Skip to main content

I just got a new pair of glasses

This is not really news, but a year ago I started feeling that my eyesight was changing and I went to my  opthalmologist to get a check-up. He told me I would soon be needing bifocals and added that I was 10 years early for those. Great.

When I went for my check-up last April I got a prescription for multifocals and since my father had good experience buying his mutifocals from abroad, I placed an order with the company he has used. The glasses arrived yesterday. I have been wearing them since I got up this morning, and I can see they will take some getting used to. It's somewhat like having your head underwater. Using them is going to involve more head movements and more eye movements while my physical memory gets to grips with the gradually changing focal lengths of the lenses, but hopefully it will only take a few days to get used to. It will be a relief to not have to peer under the rims when I am doing my crocheting or sewing while watching TV and to not have to take my glasses off when I need to read product labels at the supermarket (I always take them off for reading books, but the way my eyesight has been changing, in a couple of years I am probably going to start needing reading glasses). 


The best part? By ordering them from abroad I only paid about 1/5 to 1/4 of what I would have paid had I bought them locally.

Comments

George said…
I wear blended tri-focals. As you say, it takes a while to adjust to them, but now I can't work without them. Many of my friends have opted for the Lazik eye surgery, but I don't want lasers anywhere near my eyes. I'll stick with glasses.
Bibliophile said…
I did consider Lazik, but I would prefer to buy glasses at a fraction of the cost and spend the money on other things.
One of my friends is a -10 and is going for Lazik next week. It will be very strange to see her without glasses - she had been wearing them for 30 odd years.
Dorte H said…
I think my glasses are called progressive lenses, and they are perfect for work, driving, reading, watching TV etc, but for my computer I use the old reading glasses - I need to be able to see the whole screen.
Bibliophile said…
Mine are progressive too. I have enough distance between me and the computer screen that I can use them for computer work as well. I do have to wear the glasses slightly lower down on my nose than I'm used to, in order to hit the right focal point, but they are so light that it doesn't bother me.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme