Petunia rambles on and on….

Just before Christmas, I bought myself a red V-necked sweater. I thought it would look festive through the holiday season, the color looked good on me, and as it’s always so damn cold in the office where I work, it would be a handy addition to my wardrobe along with a parka that would also work for trips to Antarctica.

Today, I wore it with a pair of black jeans. Ok, who cares, right?

I went to the eye doctor’s office to pay money owed. Husband had gone in for his 3-month pressure check a few weeks ago, paid the required co-pay and they billed the rest to my insurance. Because my insurance company thinks that everyone including doctors works for $6 an hour, they pay accordingly, so after they settled with the doctor, there was a hefty balance left over.  I went in there today to settle up.

Such a nice staff there, always pleasant and helpful – and they looked me straight in the face when they said, “What a pretty sweater! It matches the color of your eyes.” And then they booked me for an appointment about 90 minutes later and apologized for that much delay. What great people!

I had known that my “bad” eye was pretty red and irritated, but with an idiopathic chronic inflammatory condition in there, it usually is. Not a good thing, but not terribly out of the ordinary, either. It did seem a hell of a lot bit worse, but I’m so used to seeing it look like I just came down off a hell of a drunken rage that I mostly ignore it. But over the last few weeks, I’ve thought the other eye was looking a bit off – or was it my imagination? And was it affecting my vision? It’s been harder to focus on close things, and all my near vision is from my glasses, post- cataract surgery. Well, I’m due for new glasses but still….   And when I stop and test my distance vision which is darn good now, also post cataract surgery, and the glasses just tweak it a bit, well, hell, I can see way better without the glasses at all!

Because the pressure was up a bit, my doctor had put me on pressure reducing eye drops. This is fairly common with this condition, and apparently, my eyes don’t like the ingredients – he thinks it’s an allergic reaction. SO – now I’m off that stuff, on some new med, dropped into both eyes 4 times a day, wean down to 2 drops, both eyes in 4 days, finish the 2 bottles I was given and come back in next month.

Next time, he can go pay his own damn bills.

• I should not be left alone in a house with chocolate. Ever. I know I shouldn’t eat it. It’ll probably keep me up all night, quivering from the caffeine. I’ll gain two pounds and bitch for two weeks about it. Without a babysitter watching me, supervising me, I’ll eat a bagful.
• I am off work tomorrow and am SOO glad!
• Knitpicks notified me that their prices of wool- and alpaca-based yarns would be going up, effective today. Hey, the price of everything else has gone up, and fuel costs affect shipping costs, etc. Their goods come in from Peru. Perhaps even the price of alpaca chow has gone up, too. So last night, while the husband was over there watching something simple on the tube, I was over here clicking away ordering wool-based yarns, lest there be a shortage here. Ordered enough to get free shipping. In today’s mail, I got a new Knitpicks catalog. Damn! But I did want some extra cables for my Options needles.
• I am a techie freak, a computer freak. Daughter said I have more gadgets than the Inspector! I have enough charging cables to suspend a bridge. I can design/program/administer databases and did so for the USAF. I designed and programmed this blog – if something is not right, I will drive myself insaner until I find the problem and fix it. I programmed my GPS to make sheep sounds every time I get within 5 miles of a yarn store (this has come close to causing my husband to jump out of a moving vehicle while crossing the Chesapeake Bay as there’s a yarn store on Kent Island. Eastbound is rough on him)  However, having bragged about all that, I have to admit that I can’t work the TV/DVD/attached receiver/fancy damn expensive speakers mega-system when I want to. There is some mental block here, I’m sure. For the most part, I don’t really ever want to watch TV. I hear folks at work talking about shows they’ve been following or watching for years, and I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, haven’t seen an episode. If the TV broke, I probably wouldn’t notice for weeks, maybe months. If I heard on the internet about some major news event or natural disaster, I might turn the TV on, to see more details on a larger screen. On Election Night in November, I’ll probably attempt to turn it on. But see, there’s the problem – because I do it so infrequently, and have so little interest, my mind refuses to remember the steps needed to do anything with the myriad switches and buttons involved in getting the damn stuff to do anything at all. Part of this, too, is that husband sits most of his waking, non-working time with at least 2 remotes in his hands. (I call the big Universal Remote his Plastic Penis and get dirty looks!) The remote control is clearly under his control, his domain, not mine to fool with lest I inadvertently cause the TV to display something intelligent.   So at Christmas, I told him I wanted the DVD/CD set of Adele recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall and he promptly went to Best Buy and got the Blue Ray edition. I envisioned a cozy evening watching the concert, maybe some wine. Maybe…..   Harumph. Didn’t happen. The History Channel still exists. So in a snit, I told him that I needed directions, written damn directions, Pop’s Entertainment System for Dummies so that I could play the damn thing for myself, just trying to let him know that I was fed up with watching HIS choice of shows every damn night of my life. Crap – he took me seriously for a change.

• I’ll be able to see the performance but I don’t think it’ll be quite the romantic evening I had hoped for. And that one song will make me cry.

Got an e-mail today from daughter. After seeing my Kindle, and seeing Paul’s when he was down at her house inspecting her newborn (Paul had to have one after he saw mine), well, she’s ordered a Kindle Fire, too. Amazon should be paying me a commission!!

Gonna go read my book now. On my Kindle. Currently going through Three Moons over Sedona by Sherry Hartzler.