Weekend

Mr. Meniere Makes A Visit

Sunday morning I woke up at 5:30. I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock and when I opened my eyes the image I saw spun quickly up and repeated and repeated and repeated…so I blinked a couple times, but it wouldn’t stop. I closed my eyes and decided that maybe if I rolled onto my back that would help. Trouble came about when I started to roll over I opened my eyes! I can only equate the visuals to what I imagine is a portion of a potent LSD trip. Once on my back the ceiling fan was scanning across my vision rapidly from left to right.

I closed my eyes and lay there for a few minutes contemplating. I knew what it was, it was the one symptom of Meniere’s Disease that I hadn’t suffered from back in September — vertigo. With experimentation I found that I could make it stop by jamming my eyeballs all the way to the right (direction everything was spinning.) I then woke Donna and told her what was happening. She wanted to know what we should do and I told her the first thing was I needed to go to the bathroom. Using a combination of eyes closed, eyes opened hard to the right and her supporting me, mission accomplished.

It was still early, so I suggested let’s go back to bed and see where we are when we next wake up. I woke up again at 7:30 and I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock. When I opened my eyes the image was perfectly still. I blinked my eyes a couple of times, normal. I closed them for a minute or so and opened back up to the return of ordinary. There hasn’t been a return of the dizziness since.

I’ve given up caffeine as the doctor suggested, so was it the small coffee in the morning and the 20oz. Dr. Pepper in the evening on Saturday? Was it the 300 mile road trip, more than half of it with the top down that brought it on? The pizza in Milledgeville? The glass of wine with dinner? Not getting a lot of sleep two nights before? Watching the synchronized drones of the Olympic’s Closing Ceremony?

How Was Your Weekend?

In between raindrops and watching the Olympics, we managed to donate some books for the AAUW book sale coming up the first weekend in March (where we will probably spend money on books), stopped by our usual local eyeglass place and tried on some frames and gathered a bunch of Moss Motoring Challenge points. I also installed and uninstalled a pneumatic hood lift on the Miata, but that is a whole ‘nother post.

The first glasses shown are made out of something called TR-90 and they weigh next to nothing. Also they are close to what I wanted two years ago because they have blue temple pieces, but instead of clear face pieces, these are gray translucent. The second one is a wild card like those clear frames I so wanted a couple years ago, I like the idea of round frames, but I’m not sure if I love the way they look. I am going to get another set of 5 from Warby Parker and will probably include a couple rounder ones in there too.

This year’s Motoring Change has spots for 5 “clever” Vanity License Plates and they have waved the “your car must be in the photo rule” for it. So we opted to laminate another catalog cover and keep it in the Mini. This paid off on Saturday morning when we were dropping off those boxes of books. We knew this was a personalized plate by the look, but we were not sure what it meant, until we saw the accompanying bumper sticker.

Sunday we were in the Miata, so we included it in our second Vanity Plate, which was instantly understandable because of the car it was attached to. The bare trees were our third and last Sign of Winter and I hope to recreate that shot for each of the other three seasons, flowering in spring, green leaves in summer and reddish-brown for fall.