My eye is still feeling a bit bruised after surgery, but that's not the problem.

The problem is that it's like I've been punched in the eye. Not from pain, but from swelling on my lower lid... even though there's no swelling. Instead it's more like a haze along the bottom (because the tear was at the top and things get reversed in your eye... our brains switch things right-side up).

Eventually my brain will be able to eliminate the haze at the bottom from the top and the chunk floating at the top from the bottom. At least I hope so.

It's tiring having to concentrate all day long to see... though, oddly enough, it's difficult to actually fall asleep. And so I've been falling asleep to my Disney movie collection each night. Last night was The Rescuers and tonight I'm watching The Emperor's New Groove...

This is a criminally underrated movie.

Especially since it features Eartha Kitt's delightful villain, Yzma, who steals the film at every turn...

The rumor is that the big coaster in "Villains Land" has been re-imagined to be an Yzma coaster. I sure hope that's true, because I can't imagine a better source material for an attraction.

My eye felt... bruised? I guess? today. But was otherwise pain-free. The only problem I faced was my eye feeling tired. And moving my eyes made it tired faster, so I tried to look straight ahead and move my head around to where I needed to see.

Last night when I would close my eyes to try and sleep, my lasered eye would display a light show of red lines which looked something like this...

This morning I was surprised to find that the lines were still there whenever I closed my eye... even if it was just a blink. Distracting and annoying. But it was gone after a few hours, so no harm no foul, I guess.

I thought I would probably take my pills and go to bed at 7pm, but it's almost 8pm and I'm going to see if I can make it until 9pm so that my sleep schedule (such as it is) won't be wildly disrupted.

In the meanwhile, I am trying to adjust to a huge blurry spot in my vision and hope that I can either get used to it or it will diminish in time.

Last Wednesday I woke up and had a massive spot in my vision. After years of stuff like this, I didn't panic. I thought perhaps it was a new floater, and eventually my brain would learn to disregard it just as it had a dozen times before.

But this time it was different.

Then it disappeared. Kinda. But it left a massive blurry spot behind, which caused a doozy of a headache. So I visited my awesome optometrist who took photos of my eye. She was concerned that her equipment (which is mostly built for prescribing glasses and contacts and monitoring general eye health) wasn't extensive enough to see what's going on, so she made me an urgent appointment at the ophthalmologist.

And today was the day.

The took new photo scans of my eyes... including some a machine I had never seen before.

Turns out there's a tear on my retina...

It's that nasty green thing at the top...

Dumb luck worked in my favor, because a surgeon happened to be walking by as he was leaving for the day and saw my pictures. He walked into the room to take a look in my eye for himself and said that I should have surgery to put a scar around the tear so it doesn't get any bigger and detach my retina. That sounded scary, so I asked how soon I could get on the schedule to have it done.

"I'm going to do it right now."

Next thing I know, I'm staring into a laser gun with a lens stuck to my eye as my amazing surgeon starts blasting hundreds of flashes of light at my retina... damaging the tissue so it will scar over and make a barrier to keep my tear from spreading and causing serious problems.

I was told it might hurt and feel like a dull ache in my eye. I felt it, but it didn't hurt.

When I left the clinic, it was empty. Which made me realize how lucky I was to have a doctor care so much about protecting my vision that he stayed late to take care of it.

I was able to drive home with two pairs of sunglasses on my face and was fine. For about an hour. Then the dull ache pain thing started happening, so I took an overdose of Advil with a Benadryl chaser and went to bed. And once the pain drifted away, so did I.

I slept for 9-1/2 hours, which is more sleep than I've gotten in decades. And now I'm sitting in bed with my cats trying to pull out of my sleep-haze so I can get to work.

Which is sure to be fun because the blurry spot is still there, and I'm told it could be six months before my brain can make it go away enough so I don't notice it.

Don't get old, folks... there's nothing good that comes of it. One day things are fine, the next day your eyeball is falling apart.

   
No.

Decades ago, I was a kinda-sometimes programmer. Mostly for personal use in a programming languages called Pascal (followed by Modula-2, C++, Objective-C, Perl, Java, and Rust).

Along the way I picked up a few tools which made programming easier. Editors, outliners, re-compilers, and the rest. One thing that I didn't pick up was learning RegEx (or "regex" if you're boring).

Shorthand for Regular Expressions, this is a tool which allows you to search for text in interesting and helpful ways... then act on what you find. And I don't know why I never looked at it. I had certainly heard of it, but ignored it for forever.

Until I couldn't.

This week I have been working on a difficult work project when I finally ran into a wall. I needed to alter hundreds of occurrences of text which was ever-changing. I had no idea how to do it. I assumed there would be a tool that allowed wildcard functions. And there are some. But none of them could do what I needed to do, and I resigned myself to manually changing everything.

And all of a sudden I remembered RegEx.

The reason I couldn't find a tool which did what I needed was because it had already been invented in the 1950's.

Twenty minutes later, and I had learned what I needed to learn and had completed a task which would have taken hours.

