Having been off low carb for around a year and a half, I've managed to gain back a good bit of the weight I'd lost. In fact, all of it. And maybe then some. The past three or four months have been especially challenging in this regard, because I found that I've been attracted to eating only crap food that tastes great. Also we bought a grill, which meant lots more hamburgers, hotdogs and steaks (which are not forbidden on Atkins, granted, but are when you serve them with Doritos or a loaded baked potato--mmmm, I could use me a loaded baked potato right about now, with Doritos sprinkled on top). Gradually, all my size 34 pants were been boxed up. Then my size 36s began to feel awfully snug. After I'd popped three buttons off three pairs of shorts in the course of a couple of weeks, I began to suspect that I might be gaining more weight than was absolutely necessary.
The wife, having been off of any program for a couple years longer than me, has also been unsatisfied with her situation. Being a medical professional, she began researching more diet plans and some of the mail-order meal programs to see which one best stood up to nutritional-wisdom. The one she decided she'd like to try was called MediFast. It's similar to Nutri-System and Jenny Craig, only instead of sending you microwavable meals they send you boxes of meal bars and packets containing powdered mixable meals, such as shakes, soups, etc. The program is designed to keep those on it on both a low carb and low calorie eating regimen wherein you only consume around 800 calories worth of food per day while retaining all the body's nutritional needs. Like Atkins, weight loss is achieved through Ketosis, though the high-protein component isn't as strong. Unlike Atkins or many other diet plans, it's not a program you're encouraged to remain on for the rest of your life, but only until you lose the weight you want to, at which point there are methods for transitioning back into regular "real" food meals and a better eating and nutritional pattern, which you are welcome to continue for life if you so choose.
The wife decided to give it a month's trial to see how well it worked. Sensing the challenge, I too agreed to give it a month on the logic that if I hated it I could stay on it until I was in ketosis and then transition into Atkins. But if it was tolerable and worked well, I'd stick it out for the full month and maybe beyond.
We each ordered a four week sampler pack of MediFast meals, which amounted to 20 or so boxes of meal packets and bars. Instead of eating three meals a day, the way MediFast works is that you eat five small packet-based meals per day (powdered eggs, shakes, pudding, oatmeal, soups, meal bars, etc.) and then a single meal of "real" food that has a number of restrictions as to amounts and is vegetable and meat based. Our boxes arrived within four days and on Sunday, July 19, we began the new program.
As with Atkins, the first couple of days were just a beating. Without its regular supply of tasty carbs on hand, the brain starts going all funky and making you feel weak and addle-brained. But that largely cleared up after the first couple day.
Now the program warns that you should weigh yourself only once per week, starting the first day you're on the program. I ignore this, however, weigh every day because, for me, getting that daily "attaboy" in seeing weight drop, even by fractions of a pound, is what helps keep me going. I was astounded, however, at the drop from day one to day three. When on Atkins, you basically expect to lose five pounds by the end of your first five days on the induction phase. On MediFast, I started out at 247.5 lbs and by day three was at 239.5. Granted, most of that was initial water weight as your system gets flushed out--because the meals are loaded with not only protein and nutrients, but fiber as well. At the end of the first seven days, I weighed in at 234.5, a 13 pound loss. And as of this morning, I was at 231 lbs.
Now, as to the tastiness of the MediFast meals themselves, it's something of a mixed bag...
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
The New Program (Pound Two)
Following college graduation I stepped out into the real world and began to slowly gain back the weight I'd kept off for the previous two years. I still exercised, but not on the scale I'd achieved in college. Mostly, I blamed this on the fact that there weren't any proper inclines in the Tupelo area, as my old walking path in Starkville was pretty hilly, as well as the fact that I lived on a highway with no shoulder. And my food intake, while not yet unholy, took a bit of a less than "healthy" turn with lots of single-guy rice-based dishes and trips to the never-ending Italian buffet at Vanellis.
After I started dating the woman who would become my wife, my weight gain took an upswing. We were dating long-distance and eating in restaurants a lot, plus, we both just love food. As Barenaked Ladies put it "When we are happy we both get fat." I tried to combat this, for a very brief period, by trying what I was told was the Mayo Clinic diet, but which, it turns out, was actually the legendary Grapefruit Mayo Diet that's apparently been circulating in grubby photocopied form since the Reconstruction Period. It's basically an extreme low carb/high fat/high grapefruit diet designed to put you into a state of ketosis where your body burns fat for fuel. And despite it's questionable origins, it actually does work--though not, in my experience, as efficiently as it claims. I probably only lost around 10 lbs before abandoning it due to my abiding love for French fries.
After getting married, my weight problems only increased. If I thought the Freshman 15 was bad, try the First Year of Marriage 25! (Have I mentioned that my wife is a fantastic cook?)
A couple years later, at the beginning of the wife's med school career, we decided to attempt the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. This was sort of similar to the Mayo diet above, though it involved a lot less grapefruit and two thirds less binging. On the Carb-Addicts plan you essentially avoid eating all complex carbohydrates for two out of three meals of the day, instead eating meats, low-carb veggies and fats. On that third meal, though, you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want in any quantity that you want provided you can consume it within one hour. Naturally, they prefer this to consist of a well-balanced variety of foods, but unhealthy things are allowed as well. Now, I don't remember if it strictly forbids you to spend that hour eating ice cream sandwiches, but if not it probably should. In either case, we found we could eat a lot of food in one hour. The diet still worked for us, at least for the first couple of months. After that, the wife hit a plateau she couldn't seem to come off of and became frustrated at all the salads she was having to eat while the school-club-sponsored free pizza lunches were going on around her on a near daily basis. She quit and it was no fun being on the diet alone so I did too.
A couple more years passed and in October of 2003 we decided to give the low-carb thing another try. I say "we" but it was pretty much the wife's doing. This time she wanted to try the Atkins Diet, which was not quite yet but soon was to become the major fad diet of choice for the nation and the bane of bakers everywhere. In fact, I was only a couple months into it when I began my former blog Tales from the "Liberry," so there are lots of low carb-based tales and rants to be found there. I was wholly against trying Atkins because it struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I'd tried twice in the past and had to give up because certain unnamed people didn't find it convenient to stick to. At the same time, I wanted to be supportive and I also wanted to lose some weight, so what did I have to lose other than the obvious?
The Atkins low-carb method turned out to be a pretty decent program as far as a nutritional lifestyles go. Hell, any diet that lets me eat bacon and cheese regularly has plenty going for it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's very rough seas at the start, because when your body's used to a high carb intake and once you restrict that down to less than 20 grams per day, it rebells. You feel like dazed ass during the first couple of days (or dazed ass with a headache, in case you decide to follow their suggestion of avoiding all caffeine--a suggestion I quickly chose to ignore). However, once your body goes into ketosis and starts burning your own fat reserves for energy, your brain starts working better again and you feel normal. In fact, you feel pretty darn good because empty carbs, for all their tasty-goodness, do tend to clog you up in more ways than one. I liken the feeling to how C3P0 felt after his lube-bath in Star Wars. Also, you lose weight. I lost an impressive amount of weight and quick, peeling off 20 pounds within the first couple of months. I then kind of tapered out into a regular 1 to 2 pounds a week as I settled into the program and found new and more inventive ways to bend the rules of what I was supposed to be eating. (Which amounted to eating more nuts and sugar-free peanut butter and cheese than the letter of the law would allow.) But after the first seven months I'd lost 40 lbs.
