You Know You're Getting Old When . . .

. . . it's heaven having reading glasses scattered in all rooms of the house.

Like the Cyclops sharing their single eye, Shari and I share reading glasses. I had two and she had a couple. We often forget our age and have to share a pair in order to read restaurant menus. It's less obvious than one of us reading the menu out loud.  ("Huh? Can you repeat that again, louder?")

Any more, I need glasses to peel hard boiled eggs and to play solitaire on my mini-tablet. It has become safer for me to wear glasses wielding a French knife doing food prep. I can't tell a phillips from a straight slot screw, so I need glasses for most fix-it jobs. And I can't search for songs on my ittie-bittie MP3 music device without glasses.

Fortunately, I can still bathe, brush my teeth, and drive motor cars (but not read maps) without wearing glasses.

The worst part is reading tiny 10 or even 8 point fonts in legal documents. That's when I pull the document to my sunny office window and use my trusty Oxford Dictionary magnifying glass to distinguish a 6 from an 8.

Heck. I can't even read my own tiny handwriting from years ago.

For a while I was thinking of croakies -- the elasticky thingie that clasps onto eyeglasses so you can wear them around your neck -- like jewelry or a spinster librarian. But that didn't work out.

I like to wear T-Shirts with a pocket. Some people use the pocket to store a pack of cigarettes (instead of rolling the pack in the shirt sleeve). If you are in India, that shirt pocket is used for an assortment of pens, scraps of paper, notebooks, and money. Like high school geeks, engineers and pocket-protectors, prestige is measured by the number of items bulging from the pocket. I like the pocket for my reading glasses.

Admittedly, they fall out when leaning over, and I've had to fish my glasses from the bottom of the swimming pool, but it's better than shoving glasses in a back pocket and having that sickening, crunch feeling and noise when you sit on them.

What did work out was Shari buying some reading glasses in bulk. We just leave them strategically scattered about the house in places where we might need them.

So heaven is being able to flop down in an armchair, or pick up a kitchen knife, or reach for the iSong iPlayer knowing that reading glasses are somewhere nearby.

Swimming with Critters

Swimming, sort of

Scorpions and flies do not swim very well. Either that, or they can't climb out of a swimming pool very well. Or maybe the ones around the desert never learned how to swim. In any case, this scorpion drowned and it's the time of year when flies get stuck in the pool.

We've been keeping the pool covered, especially overnight when the temperatures drop. Sometimes there's a little surprise when we uncover.

Usually it's a horde of flies. The silly critters like to drink; odd, eh? Trouble is, once they dip, they're stuck. I wonder if they ever figure out about surface tension.

Oh well. No need to mourn too many of them. Once they are skimmed out with my trusty swimming pool skimmer-net, they revive in a few tens of minutes. Happy, but none the smarter.

Drying out, sort of

Couple of mornings ago, we had a nice surprise. Well, it was a lot less nice for the scorpion on the bottom of the pool. Looks like it gave up the ghost while in a ready-to-sting posture. Dead. Defunct.

So far I've seen two kinds of scorpions around here. This is the big, kinda orange colored. The other kind is small and dark. They say it's the sting of the small ones that are more nasty. I don't have the experiences to compare, but the sting I got from one of the small guys was only a nuisance.

This guy was about three inches long. I can't be sure because it was stuck in the ready-to-sting position. It may have been defunct, but I didn't want to unwind its tail.

Good thing we shocked the pool a couple three weeks ago. ("Shock" in the world of swimming pool maintenance means overdosing on chlorine.) Our water is nice and clear. I can spot a small pebble on the deep bottom. So it's not like there is any risk of swimming with critters.

When monsoon season comes, we'll be fishing frogs out of the pool. Meanwhile, Shari has taken to swimming in the cool mornings when the water is only 92 degrees.

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Sewing Projects

The shade cover over the garden is nicely tailored, thanks to Shari's hard work. And the plastic sheet that came with the gazebo has been replaced with sun-shade cloth, again thanks to Shari's skill with her sewing machine.

Meanwhile, through the use of a solar blanket, cut to shape by seamstress Shari so that it fits within the pool perfectly, the water in the cement pond is about 90 degrees. Nice.

Twenty laps; that's twenty times back and forth, forty times the forty-five foot length of the pool.

It's not the English Channel, but it would drown me. That's what Shari will swim, given some warm water, a sunny afternoon, and only a little wind.

I just dip, maybe do a couple of laps, float with the styrofoam noodles, maybe do a couple of laps, then get out and water some plants.