I took the day off today, and Apricot knew I was not going to work because I didn't have my stack of work clothes on the little side table. He was very happy.
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| this was June 28 but I didn't have a good one from today |
Practically everything I do now at home is done with accompaniment of Apricot. It's great fun and makes everything take longer, which is not so much fun, but I didn't get him just to ignore him, after all. So if he wants to wind back and forth in front of me when I walk, and ask for pets every few steps, I'm going to accommodate him. If I run into him, he tags me with a paw, like "whap, stop that." I would like him to stop doing that, but the only reason I want him to stop is in case he gets "worse." Right now it's just a soft paw, no claws.
This morning he had his first experience with asking to see something and being shown but told he can't touch. For the first time he actually noticed that the fridge had an inside that he wanted to see. My freezer is on the bottom so the fridge starts almost at waist height to me. He let me know he wanted to see by staring fixedly at the fridge door while it was open and after I closed it.
I told him if he wanted to see, I'd have to pick him up to let him see. And then I picked him up and cradled him in one arm while I moved a step to the fridge and opened the door. He craned his neck and looked all around at the inside, but made no move to leave my arms. It was like he understood that this was "look don't touch." This also ended up being the first time I had to put him down before he was ready to leave, because even after I shut the door, he cuddled into me and was very affectionate and didn't want down.
However, I had to leave, even if I really really didn't want to. Because you see, I'd taken the entire day off work to go to an eye appointment. An ordinary, optometrist, eye appointment. Why was it going to take the whole day? Because it was in Atlanta, and was a three hour drive one way. Why was I going to an optometrist in Atlanta? Because he has equipment that allows him to do the look into your eyes that usually requires dilation, and I hate having my eyes dilated.
Side note: the last time I had my eyes dilated, the drops were painful, and worse was the drive home. It only took fifteen minutes, and I had my normal extremely dark sunglasses on in addition to the wrap around pair they give you, and by the time I got home, my eyes were so painful that I had to go into a completely dark room and sit there with my eyes closed, doing nothing, for over half an hour. Which was boring, especially since Pippin was busy toasting himself in the sun in a different room and had no desire to stop toasting himself just to come amuse me.
Anyway, thus this day off involving a round trip driving to Atlanta and back. On the drive up, the traffic stayed moving fairly well, only going down to 55 a few times (on a road that actually had a speed limit of 55, oddly enough, though you could tell traffic was going much slower than "usual" based on people's behavior) and since the sky was overcast, I didn't even have to run the air conditioner much.
I passed a chicken truck, and found it amusing that the truck I passed which was immediately behind the chicken truck had a logo on the side called "Old Dawg".
Also, I discovered that my previous definition of a "big" highway being three lanes in each direction is much lacking. Here I am, tooling along in my little Prius, in the left lane of a two lane (in the one direction) road, busily passing someone going slower than I wanted to go, when all of the sudden, like in the space of thirty seconds, I swear, the road turned into eight lanes wide. All in one direction. My "left lane" was now in the middle(ish). And I know two lanes came in from the right and joined instead of merged, so that's where two of them came from, but I have no idea where the three to my left appeared from.
I don't much appreciate driving when there's multiple middle lanes, I discovered. You really have to pay attention because not only are people changing lanes from both sides of the lane you're in (or intend to go in) but they're also potentially coming from several lanes deeper into the lane you're targeting. It's invigorating but a little exhausting to keep track of that many vehicles!
After I arrived at my sister's house, (and had a half hour nap) we went out for lunch and had excellent desserts (which we halved and shared, so we both got to sample two) and then I had my eye appointment.
This was all quite interesting as the doctor actually bothered to explain what was going on and what all the different tests meant. Apparently I "aced" the peripheral vision test (this explains a lot about getting distracted by things in the corner of my vision!) despite it depending on communication between brain and fingers (you clicked a mouse-like thing when you saw the flickers in your peripheral vision). And I'm slower at that kind of communication than regular people.
My brain goes, "look, there goes that annoying flicker again. Make it stop." Then a different part says, "you were supposed to click the mouse with your finger when the flicker happens." The first part goes, "oh, yeah, right, sorry. Hey, you on the mouse, click!" And only then do I click the mouse. If you know me, this probably explains a lot!
He showed me topographical maps of my eyes, and explained what they meant, and showed me what the laser surgery had changed, and where the nearsightedness came back--you can actually see it on the map. Nearsighted means your eyes are too long front to back, so there are tall spots, like a mountain, on the front of my eye, but part of it is flatter which is what the laser surgery did. Both eyes have this but one eye is more severe; the flat part is more flat and the raised part is more raised, and that's the one I'm the "worst" in; the other eye is kind of less flat but also less raised.
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| Topographical map. The blue parts are the flatter parts that the laser surgery did; the red is the tallest bit. |
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| Eye image: the reddish dot toward the left is the macula, where the most photoreceptive cells are and your best vision is; the veins/arteries are visible going into the "tube" at the back of the eye. |
He showed me the focal point of the eye, where the most photo-receptor cells are gathered, and I could see all the veins all gathered up into one spot and disappeared down into that spot like ribbons down a tube. I said excitedly, "and that's my blind spot, right?" and I was right. He gave me that look people do when I come up with something that ordinarily you wouldn't expect me to know.
(In case you don't know, you have a blind spot in each eye where there are no photo-receptors, because that's where all the veins and nerves go back into your brain. Your brain literally fills in the blind spots from what it sees around the spot. So you have two tiny spots, everywhere you look, that aren't real. They're your brain "photoshopping" reality into place there. I think this is fascinating.)