There's a lot of confusion over the diet in popular media and word of mouth. You tell someone you're on Atkins and they immediately think and often say, "Oh, so you're eating nothing but meat?" This is patently untrue, at least if you're actually following the program. Sure, there's meat involved, but also a lot of vegetables. In fact, we commonly explained to people that we could eat pretty much anything they could minus flour, sugar, rice and potatoes.
We both stayed on Atkins program for a couple of years. Trouble is, even when we were "on" the low carb diet and doing well with it, it was problematic to remain on it full time. Each year from Thanksgiving through New Years was just a gauntlet of fantastic food opportunities were were hard pressed to avoid. Going off diet for a meal is something you can recover from fairly quickly. Going off diet for a week is much harder to turn around and pretty much requires going back on the two-week induction period. We also always found though that going off diet for any multi-day period of time left us feeling bloated and generally crummy, whereas we felt pretty sweet on the diet itself.
After the wife began her residency, and the copious amounts of hospital cafeteria food (which was actually extremely good stuff) not to mention drug rep lunches became commonplace, she found it increasingly difficult to stay low carb and decided to ditch it. I held fast, though, and remained with the program until 2008, right about the time we moved to Borderland. That was when I basically decided that I didn't want to live in a town with a Biscuit World and Indian Food and have to avoid those delicacies. I also determined I could maintain my weight through exercise alone and joined a local gym.
Of course, I was wrong--or, more accurately, I haven't done NEAR enough cardio to come close to being right.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
After I started dating the woman who would become my wife, my weight gain took an upswing. We were dating long-distance and eating in restaurants a lot, plus, we both just love food. As Barenaked Ladies put it "When we are happy we both get fat." I tried to combat this, for a very brief period, by trying what I was told was the Mayo Clinic diet, but which, it turns out, was actually the legendary Grapefruit Mayo Diet that's apparently been circulating in grubby photocopied form since the Reconstruction Period. It's basically an extreme low carb/high fat/high grapefruit diet designed to put you into a state of ketosis where your body burns fat for fuel. And despite it's questionable origins, it actually does work--though not, in my experience, as efficiently as it claims. I probably only lost around 10 lbs before abandoning it due to my abiding love for French fries.
After getting married, my weight problems only increased. If I thought the Freshman 15 was bad, try the First Year of Marriage 25! (Have I mentioned that my wife is a fantastic cook?)
A couple years later, at the beginning of the wife's med school career, we decided to attempt the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. This was sort of similar to the Mayo diet above, though it involved a lot less grapefruit and two thirds less binging. On the Carb-Addicts plan you essentially avoid eating all complex carbohydrates for two out of three meals of the day, instead eating meats, low-carb veggies and fats. On that third meal, though, you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want in any quantity that you want provided you can consume it within one hour. Naturally, they prefer this to consist of a well-balanced variety of foods, but unhealthy things are allowed as well. Now, I don't remember if it strictly forbids you to spend that hour eating ice cream sandwiches, but if not it probably should. In either case, we found we could eat a lot of food in one hour. The diet still worked for us, at least for the first couple of months. After that, the wife hit a plateau she couldn't seem to come off of and became frustrated at all the salads she was having to eat while the school-club-sponsored free pizza lunches were going on around her on a near daily basis. She quit and it was no fun being on the diet alone so I did too.
A couple more years passed and in October of 2003 we decided to give the low-carb thing another try. I say "we" but it was pretty much the wife's doing. This time she wanted to try the Atkins Diet, which was not quite yet but soon was to become the major fad diet of choice for the nation and the bane of bakers everywhere. In fact, I was only a couple months into it when I began my former blog Tales from the "Liberry," so there are lots of low carb-based tales and rants to be found there. I was wholly against trying Atkins because it struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I'd tried twice in the past and had to give up because certain unnamed people didn't find it convenient to stick to. At the same time, I wanted to be supportive and I also wanted to lose some weight, so what did I have to lose other than the obvious?
The Atkins low-carb method turned out to be a pretty decent program as far as a nutritional lifestyles go. Hell, any diet that lets me eat bacon and cheese regularly has plenty going for it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's very rough seas at the start, because when your body's used to a high carb intake and once you restrict that down to less than 20 grams per day, it rebells. You feel like dazed ass during the first couple of days (or dazed ass with a headache, in case you decide to follow their suggestion of avoiding all caffeine--a suggestion I quickly chose to ignore). However, once your body goes into ketosis and starts burning your own fat reserves for energy, your brain starts working better again and you feel normal. In fact, you feel pretty darn good because empty carbs, for all their tasty-goodness, do tend to clog you up in more ways than one. I liken the feeling to how C3P0 felt after his lube-bath in Star Wars. Also, you lose weight. I lost an impressive amount of weight and quick, peeling off 20 pounds within the first couple of months. I then kind of tapered out into a regular 1 to 2 pounds a week as I settled into the program and found new and more inventive ways to bend the rules of what I was supposed to be eating. (Which amounted to eating more nuts and sugar-free peanut butter and cheese than the letter of the law would allow.) But after the first seven months I'd lost 40 lbs.
There's a lot of confusion over the diet in popular media and word of mouth. You tell someone you're on Atkins and they immediately think and often say, "Oh, so you're eating nothing but meat?" This is patently untrue, at least if you're actually following the program. Sure, there's meat involved, but also a lot of vegetables. In fact, we commonly explained to people that we could eat pretty much anything they could minus flour, sugar, rice and potatoes.
We both stayed on Atkins program for a couple of years. Trouble is, even when we were "on" the low carb diet and doing well with it, it was problematic to remain on it full time. Each year from Thanksgiving through New Years was just a gauntlet of fantastic food opportunities were were hard pressed to avoid. Going off diet for a meal is something you can recover from fairly quickly. Going off diet for a week is much harder to turn around and pretty much requires going back on the two-week induction period. We also always found though that going off diet for any multi-day period of time left us feeling bloated and generally crummy, whereas we felt pretty sweet on the diet itself.
After the wife began her residency, and the copious amounts of hospital cafeteria food (which was actually extremely good stuff) not to mention drug rep lunches became commonplace, she found it increasingly difficult to stay low carb and decided to ditch it. I held fast, though, and remained with the program until 2008, right about the time we moved to Borderland. That was when I basically decided that I didn't want to live in a town with a Biscuit World and Indian Food and have to avoid those delicacies. I also determined I could maintain my weight through exercise alone and joined a local gym.
Of course, I was wrong--or, more accurately, I haven't done NEAR enough cardio to come close to being right.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Friday, July 24, 2009
The New Program (Pound One)
Sorry I've been away. I'm afraid my brain hasn't been working quite at full levels due to a new nutritional regimen I've embarked upon. (Actually, I was out of town for a week and that's just an excuse for being lazy.) In other words: a diet.
