Blue-Footed Musings

• I rewatched Disney’s The Little Mermaid the other day. Since then, I’ve had the music stuck in my head, the same part over and over again: “bright young women, sick of swimmin'” (that’s some quality rhymin’ right there). I thought the movie stood up well after all these years. But, this time around it seemed to me that, excepting Ursula, everyone in the movie was painfully simple-minded, and I was almost rooting for her by the end.
• The kids are obsessed with rickrolling and I don’t know which is weirder–that they know what rickrolling is or that rickrolling is still a thing.
• I felt almost like a spy for a little while yesterday after receiving a mysterious package that contained a thumb drive. But it turned out to be from my dad, and it was just a pdf copy of his trail journal. He wants me to make another photo album for him. I said I would, of course, because I couldn’t possibly say no. Scary thing is, the first album covered about 125 pages of journal. There are another 340 pages to go. Yikes. The AT is a long-ass trail.

• Marshall joined me for my walk today, and we talked about such things as cold fusion, the ultimate fate of the Earth, and mosquito-gun turrets (a much needed invention–tiny guns that go on your hat and shoot approaching mosquitos, but not fatally, because Marshall is a softie).
• It felt like Friday, all of us agreed, probably because the kids have Friday off. I do not have Friday off, though. I must remember to go to work tomorrow!
• Speaking of work, I’ve noticed that most of my coworkers get more time for their projects than I get for mine. On the projects for which I get 50 workdays, everyone else gets at least 60. Soon I’ll be working on a larger type of project for which I have been given 78 days (three days of which I had to beg for–my boss had planned to give me only 75), while everyone else on the schedule got at least 94. I’m not sure how I ought to feel about this. I’ve known about it for a while, but I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. I still don’t. There may be a good explanation for the differences in the numbers. But, I probably should find out.
• It seems to take forever for the first violet to bloom, but once it does, suddenly there are dozens. No, hundreds. No, thousands! Well, not quite thousands yet, but certainly enough for a bouquet. The first bouquet of the season was composed mostly of white flowers. Having sprouted earlier, their stems were longer and fit into the vase better.

• Livia came down sick last week, and she passed the bug along to me. We gave her a home Covid test, and it came out negative. As I read online today, we probably ought to have tested her again a day later, just to be a little more certain. Oh, well. We kept her home for most of the week anyway. Imagining if it were Covid and she had tested positive the first day she was noticeably sick, we adhered to the current CDC guidelines. As for me, I feel like I’m on the mend, but I plan to take it easy this weekend, just to be safe.
• My car is in the shop again (grr!), this time because it wouldn’t start. The Universe is really conspiring to keep me home for the next few days. That’s fine. I have no pressing reason to leave. I already did most of my Easter shopping online.
• The daffodils that I picked last weekend have finally wilted. Time to get new ones. There are plenty outside to choose from. The longevity of the blooms is one of the things I love most about daffodils. It makes up for their vaguely unpleasant smell.
• I didn’t go outside for a couple of days this week, due to my cold, and I may have missed the first violet. When I went out yesterday evening, I found a bunch of partially opened flowers. Were the violets closing for the night or because of the cloudy weather, or had they just started to open? It doesn’t actually matter, so the first violet that I see today is going to get the honor of being First Violet of the Year.
• Marshall joined the Fishing Club at school. I’m not sure why he suddenly wanted to learn how to fish, but I suspect his grandfather’s influence. This morning he had his first fishing expedition. He says that he didn’t catch any fish, but he had a good time, and that’s what really matters.

Wordle 287 3/6

⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛
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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I like Wordle. It’s a relaxed puzzle, and I play it in a relaxed way. There are six guesses per game, and if I end up using them all, so be it. I make a point of starting with a different word every day so that I don’t fall into a rut. Sometimes I deliberately use revealed letters in my next play. Other times, I play five new letters to see what else comes up (or doesn’t, as the case may be). Today, I ignored the yellow square from my first guess and played five new letters, one of which turned out green. My third guess contained the two revealed letters, but I didn’t expect that it would be the answer. Imagine my surprise when all the letters sprouted green, like a spring metaphor. How lovely.

On Monday I had my appointment with the retina specialist. I wish I could say that she’d taken one look at my eyes, told me exactly what was going on, and gave me a sure-fire cure. Unfortunately she couldn’t tell me the things that I most wanted to know, which are why my retina is breaking down and what is likely to happen to my vision. She did at least confirm and elaborate on some of what I’d read online: retinoschisis does sometimes have a genetic element (she told me to ask my parents if anyone in the family was blind or had suffered major vision loss), it is common in people with myopia (but, as I’d suspected, I’m not nearly as myopic as would be considered typical for this kind of problem), and there is a surgical procedure that can be used (but only if a hole develops in my retina, at which time they’ll “try to put it back together again”).

I have an appointment to see the specialist again in two months, but at a different office, where they have the capacity to do genetic testing. I do want to know why my retina’s breaking down, but I’m not sure how much the genetic testing will help with treatment. Maybe knowing if it’s genetic might give them some clue as to how it will develop? In the meantime, I’m supposed to use prescription eye drops twice per day. This medicine is, according to the literature, also used to treat glaucoma. The hope is that it will reduce pressure in my eye and get the fluid out of the area between the layers of my retina–to “settle it down,” so to speak. Though the problem is much worse in my right eye than my left, I need to treat both eyes.

I put off starting the eye drops for a couple of days, because I hate taking medicine, especially in eye-drop form. But, surely blindness must be worse than eye drops, I reasoned, and I started using the medicine on Thursday. It stings and makes my eyes red, and it causes a nasty smell/taste behind my nose that slowly works its way down into my mouth (yuck!). I’m getting used to it, though, which is good, because I’ve got to do this twice per day for another two months at least.

I called my mother after the appointment to ask her about our family history. I figured I should do it while the thought was still fresh in mind. A surprising number of people in the family have suffered vision loss, but all from other causes. My mom seemed really worried about me, so I told her that the doctor hadn’t given me any indication that the situation was dire. That seemed to make her feel a little better, and it is true, of course. I don’t much care to lie, even to make my mom feel better. But it’s also true that doctors usually try not to worry their patients, and the very fact that she asked about family blindness suggests that blindness is a likely outcome. I try not to think about that, though. I don’t know enough right now to be either optimistic or pessimistic, so I’m aiming for neutral, with just a slight edge of irritation because my eyes are so red and sting-y.