What I didn't know was that all the veins, nerves, arteries, etc, are across the top of your eye, with the photo-receptors behind them. Kind of like having a camera with the electric wires running across the front of the film. Seems rather impractical. But your brain filters them out and you usually don't see them. If you startle your brain with a sudden unexpected light source (like the flash of the instrument that took the pictures) then you interrupt the "filtering" process and you can see them for a moment.
I wish I'd thought to ask him if I could have a copy of my eye photos! I will email him and if he sends them to me I'll update this post with them. (As you can see, they were quite willing to email me screen shots of the images, and I have put them into the post now!)
Well, anyway, if you're still with me after all that, we come to the drive home.
I left the doctor's office about 2:20, and even then traffic was beginning to back up. It was stop and go all through Spaghetti Junction (there are so many bridges connecting all the different interstates that come together there that they call it Spaghetti Junction. I was on the second to the top bridge). It was weird being on that tall of a bridge and not moving. I'm usually nervous about it. This time I found myself thinking, I wonder where I have to be going to get on the top bridge?
All the 6-8 lane part was moving fairly quickly after that, but then, just as it thinned down to two lanes (which means usually not much traffic and you can sit back and just move) we rapidly decelerated to stop and go again. With the go part being 5-10 mph. For like a half hour at least.
Oddly, I wasn't the least bit impatient or put out. When it got completely stopped, I sorted paperwork (all my maps plus my prescriptions and receipts), and did car stretches (the kind of stretching you can do in a car's restricted movement space), and eventually ended up braiding my hair on both sides, just the front bits, which nicely kept them out of my eyes for the rest of the trip.
A truck driver had his window down, so when the shifting flow of traffic (I use the word "flow" in the most general of terms here) brought me even with him, I rolled down my window and called up to him to see if he knew how much farther we'd be stuck in this traffic. He was startled I was asking (well, I'll admit it's a bit weird) and said he didn't know. I asked then, "Haven't heard anything on the CB?" (The CB radio, which most truckers still have and use to communicate between them, in case you don't know.)
Now he really looked startled and actually put his hand on his CB, as if it hadn't occurred to him to use it to ask, and then, as if he wasn't going to admit that to me, shook his head and said no, nothing useful. I gave him a grin and said thanks, just thought I'd ask.
I bet he's still scratching his head over that one. Woman in tiny Prius knows about CB radios and bothers to ask truckers what's going on? (Helps when your dad was a long-haul trucker for just ages until he retired and you know what's what!)
We finally passed two police cars on the edge and a wrecker hauling up a rather battered but still intact car onto its platform. Ah ha, the source of the backup. Sure enough, once we were past that, traffic started back up to its normal speed.
The sky is blue with fluffy white clouds. The trees are green on either side. The cars are sorting themselves out into packs that want to all travel the same speed, with the faster packs moving through and past the slower packs on a regular basis. I travel in the middle speed packs, if you're wondering. I was resting comfortably in my driver's seat, watching the road scroll by, engaged enough in dodging the slow packs to have entertainment, and listening to my music.
And it occurred to me that I was enjoying this. Like really having fun. This was the way it used to be, driving. I used to like long distance driving. But since Pippin passed away my anxiety levels had gotten so high that it was interfering with a lot of things I used to enjoy doing, even removing the memory of how they were enjoyable. All the other road trips I've taken this year have been miserable.
But ever since Apricot came into my life and I decided to let him stay inside my life and care for him, the anxiety has been slowly draining back to normal (it's still there, just not the awful tense constant fear of the past nine months).
I enjoyed driving 6 hours in a day. 6 and a half if you count the stop-and-go traffic time! It was fun. When I got home I wasn't tired at all. Unlike the previous trips, the one in March to Megacoons and the one to the cat show and the one to visit Br'er Coons.
This was a good thing, since it's Friday and I had to make my bed with the freshly washed sheets and finish washing the towels and put them away in addition to all the other normal after work stuff. Apricot helped me with most of it. Turning the mattress around (horizontally, not flipping it) and putting the sheets on were something he watched from a cautious distance. But he did watch, and not go hide!
My sister had given me some extra finger-tooth-brushes for kitties, since they came in a pack of six and she had no idea why they'd put so many in. I put one on my finger and let Apricot investigate it.
Now I know why there were six. Apricot's response to the nubbly plastic brushes was to brush his own teeth by chomping down, hard. He didn't know my finger was inside it, so I didn't get mad at him, just pulled my finger out and let him continue chomping on an empty finger brush. He quite enjoyed it. But if that's the response some cats give, they're going to go through those brushes rather quickly!
Also I now know the difference between his love nibbles and play nibbles, both of which I'm trying to discourage, and his actual biting. My word but he has some strength in those jaws! The plastic kept my finger from being perforated but it certainly didn't keep my finger from aching for a few minutes from the power behind that bite.
Since I got home rather later than usual (around 5:45), I ate some supper before we played with Da Bird. Da Bird has been a slow stalk toy the last few days rather than a run after at high speed toy, but today we were back to full charge.
He has learned how to capture it so I can't get it back. We even managed to break it the other day by snapping the elastic strand off the end of the feathers which are held together by a metal clamp thingy. I fixed it by tying the elastic back through the (tiny, I'll have you know) loop that it was attached to before (glued, maybe? Industrial glue is quite powerful). So we were both happy the toy got fixed--him because he got to play with it some more and me because I don't often fix things well or even adequately!
My sister also gave me back the sisal scratching post I'd given her when Pippin didn't use it (Pippin never liked sisal; he was a cardboard scratcher). But Apricot uses sisal. I haven't brought it in yet, though. It's in my trunk and at 90+degrees when I got home, I didn't feel like hauling it out. I'll bring it in tomorrow morning and we shall see what kind of reception it gets, since it will smell very strange to Apricot. Tee hee. I enjoy setting puzzles for my cats.
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