Monday

Somewhere in the middle of the night, Ed comes up to the bedroom and tells me -- I can't get the cats out and by the way you should take a picture of what's outside.

I mumble, indicating half sleep -- I saw it. Snow. It's too dark. Get the cats out or else.

We have this rule: the cats do not overnight in the farmhouse. On the rare occasion that they refuse to leave, we close the door to the bedroom on them. But that should happen only when all else fails. Apparently all else failed. (Likely they were put off by the snow. Well who wasn't!)

No, you really should take a picture. There's a certain quality to the light...

Yeah -- the quality is that it's dark. If I get up, I wont fall back asleep again.

In the end, the cats complained loud enough that they were excluded from the bedroom if not the house, that I had to get up anyway. I have a more forceful personality I guess, because I had no trouble chasing them out onto the porch. And as long as I am downstairs (now wide awake, mind you), I may as well take that picture, which properly belongs on a holiday greeting card. Only not an April holiday greeting card.

Of course, that was it for sleep. Still, there is something luxurious about staying in bed and watching the light slowly creep in. Ed reads, I just revel in the comfort of not having to do much of anything.

But I do have to be up and running on the early side of things. I have an eye doc appointment. Right after I brave the horrors outside...

... and eat a quick breakfast.

My eye appointment is a bit of a gift. I had it scheduled for early summer (first available!), but then on a lark, I called on Friday and they had a cancellation and so boom! I grabbed it.

This is to discuss the apparently crucial need for cataract surgery. I still don't know how I went from "you dont need it yet" last year to "you really need it ASAP" this last month, but once I came to terms with that, I decided I wanted to move ahead with it as quickly as possible. Visions of shedding my smudgy glasses forever, with their imperfect progression of progressives (you always have to tilt your head just so, to catch the golden spot for reading) suddenly became so rosy and beguiling that I could not wait to get in queue for the procedure.

The visit with the doc was long and it was sort of like peeling a banana you had hoped was only slightly soft but turns out it's rotting all the way through. In the space of an hour, I moved from having just a wee problem (cataracts), to having wrinkly surfaces and holes in a retina and who knows what else, disqualifying me from the super cool surgery that would have given me near perfect vision, eliminating glasses forever!

So, only monofocal for me? -- I ask, both glumly and naively.

Oh, no! You are eligible for the Vivity lens which will give you arm's length vision in addition to far away vision.

Well, at least Medicare will pay for that, right?

Wrongo bongo!

At this moment, I'd been at the doc's office for over two hours and my grocery shopper was madly texting me about substitutions, so I kind of tuned out the cost estimate for these not quite super cool lenses. But it was high.

I came home discouraged, but then I had a brilliant idea: Ed, are you still looking to give me a birthday present?

I'm not sure budget breaking eye surgery is what he had in mind (having instead planned a visit to the Dollar Store -- a favorite shopping place for him for Gorgeous cards), but at least he's thinking about it. And, he was much more upbeat about my ostensibly imperfect lenses. 

They're the newest thing! They weren't even available when I had eye surgery 2.5 years ago! I'm not sure why Ed is so keen on the newest thing in eye surgery given that he wears the oldest cheapest Timex watch on the planet and our clothes dryer is a curbside salvage from thirty years ago (man, does that thing spew hot air!), but still...

By the afternoon the snow had mostly melted, but the day's high is stuck at 35F (that's less than 2C), so you can tell where I chose to be parked during the remainder of the day.

April 18th, and this is what we have for my fields of daffodils:

On the other hand, as I noted to whoever was listening a few minutes ago -- I could be ending my sixties blind, and we could be at war. So yes, it was a very very good day, even though, last I looked, it's snowing again.