My plan was to go into work and immediately print out 653 forms and sole source justifications (don't ask). After the alarm sounded, everything took a bizarre turn.

Usually when I go into the bedroom at night I put my glasses on my nightstand, but sometimes I wear them into the bathroom and, when I'm ready to shower, put them on the little divider wall that shelters the toilet. I keep my deodorant on there so I can start getting dressed in the morning, and James always has a book or two sitting on it for what Frank Gilbreth always called "unavoidable delay." As always Sunday night, I set my St. Jude medal on these books, the book book I was reading, and, since I had to wash my hair, the barrette or hair tie keeping my hair back. I know I put the medal and the book on it last night.

We had both just left the bathroom last night when a thump came from the bathroom. James had one of his aviation journals on top of a smaller book and the journal had fallen to the floor. I was beat and just left it there; I would get it the next day.

This morning when I looked for my glasses, they weren't on the nighttable. But they weren't on the divider, either. After squinting and peering at things for about fifteen minutes, while James looked more closely, I found one of my pairs of old glasses, which immediately made my eyes water, but at least things had edges. Well, James and I looked everywhere. He even looked in the refrigerator! Then he had a thought: I had started collecting the trash last night, but sat down after it was almost done and had taken my glasses off to read. James came by with the trash bag to collect the newspaper. Had my glasses somehow fallen in the trash bag? So we went out to get the bag.

At this point I told James to go off to work as there was no use in two of us being late and I have annual leave and he doesn't. I did pull everything out of the bag, but I knew the glasses wouldn't be in there because I remember going past James' computer as I went off to bed last night and reading what was on the screen. I have been known to bump into walls without my glasses on and couldn't have seen the screen with them off.

But where had they gone? I used to walk in my sleep when I was stressed out. Had I done so again after all this time?

Then I went back into the bathroom and picked up the aviation journal and got a horrible suspicion. I found my oldest sunglasses which I don't wear anymore and placed it on top of the journal, then nudged it over a bit at a time until it became unbalanced from being on top of the smaller book and fell to the floor.

The glasses fell in the toilet.

Oh, hell. If my glasses had been on top of the journal last night (even though I don't remember them being there) when it fell, they would have plunked straight into the toilet.

And we had flushed it just a half hour ago.

Son of a bitch.

So instead of printing out forms, I went to the mall with my old, heavy glasses on and shopped for new ones. I found glasses I liked at Sears, but they didn't have an eye doctor appointment until Wednesday. So I went down to VisionWorks, where I had gotten the old glasses, and got an appointment there. I went so far as to look at several frames, and get a quote, then walked back to Sears with the prescription. I think I would have gotten slightly better lenses at VisionWorks, but the frames at Sears fit better. I'd actually been having trouble with the supposedly "drowned" glasses; they hurt my nose terribly, but so do all my glasses. The skin on the bridge of my nose gets more sensitive every year. But I intended to look for them in the fall, not now.

I didn't get finished until 12:15. Let's see...45 minutes to work, and I can only work three and a half hours (since I don't intend to stay after 4:30 and then spend two hours driving home), or I can go home in fifteen minutes and work until James finishes dinner, a total of about five hours. Guess which I chose. Work was still frustratingly slow; I only was able to finish four orders.

And in the meantime I have to wear these wretched old glasses, which are big and heavy. My nose really hurts now, and so does my head. Sears put a rush on the glasses, but he thinks about 10 days. Ten days of this. Oy. And of course they are all scratched, which is why I got rid of them in the first place.

The really, really ironic thing about this whole affair is that not only were we talking on Friday night about the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last" with Burgess Meredith as only survivor of an atomic blast who now has time enough to read all he likes, only to break his glasses, but last night I had a dream about losing my glasses. That really freaked me out. Maybe it was my mom trying to tell me something, but I just couldn't understand it.

Labels: events, work

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:16:00 PM

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