The morning light seemed a little less light than usual when I woke up but I figured it was just that I'd not noticed the days getting shorter. O, no. I stepped out the door and nearly cried with relief. Clouds and a fine mist and chill air and finally, finally, some relief from the interminable heat of summer.
If, gord forbid, I am still here this time next year, I'm going to have to see about being elsewhere for at least some of July and August.
The Key West trip is going to involve snorkeling. Somehow it didn't occur to me until this weekend that that's going to be a bit more difficult for me now than it was, um, eighteen (!) years ago. Thankfully![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ancientsong noted that most places will rent goggles that do some amount of vision correction, so I probably won't be restricted to seeing "coral in front of my face" and "brightly-colored maybe-fish-shaped blur five feet away."
I've had corrected vision since I was in first grade. I'm told that my parents started suspecting I needed glasses when they realised I was sitting about three feet from the television. I /do/ remember being really mad that after wearing my glasses for a week I could no longer see much of anything without them.
Sometime in Fayetteville I succumbed to the magical thinking of "if i didn't wear glasses then everyone would stop thinking i was such a nerd," and contact lenses became a holy grail of sorts. I finally got them in January 1991, and had a few months of glasses-free junior high before moving back to DC for high school. (I did have a much better time of things for those few months. It's anyone's guess as to whether this was due to the Dumbo's feather effect, or knowing that I'd be in a better place soon, or what.)
(A couple years into high school I read an article in the opthalmologist's office on this new thing called "radial keratotomy." I asked him about it and he said "Eh, maybe, but I'd wait another couple years until your eyes stop changing." Hasn't happened yet, and I'm getting towards the point where I'll likely need reading glasses anyway in a few years. Oh well.)
I wore contacts for a good many years. It was just so neat to have peripheral vision, or to see things in the shower. Not to mention not having to worry about keeping them clean, or having them fall off my face at an inopportune time. (Losing contact lenses has never been a problem for me.) Eventually, though, the price started to wear on me. One of my eyes is exceptionally nearsighted with a moderate astigmatism, and the other has a severe astigmatism and is moderately nearsighted. So not only do I have to have specially-made contacts, but at times each lens has had to come from a different vendor. None of this "off-the-shelf disposable" nonsense for me.
Finally in winter 2003-04, when money was exceptionally tight for a variety of reasons, I gave up on them altogether. I've been wearing glasses constantly since then. I can't say I miss the maintenance of having to take them out every night and lug around a bottle of saline solution every time I travel. I do sort of miss the other things about them, though, and this snorkeling issue has reminded me of that.
Plus, my father has just gotten contacts again, after twenty years of wearing glasses (he stopped originally because nine months in the desert with contacts seemed like a bad plan), and... he looks twenty years younger. It's kind of startling.
So, I'm curious, and also prone to occasional fits of vanity (because I don't think I can separate contacts from "appearance"): for those of you who have some idea what I look like, what do you think? I've so far heard from one person who prefers me in glasses, but a sample size of one isn't all that rigorous.
(And those of you who don't know what I look like, this is the internet! Never let something as trivial as a lack of knowledge stand in the way of making your opinion known!)
If, gord forbid, I am still here this time next year, I'm going to have to see about being elsewhere for at least some of July and August.
The Key West trip is going to involve snorkeling. Somehow it didn't occur to me until this weekend that that's going to be a bit more difficult for me now than it was, um, eighteen (!) years ago. Thankfully
ancientsong noted that most places will rent goggles that do some amount of vision correction, so I probably won't be restricted to seeing "coral in front of my face" and "brightly-colored maybe-fish-shaped blur five feet away."I've had corrected vision since I was in first grade. I'm told that my parents started suspecting I needed glasses when they realised I was sitting about three feet from the television. I /do/ remember being really mad that after wearing my glasses for a week I could no longer see much of anything without them.
Sometime in Fayetteville I succumbed to the magical thinking of "if i didn't wear glasses then everyone would stop thinking i was such a nerd," and contact lenses became a holy grail of sorts. I finally got them in January 1991, and had a few months of glasses-free junior high before moving back to DC for high school. (I did have a much better time of things for those few months. It's anyone's guess as to whether this was due to the Dumbo's feather effect, or knowing that I'd be in a better place soon, or what.)
(A couple years into high school I read an article in the opthalmologist's office on this new thing called "radial keratotomy." I asked him about it and he said "Eh, maybe, but I'd wait another couple years until your eyes stop changing." Hasn't happened yet, and I'm getting towards the point where I'll likely need reading glasses anyway in a few years. Oh well.)
I wore contacts for a good many years. It was just so neat to have peripheral vision, or to see things in the shower. Not to mention not having to worry about keeping them clean, or having them fall off my face at an inopportune time. (Losing contact lenses has never been a problem for me.) Eventually, though, the price started to wear on me. One of my eyes is exceptionally nearsighted with a moderate astigmatism, and the other has a severe astigmatism and is moderately nearsighted. So not only do I have to have specially-made contacts, but at times each lens has had to come from a different vendor. None of this "off-the-shelf disposable" nonsense for me.
Finally in winter 2003-04, when money was exceptionally tight for a variety of reasons, I gave up on them altogether. I've been wearing glasses constantly since then. I can't say I miss the maintenance of having to take them out every night and lug around a bottle of saline solution every time I travel. I do sort of miss the other things about them, though, and this snorkeling issue has reminded me of that.
Plus, my father has just gotten contacts again, after twenty years of wearing glasses (he stopped originally because nine months in the desert with contacts seemed like a bad plan), and... he looks twenty years younger. It's kind of startling.
So, I'm curious, and also prone to occasional fits of vanity (because I don't think I can separate contacts from "appearance"): for those of you who have some idea what I look like, what do you think? I've so far heard from one person who prefers me in glasses, but a sample size of one isn't all that rigorous.
(And those of you who don't know what I look like, this is the internet! Never let something as trivial as a lack of knowledge stand in the way of making your opinion known!)