It's A Mystery

What's up with Tiger Woods! He can drive a golf ball to the moon without a problem, but he can't drive a car down a street without running into a few things.

Nervous Nellie Survives Once Again

This is a follow up on my eye problems. I had surgery a year ago to have cataract’s removed, and artificial lens was implanted in my eyes. This is a year later. After the cataracts were removed a membrane or film grew over the new artificial lens. I had to wait a year for it to be ready to be removed. The day arrived and I had the film removed from one eye and I will go back in a couple weeks to have the other eye taken care of. Before the surgery the nurse took my blood pressure and checked my pulse and oxygen level. My blood pressure was 228 over 88.
I nearly fell off of the stool. I never had such high blood pressure in my life. "What’s that all about", I asked. She said, "He may want you to go to emergency". Then she asked if I was nervous about the surgery. I said, "Yes I’m worried because they said it would be laser surgery and I will not be sedated; what if I blink my eye while he is doing it"? "Will I end up with a big round hole in my eyelid". She said, "No, that isn’t going to happen."
She said he would be right in and left the room. I waited and waited and waited, and my blood pressure may have peaked around 500 because I thought I could be having a stroke and they are just going to ignore me until the cows come home. I forgot all about the hole in the eyelid because I now had something really serious to worry about. I don’t want to have a stroke.

The surgeon finally came strolling in like it was just another boring day with the laser gun. He didn’t mention the blood pressure so I didn’t either, because I wanted to get the surgery over with before I had the stroke.
It was very simple, the first thing he did was place an object in my eye. I don’t know what it was, but I think it prevented the laser from doing what it was not supposed to do. All you do is set your chin on the chin thing and stare at a red light and the surgeon operates the laser gun or whatever it’s called and he zaps around the iris of the eye and removes it. Anyway that is what I felt like he was doing. The nurse had already dilated my eye that was having the procedure, and put in numbing drops.
I tried my very best not to blink. Anyway, he said it’s all done and you will not be able to see anything with that eye for a few minutes. I asked him about my blood pressure and he had not heard anything about it. He suggested I go home and call my primary doctor about it. I drove straight to my primary doctor’s office and they took the blood pressure and it was 144 over 72. That is the normal for me. I still don’t know why my blood pressure was sky high and went down to normal so soon. Maybe their blood pressure apparatus was out of order. I was totally blind in the eye for about five minutes. Of course the reading problem is worse than ever until I get the other eye fixed.

Famous Last Words

What’s up with all that texting? There seems to be some secret fascination about it that I fail to grasp. Everybody has a cell phone in their hand and while you are conversing with them they are texting.

My Grandson, Tylor (age 15) was over here the other evening and he is sitting on the couch and I thought we were having a normal conversation. I finally asked if he was texting while talking to me. He said, "I’m texting with two people, Grandma". Those same people can sit in the same room for thirty minutes and not say a half dozen words to each other.

Do they just like pressing the letters on the phone. Some do it while driving a car. So many are doing it that they had to pass a law making it illegal to text while driving. I decided to try it the other day to see if I could do it without getting addicted to it. So I typed a message to Deena, one of my granddaughters. It took me about 30 minutes to type out. "Wats up Doc? She answered back instantly, "Nuttin much". I couldn't think of anything else to say. I can assure you , I’ll never get addicted to it. I think it's a kid thing and will soon lose it's appeal.

Wordless Wednesday

It's The Law

When I got my first computer, Email was the fascinating new technology of the day. Every stupid joke that was ever thought of was emailed to you. I even remember getting excited when I thought Bill Gates was going to send me $250 for forwarding the letter on to 20 more people. I’m still waiting, Bill.

Now it's all about texting. They even pass laws that you cannot text while driving? Think how stupid that will sound to future generations.

Here are few examples of old laws that are still on the books:

Do not hunt birds from an airplane in Tennessee; it's illegal.
Don't think of popping a champagne cork in Colorado on Christmas Day.
Forgetting to close a gate in Nevada is against the law.
You can't sell perfume as a drink in Delaware.
Wisconsin law prohibits margarine from being substituted for butter in restaurants unless requested by the customer.
Kentucky law requires that residents bathe at least once a year. (Hey, nothing wrong with that law)

Do Not Try This At Home

I had the cataracts taken off of my eyes a year ago. Nothing ever really comes to an end. I thought that would be the end of my vision problems. That was not to be. Do you know that when you have cataracts taken off, it is not necessarily the end of your eye problem. You may or may not want to know this, but I got to the nitty gritty of it. When they take a cataract off this is what happens. Think of your eyeball as a grape. They take the upper half of the peeling off of the grape and place the artificial lens in that pulp area. The bottom half of the peeling is left in place.