Yes, indeedy, Fatty is tired of buying progressively larger sizes of clothing and is, once again, going to do something about it and not just say he needs to and then have another Frito Chili Pie. (Sonofabee, I could use me a Frito Chili Pie right about now.)
I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and have had Oprah-esque crests and troughs with it on a few occasions. I didn't really consider myself to be "fat guy" per se, until college, after the Freshman 15 and the Sophomore 16 set in and I found myself at what I thought then was the enormous weight of 235. Even facing that number on the scale, I was still in denial until my dad pointed out that I weighed the same as he did--and he was a fat guy. Even then, while I did exercise by walking around my neighborhood, I never really committed to any sort of hard core exercise or diet until my scooter broke.
See, somewhere around my junior year (or maybe it was my second junior year) my Honda Elite 250 scooter began acting funny due to something within it having gone amiss. The major symptom of this amissment was that it felt like there was a cement block loose somewhere within the scooter's housing, rocking back and forth, causing the balance to be thrown off with the slightest turn of the wheel. No sir, I did not like this. Turns out, it was something wrong with the front axle, but at the time I felt that I couldn't take it in for repair because A) the one motorcycle place in the area was located three miles outside of town, B) I didn't have a trailer to tow it on, and C) the last time I'd been there as a customer my dad had shown his ass over the difference between the price he'd been quoted on two tires and the price of those tires plus labor, and I suspected my face would not be welcome.
Instead of risking my life further by driving the scooter, I started walking to class instead.
My school was only around a mile and a half away, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to get up half an hour earlier to make the trek. Within a couple of weeks, I began to notice that my clothes were getting loose and I was getting smaller. Not long after this, I did some math and decided that if walking alone was good enough to shed around a pound per week, walking plus eating right would do more. So I adopted a self-styled low-fat diet based on no nutritional foundation whatsoever. I basically ate lots of salad, carrots, celery and chicken. I eschewed dairy products and any food item that had more than 5 grams of fat in it, (though plenty of carbohydrates, I note in retrospect) except on rare occasions when I would take a night off and eat pizza with friends. I went from around 220 lbs when I started to around 170 at my lowest. I also grew my hair out to shoulder length, began wearing contact lenses and Rasta hats and became something of a faux hippie for a couple of years. The whole thing made for a pretty dramatic shift in appearance over a relatively short period of time, so much so that people who hadn't seen me in a few months usually didn't recognize me immediately and would often carry on conversations with mutual friends I was standing next to for upwards of 20 minutes before it finally hit them who I was. And, just like ladies who undergo hooter augmentation often receive more attention from people who otherwise paid little to them before, I also found that people treated me differently, or seemed to pay very different kinds of attention to me than previously. This was deeply satisfying for my ego.
The major problems with my new healthy attitude were twofold. Problem One: I became something of a food Nazi when it came to where I was willing to eat. Again, I was operating from NO nutritional information whatsoever, but became an enormous pain to all my friends all the same because of my unwillingness to eat in places that didn't have a salad bar, or the guilt funks I sank into whenever I did consume fatty foods. (Oddly, I usually dropped weight after eating pizza.) While I probably never quite achieved it, I'm sure there's some sort of eating-disorder I was actively cultivating--not a dangerous one so much as an annoying one.
Come to think of it, a frightening side-effect did crop up once. I once went so long without eating dairy products (my step-mother had stocked the frige with some sort of Vegan fake cheese slices that had never even seen a cow) that something very strange happened to my body chemistry. Within the course of about two days my teeth all began to feel as if they had become very brittle and were about to fall out of my head. It's hard to describe, but that was the feeling I had; as though my teeth were becoming hollow and fragile and might break if I ate a low-fat Bavarian pretzel. I was completely terrified. My friend Joe suggested I might have a calcium deficiency, so I immediately bought a bottle of calcium pills, a full gallon of whole milk and spent a weekend eating cheese. The problem cleared up almost immediately.
Now, I've told that story not only to my wife but to dentists and other medical professionals who should know better and to a one they have all given me a decidedly suspicious look in response. They have also, to a one, gone on to inform me that what I was telling them was pretty much impossible, and then, to a one, they redoubled their suspicious look to imply (or at least be inferred) that I was probably on drugs at the time. As this was not the case, I guess I still have no real explanation for what happened with my teeth--only that it has not happened since.
Problem Two: I began to see how I was becoming prejudiced against overweight people in my own thinking. After all, I thought, if I could lose all that weight, what excuse did anyone else have? I was soon to learn hard lessons in this regard.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Yes, indeedy, Fatty is tired of buying progressively larger sizes of clothing and is, once again, going to do something about it and not just say he needs to and then have another Frito Chili Pie. (Sonofabee, I could use me a Frito Chili Pie right about now.)
I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and have had Oprah-esque crests and troughs with it on a few occasions. I didn't really consider myself to be "fat guy" per se, until college, after the Freshman 15 and the Sophomore 16 set in and I found myself at what I thought then was the enormous weight of 235. Even facing that number on the scale, I was still in denial until my dad pointed out that I weighed the same as he did--and he was a fat guy. Even then, while I did exercise by walking around my neighborhood, I never really committed to any sort of hard core exercise or diet until my scooter broke.
See, somewhere around my junior year (or maybe it was my second junior year) my Honda Elite 250 scooter began acting funny due to something within it having gone amiss. The major symptom of this amissment was that it felt like there was a cement block loose somewhere within the scooter's housing, rocking back and forth, causing the balance to be thrown off with the slightest turn of the wheel. No sir, I did not like this. Turns out, it was something wrong with the front axle, but at the time I felt that I couldn't take it in for repair because A) the one motorcycle place in the area was located three miles outside of town, B) I didn't have a trailer to tow it on, and C) the last time I'd been there as a customer my dad had shown his ass over the difference between the price he'd been quoted on two tires and the price of those tires plus labor, and I suspected my face would not be welcome.
Instead of risking my life further by driving the scooter, I started walking to class instead.
My school was only around a mile and a half away, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to get up half an hour earlier to make the trek. Within a couple of weeks, I began to notice that my clothes were getting loose and I was getting smaller. Not long after this, I did some math and decided that if walking alone was good enough to shed around a pound per week, walking plus eating right would do more. So I adopted a self-styled low-fat diet based on no nutritional foundation whatsoever. I basically ate lots of salad, carrots, celery and chicken. I eschewed dairy products and any food item that had more than 5 grams of fat in it, (though plenty of carbohydrates, I note in retrospect) except on rare occasions when I would take a night off and eat pizza with friends. I went from around 220 lbs when I started to around 170 at my lowest. I also grew my hair out to shoulder length, began wearing contact lenses and Rasta hats and became something of a faux hippie for a couple of years. The whole thing made for a pretty dramatic shift in appearance over a relatively short period of time, so much so that people who hadn't seen me in a few months usually didn't recognize me immediately and would often carry on conversations with mutual friends I was standing next to for upwards of 20 minutes before it finally hit them who I was. And, just like ladies who undergo hooter augmentation often receive more attention from people who otherwise paid little to them before, I also found that people treated me differently, or seemed to pay very different kinds of attention to me than previously. This was deeply satisfying for my ego.
