SpecsWar `09 Part I

I've worn glasses for my vision since around the 9th grade. In the time I've had to wear them, I can count on one finger the number of times I've both ordered glasses and received them within a reasonable period of time. Now, I realize I am not alone in this, as there is a standard waiting period of at least a week for most orders. In my case, however, it's usually two weeks, though sometimes longer. There are also often accompanying complications with new glasses, such as the fact that my ears are slightly further back on my head than the average person, necessitating the longest temples money can buy. Most decent optical technicians figure this out on their own and order accordingly, but due to the ones who are not so observant, I make it a point to tell them in advance. On one occasion my warnings went unheeded resulting in glasses arriving equipped with temples that would scarcely fit over the ears of an eight-year-old. And on that point, I am not exaggerating.

"Well, do you want to go ahead and wear them until the new temples arrive?" they asked. I then attempted to do so just to demonstrate to them how absurd it was to even suggest it. They had to send them back and cost me another week's worth of waiting.

So it takes me a long time to get my glasses. Well, except for that one time...

It was around ten years ago when I lost my glasses in the ocean while vacationing with my then girlfriend (now wife) at Holden Beach. At the time my glasses were wire frame and had temples that ended in old-fashioned wire cables, the kind that hook around the ear and prevent them from slipping off. I was operating, falsely, under the impression that the cables also made them wave-proof. Soon enough, they were ripped from my noggin by a rogue wave and were never seen by me again. It was pretty humiliating, what with my newly met future brother and sister-in-law in attendance (the parents of the very niece we're enjoying a visit from this week), but I chalked it up to a lesson learned. I resolved forever more never to set foot in the ocean wearing specs unless they were secured to my head with one of those rubber floaty things designed to prevent them from sinking away should they become dislodged.

Being a Friday, the local optometrist in Supply was still open, but only until 3p, so I had my then girlfriend (now wife) drive me over for an emergency consultation and--I hoped--some specs. Considering my practically still-dripping swim trunks, it was pretty obvious why I was there when I walked through the door, squinting. The staff looked up at me and said the polite equivalent of, "Lost yer glasses in the drink, eh?"

Even though it had been something on the order of three years since my last eye exam, the doc at Beach Opti agreed to go ahead and sell me some glasses based on my prescription from the last exam, which they had to phone to get. Better still, he said if I was able to find some frames in the store they could have me ready to go in a couple of hours provided I promised to go have my eyes examined immediately upon my return home. I found frames and true to his word the doc handed me a new pair of glasses in record time. (My promise to have my eyes examined took another couple of years to get around to, but for the record my eyes had not changed one whit in the interim, which means not one whit from five years earlier.)

Jump ahead to 2005 or so. I finally decide it's time to get new frames and ditch the beach-emergency, gun-metal-colored frames for some sleek rimless ones. I then got my eyes examined and headed to the Wal-Mart optical center to pick out some frames. I expected a two week wait, but they informed me it would actually take a month because they had to be sent away to a lab for assembly. I didn't want to wait a month, but I really liked the frames so I agreed. Finally, a month and a day later, they arrived and I rushed down to pick them up only to find that some genius at the lab royally effed up the mounting of the nose bar to the point where it was not mounted flat across between the lenses. The staff at the Wal-Mart optical center argued with me that this was not actually the case and that such rimless glasses often appear crooked to the naked eye. They actually said that. Then I laid the glasses flat across the surface of their counter and pointed out to them how no parallel lines were formed between the counter and the nose bar. They had no ground to stand on after that, other than to say it was the lab's fault and not theirs. They offered to send them in to be redone, but I'd have to wait another month. I opted for a refund, instead.

I eventually found rimless frames at a more reputable optical center and stuck with those until two months back when my most recent pair exploded.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Niecewatch Day 3

Niecewatch Days 1 and 2 went fairly smoothly. We've had very few behavior issues (certainly none during my watch) and have actually had a good time. We've done local museum tours, trips to the gym to swim in the lap pool, lunches at Biscuit World, shopping trips to the mall, etc.

This morning after Kayley awoke, I gave her a breakfast of healthy Kashi Autumn Harvest cereal and then went out to turn my compost heap. I was nearly finished when I heard the *DING* of our microwave and wondered what she would be heating up. When I returned to the house I saw that she had just finished eating the last bits of the chocolate pie my moms-in-law sent. However, because Ma couldn't send it in one of her pie pans, she sent it with us in a lidded storage container--you know, the kind made of enamel-coated metal.

"Uh, did you just microwave that bowl?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "But it didn't explode," she quickly added.

