|
|
|
- It's windy and cold, 30 mph winds, gusts of over 50 mph, 8 degrees above zero, windchill of negative whatever. Yesterday, driving over mountain passes, my car coated in brown frozen truck spray - it wasn't bad, left lane snow-covered but not icy and there were hardly any other cars because the weather was so bad. It'll be weeks before it warms up enough to wash my car. Actually, it'll be weeks before it warms up enough for this dirty ice to even melt off my car. I don't know why but I love this weather. Not the wind, but I love it when winter turns into brutal winter. It doesn't last long - a few days, maybe a week - but it's important. I wish we'd gotten the -40 degrees or colder that other parts of the country got a couple weeks ago. Kill off some of the pine beetles. I'd been worried about my right eye, not seeing super well, feeling physically weird. I assumed, of course, that my eyeball was ruined. It felt like it had sustained some trauma in that contraption that holds your eye open while the laser slices into the outer layer of your eyeball to create the flap that they lift up when they zap your cornea. I had my one-week post-Lasik checkup yesterday. My eyes are both fine, everything clear and healing well. My left eye is perfect. My right eye - the deal is, the astigmatism in my cornea isn't lining up with the astigmatism in the lens. It'll settle down - or it won't, and then we'll deal with it. Still, even with that going on, I've got 20/15 vision. I just have to blink a few times sometimes to get that. So my eyeballs are fine! It looks like I'll be approved for the amount I estimated for my mortgage pre-approval, which means there's nothing standing in my way of buying a house except for my own insecurities. There are two or three houses within my price range that don't gross me out and I could actually imagine living in. All of them are newer, under 15 years old, and I've always imagined living in an older house that I'd fix up myself. I'll put in a dog door. One of them I'd have to get a fence built. One of them I'd want to move part of the fence out in order to put in a garden in the backyard. I could do that myself. Both of my criteria are met: yard, garage. So... I did apply for that paid training "job". In retrospect my cover letter was beyond stupid. If I don't get it and have to stay at my current job I suppose that would be fine - I've got good benefits, and we're getting a 2% raise this month, and my boss is new so I have a certain amount of power now that I didn't have before. Also, of course, inertia is comfortable. A few nights ago it was snowing the lightest, sparkliest snow you've ever seen, diamonds mixed with spider eggs. Each diamond was a perfect snowflake, shinier than any perfect snowflakes I've ever seen, and the tiny cotton that also came down blew away with the faintest breath. You could have cleared off the sidewalks by blowing on them. I decided that I can never be skeptical of fake snow in movies now because this was the fakest-looking snow I've ever seen, except it was real. Over Christmas the puppy's roommate had built two snowmen out front, and on the night of the sparkly snow someone had knocked one over with their truck, somehow - accidental or intentional, you couldn't tell from the tire tracks. They'd come up over the curb and it's a pretty high curb, so if it was intentional they were pretty dumb, and if it was an accident they were also pretty dumb, as the roads weren't super slick that night. The puppy's roommate poured red Kool-aid on the fallen snowman, and I put a surprised face on the other snowman on the side of its head facing its fallen comrade. It was very sad. My dog is curled up in front of the fire.
|