It's been one of those strange weeks. Yesterday at freeway speeds, my rear driver-side tire blew out. As I said on Instagram, Things that weren't on my bucket list that I can now say I've "done."
Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-- Elie Wiesel
Serious things that have nothing to do with cats first. Charlottesville. Both sides are not equal. One side is *wrong*. We have a racism problem in this country. We have a white supremacy problem in this country. We cannot resolve this by being polite. Being polite is for people who are genuinely acting in good faith. People who don't care are incapable of acting in good faith, and so we must do whatever it takes. Persistently. Consistently. Every single time it comes up. Do the thing.
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It's been one of those strange weeks. Yesterday at freeway speeds, my rear driver-side tire blew out. As I said on Instagram, Things that weren't on my bucket list that I can now say I've "done." For real. It was weirdly slow motion, and I couldn't quite put together what was going on. I was able to get off the freeway, and safely to a parking lot (ironically a WSDOT - Washington State Department of Transportation - lot). I thought I had blown out my muffler too, but apparently that's the sound the rims make as they're grinding along with a flat tire barely hanging on. I wasn't sure if the engine was messed up too. A car with only three functioning tires is very resistant to being driven! Srsly, I don't even know how the hubcap isn't bent.
So there I was sitting in the parking lot. Called USAA for roadside assistance. Texted kid #1 to have her dad give me a call (he never answers the phone, it's just easier this way as roundabout as it sounds), so they could come out and pick me up. It just all seemed so surreal. Glad I left roadside assistance to do their thing by themselves or it would have been a LOT later before I got home!
And on the way home I got to see an amazing sunset as we crossed the bridge (which I did NOT have a blow out on which I am SUPER THANKFUL FOR).
I mean. Unreal. And I'd have missed it if I had made it home without incident. And it made me think about gratitude because, yep, my tire blew out on the freeway which is... unsettling at best, but - I got off the freeway safely, I got to a safe parking place, I'm, safe, I have a network in place that can come help me get stuff taken care of, AND I get to see this amazing sunset too. Gonna be an expensive sunset, but... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I get fresh tires out of it too? So that was yesterday.
On Monday I picked up new glasses. My first progressive lenses. I have really disparate eyesight. One eye is so bad that without my glasses on, I can't read the letters on my screen as I'm typing this. My other eye is somewhat more normal, but getting a little farsighted, so I can see the screen, but it's a bit close to focus well on. Depth perception is not really a thing I have. I mostly navigate by perspective. If it's bigger, and moves in a particular way against the background, it's probably closer to me. It's like looking at a painting - you can see that things are "further away", but it's two dimensional.
I have 3-D vision right now - it's SO weird. Sidewalks in particular are difficult for me. Curbs, hills, crosswalks where there's a little ramp for wheelchairs -- really disorienting! I haven't gone into our backyard yet, the back part of the backyard in particular is really uneven and just weird.
So they're trifocals, so I have a near, middle, and far - and they're the invisible line, so it's not super obvious - but my eyesight is bad enough that if I look down when I'm walking and don't look through the top part of the lense, it's all really blurry. Some places (cough, oldest kid's room) are really difficult because if things are close enough to be in focus, but I'm looking a little above, the magnification causes things to shift around weird.
So (I promise that this is related) there are a lot of studies about orientation and motion sickness in virtual and mixed reality video games. I can't play a lot of types of video games because they make me really motion sick because of the simulated 3-D. Having new glasses - every time I get them - I go through a queasy couple days to a week or so as I adjust to the weirdness that is having depth perception. I'm getting there. Now it's mostly first thing in the morning when I first put on glasses until my brain remembers that 3-D is the point, and not because I've poisoned myself. So progress!
Oh yeah - the cats! The youngest has started to try to train the cats. It's going... better than expected, actually. We'll see how it continues to go. If she's still working on it next week this time, I will report back!
With love and gratitude and curiosity,
--Susan