The major problems with my new healthy attitude were twofold. Problem One: I became something of a food Nazi when it came to where I was willing to eat. Again, I was operating from NO nutritional information whatsoever, but became an enormous pain to all my friends all the same because of my unwillingness to eat in places that didn't have a salad bar, or the guilt funks I sank into whenever I did consume fatty foods. (Oddly, I usually dropped weight after eating pizza.) While I probably never quite achieved it, I'm sure there's some sort of eating-disorder I was actively cultivating--not a dangerous one so much as an annoying one.
Come to think of it, a frightening side-effect did crop up once. I once went so long without eating dairy products (my step-mother had stocked the frige with some sort of Vegan fake cheese slices that had never even seen a cow) that something very strange happened to my body chemistry. Within the course of about two days my teeth all began to feel as if they had become very brittle and were about to fall out of my head. It's hard to describe, but that was the feeling I had; as though my teeth were becoming hollow and fragile and might break if I ate a low-fat Bavarian pretzel. I was completely terrified. My friend Joe suggested I might have a calcium deficiency, so I immediately bought a bottle of calcium pills, a full gallon of whole milk and spent a weekend eating cheese. The problem cleared up almost immediately.
Now, I've told that story not only to my wife but to dentists and other medical professionals who should know better and to a one they have all given me a decidedly suspicious look in response. They have also, to a one, gone on to inform me that what I was telling them was pretty much impossible, and then, to a one, they redoubled their suspicious look to imply (or at least be inferred) that I was probably on drugs at the time. As this was not the case, I guess I still have no real explanation for what happened with my teeth--only that it has not happened since.
Problem Two: I began to see how I was becoming prejudiced against overweight people in my own thinking. After all, I thought, if I could lose all that weight, what excuse did anyone else have? I was soon to learn hard lessons in this regard.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, July 13, 2009
Bed Time Woes
The wife's Element was pretty fully packed for our trip to D.C., what with us camping and all. Beyond food and clothes, there was an awful lot of equipment to haul as well. Most of it went in the back, but we put the tent, bedding and our queen sized inflata-bed atop in the roof rack and tied it all down with twine.
Upon our arrival at Bull Run camp ground, we saw that the twine had cleanly cut two holes in the base surface of our inflatabed. Bad news.
We're kind of old hat at patching holes in inflatabeds, having had to do it for multiple beds in the past--we once spent a very long night at a KOA near St. Augustine, FL, sleeping on the tent floor while we waited for a patch to cure before we could drowsily inflate the bed using only the built-in hand pump; not fun--but we'd never had to with our beloved super-double-layered-queen size model. We've only had it for a year or two and it's served us well, particularly during the weekends spent in Borderland before our move away from Tri-Metro. We also had graduated to a portable electric air pump of extremely high quality that can inflate the bed in under 3 minutes. Wouldn't work well with the holes, though, so we opted to patch them early in the evening. This involves going out and buying a patch kit, which comes with rubber patch pieces and a vinyl glue to affix them to the surface of the bed. The kit claims it takes an hour or so to cure, so we gave it nearly two hours before we inflated it, just to be sure.
Bed inflated, bedding secured to it, we attempted to go to sleep but quickly realized that either our patch job had not worked or there were holes we were otherwise unaware of. Soon, the firmness of the bed began to soften as we sank ever-so-slowly toward the floor of the tent. Before long, we were having to roll to the outer edges of the bed to prevent us being lumped against each other in the middle. Eventually, we gave up on that, too, and just rolled to the center as the meat what was quickly becoming our vinyl taco. Please note that I haven't mentioned actually sleeping during all this. At least, I didn't, as my mind just would not let go of the fact that sooner than later we would be on the ground and would then be uncomfortable and unable to sleep. My ass had not quite reached the ground when I decided I could no longer take the suspense and gave up to go sleep in the car. After all, the Element is designed for the front and back seats to fold down to create a semi-horizontal surface on which a person or two could, at least theoretically, sleep. Meanwhile, the wife decided she would shove together the two smaller inflatable beds on which the girls were sleeping and have a go at snoozing across the foot of those beds.
In the car, the seats folded, I tried to sleep, but it was terribly uncomfortable. I'm a side-sleeper and trying it on those seats was an exercise in spine compression. I did get some sleep, as it was nearly 9 when I finally awoke, but it was not relaxed sleep. Also, a mosquito had shared my slumber chamber with me and had made off with most of my blood in the night. The wife said that she didn't get much more sleep inside the tent, either, as the girls kicked like mermaids and the beds refused to stay together.
We repatched the poor patch-job and left it to cure for the whole day.
The next night we tried anew, but again discovered that the patch was not quite up to snuff. The leak was considerably slower than the night before. At one point, I heard Kayley's voice calling out to Meg, saying, "Meg, wake up. Aunt Ashley and Uncle Eric are gone. Wake up, Meg. They're not in their bed." At first I was confused by this, before realizing that we'd merely sunk down low enough that she couldn't see us very well. "No, we're still here," I called. Soon after, we got up and inflated the bed again.
Since the second night had not been as bad, we decided to repeat the formula for the third--sleep half the night, reinflate, sleep the second half. We arose at 1a, reinflated the bed and then settled back in to sleep at which point we heard "Sssssssssssssss" coming from the bed. Yep, the very process of inflating--perhaps OVER-inflating--the bed had ruptured a new hole in the topside. We swore in hushed tones and pondered what to do. I announced I was going back to the car, but it was suggested a local Wally World or Target might be open to sell us a new mattress. I decided it was worth a try and spent the next hour driving around Virginia in search of a 24 hour Wal-Mart. Didn't find one. I returned to camp to learn that the wife had patched the hole with duct tape and that it actually worked better than the patch kit, so we got a little more sleep.
We bought a new mattress the next morning. It too was very nice, double-layered, queen-sized and comfortable, but it hurt our feelings to ditch the old one that had served us faithfully. It did sleep rather well during our final night in the D.C. area.
Upon our arrival at Bull Run camp ground, we saw that the twine had cleanly cut two holes in the base surface of our inflatabed. Bad news.
We're kind of old hat at patching holes in inflatabeds, having had to do it for multiple beds in the past--we once spent a very long night at a KOA near St. Augustine, FL, sleeping on the tent floor while we waited for a patch to cure before we could drowsily inflate the bed using only the built-in hand pump; not fun--but we'd never had to with our beloved super-double-layered-queen size model. We've only had it for a year or two and it's served us well, particularly during the weekends spent in Borderland before our move away from Tri-Metro. We also had graduated to a portable electric air pump of extremely high quality that can inflate the bed in under 3 minutes. Wouldn't work well with the holes, though, so we opted to patch them early in the evening. This involves going out and buying a patch kit, which comes with rubber patch pieces and a vinyl glue to affix them to the surface of the bed. The kit claims it takes an hour or so to cure, so we gave it nearly two hours before we inflated it, just to be sure.