My biggest regret in life is that I didn't learn how to learn RegEx earlier than I did.

   
I am so tired, y'all.

I have yet to run across a word that offends me. Words are, after all, just words. Sure there's ways of stringing words together which can be offensive, but overall I cannot be bothered.

And because of the way I don't process words as "bad," I have a tough time understanding the pearl-clutching that can ensue when somebody hears a word they don't like. I mean, certainly you don't want to say bad words in front of young children who don't have the mental capacity to mimic such words in inappropriate places, but adults can choose to ignore things quite easily.

Today I ran across this clip from the movie Office Romance on Netflix which reminded me of a situation several years ago...

I was in Chicago meeting with some work colleagues at a bar down the street. A friend from the UK was in town, so I invited him along. At some point in the evening, my friend and I were telling stories about each other to my co-workers, when he started his next story with "Let me tell you about this cunt right here!" My co-workers laughed, but two women at the table next to ours did not. They were both upset, but one of the women was completely enraged. My friend apologized and said he forgot that word was viewed differently here, but that did nothing to appease the angry women who took their drinks and walked to another table across the bar.

"What a cunt!" my friend said, as everybody bust out laughing.

A part of me was wondering if we would get asked to leave because the women complained. But, if they did complain, it fell on deaf ears because we were there for another couple hours.

The next day at work I found out from one of my coworkers that the angriest woman did complain about us. But the bartender, who was a woman, just said "Okay" and that was the end of it.

I mentioned it to my British friend a couple nights later before I headed home.

His thoughts on the bartender? "Now THAT'S a cunt!"

Today I took a couple photos with my iPhone, as I do almost every day. It all went well, the photos were nice, and I went on with my life. Then, about an hour later, I picked up my iPhone and it was hot to the touch. That's when I noticed the camera was still running. I exited out of it, assuming it was hot because I accidentally left the camera going. But when I picked up the phone to go home for the day, it was still hot to the touch. So I rebooted it thinking that something was stuck running and off I went.

The reboot did nothing. Furthermore, I saw that my battery level was almost zero. So I ran upstairs and put it on my wireless charger. But when I finally went to bed, I saw that it would charge enough to turn on, run out of charge immediately, then turn off and repeat the cycle over and over and over.

Multiple resets did nothing, probably because it ran out of charge before it could register the reset. So I finally hooked it up (wired) to the most powerful charger I own. This got it charged quickly enough that I was able to shut it down completely before it ran out of power. And when I woke up, it was back to normal.

At which point I realized that I left a malfunctioning phone plugged in all night.

I'm lucky it didn't explode.

In other news, I think I'm too susceptible to social media marketing.

There's a content creator who operates under What the F Show who has been making some Nerf War skits that have been making me regret giving away my Nerf gun...

And so I spent a whole $7 to order a new one. Just to have on-hand, because sometimes I like shooting random visitors to my house with a Nerf dart.

Plus I'll feel safer at night knowing that I'm armed.

Good news, everyone! I have water again! Sunday the pressure was so low as to be non-existent, but I put a pot under the spout and turned the water on all day. Then around dinner time I had just enough water collected to boil pasta so I could have be some butternut squash ravioli in browned butter with crispy-fried sage. Something I've been wanting since I bought everything for it the previous Sunday.

It was pretty delicious...

Today I had to get my car serviced. Before I could even sit down, I had a text providing me a link to tracking the progress on my car. That's nice, I thought.

It sat in the shop for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES before they got around to it. My appointment was at 2:15. They finally started at 3:00...

Then they managed to get the inspection and oil change done in fifteen minutes, which means their time estimate of "about an hour" was correct in the end. But... dang...

The wait was made worse by a guy in the waiting room watching videos on his phone... WITHOUT USING HEADPHONES... which made the entire wait a horrific experience. Why are assholes so rude like this in public? Because they're assholes, I guess.

After that blight on my day, I went grocery shopping, picked up kitty litter at Petco, and grabbed an ice cream cone at the drive-through before heading home.

Where I had water again, thank heavens. Pasta for everyone!

When it comes to a cruise, anything less than 3 nights doesn't feel worth it... and anything more than 7 nights feels too long to be trapped on a big boat. My cruise was 5 nights, which is just about perfect. But that's not to say that I was happy about disembarking. Oh heck no. I would have gladly stayed onboard for those two extra nights. Bet.

Since they kick you off the ship early in the morning, most people just book a trip home that same day. I usually do not, preferring to stay an extra night at a hotel. It beats having to spend a big chunk of the day waiting for my flight at the airport. And, even more importantly, this time the cost to fly out the same day was significantly more expensive than waiting for some reason.

So... off to Fort Lauderdale Beach for a bit.

To drink seven mojitos of various flavors. Yes, seven...

The place was The Salty Sombrero, which I highly recommend. Great food, great drinks, great service, great view...

My room also had a great view, but it didn't have somebody serving me fresh mojitos all day...

But of course the beach is always better when you're not having to look at it through a window...

And that was it. All that was left to fly home the next morning...

Oh Florida, don't ever change.