Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland. Since much of my news these days relates to trying to age gracefully, this series might be called The Geezer Gazette.]
3/1/25
Aloha, All!
March already! Can you believe it? Seems like just yesterday we were heralding cooler weather and
those wonderful changes of seasons! Now there are some welcome signs of Spring showing up on the mainland that will provide you some relief from your rather brutal winter. To get you even more in the springtime mood, here's a photo taken Thursday of some "spring" flowers in our garden. Of course, these were blooming most of the winter, too. Enjoy your early Spring, but keep in mind that Nature can be fickle....
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| March Magnificence |
In the Geezer Gazette this week the big news is that Karen finally got her glasses after 3 weeks of shipping time. These were to be a quick stop-gap until her eyes stopped changing after her cataract redo last month. We expected them to arrive in about 5-7 days. The delay unfortunately means the prescription is not quite right. They do help a lot, and almost get her back to where she was before cataract surgery, but not quite. In addition to only giving her 20/20 "ish" vision, she also has a problem in that the glasses distort things so that objects seem to be leaning away from her. She has an appointment with her optometrist on Tuesday for a follow-up and hopefully he will be able to assess what the problem is. My left eye is now 1 month out from my own cataract surgery, and my vision has stabilized enough so that I can confidently say the overall improvement has been ......meh. I notice a bit of improvement in my acuity but the overall problem that began last July is still with me. A neurologist may be able to identify a cause but I'm now not hopeful there will be any cure. My own diagnosis is that this may be a case of irreversible Optica Geezerosis -- i.e., being an old fart.
In other news. we have been making plans for a short bucket-list spring trip to Yosemite, a National Park that we have never visited. We actually booked a room in one of the hotels inside the park almost a year ago. Now it is getting close enough that we want to firm up our plans. Of course, our current administration's efforts to make the country great again may mean we have to cancel, since staffing National Parks is now deemed a waste of tax money. So far we've not heard anything from the hotel and so we're going ahead with our plans, which are to fly to San Francisco, rent a car (Karen may be the driver) and travel to the park from there. After 5 days of communing with nature, we are thinking of returning to SF and flying to Las Vegas, though our brains may explode from the contrasting experiences. I'll let you know how the plans progress.
Karen and I played golf on Thursday. It went pretty well. I got two bogeys and Karen got a par. These weren't manifestations of fantasy golf, either. Karen's par and one of my bogeys occurred on our last hole of the day, a par three. We both hit fabulous tee shots that landed on the green, though mine was considerably farther from the hole than Karen's. Karen nearly putted a birdie There were a number of other shots during the day that were surprisingly good, though there were also quite a few that required some fantasy adjustments. As we were playing I thought of a new putting technique that I may try next time. It involves using a bit of glue to attach a string to the ball, looping the string around the pin, and then pulling until the ball drops in the hole. Perfect putt every time! Notice, this requires no skill, no ability, no knowledge, and no ethics. It fits nicely with the new administration's strategy for making appointments to high offices.
Pele is still pulsing, with the eleventh episode since December 23 ending this week after a brief period of fountaining that lasted about 12 hours. Unfortunately these pulses have occurred close enough together to keep our vog levels high along our coast. If you've seen video of these recent episodes, you might think that the whole island is being inundated with lava. However, as I've pointed out before, the active vents are actually in a very small corner of the summit caldera. Video can be real but very misleading at times.
That's it for this week. Stay warm, enjoy your thaw. And as always, Carpe Vitam.
4 comments:
I love your plans to visit Yosemite and if it happens I would be interested in hearing about it. I am afraid all of us will be touched more or less, and quickly, by our MAGA government. I don’t see why planes won’t start falling out off the sky routinely (half-joking), and it is clear that there is a scheme afoot to scam us on social security. As in—starve SS, tick us off with the resulting problems, then replace it with something so much “better.” I have one trip planned for this year and I will avoid flying the friendly American skies. We will drive to Toronto and fly to Copenhagen and back. Maybe it is not so bad being a geezer. I can’t image how much worse I would be feeling now if I were just starting graduate school.
Karen and I keep telling ourselves how fortunate we were to have done what we did when we did it. The social upheaval of the Vietnam War, several shattering assassinations, and the crushing burden of living during the Cold War were very, very bad times, to be sure. But right now feels even worse, and the next 10-20 years are going to involve a LOT of turmoil inside and outside of the US. Carpe Vitam.
Thanks for the heads up re national parks— we have a bucket list trip planned for fall to Yellowstone, and I hadn’t yet heard about them being on the chopping block. carpe vitam for sure!
Glad you are the advance scouts to Yosemite. Friends of ours from Colorado have never been, well, she hasn't. So we all agreed to a fall trip to Yosemite and then to Sequoia. Maybe the Trump administration (if there is such a thing) should be required to watch the The National Parks, America's Best Idea, by Ken Burns and company? No reading required!
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