trees, eyes and croissants

We are finally going to start in on November weather this weekend, beginning with gusty storms and pounding rain this afternoon.  Indeed, I get out of bed in November darkness. In part it's the early hour -- pre-sunrise, as usual, but, too, the clouds make for a steely gray landscape out there. 

I have no choice but to get going. I have a post-surgical eye appointment very early. I decide to wait with breakfast. Rushing to eat in a darkened kitchen seems so not right!

My eye doc takes great pride in her cataract surgeries and in my case she has reason to be proud. By giving the two eyes different distance lenses, she managed to accomplish the goal of permitting me to see far and see reasonably near as well. (One eye for each function!) Sometimes I need readers, but, too, I can go a whole day not needing anything at all. So yes, she should be proud.

On the other hand, when I tell her about my accident in France (my eye still has the telltale black and blue markings of an injury), she surprises me. I explain how I had been treated in the ER room and no one wanted to charge me anything for it and she just couldn't grasp the logic of this. They treated you without requiring payment? How could that be? -- was her repeated theme.

I remembered how the French ER doc knew all about our health care system and how it functioned in its payment chaos and dysfunction. It strikes me as funny that a French doc knows about that dysfunction but an American doc has little clue about what appears to be an actually functioning system, where a patient gets care and never sees nor worries about the strange and confusing bills that come at us afterwards. (I say this with a sample of one doc from each country, so please know this is not a general statement about them or us.) Ah well -- my doc did fantastic work on my eyes. Why should she involve herself in the details of payment, right?

After the morning appointment I felt fresh croissants would be a wonderful reward for a delayed breakfast.  I drive over to the bakery. Two temptations today:

It is now nearly 10 and I know that by 11 we are to have the rains come down on us. If I want to keep up the daily walking trend, I need to do it now, or else limit myself to pacing the farmhouse. So I turn the car toward our county park and somewhat blindly (you know how dilated eyes feel!) I walk the paths of my favorite trail.

And only then do I sit down to breakfast. It's lunch hour and my daughter calls and so you can say I am having breakfast not alone at all, but with her!

And now it's a sprint to finish tidying before I'm off to pick up Snowdrop. Unusual to have her here on Fridays. I typically save this day for catch up stuff with Ed, but there is no Ed, and I don't care about catch up stuff, and she wanted to make up for lost time last week, and so here she is.

But what a drive it is! Torrents of rain. Hail. Thunder. You name it, we got it! Still, such storms pass quickly and by the time we are at the farmette, there's just a light rainfall. Not strong enough to keep her from climbing her tree. (And by the way, she is starting to have very definite opinions on what kind of photo I should take and post on Ocean. You're going to see a lot of tree climbing. I obey instructions!)

Meanwhile, out at sea, the sailors have stopped posting daily updates and so we can only guess that everyone is alive and pushing through the last 24 hours on the waters of the Atlantic. By tomorrow they will almost certainly hit the shores of the islands. Unfortunately, I see rain in the forecast for the Caribbean for the next week, perhaps longer. Ah well. It will be warm rain. I'm sure it wont keep Ed from swimming in the salty seas.

Dinner tonight? Oh, this is a no-brainer. My veggie soup! With grated parmesan. So fitting for this wet and stormy day!

With love...