincerity, interest, or caring.
The upshot of this with regards to sales is: if I don’t believe in the product I can’t pretent to be enthusiastic about it. I can’t tell someone I think the product would be great for them if I honestly don’t believe it would be. Even if they’re incredibly enthusiastic about the product themselves and have already long since decided to invest wholeheartedly in it, if I don’t share their enthusiasm then the best I can muster is a genial smile that says “Cool, I’m glad you’re happy with it… I still think it’s crap, myself, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.”
The corollary to this is if nobody is looking for this product then it must not be very good. It’s an insidious opinion that I’m generally not consciously aware of, but if people aren’t already showing up to buy the thing then my estimation of the product itself gradually diminishes until I can’t even get up the enthusiasm to talk about it to the people who do, eventually, show up to ask about it.
Second: I hate bothering people.
This stems from the simple association of hating to be bothered myself. Telemarketters, innocent victims of The Machine that they are, piss me off. Worse if they sound genuinely enthusiastic about their job, because that translates into being genuinely enthusiastic about bothering me. Bad enough you’re annoying me in the first place, but if you’re happy about it my instinctual response is to want to kick you squarely in the balls and mash your face into the concrete. So don’t do it.
Feeling this way about being annoyed means I don’t want to annoy others. After all, if it bothers me this much there’s a good chance it will bother others in much the same way. I don’t want to be responsible for that. There’s enough negativity and anger in the world right now, why add to it by pissing people off?
Now while I don’t feel “hating Intensely disliking doing sales” or even “being terrible at sales” is a bad thing in and of itself, there is a bit of a problem with this… attitude.
Job hunting, and interviews in particular, are a form of sales. You’re selling yourself to prospective employers who aren’t sure they really want you yet.
And I suck at it.
Worse, the longer I’m stuck doing it the worse I get. It’s hard enough to generate enthusiasm about myself for an interview, it just gets worse as fewer and fewer people show any interest.
Add to that the realization that of the last four interviews I’ve been successful at two of them weren’t “interviews” so much as they were “dredging for warm bodies”. I passed simply by virtue of being warm, breathing, and capable of finding the address of the interview. The interview questions consisted of “when can you start” and “do you ahve a pen”. The other two interviews consisted of “Do you feel you can do this job?” to which I replied to both of them “I don’t know but I’m willing to try.” Luckily for me at the time they were willing to take a chance.
Every other interview, those in which I said “Yes, I firmly believe I can do this job” or something similar, have resulted in the sound of crickets, even when it appeared the interviewers shared my enthusiasm for my abilities.
It sucks when being successful at a job you should be good at depends first on being extremely good at a job you royally suck at. In addition to making being unemployed difficult it can make me reluctant to leave a bad job, because having a bad job is hell of a lot better than having to look for another one.
I want my interview to consist of me saying “yes, I can do it” once and then being told to go do it.
So sometime last month we ran low on medication for Carmen. We’ve been dosing her for a while now, compensating for some kidney failure she experienced, the very same affliction that killed Gargoyle. We’ve been giving her medication every day and injecting fluids under her skin every second day to keep her hydrated.
"Buzz off, I'm sleeping."
We called the vet for a refill on the medication but they wanted to do a blood test on her first. Primarily as a check up to see how she was doing, but secondarily to see if she still needs ongoing treatment. The bad news is she does. The blood and urine tests combined with the medication was about $380. The worse news, though, was that she had some pretty bad teeth that needed immediate attention.
Luckily for us the vet was offering 20% off on dental work for the month of March. Unluckily for Carmen she wound up losing four infected teeth. Worse for us, despite the discount we still wound up paying $800 for her dental work.
The whole thing was pretty rough on Carmen. She doesn’t do well with travel at the best of times, and the clinic is always the worst place for her. We dropped her off a week ago Monday, in the morning, and picked her up in the evening after her surgery was done. For the first time in her entire life she was utterly silent. She didn’t utter a peep for over 24 hours after we got her home. Worse, she found a cubbyhole in the paneling behind the fish tanks to hide in. If she hadn’t been overcome by hunger we might never have coaxed her out. We’ve since sealed the hole, and she eventually found her voice, but for two whole days she skittered around the house like an ex-con in a room full of dropped soap. The slightest movement or whisper would have her bolting for cover.
Fair is fair, though, the vet did a good job and she has made excellent recovery. She’s definitely found her voice again.
But it can never be simple, can it?
"Wait... what was I doing again?
On Saturday Calli started throwing up. Not entirely unusual for any cat, but Calli doesn’t normally throw up much. Then, when I came home from grocery shopping in the late afternoon she was in the living room retching HARD, pushing with all her might, hunkered down in the middle of a vast pool of water and bile. She’d been binging on water and vomiting it up, it seemed. Took a dozen paper towels to soak up the mess.
Our regular vet was closed so Ronya took her to the emergency vet hospital off of Deerfoot and Glenmore. They took some blood and urine samples, promising to fax the results to our Vet. They sent Calli home with some anti-vomit medicine, some more sub-cutaneous fluids to prevent severe dehydration, and some easy-to-digest wet food. Calli wasn’t at all interested in the food but the drugs did seem to keep settle her stomach for the time being. On Monday we took her in with Carmen since Carmen was scheduled for a follow-up anyway.
The vet suggested a variety of scenarios for Calli, but after examining the test results the most likely culprit was blockage in the bowels. She probably swallowed something that’s too big to pass. I’m not surprised, Calli will chew on damn near anything. I’ve had to lock my earplugs away and we keep confiscating twist ties from her. We have no idea where she gets them, either. We don’t even use the damned things.
The vet suggested an X ray to look for potential blockage. The barium goes in, passes through, and if it doesn’t pass through all the way then there’s strong evidence of blockage. We agreed figuring the $300 plus dollar for the X ray were worth knowing for sure what was wrong.
The vet called us back a few of hours later. The barium wouldn’t stay down, she just kept throwing it up. They Xrayed her with what she did have and caught evidence of a potential blockage very high up in her bowels, very close to the stomach. He strongly suggested surgery. I asked how much it would cost. About $1200 was the answer.
Ronya and I discussed it and decided to go ahead. We’d be deeper in debt but it would be worth it if Calli could be given a chance for full recovery.
When I went to sign the papers, though, the full estimate worked out to be nearly $2000.
Saw Iron Man 2 the other night. Really, really enjoyed it. Felt fully immersed in the whole story and was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t follow the usual action movie wave-crest-tail plotline but rather set up a nice plateau of interesting dialog and action. I honestly felt I could spend hours locked in the story and not want to leave.
The use of Doctor Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, as the counterpoint to Tony Stark, Industry Giant and Inventor, was scripting genius. The two most powerful minds of the Marvel Universe, each completely ignorant of the other’s realm of expertise. Doctor Strange’s comments on how Tony’s Iron Man armor and all his other gadgets might as well be magic given how advanced they were was a nice interpretation of Larry Niven’s quote about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, and his awesome goatee
Tony Stark’s comment on how only the best minds can truly wear a goatee with conviction was simply pure Robert Downey Junior.
Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. All the smartest heroes have the best goatees.
And the visuals were spectacular! The effects for Doctor Strange’s spells were mesmerizing and, of course, Iron Man’s armor was awesome.
It wasn’t until I started reflecting on the previews I’d seen earlier and wondered where the heck Backlash was that I realized I was dreaming. Which, of course, ended the dream immediately.