I then had to give her the very stern lecture on how you should NEVER put metal into a microwave, even if you really don't want to have to hunt up another safer dish to put your pie in because you don't want to miss even a second of Zoey 101. As she offered the bit about exploding, on her own, I have to assume she knew damn well better than to put metal in a microwave. So I added that she should never EVER put metal in ANY microwave, not just ours.

It can only get better, today, right?

Vacations, and coming back there from

Wow.

Been a while since I've posted. I have the perfect excuse, though: vacation.

Yesirree, last week the wife and I drove down to see her family in Holden Beach and there we stayed, gorging ourselves on the flounder that my father-in-law caught and my moms-in-law fried up, basking in the 6 p.m. beach time sun (we no longer have patience for beaches any earlier than about 5p) and occasionally heading out on the ocean and waterway with Pa on his new cabin-boat. It's long been his dream to purchase such a craft and head out to fish whenever he wants and now that dream has come to pass. I didn't catch anything and, instead, lost something very expensive in the form of my new eye glasses which were knocked from my face by a less than rogue wave and may wash up somewhere near Myrtle beach one day. If you find them, lemme know.

This week, we're back in Borderland, but with an added cast member: our 10-year-old niece Kayley, who is staying with us for a couple of weeks. We plan to see the sights around here this week (all two of them) and then head to D.C. next week for some camping and monument/museum touring. It's proven to be a mild adventure, as the wife is back at work this week leaving me to entertain the kid during the day. So far it's not been much of a problem, but the week is still young.

In the meantime, I'm wearing my contact lenses while I wait for yet another pair of glasses to arrive. The story behind my battle with a local optometrist to achieve this, however, is a fun one which I shall shortly tell...

Potty Party (Our Baffroom Adventure Part 18)

This past weekend we threw our first major cookout bash here at Chez Juice, inviting friends and coworkers to pop by for a Potty Party. Yes, we threw a party in honor of our newly and finally finished potty.

Okay, so the potty still wasn't precisely finished when we scheduled the party, but one miter-box, saw and some pre-painted white wood trim strips later, not to mention an evening's work, and we finally had the trim set into place. (Note that I didn't say I nailed all of them into place, as the nails I bought don't seem to get along with our walls very well, so I gave up toward the end and just strategically placed the cut trim so as to look like it was affixed to the wall. I'll figure it out later.)

We've not had a party here before and had no idea how many people would show, so we wound up making a tremendous amount of food for it. We had loads of hamburger patties and hotdogs ready to grill, plus chips, hot dog chili and baked beans, but the wife also made potato salad, slaw, a massive fruit platter, bean & corn salad, and a huge banana pudding. In addition, she also cut up chunks of chicken, beef, shrimp, and veggies for kebabs, and even attached little jewels to the skewers so everyone would know whose was whose. Meanwhile, I laid in a stockpile of soft drinks, wine and beer.

Saturday evening people began to arrive and soon we had a whole house full of folks for Sadie to bark at. She was our major concern, because Sadie's something of a wild card when it comes to strangers in her house. She used to be a very friendly dog as a puppy and is still friendly with the people she met at that age, but anyone not on that list gets barked at. For instance, it took her an entire weekend to make friends with my sister during her visit in February. So Sadie barked ferociously at first, but after only a few minutes calmed down a bit and began making friends. Soon everyone was giving her dog taxes from their plates and a couple of guests even played Frisbee with her. (Her version of Frisbee is, "you throw it, I'll go get it and never give it back.")

All in all, we were having a great evening until one of our Tiki torches decided to blow up. The wife had bought new innards, wicks and safety caps for all the torches, but something went amiss with one of them and by the time my attention was called to it flames were spilling down the side of it onto the wicker body of the torch itself. One attendee attempted to put out the flames by pouring beer on it, which we all shouted at him to stop doing. I poured half a bottle of water on it, to no avail. Not wanting to see what would happen when the flames finished burning through the wicker and melted into the nearly full plastic fuel canister, I opted to yank the entire torch up and move it away from the wooden deck and our guests. How to put it out was not as apparent to me, though.

"SWEE, I NEED A TOWEL!" I screamed toward the house, hoping I could smother the flames with one. It then occurred to me that I had just the thing for putting out fires in the garage, whcih was a large bucket filled with rain water. The foolishness of carrying a burning object into my house to put it out didn't strike me at first, so I began running across the lawn toward the rear garage door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the wife arrive carrying a couple of hand towels and our laundry room runner carpet.

"Here," she said, offering the carpet. Trouble is, I really like the runner carpet and didn't want to see it damaged when I had a perfectly good bucket of water a few feet away.

