Duck…Cupid’s eyes ain’t what they used to be!
As age creeps…creeps? More like ZOOMS up upon us, one of the first things we notice taking a hike, is our 20-20 eyesight. Mine decided to skitter on outta here while I was not paying much attention to my eyes at all. I mean I was back in college, a single mom, working three jobs, raising two kids, and trying to maintain a high enough GPA to keep the scholarships rolling in.
The wavy lines, haloes, and pixilated interruptions in my 20-20’s I put down to growing fatigue that would right itself just as soon as I put in more than two hours of sleep, crashed out on the living room floor where I landed as son as I’d shut the door of our apartment behind me. I mean wouldn’t you?
I worked my first job, trawling around the neighborhood, tossing, none-too-gracefully the morning papers upon your lawns so you could hide behind them at your breakfast tables. This means I was up and out by 4:00 A.M. From there I’d zoom down the interstate for one glorious…please car do not break down…hour, giving a humungous sigh of relief when I finally found a free parking lot in the student’s parking lot at my college. Why it is the nearest parking spot always seems like it is a good mile hike from class?
Studying when you are on the downward slope of thirty requires great attention and tenacity. In between classes, I tried to catch a “z” or two curled up in a most uncomfortable chair…why is it there are never any benches free when you need SLEEP? During my many years pounding the academic pavement, I searched high and low for a “quiet” spot to catch those ‘Z’s” in…Okay I see you want to laugh up a storm. Go ahead, feel free. You wouldn’t be laughing though if at some point you hadn’t tried to find that elusive quiet spot, so we are both dumber than academic dirt.
In between my 8:00 A.M. class that ends at 9:00 and my 1:00 class, I have to zip back up that interstate…please car stop guzzling oil like its water…so I can get to my second job…keeping the books and making deposits for an Auto-parts store. That took me from 11:00 am thru 3:00 PM when I downed a few Saltine crackers and headed back down that ribbon of concrete towards the college. When I arrived there, I had to call home and take a few to speak with my kids, find out how they were and promise them I’d help my daughter build her tar pit for school, and play target practice with my son and his paintball gun. (Yellow is really hard to wash out of your hair, so it’s a good thing I was already blonde.)
5:00 sitting smack dab in the front of the room, because I discovered I had to squint too much from the back, I began taking notes on the rights and requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. We DID get a fifteen minute break at the halfway mark because three hours of sitting on hard benches makes just about everyone’s ass go numb…and for some reason you don’t’ learn as much on numb asses.
8:00, a quick rush to the library so you can sign out that book on Teaching Reading to the Handicapped you need for your term paper. 9:00 back on the road headed north. Okay car, now is SOOO not the time to give up the ghost. Get me safely home and I promise I will buy you 10/40 weight oil next time we go to Walmart.
11:30, for some reason there was a LOT of traffic on the road tonight, I get home, stagger up the steps, open the door, enter, close the door, and fall, like a tree cut down in its prime. I’m asleep before my face smooshes against the fortunately richly carpeted floor.
So is it any surprise I did not recognize the real reason I had to squint, saw haloes, or just suffered from an advanced case of eye fatigue. Name me any student who doesn’t believe that the lack of proper vision isn’t because the Sandman is not a frequent visitor.
So it came as a real shock the first time I was pressured by my children into seeing the eye-doctor.
Most people start out with single lenses. I’m no wuss. For me it was right to bifocals.
If you are not familiar with bifocals, let me correct that education deficiency. Bifocals are like wearing little telescopes with your nose as the bridge between them. Telescopes bring everything CLOSER. The bifocals make that hood ornament on your car that you use to guide you into staying properly in your own lane, closer, conning you into thinking the tank you are really driving is a VW Bug. I had to go out into the Country…way out in the Country, to learn how to drive again with bifocals. Mrs. Eastburn, I am really sorry I felled your prize yew tree. I didn’t realize I was that close to the roads edge…and well, your yew, it jumped out…I think it might have had a suicide by auto wish. IT probably needed therapy.
Many years have passed since Mrs. Eastburn’s favorite yew gasped its last sap. My eyes have gone through many changes, including surgery for cataracts, and laser surgery when the cataract surgery left me with a thick wall of scarring. I asked my eye doctor about contacts, and he had the nerve to laugh. At MY age, he chortled! Hell, I am only 59, I wanted to respond, but I remembered something I read somewhere…about old eyes not producing as much tears. I imagined contacts plastered against my eyeballs without tears to keep them comfortably floating.
