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Dawning of the Web age, redux

This afternoon I came across something on the Web, an ad, perhaps. Hell I can’t remember. What it was, in fact, was a gateway to my life on the internet.

Some years ago, maybe two or three, I can’t remember these things, I lost my password on my Yahoo Mail account. I spent about a week trying to coax the yahoos at Yahoo into returning me to my mail. It didn’t happen.

I took this with a disposable camera back in 2003 or 2004. I was on the top of Enchanted Rock in Central Texas. Yes, ye old rock climber, just walked on up to the top.

I eventually got onto Google Mail. I had Google everything else, so why not Google Mail? I had a learning curve, but a symbiosis developed between Google and I.

This afternoon, with the opportunity to revisit my Yahoo Mail account, I traveled ahead although I felt that if that chance failed, I wouldn’t sob too loudly, and probably not at all.

As it happened, Yahoo had my telephone number and it offered a code sent via text. Then, taa-daa! There was my Yahoo mail account some two or three years later. Daunting was the 9,999+ unread messages that await me. I know probably 95-plus percent of these messages are spam, or mail that is what I now consider as spam.

I did manage to access some files and found messages from as far back as 2001. Among the messages were some photos of mine of friends and those pictures I took. One of those photos is the new header media. This was one of two of the best pictures I took with a disposable camera back in 2003 or 2004. I didn’t even have a personal computer, well at least one with internet connectivity. Most of my internet usage back then was done  at my job as a journalist in Central Texas.

After leaving that job for a short-lived freelancing-only career, I had a jerry-built desktop, constructed by one of my computer science friends. I don’t know how identifies himself professionally these days since he has been on what is seemingly an extended vacation since at least summer 2016. That is when Ross and I went on a week-long expedition of the southeastern U.S. During Hurricane Rita in 2005, I was freelancing for a large U.S. metro newspapers but didn’t have laptop. I needed a laptop. If you are going to work outside an office, you pretty much have to own a laptop. So I bought a rebuilt laptop in Dallas less than a week after Rita hit. Since that time I have had  four, five, crap, I don’t know.

The picture that is my header now was taken on my way up to the summit of Enchanted Rock . As is suggested, Enchanted is a rock. It is a large dome of pink granite located near Fredericksburg, Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Austin. A Texas Monthly article about the rock said its incline is about 30 degrees. I was in much better shape when I walked, yes, walked up the rock, than I am now. I was somewhere around 47 or 48 back then. I walked a lot and did some hiking.

I have no idea how, or if, I will deal with the thousands of emails on my Yahoo account. I am glad to have recovered some of my early web days though.

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Dos ojos son mejores que uno.

Yesterday I had a cataract removed from my left eye. I didn’t meet the surgeon until I was in the operating room. That is because the ophthalmologist I had previously spoken with was on leave due to a new baby in his family. I ended up having an equally apt surgeon. Or hopefully it will be the case.

Any sort of surgery is imperfect. Saying, ” … having a cataract removed,” is kind of half of the work performed in 30 minutes or so in the operating room. During the surgery, one’s lens is removed from the eye. And a new artificial lens is implanted, As we age, the lens in an eye often is made opaque. The result is what can be described as a “cloudy lens.” Vision is hampered and colors are less brilliant. In my case, I also see so-called “starburst” halos from light including those from automobiles. I have driven too many times more than I should have with this condition because your depth perception is shot to hell.  Driving becomes dangerous with this condition.

This is what I see at night, plus hundreds of even more lights glaring as such. Hopefully cataract surgery will reduce “starburst” halos.

Cataract surgery is one of the most common surgeries these days.

Most doctors use a technique known as Phacoemulsification. In very general terms the surgeon makes a tiny incision then uses tools to break up the lens and cataract followed by the implanting the new lens.

Different eye drops are used during and after this surgery. Eye drops and a numbing “gel” which enables the surgeon to anesthetize the eye were used in surgery. I was given a little kit at the VA, where my surgery was done Wednesday, that contains an eye shield and three different eye drops. These eye drops are applied for a month or more.

The amount of tape the surgeon used on me could prompt a commercial for whatever company where the medical tape is purchased. I had an IV inserted on top of my hand and it was taped. As the surgery began, my surgeon said she was going to tape head to the bed.

“This is for, in the event that you doze off, you will remember you are on the OR table, she said.

The attending surgeon told those personnel, however many there were, that they and I should not talk when she began to do her thing. And I could only talk if experienced pain. I was given some kind of sedative, I was pretty loose but not knocked out. I must admit when I was rolled into the OR, I felt a small measure of panic. That soon diminished. Although, I was again freaked somewhat when she looked down at me on the table. Perhaps her brown eyes provided perhaps equal parts strangeness and the rest perhaps a bit of attraction. I know that sounds like something George Constanza from “Seinfeld” would say.

After the surgery, the tape was removed on my head. An eye shield was then placed on my eye, held into place by more tape. This was after the other tape holding my head to the table was ripped off and seemingly took skin or hair. Just kidding.

I wore the patch overnight and had to return to see a doctor the next morning. The doctor I saw had been in the OR, but assisted with the surgery.