"No, I got it," I said, still moving for the garage door. As I ducked through the door, I could see the amount of light my torch fire was casting and realized it had grown much larger than when I first started running with it. Probably all the air from running had accelerated the flames. What I didn't know was that it had at last burned through both the wicker and the plastic fuel canister and was likely going to begin raining hot burning oil down on me moments later, had I not shoved the flaming end of the torch into the water. Unfortunately, the act tipping the torch over to do this caused the top of the torch to come loose and the still-burning wick went flying onto the garage floor and rolled to a halt against the wall by one of our big gray plastic shelves.

The wife was outside, calling for me to bring the fire back out.

"I can't!" I called back, while trying to move the wick away from the shelf with the tip of my plastic flip-flop.

"Just bring it back out!" she said again.

"I CAN'T!" I screamed, still toeing at the fire. I did manage to move it away from the plastic and the wall, but it was still burning. Finally, I poured half the bucket of water on it and that put it out.

Only after thinking about my actions later on did I realize the full amount of foolishness contained within them. That could have gone REALLY poorly.

The rest of the evening went very nicely and both we and Sadie had a blast. She was sad to see everyone leave.

You wanna talk about adventure and excitement then the person you need to talk to is my cousin Earl...

Yesirree, it's been a full weekend of adventure and excitement round Chez Juice. We're wild people, I tell you. Example: We spent nigh on our entire Saturday mulching the flowerbeds. No, I'm serious, we did. Top that, Ashton Kutcher!

Now when you need mulch, the recommended thing to do is to buy it from some guy with a front-loader who sits around in an abandoned lot next to some giant piles of mulch. It's the best way, really. There were a couple of varieties of mulch, but we wanted the super dark black mulch. It was $20 per front-loader scoop, so we handed the man $40 and he scooped us up a big ol' pile of mulch.

Did I mention we don't own a truck nor a flatbed trailer with which to haul mulch? Oh, cause we don't. Instead we'd brought shovels and our plan was to shovel our massive pile of mulch into the back of the wife's Honda Element. Now, the annoying thing was that I'd spent the better part of an hour cleaning out and vacuuming the wife's Honda just the day before, because it had become what we in sweet-hubbie business term "reisty" with filth. We're talking piles of old paper plates from breakfasts on the go; greasy fast-food bags left over from Biscuit World, just waiting for a dog to come along and shred in an attempt to get at the ghosts of bacon past; herds of junk mail and paper piles and stray Kleenexes that somehow failed to be deposited in her gear-shift mounted trash bag; plus a whole winter's worth of dried mud and dirt. And I didn't even have to be asked to clean all this junk out--that's how sweet a hubbie I am, not to mention a wild man, much liken unto the levels of wild contained within one Mr. Steve "Wild Dog" Wampler. The wife had been ever-so-grateful that I'd cleaned her car. She even shed a few tears at the sweetness of it. However, we were still going to fill the back of her Element up with mulch, all the same, and I had to admit it was the only logical way we could haul that amount of mulch back to the house.

In anticipation of the quantity of mulch we'd guessed we'd need to haul, we took the back seats out and covered the floor with both a large sheet of cardboard and then a drop cloth taped to the sides. However, it was such a truly massive pile of mulch that it soon breached the levees we'd set up and spilled into every crack, crevice and compartment of the back seat and then spilled into the front seat all the way up to the parking break. This we hauled home and began distributing into our mulchless flower beds.

By 8p, or so, we had the beds weeded and mulched and everything looked particularly nice. We were even able to save ourselves some hassle in the Element-cleaning department by pulling the drop cloth and most of the remaining mulch out, leaving behind only a reasonable amount that I'll probably go vacuum up, some day. The mulchy stench was still pretty strong in there, though, so we opted to leave all the doors of the car open overnight so so it could air out in the driveway.

At 3 a.m. I was awakened when the door to our bedroom was slammed shut by a gust of wind blowing through the open windows of our house. I could hear rain and wind outside that sounded fairly heavy. I arose and went to close some of the windows so that the rain didn't blow through them. After a minute or so of being up, I saw the wife walking through the hall, as well.

"The car's still open," she said. Only then did I remember that not only were all the doors of her car open, but that the windows were too. I offered to go close it up, but she'd already retrieved an umbrella from the garage and was on her way out. I later learned that she'd woken up around the same time I had, heard the rain, saw me get up and had thought I was sweetly going to close her windows. After I clearly hadn't a minute later, though, she realized I was half-asleep and had not remembered and got up to do it herself. She had unfortunately, not taken her keys and I knew she would not be able to close the power windows without them. I dashed and got mine and walked them out to her in the rain.

In the morning, we saw that our black mulch had been washed clean of its dye and was now just bark-colored mulch, except beneath the overhang of the roof, where it remained black. Still looks a darn sight better than the bare dirt and weeds we'd had before.