Broken Eyed Perry

I have been wearing corrective lenses since I was fifteen. Mostly glasses, but I started out wearing those saucer-sized hard contact lenses, then gas perms, then soft ones, fifty years ago. 

Contact lenses in this part of the world in the spring turn yellow from pollen, and working at a computer, they also tend to wear blisters on your eyeballs, so I went back to specs. More trouble than they were worth, contacts.

And no, the Lasix surgery isn't an option, because once presbyopia sets in, you still have to wear glasses for close work anyhow, and what's the point? And there are some side-effects of laying a cutter onto your eye ...

Couple weeks ago, I dropped my current pair of cheaters onto the floor. Onto the carpet, mind you, but even so, the little support bar across the top must have taken the impact and transmitted it to the lenses, and the result you can see if you blow up the image: a pair of tiny cracks radiating from the juncture of frame and support.

For years, I wore eyewear with glass lenses, for fear I would scratch the plastic. First pair of those I tried, I scratched on the way home from collecting them. Seriously.

Eventually, the anti-scratch coatings got better, and I went to the lighter, thinner super-dense plastic, and my nose has been thankful. They weigh about a third as much as glass.

So, cracks, that, like a windshield, were apt to craze and get worse. It was time for my eye exam anyway, and I made an appointment. 

In the good-news-bad-news department, Costco was willing to replace the cracked lenses for free. Thing was, my prescription, which had been stable for five years and essentially the same, had this time, decided to change, so I now needed a stronger one. Which meant that replacing the old glasses was useless. Unless I wanted another back-up pair, of which I already have three.

Swell.

And while the old glasses were covered, a new prescription would not be. Had to start over.

Ah, well. It's a first-world problem, isn't it? I found a new frame I like, got all the bells and whistles in the Transistion™blended/non-reflective/hard-coated/stops UV lenses, and ordered a second pair of spiffy sunglasses for driving. (The Transition™ lenses, which now go Stevie Wonder-dark a few seconds after you walk outside into the sunshine, are pretty good sunglasses; however, the window glass in your car stops UV light, and that's what makes the transition work, so they don't work in the car unless you put the top down, or stick your head out the window. Plus they don't polarize and take out the glare.)

Went with gold wire-rims this time. In keeping with my policy of shaking such things up every ten or twelve years ...