Ah yes, the joy of watching yourself fall apart! About two years ago I was wiring up a 6-way trailer plug, the one with those teeny-weeny little letters "G, B, W, R, Y, AS" and I yelled over to my friend who has an adjoining shop to mine - "Hey Kurt, why do they make these d*** letters so #!*$& small???" Says he with a knowing grin, "Here, you might want to try these" and hands me his reading glasses. "Hmm, much better" says I. Comes the dawn, my auto-focus is on the fritz. I'm at 200 diopter and holding. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
Oh, and the little black floaters. I'm driving home from dinner with the family about 6 months ago and slowly realize that I've got a little blind spot in my left eye that is the spittin' image of the outline of the state of Tennessee. Only about 2% of my entire field of vision, but an unsettling development nonetheless. After a week of gazing at the Volunteer State it's off to the eye doctor. "Yep, you've got what is called a "floater", says he. Something about my vitreous humor, but it didn't strike me as being at all funny. "Sometimes they go away, sometimes they don't". Great, and I'm paying good money for this. Well Tennessee is gone now thank god (not that I don't think it's great place), and I got the good news that my beyond arm's-length eyesight is 20-15, so that's a major plus.
This all reminds me of one of life's most important axioms - be thankful for what you've got, it could always be much, much worse. A longtime friend of our family, a retired Admiral who grew up on Lake Erie building and tinkering with steamboats, was instrumental in raising the Seventh Fleet from the bottom of Pearl Harbor, and who has spent his whole life working with machines and anything mechanical, is now completely blind. He wrote to us recently and said that he felt it was the worst fate that could befall a man - and this from a proud, courageous and stoic giant of a man.
So let's all count our blessings, eh? If I can put on my reading glasses and see things in razor-sharp detail, all is right with the world.
Regards, and keep looking on the sunny side, John D.