Bed inflated, bedding secured to it, we attempted to go to sleep but quickly realized that either our patch job had not worked or there were holes we were otherwise unaware of. Soon, the firmness of the bed began to soften as we sank ever-so-slowly toward the floor of the tent. Before long, we were having to roll to the outer edges of the bed to prevent us being lumped against each other in the middle. Eventually, we gave up on that, too, and just rolled to the center as the meat what was quickly becoming our vinyl taco. Please note that I haven't mentioned actually sleeping during all this. At least, I didn't, as my mind just would not let go of the fact that sooner than later we would be on the ground and would then be uncomfortable and unable to sleep. My ass had not quite reached the ground when I decided I could no longer take the suspense and gave up to go sleep in the car. After all, the Element is designed for the front and back seats to fold down to create a semi-horizontal surface on which a person or two could, at least theoretically, sleep. Meanwhile, the wife decided she would shove together the two smaller inflatable beds on which the girls were sleeping and have a go at snoozing across the foot of those beds.
In the car, the seats folded, I tried to sleep, but it was terribly uncomfortable. I'm a side-sleeper and trying it on those seats was an exercise in spine compression. I did get some sleep, as it was nearly 9 when I finally awoke, but it was not relaxed sleep. Also, a mosquito had shared my slumber chamber with me and had made off with most of my blood in the night. The wife said that she didn't get much more sleep inside the tent, either, as the girls kicked like mermaids and the beds refused to stay together.
We repatched the poor patch-job and left it to cure for the whole day.
The next night we tried anew, but again discovered that the patch was not quite up to snuff. The leak was considerably slower than the night before. At one point, I heard Kayley's voice calling out to Meg, saying, "Meg, wake up. Aunt Ashley and Uncle Eric are gone. Wake up, Meg. They're not in their bed." At first I was confused by this, before realizing that we'd merely sunk down low enough that she couldn't see us very well. "No, we're still here," I called. Soon after, we got up and inflated the bed again.
Since the second night had not been as bad, we decided to repeat the formula for the third--sleep half the night, reinflate, sleep the second half. We arose at 1a, reinflated the bed and then settled back in to sleep at which point we heard "Sssssssssssssss" coming from the bed. Yep, the very process of inflating--perhaps OVER-inflating--the bed had ruptured a new hole in the topside. We swore in hushed tones and pondered what to do. I announced I was going back to the car, but it was suggested a local Wally World or Target might be open to sell us a new mattress. I decided it was worth a try and spent the next hour driving around Virginia in search of a 24 hour Wal-Mart. Didn't find one. I returned to camp to learn that the wife had patched the hole with duct tape and that it actually worked better than the patch kit, so we got a little more sleep.
We bought a new mattress the next morning. It too was very nice, double-layered, queen-sized and comfortable, but it hurt our feelings to ditch the old one that had served us faithfully. It did sleep rather well during our final night in the D.C. area.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Magic Words
So, as amazing as the Smithsonian Museums are, there's something that can trump it every time, at least as far as my niece is concerned. Two words: water park.
Yep, we camped at Bull Run State Park while we were in the DC area and there is a water park there called Atlantis. It's not even an especially impressive water park, though not at all bad. However, Atlantis was the one that was at hand and was a place of fascination for Kayley and her friend Meg the entire time we were there. This is possibly because they didn't get to visit it for two days after we arrived, so their anticipation had plenty of time to build. More likely, though, they were pretty jazzed about it from before our arrival. Sure, Kayley and my wife had plotted out our museum and zoo visitation schedule days in advance and had everything mapped out as to where and when we were doing stuff, but I'm pretty sure WATER PARK were the giant red glowing words that shone through the pages and plans.
Our first day was dedicated to journeying to the Baltimore Zoo. We got a very unfortunate late start, however, due to having to show the girls how to clean up the campsite before departing and by the time we arrived it was 2p, giving us exactly 2 hours to see the entire zoo before it closed at 4. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, though the kids were quite hungry by the end of it. As we climbed into the car shortly after 4 to go find some dinner, Kayley said, "We should have gone to the water park." This instantly infuriated me, but I let it pass, filing her words away as the complaint of a starving child.
The following day, we journeyed by Metro to the National Mall where we visited the National Space and Native American museums, in that order. Mid-way through the National Space Museum, my wife made an unfortunate inquiry to me regarding the hours of the water park--unfortunate because the words were picked up by young ears and their fun radar instantly lost all other echoes. And from the sudden shift in her expression I could tell that Kayley was gearing up for a calculated burst of forced boredom designed to hurry our departure. I glowered at my wife for stirring up this pot. Sure enough, within two minutes the complaints about wanting to leave began and I was having none of it. I called the girls over to a wall out of the way of the bustling crowds and told them that their aunt had merely been asking about the hours of the park as a point of information which was not necessarily going to prove fruitful as it pertained to our immediate day. We would indeed let them go to the waterpark should we return to the campground with enough hours remaining in the park's day to allow them to swim and remain economical for us, but we would in no uncertain terms be leaving early to try and make this happen. We were there to see the museums, which is what Kayley had said she wanted to do in the first place, and see them we would. Any time spent at the water park would merely be a bonus. Furthermore, I did not want to hear them utter the words "water" or "park" for the remainder of our afternoon. I expected they would be unable to abide by this and I fully intended to revoke any water park activities for the day as punishment for their infraction, but having been through a week of our School of Consequences method of aunting and uncling I think Kayley knew this was unwise and she and Meg refrained from bringing it up.
We didn't return to camp in time to do the water park that day, mostly because of traffic delays, but the following afternoon we made sure to leave for our visit to the National History museum early and returned home with a couple of hours left for water park time, so all was well. And before our departure time on Wedesday, we sent em back for another couple of hours and even went along ourselves.
Much to my disappointment, I found that I either A) own a swim-suit that has too much friction, or B) am too fat to properly slide down the tube slide at a decent rate of speed. I tried twice, both times hurling myself in the opening so as to get the maximum amount of momentum only to find that about mid-way down the enclosed tube I was practically having to push myself along just to remain in motion. And by the time I reached the end, I emerged with more of a plop than a splash, moving slowly enough that I could practically read the look of pity on the lifeguard's face. It was extremely embarassing.
Yep, we camped at Bull Run State Park while we were in the DC area and there is a water park there called Atlantis. It's not even an especially impressive water park, though not at all bad. However, Atlantis was the one that was at hand and was a place of fascination for Kayley and her friend Meg the entire time we were there. This is possibly because they didn't get to visit it for two days after we arrived, so their anticipation had plenty of time to build. More likely, though, they were pretty jazzed about it from before our arrival. Sure, Kayley and my wife had plotted out our museum and zoo visitation schedule days in advance and had everything mapped out as to where and when we were doing stuff, but I'm pretty sure WATER PARK were the giant red glowing words that shone through the pages and plans.
Our first day was dedicated to journeying to the Baltimore Zoo. We got a very unfortunate late start, however, due to having to show the girls how to clean up the campsite before departing and by the time we arrived it was 2p, giving us exactly 2 hours to see the entire zoo before it closed at 4. They seemed to enjoy it well enough, though the kids were quite hungry by the end of it. As we climbed into the car shortly after 4 to go find some dinner, Kayley said, "We should have gone to the water park." This instantly infuriated me, but I let it pass, filing her words away as the complaint of a starving child.
