[personal profile] moominmuppet
I spent all day yesterday catching on my secondary email account, and only managed a bit of quick skimming through LJ. Ah well. Many replies to catch up on, particularly.

However, quick life update...
I spent most of the weekend cleaning house; scrubbing pet cages and fan blades and the like. I'm really quite pleased about that, since I have an easier time enjoying my relaxation time at home when I'm not absolutely surrounded by unfinished tasks that are threatening to take on a life of their own. I added some new toys for Ben and Jerry (two of the rats); in cleaning Nico's cage, I took out the hammock, a wooden beam, and a ladder that she no longer uses, and relocated them to Ben and Jerry's cage. Rats napping in hammocks are cute. Ridiculously so.

We also got the porches cleaned off, piles of laundry done, and some basic kitchen cleaning accomplished. There's lots left to do, but I'm feeling pretty good about where we're at. We're hoping to gradually work our way through the house, paring down piles of junk we just don't need.

Also, it looks like I'll soon have a functional car again! Olivia, a friend of ours, is giving us her old car. Very cool. I offered to work out payments for it, but she said not to worry about it unless we sell it, in which case we'll give her the profits. So, Saturday we'll be doing the necessary E-Check, tags, plates, insurance deal. We're keeping the Accord at the moment, still looking toward maybe doing repairs on it later this summer, when it'll be easier to afford. That way we have two old potentially unreliable cars, so we'll have backup if one or the other breaks down. Honestly, it's going to be weird to have a car again. I've been doing the RTA thing for long enough now that there are things about it I'm going to miss. Not the "mandatorily losing huge chunks of my day to commuting" and the "dependent on other people for basic grocery shopping runs" and the "how are we getting Becca to work tonight", but interaction with and awareness of my environment, people-watching, reading time, extra exercise, not worrying about breakdowns, tickets, or accidents, and coffee in the morning at Tower City. I'm thinking I may decide to continue to do RTA off and on, but I'm not sure how likely that'll be when I'm not required to (it's that whole having to wake up earlier thing -- I'm not so good at doing that voluntarily).

Oh, I think I forgot to mention that my annual review was last week. I've historically done very well on call stats (they track everything; number of calls, number of minutes on the phone, percent first-level resolution, the works). I apparently still am, and am comfortably at the top of the heap in those regards. Which is all for the good, because they don't hassle long-term high-performers as much about being slackers who spend all their time playing on LJ. And I got my typical piddly little cost of living raise. Good enough.

The weather here has been pleasantly spring-like (finally) for the past week or so, too. Sometimes a bit chilly by evening, but equal parts sun and rain, and quite refreshing. I've been more than usually achy and exhausted recently, but not debilitatingly so, and not enough to really to impede my generally good and productive mood. I've been working my way through the stack of library books we currently have at home (the folks at the East Cleveland public library now know me by name. I'm not complaining about this, since the guy who's usually working the front desk is cute, and pretty charming.) I finally finished all the DeChancie fluff (the Castle Perilous series), and am on to some Lackey fluff (Exile's Honor, then probably Brightly Burning -- Becca and I are rather amused by Lackey's rather obvious Mary-Sue tendencies with regard to the Myste character), with two Chris Moore books waiting in my bag, Coyote Blue and Island of the Sequined Love Nun ([livejournal.com profile] yoli, you were right; exactly my kind of thing). I'll hopefully exhaust the fluff trend sometime soon, and spend a bit reading something more productive or thought-provoking. To that end, I finally got Odd Girl Out requested (on the sociology of aggression among teen girls). Other suggestions welcome.

I'm back in my glasses again. My last pair of contacts are pretty icky, and they were bothering my eyes yesterday, so they're soaking. I definitely need to get off my butt and find the insurance card for my eye coverage so I can get new contacts (and glasses lenses as well, since the lenses on these are scratched, and I need to get a new screw for the frames). I want to stock up on contacts and such while I've got this coverage (and get everything dental taken care of before I move to New York as well). Aside from the benefits of the coverage itself, I've got a FlexPlan that allows the extra costs to be tax-free, and I put $500 in it this year. My general plan is to get everything foreseeable taken care of before I move next year, and possibly end up without insurance for a while.

Wearing my glasses is weird. I'm really bad about giving my eyes a break from contacts because of it. My vision's pretty atrocious - 20/1200 or so (-8.5 for my contacts). Having my contacts out always reminds me of how precarious my ability to function independently truly is. I don't like being reminded of that, so I don't tend to take out my contacts very frequently. I've thought about corrective surgery, but even if I had the cash for it right now, I'm not sure I'd do it. Although I hate being reliant on corrective lenses, I'm rather disconcerted by the idea of permanently losing the particular perspective that my uncorrected vision provides. I can see incredible detail extremely close-up (an inch or two from my eye); much much more than I can with lenses in or on. I also find it fun, in a trippy sort of way, to experience the world as a giant fuzz every once in a while. When I take off my glasses, everything becomes unreal, distanced from me. I don't know if it's just the ostrich phenomenon (if I can't see it, it isn't real), or something else, but it's rather fascinating.

I dislike the loss of peripheral vision with the glasses, the curvature of the world, the fogging, scratch problems, the frames against my skin. I don't like (usually) that they create a tangible wall between me and the world. I also hate the way I look in them. I don't mind the way that glasses frames look on me, but my prescription shrinks my eyes to about half-size, and I really don't like the way that looks.

I don't like the vulnerability of contacts; the ease with which irritants can get trapped near my eye, sudden and unexpected problems at the most inconvenient times, etc.

Given that I'm not enamoured of any of the options, I'll probably generally stick with contacts. Most of my concerns about them are easily resolved by having spare sets of disposables around, instead of being reliant on being able to "fix" problems with old lenses. My eyes need a high D.K. value anyway (oxygen permeability, basically) -- I'm prone toward pannus, and need to be better about keeping my eye health in mind.

Oddly, most of my reasons for considering corrective surgery come out of my more apocalyptic imaginings. If massive catastrophe struck, and the current high level of access to vision correction became a limited resource, there's the potential for me to be well and truly fucked. In a world like that, one would have to assume that other adaptive technology would be rare and inaccessible as well. I can't even read without vision correction; by the time the page is close enough to my eye to be able to make out the words, my eyes have crossed. Raise your hand if you've read the short story about the man who survives nuclear armageddon, finally has all the time in the world to read, and breaks his glasses. That gives me the shivers.

This isn't an immediate thing, since other budgetary concerns are more central, but I very much want to get a basic digital camera at some point. I want to get some photos to send to [livejournal.com profile] firinel for her art, and I still want to send [livejournal.com profile] cjdoyle one if the offer for the modified Muppets From Space poster is still open. Hell, I'd like to have some user icons that are actually me. I won't be doing high quality digital art, but I want to be able to get decent snapshots, and I'd like to be able to do some reasonably close-up shots (piercings, tattoos, vulva, and such). Does anyone have any suggestions about what kinds of factors I should be considering in trying to find a low-end used digital camera?

OK, I think I'm all chattered out for the moment. On to an even more belated attempt to catch up on reading my friends-list.
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moominmuppet

October 2024

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