Before I go into today’s story, an update. Either the critter Rosie’s been tracking has moved on, or else she’s finally realized that we’re simply not going to fall for her version of Extreme Made-You-Look, but there’s been no more lurking and staring at the dishwasher since last night. I figure it’ll be soon enough we’ll be yanking that dishwasher out (along with every other item in that kitchen) in preparation for the grand remodel early next year, so we’ll find out what her fuss was about sooner or later.

But back to today. I got laser surgery done on my left eye probably nine or ten years ago (the fact that I cannot find reference to having the surgery in my archives lets me know it’s been since before 2000; other than that, who knows). The left eye was brought from 20/200 up to 20/20; the right eye they didn’t touch because it’s been 20/40 all along and since that’s driving legal in the state of California, they didn’t want to mess with it and possibly make it worse.

Well, the past year or so I’ve noticed it’s been slowly getting harder to read street signs (and that sort of excitement is the kind I could live without when I’m driving), and I’m having to squint to read stuff that’s far away, and while I could put it down to eye strain from spending about 8 hours a day in front of a computer (or else in front of a book, or in front of some knitting) , and, well, let’s face it. I’m two years away from turning 40, and vision’s one of the first things to start to slip. Except, of course, that when you get older you’re supposed to get more far-sighted, and my problem seems to be slipping back into near-sighted, so maybe once I hit that magical ‘older’ point, the eyes will finally adjust to normal, for once in my life.

I went to an optometrist today. She did all manner of tests and shining of lights and poking and prodding and then she put a lens in front of each eye and said ‘how’s that?’ and what do you know, all those letters on the vision chart that were so blurry were suddenly actually distinguishable from each other.

So basically it turns out that my left eye decided that it was tired of being always different, and has now joined the right eye, and I’ve got a matched set of 20/40 eyeballs. Where before I used to be able to just adjust to distances and such, depending on what I needed to see, and which eye would work best for that sort of vision, now both eyes are just about the same, and that self-adjusting doesn’t work so well anymore. Who knew such a tiny little deficiency could be such a huge pain in the tail?

I picked out a pair of glasses, because to be perfectly honest I am just not interested in going back to contacts and all that those entail. Neither eye is bad enough to try for laser surgery again. And for close up stuff I can still probably get away with no glasses at all. But for driving, and distance stuff, and seeing things in lower levels of light (like, say, reading music for a concert in which I am singing, in poor lighting – wouldn’t *that* be useful), the glasses will come in quite handy.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.