The following day, we journeyed by Metro to the National Mall where we visited the National Space and Native American museums, in that order. Mid-way through the National Space Museum, my wife made an unfortunate inquiry to me regarding the hours of the water park--unfortunate because the words were picked up by young ears and their fun radar instantly lost all other echoes. And from the sudden shift in her expression I could tell that Kayley was gearing up for a calculated burst of forced boredom designed to hurry our departure. I glowered at my wife for stirring up this pot. Sure enough, within two minutes the complaints about wanting to leave began and I was having none of it. I called the girls over to a wall out of the way of the bustling crowds and told them that their aunt had merely been asking about the hours of the park as a point of information which was not necessarily going to prove fruitful as it pertained to our immediate day. We would indeed let them go to the waterpark should we return to the campground with enough hours remaining in the park's day to allow them to swim and remain economical for us, but we would in no uncertain terms be leaving early to try and make this happen. We were there to see the museums, which is what Kayley had said she wanted to do in the first place, and see them we would. Any time spent at the water park would merely be a bonus. Furthermore, I did not want to hear them utter the words "water" or "park" for the remainder of our afternoon. I expected they would be unable to abide by this and I fully intended to revoke any water park activities for the day as punishment for their infraction, but having been through a week of our School of Consequences method of aunting and uncling I think Kayley knew this was unwise and she and Meg refrained from bringing it up.
We didn't return to camp in time to do the water park that day, mostly because of traffic delays, but the following afternoon we made sure to leave for our visit to the National History museum early and returned home with a couple of hours left for water park time, so all was well. And before our departure time on Wedesday, we sent em back for another couple of hours and even went along ourselves.
Much to my disappointment, I found that I either A) own a swim-suit that has too much friction, or B) am too fat to properly slide down the tube slide at a decent rate of speed. I tried twice, both times hurling myself in the opening so as to get the maximum amount of momentum only to find that about mid-way down the enclosed tube I was practically having to push myself along just to remain in motion. And by the time I reached the end, I emerged with more of a plop than a splash, moving slowly enough that I could practically read the look of pity on the lifeguard's face. It was extremely embarassing.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Vacation from the Vacation
We're back from our whirlwind visit to D.C. along with the niece.
I didn't find a lot of time to write during the first of our two week tour of duty, as I was chief niece-watcher whilst the wife was away at work. Other than the previously mentioned microwaving of a metal bowl, it mostly went okay with only a few clashes of personality here and there which I'm happy to say I won. Most of these clashes came over the subject of food, specifically which ones the niece would agree to eat and in what quantities and over how much sugar she could work into the equation. The culmination of this came when I suggested we have grilled cheese sandwiches and soup for lunch one day, to which she responded that she would indeed enjoy such a sandwich but would not be having any soup. This, to me, smacked of a gauntlet thrown down, so I not only made a can of tasty meatball soup, but I also emptied into it some left over spaghetti sauce I'd made to help stretch it out and add needed vegetables, such as squash and zucchini. I announced that she needed to eat the soup, too, as her aunt would want to be sure I was feeding her healthy things. And because we'd been planning to head to my gym, where there's a pool, I was determined she would eat her soup or there would be no trip--though I didn't immediately clue her in on this threat.
So she picked at the soup for ten minutes as we watched a blisteringly bad rerun of Full House on the Disney channel. (I could have just said "a rerun of Full House" and everyone would have assumed it was blisteringly bad if not worse.) Then she started in on her sandwich, which she eats with syrup. Don't scoff, cause grilled cheese and syrup are actually a pretty good combination and tastes remarkably like French toast. The joke was on her, though, as I'd given her sugar-free syrup.
"You're going to need to eat more soup," I said. This resulted in a less than clean look in my direction, but I remained firm. I also remained in the room, because Sadie was nearby and I was pretty sure if I left the room for even a moment the kid's soup would be gone and the dog would be licking her chops. More bites were slowly taken as yet another horrifyingly bad episode of Full House started. If I was going to torture her with soup, she was clearly going to torture me with Dave Coullier.
"What's this," she said, holding up a spoon in which rested a possibly overcooked lump of vegetable matter.
"Zucchini," I said.
"What's that?"
"It's like squash," I said.
"I don't eat squash."
After nearly 15 more minutes and still very little progress in diminishing the admittedly monster bowl of soup I'd served her, I announced that she would need to eat at least half of her soup or we couldn't leave for the pool.
"But I don't like soup," she said.
"That's unfortunate," I said calmly. "But you're going to need to eat at least half of yours or we won't go to the pool."
More minutes slowly passed and more microscopic bites were taken. She eventually asked to be excused to the bathroom, which I allowed, but stayed behind to guard her dog-eye-level bowl against any hopeful thefts. She eventually returned and acted as though enough time must have passed for me to have forgotten about that whole soup thing or that it was cold enough that I would no longer insist she eat it.
"Eat your soup," I said.
It took her another ten minutes, but she finally choked down enough bites that she was very nearly at the half-way mark so I set her free.
This was to be but the first of many food skirmishes. Fortunately, most of the others happened after the wife was there to help provide added muscle to our nutritional decrees. By our final night of camping near D.C., we even began discussing cooking up some of the enormous quantity of squash we'd brought with us.
"Ohhh, no," Kayley said, holding up her hands in a stop this line of reasoning right now manner. "I don't eat squash!"
I gave her a long slow burn then said, "Child, have you not realized yet that whatever you say you WON'T eat is the very thing we decide you HAVE to eat?"
Friday, July 3, 2009
SpecsWar `09 Part III
I lost my Silhouettes in the ocean because I was dumb enough to go into the ocean with them. See, I'd neglected to bring my Chesterfields (which I still possessed, pending the arrival of my new shades) but wasn't keen on wearing my $20 pair of contacts into the water for fear of losing them, so instead I wore my expensive pair of Silhouettes in. (I didn't know the exact cost at that point because I hadn't paid attention to that detail.) Yes, despite my obvious history of losing far sturdier and heavier glasses in the ocean, I once again paraded out in my light fluffy, nearly invisible Silhouettes intent on watery fun. After all, I had no intention of getting my head wet, right?
Mere moments after my nephew Kolby asked why I'd worn my glasses into the ocean, I was smashed about the head by a very slight wave, felt the glasses fall forward and they were gone. I have great reflexes, but they were gone before I could even fumble for them. I dove under water to search for them, but quickly discovered that the major trouble in seeing nearly invisible, rimless glasses under water is that it's very difficult due to them being nearly invisible and rimless. Also, it's hard to see anything clearly WITHOUT YOUR GLASSES!
Embarrassed, dejected, and humiliated at my own hand, I stalked out of the water and, soon after, stalked from the beach. The typical reaction our family had upon hearing what I'd done was to say, "AGAIN?!"
I put in my contacts and drowned my sorrows in Yuengling.
Jump ahead to our return home. On the answering machine was a message from Liz alerting me to the fact that my sunglasses had still not arrived because the company had pushed back the release date to mid July.
Well I'll fix them, I thought. I'll just cancel the damned order and have Liz fire me up some new Silhouettes as my second pair. And this I did. In person. To Liz herself. I hoped that my very presence would serve as a dare to say no or provide any more hassle.
