Pug’s Place

…it smells funny when wet.

This is the second day this month with a fluctuating rain all day long. The first time I saw it rain here was on my way to work one morning: I was driving down the freeway, bracketed in by other vehicles. Suddenly raindrops hit my windshield. A second later the car ahead of me slammed on his breaks, prompting me to follow suit while I glanced in my rear-view mirror to check on the guy behind me. Mentally preparing myself to swerve to avoid being hit if the guy was tailgating like so many do, I was startled to not see him back there. Oops, where was he? Oh, he was there alright. Just a good bit further back, slowing down and running his windshield wipers full tilt.

Conclusion: People here don’t know how to drive in rain. If it weren’t dangerous to me it’d be funny.

I was nearly late for work yesterday morning. Over the weekend I found my alarm clock from Gainesville (and high school before that), so I swapped Chris’ spare alarm for that one. So I set it for 5:20 am and went to bed Sunday night… and woke up when Chris checked on me at 6:40 am Monday morning. CRAP! I checked the alarm - it was still set, the AM/PM was correct… but the alarm light was weak and when I touched the clock it got much brighter. Something inside shorted out in the move!

Just to show how weird traffic can be, I left here at 7:10 and got to work on time at 7:30. I usually leave at 6:30 and get there at about 7:20. Too bad it doesn’t work like that every day…

In other news, it turns out my eyeglasses which I’ve had for the last year and a half are the wrong prescription: I had an eye exam Friday which showed that my right lens is a full diopter too strong for the eye. That’s bad. My right eye’s prescription is supposed to be 1.5, the lens is 2.5. So that’s causing my eye to do slightly weird things when the other is closed (apparently) and it’s also working my eye’s focusing muscles really really hard. My new optometrist said, “this should be giving you constant migraines.”

D’oh. I haven’t been having the migraines (and am glad for it) but it’s very bad that I’ve been hurting my eyes for the last year and a half because of poor quality control back in Ft. Walton. My new glasses will be in this week.

Also in that trip I had some sty-like things under my eyes examined. That required my optometrist to not only dilate my eyes for the standard glaucoma test but also paralyze them. So when I left I was unable to focus my eyes at all; they were stuck at the relaxed focal length of about 20 feet. When I got home here I cranked the font size up to 120 pt. on my computer and still couldn’t read the text. It was frustrating beyond all belief. All I could find to do was to unpack box after box since I didn’t need to know more than basic shape info on what I was unpacking. Of course that led to me making educated guesses about what some of the things were: I told my brother when he got home, “I may have mixed up the booze and the cooking oils. Please check for me, I still can’t see the labels.”

The worst part about it was the paralyzing agent made the dilation effects linger for more than 24 hours. I was in pain whenever I looked outside all day Saturday - and we went shopping around the city. Oops.

To close, my room now has furniture and I’m going to Boston next week! Woo!