Maybe the doc was right. At my age keeping foreign things outside my body is probably a good thing.
Now that I have made all your stomachs flop and you eyes bug, let me tell you why you need to have vision that is in tip-top shape…
I am L.J. Holmes and I have a slew of e-books coming out from Muse Publishing, Inc. in the magical year, 2011. Yeah, I KNOW we are already IN 2011, but my first 2011 book does not release until February 1st.
So lean back and let me regale with my February and March releases. No, I am not going to tell you about my May, June, August, September, November, or December releases this time. You’ll just have to wait till I visit with Miz Ging again.
Keith Patterson owns Patterson Construction. Coryne takes one look at him and wants to run. Surely someone who looks like a god and is built like a sinner, cannot possibly build the house Coryne needs built and in the limited time frame she requires? Besides what he does to parts of her she had decided were dead, was sinful.
Her co-workers convince her that Patterson Construction is the best. Coryne hires him but also purchases a camping trailer so she can be on the spot overseeing the progress. Not the wisest of choices, she would come to admit, but she would not turn coward now. Each day Keith filters into more and more of her daydreams, and x-rated night fantasies. It’s hard enough to avoid your own wild dreams, but much harder when the object of those fantasies lets you know he’d be more than willing to trip the light-explosive with you.
Will Coryne be able to avoid giving in to Keith’s magnetism?
Forever With You comes out from Muse It Hot, the erotic wing of Muse Publishing, Inc. on February 1st. You do not want to miss this book, nor do you want to miss the surprise ending. I promise it will stay with you long after you have read the last line.
On March 1st, The Pendulum Swings releases, also from the Muse It Hot Side.
Guess you can tell from the cover there will be some erotic belly dancing going on. But that’s not the half of it.
She wakes up in a room that has the weirdest things she’s ever seen. What is this thing she is lying on…a bed, but not like any bed she could remember sleeping on before? And why doesn’t her hand look familiar to her?
The door whooshes open and in walks a gorgeous man whose carefree expression turns into a blistering scowl when he realizes she’s awake.
He calls her “Joanna.” Why would he do that? She’s not a Joanna? But as she wrestles with her mind to bring up through its many layers her name she is panicked to discover she does not know who she is. How can that be?
She poses the question to the angry man. Her question makes his face morph into a horrible mask of dislike and distrust. The next word he throws at her makes her recoil even more. Amnesia. What or who is Amnesia?
Almost on the next heartbeat he tells her he’s her husband. This man who obviously hates me, owns me? Something inside her began quaking. Why would he take as his wife someone he obviously hates, and why can’t she wrap her mind and heart around the idea that she is the loathsome creature he obviously despises?
I want to again thank Ginger for allowing me to come in and play in her toy chest.
I can be reached by e-mail at spatzdkat1212@yahoo.com
I also have so many blogs I don’t know what to do, but I will give you the one where I do most of my own mouthing off…on a semi-regular basis, and the two I have for the cover blogs for Muse authors…if you don’t know what a cover blog is, Miz Ging has dubbed them Stationary Trailers and you can learn a lot more about ALL the authors and their upcoming releases.
First my…mouthing off blog. http://linsownspeculations.blogspot.com
Second is the blog I set up for the adult muse stories form the Muse It Up and Muse It Hot Side… http://linsownblog.blogspot.com
Finally the one I set up for our YA authors… http://linsownbooklounge.blogspot.com
Your struggle with sleep and vision was quite funny. Strange how you can make going semi-blind into a laff-riot. Way to go!
ReplyDeleteI have three pairs of glasses which I constantly switch, so I know my next pair will be tri-focals. Either that, or I'm going to have to move closer to the TV set to watch Castle.
Thanks for coming over to visit Marva. I have to wear different glasses to see the computer than I do out in the real world...but I tend to forget and will still be wearing my computer glasses and start wondering why everything has a halo around it. So I'll take the glasses off, turn them around and see what I'm wearing and go..."Oh S**t", cause now I'm stuck wearing them 3/4's the way down my nose until I can get home to my OTHER glasses.
ReplyDeleteLin,
ReplyDeleteYour life sounds too crazy for words. I don't envy you.
I've worn thick glasses ever since I was seven. My vision is so bad that I'm legally blind in some states. It's sobering to realize that if I had been born in the middle ages, before the invention of eyeglasses, I probably wouldn't have survived. Now, it's mostly correctable.
And if you'd been born 50 years ago, your cataracts would have made you effectively blind.
(It always helps ME, at least, to think about how much better things are than they could have been.)
Hugs,
Lisabet