Liz seemed okay with canceling the original sunglasses order and applying the money I'd already paid there to the new order of some Silhouettes. Then she told me the difference I would need to cover, which was to the tune of $260. I nearly shat.
"Wait. How much did the Silhouettes originally cost?" I asked, for until that moment, I only thought I knew a ballpark.
She consulted her notes, then decided that even though they'd had a price increase recently she would generously go ahead and give them to me at the original price I'd paid for the first pair, so I'd now owe $230.
"That's nice," I said, "but how much did they cost?"
"With lenses and frames and before insurance, it was $390" she said.
This time I nearly threw up. I was so stunned I barely caught Liz telling me she was going to give me a special 15 percent discount on the frames. Before I left, I asked if I could buy another pair of the Air Optix Aquas, as mine are past their official expiration date by a month.
"Did you need a trial pair or did you want to buy a box?" Liz asked. I asked how much a box was. Turned out $70 per eye with a two box minimum, making a six month supply.
"Gimme a trial pair," I said.
"We no longer carry trial pairs in those," Liz corrected.
"But you sold me a trial pair when I bought the ones I'm wearing right now," I said, my s.
"We've since... made new policies," she said.
"Then nevermind," I said.
When I was retelling this to my wife at lunch, she pointed out an obvious flaw which was that Liz's offer of 15 percent off should have been 50 percent off, as per the rules of the original special.
I blinked. "Wait. Yeah. They are." Or did I mishear "fifty" as "fifteen"? It's a common error. I called Liz back and learned that she had indeed said fifteen.
"But isn't my second pair supposed to be half off?" I said.
"Well, that's what the special is, but you have to buy a pair of glasses at normal price before you can get the second pair half off."
I felt my sickeningly sweet exterior slipping at the edges. "But I did buy a pair of glasses at normal price," I pointed out. They're washed up in Wilmington, granted, but I did buy them.
"Um... yes," she said cautiously. "But in a case where you're upgrading to a more expensive frame," she began again.
"I have already purchased the exact same pair of glasses at full price," I said, still very sweet.
Liz became kind of flustered at this point and said she didn't have the authority to make any decisions, but could consult with the doctor and call me back.
Adopting an even sweeter tone of voice, I said, "And would you please inform the doctor of the two months I've been waiting for my original second pair of glasses?"
Yes, Liz agreed, she would. I later received a message from her saying that she had decided to go ahead and give me the second pair at half off. After my credit was applied I would only owe $97.
I felt like I'd won a small victory, but for the fact that it will now take two weeks for them to arrive, with likely interference by the July 4th holiday and I'm scheduled to leave town for a week by July 3. At this point, I plan to set foot in Liz's place of business only one more time and then never EVER again. I may even tell her that.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Mere moments after my nephew Kolby asked why I'd worn my glasses into the ocean, I was smashed about the head by a very slight wave, felt the glasses fall forward and they were gone. I have great reflexes, but they were gone before I could even fumble for them. I dove under water to search for them, but quickly discovered that the major trouble in seeing nearly invisible, rimless glasses under water is that it's very difficult due to them being nearly invisible and rimless. Also, it's hard to see anything clearly WITHOUT YOUR GLASSES!
Embarrassed, dejected, and humiliated at my own hand, I stalked out of the water and, soon after, stalked from the beach. The typical reaction our family had upon hearing what I'd done was to say, "AGAIN?!"
I put in my contacts and drowned my sorrows in Yuengling.
Jump ahead to our return home. On the answering machine was a message from Liz alerting me to the fact that my sunglasses had still not arrived because the company had pushed back the release date to mid July.
Well I'll fix them, I thought. I'll just cancel the damned order and have Liz fire me up some new Silhouettes as my second pair. And this I did. In person. To Liz herself. I hoped that my very presence would serve as a dare to say no or provide any more hassle.
Liz seemed okay with canceling the original sunglasses order and applying the money I'd already paid there to the new order of some Silhouettes. Then she told me the difference I would need to cover, which was to the tune of $260. I nearly shat.
"Wait. How much did the Silhouettes originally cost?" I asked, for until that moment, I only thought I knew a ballpark.
She consulted her notes, then decided that even though they'd had a price increase recently she would generously go ahead and give them to me at the original price I'd paid for the first pair, so I'd now owe $230.
"That's nice," I said, "but how much did they cost?"
"With lenses and frames and before insurance, it was $390" she said.
This time I nearly threw up. I was so stunned I barely caught Liz telling me she was going to give me a special 15 percent discount on the frames. Before I left, I asked if I could buy another pair of the Air Optix Aquas, as mine are past their official expiration date by a month.
"Did you need a trial pair or did you want to buy a box?" Liz asked. I asked how much a box was. Turned out $70 per eye with a two box minimum, making a six month supply.
"Gimme a trial pair," I said.
"We no longer carry trial pairs in those," Liz corrected.
"But you sold me a trial pair when I bought the ones I'm wearing right now," I said, my s.
"We've since... made new policies," she said.
"Then nevermind," I said.
When I was retelling this to my wife at lunch, she pointed out an obvious flaw which was that Liz's offer of 15 percent off should have been 50 percent off, as per the rules of the original special.
I blinked. "Wait. Yeah. They are." Or did I mishear "fifty" as "fifteen"? It's a common error. I called Liz back and learned that she had indeed said fifteen.
"But isn't my second pair supposed to be half off?" I said.
"Well, that's what the special is, but you have to buy a pair of glasses at normal price before you can get the second pair half off."
I felt my sickeningly sweet exterior slipping at the edges. "But I did buy a pair of glasses at normal price," I pointed out. They're washed up in Wilmington, granted, but I did buy them.
"Um... yes," she said cautiously. "But in a case where you're upgrading to a more expensive frame," she began again.
"I have already purchased the exact same pair of glasses at full price," I said, still very sweet.
Liz became kind of flustered at this point and said she didn't have the authority to make any decisions, but could consult with the doctor and call me back.
Adopting an even sweeter tone of voice, I said, "And would you please inform the doctor of the two months I've been waiting for my original second pair of glasses?"
Yes, Liz agreed, she would. I later received a message from her saying that she had decided to go ahead and give me the second pair at half off. After my credit was applied I would only owe $97.
I felt like I'd won a small victory, but for the fact that it will now take two weeks for them to arrive, with likely interference by the July 4th holiday and I'm scheduled to leave town for a week by July 3. At this point, I plan to set foot in Liz's place of business only one more time and then never EVER again. I may even tell her that.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
SpecsWar `09 Part II
(My apologies for the lateness of this entry. We took the niece to D.C. starting last Saturday and I forgot to set this thing to automatic posting.)
Okay, so my frames didn't actually explode so much as come apart in multiple places very quickly. First one of the double mounting bolts of the left temple broke, causing the lens to pivot on the remaining bolt. I super-glued that one. Then, on the very day I had scheduled my most recent eye exam, two months back, the nose-bar snapped, as did my glue job on the temple, causing everything to fall apart. As I said, it was a nice coincidence that I was already having my eyes checked, but it meant either being blind for two weeks or that I'd need to get some contacts to tide me over.
