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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Reading Glasses

I bought my first ever pair of glasses. The final straw was that my youngest daughter had a splinter in her foot that I just couldn't get out. After 25 minutes of hacking at it with needles, tweezers, razor blades, scissors, a chainsaw (just kidding), and a magnifying glass, I had to admit defeat and took her to an urgent care facility where the doctor had the splinter out in about two minutes. The doctor, of course, had several advantages. The most important advantage was that he knew what he was doing. Other advantages included a local anesthetic so she stopped squirming so much, a very sharp scalpel to cut through my daughter's impressively tough calluses on the bottom of her foot, and, last but not least, he had cool stereo magnifying glasses.

My main problem was that I just couldn't see what I was doing. Either I could hold the foot far away and see it clearly, but tiny with limited help from stereo vision, or I could hold it close and then it was blurry (even with the magnifying glass). That's why I bought the reading glasses.

The glasses aren't doing me much good though. My vision is still razor sharp at three feet and fortunately I have very long arms (I think I'm part Ape) so when I read I just hold the book (or the menu or whatever) far away. My computer monitor is set to 1600x1200 using the smallest possible font, but as long as I put the monitor on the other side of the room, I can see it just fine. It's just those first few feet that are a problem, but I've adapted to not needing to see anything in that range. Except splinters in children's feet.

So I'm now the proud owner of reading glasses for which the only use I can think of so far is to remove splinters from my children's feet. Unfortunately, I'll probably lose the glasses by the time I need them.

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