Twas a busy and varied day yesterday---some of it spent in Coeur d'Alene, some on the back of a horse.
All good.
A while back, when it appeared that this would be a personal maintenance year for the old Love's, I informed Bill that he had to get his cataract surgery first.
After all, he's the driver when we visit Ireland, and if we get to go in the fall, he may have to drive in the dark on occasion.
We have both reached that age where driving in the dark doesn't happen unless absolutely necessary.
Those street lights and car lights magnify in size, and any photographer will tell you that the larger you expand the image, the blurrier it gets.
Old eyes like to magnify the images at night but old eyes also have a hard time focusing when there's an ever-growing film over them.
So, as part of maintenance year, Bill had his first cataract removed yesterday. He'll have it checked by the doctor today.
Pretty much everyone our age or older is getting very adept at telling you the drill for cataract surgery.
We were noticing the age demographic yesterday after pulling into the parking lot at the North Idaho Eye Institute.
Almost every car in the lot with inhabitants contains an old man and an old woman. We could easily tell that because it was daylight, not dark.
Eventually, either the old man or the old woman steps out of the car. In some cases, the remaining passenger, pulls up the cell phone and gets ready for a couple of hours of surfing the web.
In other cases, like mine, the old woman drives off in search of a place to go have a bite to eat.
In my case, out of respect, I refrained from eating in front of Bill who was told not to eat anything after 4:15 a.m. and to quit drinking water, apple juice or 7-up after 10:10.
The cataract-removal "drill" is very specific.
The drill includes a whole lot of set-up inside the surgery center and about 50,000 reminders of which eye is getting the surgery, including an ink dot drawn above said eye.
There's much more to the drill, but I wasn't there. I was enjoying lunch at Tomato Street where the server, who had accompanied her mother to cataract surgery, assured me it's just like drive-through these days.
I actually furthered my specific knowledge by listening to a seasoned cataract-removal veteran (she got hers removed in April) and Bill exchanged surgery stories over the phone last night.
Anyway, by the time I had finished my quick lunch and driven back to the surgery center, there an opportunity to walk around the parking lot three times before my phone rang, telling me Bill was ready.
He seemed really happy to see that meatball sandwich and fries from Tomato Street. After all, it had been ten hours since his last meal.
We also stopped for beverages on the way home.
Once home, Bill went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror with one eye covered with a transparent patch and the other without aid of his usual glasses.
He then came out to the living room and announced, "I look like a dork."
Well, yah, but I wasn't gonna be the one to tell him. Plus, it was obvious his eyes were working.
He also spent some time covering his left eye to see what he could see.
I don't know if he was quite ready to sing the song "I Can See Clearly Now," but he did pull out a book and did some rather awkward-looking reading.
This morning the transparent patch comes off. He'll do the eye drops regularly and wait two weeks until returning to the surgery center and hearing 50,000 times, "It's the left eye."
With luck, soon, all those lights at night should get smaller and much clearer in his eyes.
Then I'll decide if and when I want to go through the same drill.
In the meantime, after our return home yesterday, I went on with life as usual. Foster received a hair cut and a groom on the 4-wheeler tailgate, I dropped off asparagus to a neighbor and froze a batch of fresh-picked rhubarb.
And, then, I saddled up Lily.
We don't do the roads anymore, and we don't travel too far---just leisurely trips around the yard, out to the woods and up and down the lane.
On a beautiful early summer evening, there's no better feeling for an old lady who still sees pretty clearly in the daylight, to be sitting on a horse as she plods around the place.
Furthermore, to discover the barn cat thinks she'll tag along for the ride----that's pretty neat too.
Happy rainy Wednesday.
We'll finish up this segment of Bill's cataract drill today.
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