In some cases, the bottom peel starts growing over the new lens. It has to reach a certain stage before it can be taken off. In my case it took a year. It happens to some people in a much shorter time. They can remove the film or whatever they call it with laser surgery and you do not need to be sedated. It is painless and only takes a couple minutes. Mine is now ready to be removed, but the surgeon was not in today so I have an appointment to have it done in about a week.

That is my medical lesson for today. I’m probably crazy as a bed bug and have it all wrong, but that is the way I understood it. Or maybe he was just explaining in a way he thought the old lady could grasp. Anyway I might be able to read the newspaper again, and the novel I have started. I can read for a few minutes before the words start running together.

If you have Cadillac’s (that’s what my brother, Hollis calls them) on your eyes you may be one of the lucky ones and not have this happen to you.

The Big Secret

I once had a friend that was so friendly that going with her to a public place was a nightmare. She would stop and talk to everybody she came in contact with, especially if they had a baby or a small child. She would ooh and aah over the little person, like they were the most adorable little creature on the face of the earth. It used to bug me to no end. I would ask her, "Why do you find it necessary to talk to everybody in the universe"? She never gave me a straight answer. She didn’t know why, she just liked people, she guessed. Going with her to a place like the County Fair was like going out with a celebrity. Not only did she know everybody, but everybody knew her as well.

Alice was the most popular person I ever knew in my life. We were very good friends and were neighbors to begin with. I became widowed and moved to another part of town, but we remained friends and since she didn’t drive anything, but a golf cart, I would take her anyplace she wanted to go. We laughed a lot and that was why I enjoyed her company so much. She could make something funny out of almost anything. Sometimes I could make her laugh. One time as we were driving down a street and a group of people were standing on the sidewalk and after we passed them, I said, "Oh my gosh! I forgot to stop so you could talk to those people". She answered, "Smart Aleck". It was that sort of thing that went on between us constantly.

One time we drove to a small nearby town on a whim. We both said later, that we enjoyed that little outing more than anything in our lives. We were in our seventies at the time, and had nothing, but time on our hands. She passed away a few years ago, and I cannot tell you how much I miss her. We had many serious conversations about our past lives. She had a grown son and daughter. We had no secrets between us, or so I thought.

About a year after she passed away, I was invited to the 90th Birthday party of Jo, who was a sister of my friend. Jo had called me and told me there would be a special guest at the party. It seems that years and years ago Alice had a baby that she gave up for adoption at birth. She was divorced from her husband and had her two children to support. The EX was not helping with the support at all and lived in another state so she felt she had no choice, but to give up the baby.

He was the special guest that would be at the party. In all those years that we had discussed everything in the world, she had never shared that little incident with me. Nobody in her family knew about the adoption except her sister. So I met her long lost son at the party. He said his adopted father had passed away and he was at his adopted mothers bedside just before she passed away, when she told him that he had been adopted. He was totally shocked. He did not have a clue that he had been adopted. He was an only child.

His mother told him the name of his biological mother and the city she was living in when he was adopted. It took him about a year to digest the whole thing, but finally decided to see if he could find her. He didn’t have any trouble tracking her down and found that she had just passed away a few months before. His biological father had also passed away. He was invited to the party and we all got to meet him and he was very friendly, just like his mother, and was also very happy to find that he had a brother and sister. Brother and sister were just as surprised, as he was to find out about him. He lives in another state, but is keeping in touch and visits with his new family.
Now, I understand why she was so enamored with babies and small children, I think she was always searching for the baby she had given away.

The new brother is Chris (the one in the pink shirt) Mike to his left. Sister is in front of him and Aunt Jo. The other lady is Mike's wife, sorry I can't remember her name.

KABOOM

Early this morning as I was reading my newspaper about all the war things that are going on, I nearly jumped through the ceiling as a very loud explosion sound invaded the morning silence. It sounds like the war has come to my neighborhood. I jumped up and looked outside, up and down the street and didn’t see anything going on. I put it out of my mind and continued to read all the good news in the paper.
Later in the day I heard another strange unfamiliar sound. It was a high pitch noise that just kept going on so I had to go look outside again. Now, I think I know where the morning explosion sound came from. Somebody had hired a chimney sweep and they were cleaning the chimney of the duplex that is across the street and down two houses.
I don’t know for sure, but I am thinking they may be the ones that had the explosion. If so, I guess nobody was hurt. I wonder if that sort of thing damages your walls or anything.
I hate to sound so ignorant, but do you have to have a fireplace for the soot to accumulate like that or does it happen with gas heat also. I wonder if I should do as the neighbors do, and hire one of those places.
I sure would hate to be roused out of bed in the middle of the night to the tune of my chimney exploding. I’ll bet I wouldn’t have any trouble getting out of bed if it happened.