It had been nearly ten years since I'd last worn contacts, having lost my final pair of Acuvues to the ocean the summer after losing my glasses to it. (Are you sensing a pattern, yet?) Fortunately the local Borderland optometrist I'd chosen said they could roll with this new request easily and that great strides had been made in contacts for people with astigmatism in the last decade. They hooked me up with a trial pair of Air Optix Aquas, then the optical technician--let's call her Liz--helped me pick out some more rimless frames. The only brand they carried was Silhouette, which were a bit pricier than I liked, but I figured the insurance would take care of most of it. (Wrong.) And because the Silhouette frames didn't come with clip on shades, as my previous brand of rimless frames did (or, rather, you could buy some as extras, but they were nearly as expensive as a pair of frames themselves), I decided to take advantage of a buy one get one half off sale they were having and order some prescription sunglasses to boot. The only ones I really thought looked decent in the store, though, were some Chesterfields, and then only just barely. In retrospect, I shouldn't have bothered ordering frames I wasn't 100 percent satisfied with, but especially these. The Chesterfields have a big clunky CHESTERFIELD logo embedded in both temples and I must not have noticed it right off because I pretty much hate logos on clothing and glasses as a rule. As it turns out, though, my saving grace was found with those very logo-embossed temples.
Remember the bit about how I always tell optical technicians to order the longest temples possible? Well, true to form, I'd shown Liz how the temples in the Chesterfields were woefully too short and noted that she would need to order the longest they had for my pair. She said she wasn't sure they carried ones that were longer, but would call them up to ask and then phone me if there were any problems. She said if I didn't hear from her, expect them to be correct and in hand within a week.
A week later, Liz called to say my Chesterfields had arrived. Can you guess how short the temples were? Oh, very, I assure you. It was exactly as if Liz had taken the display frames I'd told her were too short and just put lenses in them anyway. (Which is what she'd done.) But I didn't realize this until I'd returned home with them, because there was no point in wearing them home as I'd driven over wearing my contacts. I phoned Liz up and had to leave a message regarding the temples of inadequate length. She must have checked the notes in my file at some point and saw her own notation to order longer ones, for she was very accommodating when next we spoke. Turned out Chesterfield didn't make longer temples, which we would have known had she called them like she said.
I came in to pick out new frames and found some nice ones before long. They were some display frames Liz had just received and she said I could have them in a week. Meanwhile my Silhouettes came in and were wonderful to behold and with temples of the correct length.
Two weeks later, I phoned to ask about my promised sunglasses. Liz explained that the frames and lenses had arrived but that a screw was stuck in the frames and she couldn't release them to me in that condition so she'd reordered the frames. She should have them by the end of the week.
The following Monday I phoned again. Still delayed, she'd let me know.
Another week passed and I phoned again. Again, we were looking at some delays. I'd be the first to hear any news.
So, after a full month of waiting had gone by I was pissed off. Actually, I was pissed off long before that, but I was nearly willing to alert Liz to my level of pissed-offedness. Until that point I had been sickeningly sweet to her in all our interactions. I played phone tag with Liz for a day before she called back. When she did it was to say that my frames were not in, they hadn't technically even been released to the public and wouldn't be until June 16. I could either wait, pick out some new ones or get a refund. At this point, barely two weeks away from June 16, I decided I'd invested too much time to give up, so I opted to wait.
On June 16 I received no word from Liz. That evening, we left for the beach, during which I lost my Silhouettes in the drink.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Okay, so my frames didn't actually explode so much as come apart in multiple places very quickly. First one of the double mounting bolts of the left temple broke, causing the lens to pivot on the remaining bolt. I super-glued that one. Then, on the very day I had scheduled my most recent eye exam, two months back, the nose-bar snapped, as did my glue job on the temple, causing everything to fall apart. As I said, it was a nice coincidence that I was already having my eyes checked, but it meant either being blind for two weeks or that I'd need to get some contacts to tide me over.
It had been nearly ten years since I'd last worn contacts, having lost my final pair of Acuvues to the ocean the summer after losing my glasses to it. (Are you sensing a pattern, yet?) Fortunately the local Borderland optometrist I'd chosen said they could roll with this new request easily and that great strides had been made in contacts for people with astigmatism in the last decade. They hooked me up with a trial pair of Air Optix Aquas, then the optical technician--let's call her Liz--helped me pick out some more rimless frames. The only brand they carried was Silhouette, which were a bit pricier than I liked, but I figured the insurance would take care of most of it. (Wrong.) And because the Silhouette frames didn't come with clip on shades, as my previous brand of rimless frames did (or, rather, you could buy some as extras, but they were nearly as expensive as a pair of frames themselves), I decided to take advantage of a buy one get one half off sale they were having and order some prescription sunglasses to boot. The only ones I really thought looked decent in the store, though, were some Chesterfields, and then only just barely. In retrospect, I shouldn't have bothered ordering frames I wasn't 100 percent satisfied with, but especially these. The Chesterfields have a big clunky CHESTERFIELD logo embedded in both temples and I must not have noticed it right off because I pretty much hate logos on clothing and glasses as a rule. As it turns out, though, my saving grace was found with those very logo-embossed temples.
Remember the bit about how I always tell optical technicians to order the longest temples possible? Well, true to form, I'd shown Liz how the temples in the Chesterfields were woefully too short and noted that she would need to order the longest they had for my pair. She said she wasn't sure they carried ones that were longer, but would call them up to ask and then phone me if there were any problems. She said if I didn't hear from her, expect them to be correct and in hand within a week.
A week later, Liz called to say my Chesterfields had arrived. Can you guess how short the temples were? Oh, very, I assure you. It was exactly as if Liz had taken the display frames I'd told her were too short and just put lenses in them anyway. (Which is what she'd done.) But I didn't realize this until I'd returned home with them, because there was no point in wearing them home as I'd driven over wearing my contacts. I phoned Liz up and had to leave a message regarding the temples of inadequate length. She must have checked the notes in my file at some point and saw her own notation to order longer ones, for she was very accommodating when next we spoke. Turned out Chesterfield didn't make longer temples, which we would have known had she called them like she said.
I came in to pick out new frames and found some nice ones before long. They were some display frames Liz had just received and she said I could have them in a week. Meanwhile my Silhouettes came in and were wonderful to behold and with temples of the correct length.
Two weeks later, I phoned to ask about my promised sunglasses. Liz explained that the frames and lenses had arrived but that a screw was stuck in the frames and she couldn't release them to me in that condition so she'd reordered the frames. She should have them by the end of the week.
The following Monday I phoned again. Still delayed, she'd let me know.
Another week passed and I phoned again. Again, we were looking at some delays. I'd be the first to hear any news.
So, after a full month of waiting had gone by I was pissed off. Actually, I was pissed off long before that, but I was nearly willing to alert Liz to my level of pissed-offedness. Until that point I had been sickeningly sweet to her in all our interactions. I played phone tag with Liz for a day before she called back. When she did it was to say that my frames were not in, they hadn't technically even been released to the public and wouldn't be until June 16. I could either wait, pick out some new ones or get a refund. At this point, barely two weeks away from June 16, I decided I'd invested too much time to give up, so I opted to wait.
On June 16 I received no word from Liz. That evening, we left for the beach, during which I lost my Silhouettes in the drink.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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