When she took the tape holding my eye shield, the doctor was careful to remove the tape. The doctor said she was in the OR, and remembered how annoyed I was the day before when that happened. But, I must admit I was pretty stunned when she took off the shield off and everything was, at least from my left eye, bold and beautiful.

“I can see,” I said. The doctor said that was kind of the whole point of all this.

The difference between my left and my right eye are quite stark. When I close my surgically-interventioned eye, the sight from my right eye appeared is if has a slightly brown tint. For some reason, it looks as if all I see from that right eye had been covered in nicotine. It is pretty strange.

My eyesight overall is much better, even using the right eye. I notice some instability in my left eye. But, I am hopeful that I can get that other eye fixed as soon as possible.

I thought about all the precautions given to me before and after surgery. Some of these are common sense such as having someone to drive you. Others were less clear. It is definitely a drag having to take three different eye drop. However, these drops supposedly help healing and preventing harmful infections. This is pretty important for someone like me who has Type 2 diabetes..

I remain helpful my improved and implanted new lens will continue healing and hope my right eye will join its eye brother. To paraphrase an old Mexican proverb, uh well — read the heading.

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Here now …

I spent two hours crafting today’s post. I couldn’t finish it. What a lazy old man I have become. Of course, my job is no longer one of deadline writing. I was good at that. I don’t do it any longer. But, I can put off today what I cannot do tomorrow. Okay doke?

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I would love to tour the South land, in a traveling Corvette show

Eight Feet Deep has been on annual leave, vacation, this week. Next week EFD will undergo annual training for stewards of the union to which I belong.

I have hoped to use part of this week to figure out in a more precise manner how I should go about my feature after and before retiring from my part-time job that provides me a full-time income. But no, one of my college friends from North Central Texas — that’s not the college, it is the region from which so many of my college friends hailed and now remain — and I have been traipsing around the South and Mideastern U.S. areas of our nation.

Right now I am in a Bowling Green, Kentucky, motel room enjoying not riding for hours on end in a Corvette. I mean Corvettes are a feat of great engineering, but I don’t own one and I have some mobility troubles from a a variety of neuro and arthritic issues which make it a little difficult to get in and out of a Corvette. Also, riding in one for hours is not as fun for old men passengers like me as opposed to old men driving “Vettes.”

Oh, and our being in Bowling Green in a Corvette is no coincidence, as this isn’t my bud”s first “Vette.”

Later when I return to kind of home.

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Just another day in America. Right?

This has been one of those extraordinary days in America.

Two presidents — one white and former president and one black who is the president — spoke on the same page praising work of the five Dallas police officers killed in an ambush following a protest march on July 7.

A former Democratic party presidential candidate and the presumptive Democratic candidate embraced in a showing of party unity.

Hey there, take a look at my neck it's a lot like your's. That is if your neck looks anything like mine. (It actually is my MRI neck picture) MRI image. Copyright 2016. Dick at EFD
Old man take a look at my neck it’s a lot like your’s. That is if your neck looks anything like mine. (It actually is my MRI neck picture) MRI image. Copyright 2016. Dick at EFD. Oh, and Fair Use paraphrasing Neil Young’s “Old Man” which is a hell of a good song.

The U.S. attorney general was grilled by Republicans who demanded to know why she didn’t refer charges against the presumptive Democratic candidate in a politically-charged scandal over e-mails.

One of eight Supreme Court justices said she could not imagine a presidency under the presumptive Republican candidate.

All of this took place today as I sat in the Parkinson’s Disease clinic at the Houston VA waiting to see my neurologist. Oh, I don’t have Parkinson’s, at least I don’t think so.

I began reading an interesting article on one major problem I do have, that is maintaining balance. The article was in “Neurology Now,” a title I previously didn’t know. But this magazine had an attractive cover layout that pictured the former California first lady, who also was once an NBC television news correspondent, and a member of the famous Camelot clan from which came a murdered, young U.S. president. That lady shouldn’t be former anything and proves she isn’t by speaking out on Alzheimer’s Disease.

The article, which I have yet to finish, suggests Tai Chi and other methods can help older folks to maintain balance. You, the reader reading this blog, may read this article  before I do. I have had concerns over the last couple of years, since my balance had gone awry, that I might get stopped by police and asked me to perform a field sobriety test. I don’t drink and drive, anymore at least. Buy my balance is way out of whack and that would be the first thing I would tell police. Well, I would tell them right after saying: “No,” I would not perform any tests.

Before I finished the article my neurologist, a very nice lady who came from India to help veterans, gave me about 10 shots of Botox. The Botox shots — I have received about four or five sets — have been in my head, neck and face to attempt helping the great pain I suffer from my cervical spine and the osteoarthritis that has savaged my neck over the years.

The shots today were in the back of my neck in a peripheral area of my spine.

My neck felt better, for the first time since I have received the shots, although after the drive back from Houston the neck is back to its painful ways. My lower back has, in the interim, become much more painful among standing and walking. That has been attributed to the diagnosis I was given of a rare disease called “Arachnoiditis.” And as I must always point out, the disorder has nothing to do with spiders.

I will be checking in my self-examination mirror to determine if the Botox has made the back of my neck appear any younger. In the meantime, my doctor said she will say what, if anything, she will do about my lower back.

This was what happened in my day, another day in America.