The last near 24 hours has been a complete nightmare. I now know how valuable my eyes are to my very existence and what a crap time partially blind and blind folks have with normal software.
I was sitting in a waiting room with the wife, boasting that my glasses were indestructible as they were made of a titanium alloy. Less than two hours later, they were feeling a bit wonky. I took them off to clean them. To my utter surprise and dismay, two halves broke away in my fingers. The titanium bridge, supposedly one of the strongest points on the frame, had clean broke in two. 🙁
I can’t see crap without them. The entire world is a blur. I can’t read, I can’t see. I turn on universal access in Mac OS X and I can’t use it. Too many programs are inaccessible – Word doesn’t read to you unless you click the button on the speech toolbar to read to you. I can’t easily see that. I magnify the screen up and you see like three buttons at once, and it’s still blurry. I’m starting to get a headache. Entourage is “Button 3 Button 3 scrollbar”. It never reads e-mails to you. Apple Mail is MUCH better. So is Safari – both work just fine with the text to speech accessibility aide.
At the moment, I’m using Eclipse, and being a Java program it’s simply not working properly with the system’s accessibility aides. So I give up. I’m stuck – I can’t drive anywhere, and I can’t do crap.
Dinner is brown and white globs of food until they resolve themselves in my mouth. I try watching the big arse TV (bigger than the one Frasier’s Dad has), but it too is blurry. Tanya took pity on me and we went out to a nice coffee and cake place I know at the ferry terminal. There was a black and unreleased SUV (probably the new Freelander) doing an ad there. I wish I could have seen it as I’m a bit of a car nut, and even though I despise SUVs, I love seeing new releases before anyone else. I couldn’t even check out the hot chicks in the cafe as they’re all blurs. Tanya checked out the restaurant for hot chicks (other than herself) for me, and reckoned there was a couple of scraggers and not much else. Best. Wife. Ever!
We come home, but Tanya would not read a bedtime car magazine story or three to me. I feel really helpless without being able to read myself, but remember her putting up with my pitiful moaning at the cafe and let it be.
This morning, we got up early and went to a eye wear place which does “same day” prescriptions, had my eyes checked, and luckily, as my glasses are newish and very funky, they had the same exact pair there. They swapped out the broken bridge for the one from that pair. But as I don’t trust these glasses now and I don’t have a spare pair of glasses any more (it’s all packed away), I had my eyes checked and I’ve got a new pair of glasses on order. They’ll be here by next Thursday or so as my prescription is pretty funky and will require grinding of the lens.
But at least I can see! Yay! I am so incredibly happy.
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