Scuba Diving Vacations

The other day I go to pick up something from my wife at her work and she mentions one of her 20 something-ish co-workers said to her "I hope this doesn't offend you, but your husband's cute, sure he's older, but he's cute"... Now I'm feeling pretty good about myself for the rest of the day... hey 20 something-ish women think I'm cute, they didn't ever say that back in the day, but they do now... I'm feelin' kind of manly... then my wife comes home and the first thing out of her mouth is... "Yeah, so and so (name edited) says you remind her of a younger Santa Claus".

A younger Santa Claus!?!?!?! I'm not sure that's what I was privately hoping for... I don't think I look like anyone famous... but Santa Claus??? Oh well, guess I gotta take a "compliment" for what it's worth, and I guess I can think of worse people to remind people of than Santa.

Well, it's time for new glasses and part of my last grasp at youth is getting back into contact lenses part time. I went to the optometrist and was given both standard contact and bi-focal contacts. The bi-focal contacts are interesting, apparently the center of the contact is slightly more set for near vision and you see around it for distance vision, and in my case the lens on my dominant eye (didn't know I had one) is corrected more for distance vision and the less-dominant eye is corrected more for close-up vision. Well, neither works perfectly and it's kind of aggravating, but most of the time it works. I wore the bi-focal lenses for several days and today I tried the standard vision lenses. Wow, a noticeable difference in the distance vision, but I can't see a darned thing within 3-4 feet. I had to borrow my wife's reading glasses (she had lasik a few years back and can't read real small print without them) for even basic reading and detail work, like typing this post... my mind is basically made up at this point, ixnay on the andardstay contacts and I'll probably go with the bi-focal ones, at least I can see my camera settings with them.

The pic above is of a Divided Flatworm (Pseuderos c.f. dimidiatus) -maybe the "c.f." stands for "certainly familiar", whatever, apparently it is similar to yet different from the originally described species. The other pic above is of me a couple months ago (before my white-hair breakdown haircut).

later,

Steve