Today I turned 71. As part of that celebration I received a new pair of glasses I’d ordered last week from Visionworks. I had a full eye exam at Visionworks, which showed that my very bad nearsightedness (20/700) had improved dramatically over the last two years to 20/400 in the right eye and 20/350 in the left eye. I figure if I live long enough I’ll die with 20/20 vision, assuming some other eye-related disease doesn’t strike first. What I’m watching is farsightedness fighting nearsightedness.

I was treated to the latest eye examination device, where the doctor photographed the inside back of each eye. That eliminated the need to have both eyes dilated, and allowed me to walk out without any visual impediment. The doctor told me my eyes were in perfect health, with barely an indication of cataract development. Blood pressure and diabetes contribute to physical eye problems, and I keep mine under tight control with exercise, diet, and medications. Every six months I have my blood chemistry checked to make sure everything is where it should be, and it is. I hope I can keep it that way for as long as possible.

I can tell a difference between the new glasses and the pair from two years ago. At the rate my vision is changing I’ll need to check again in two years, and I’m certain the prescription will change again, necessitating a new pair. Right now things are wonderfully sharp again.

The frames are all metal with very little plastic, and with a light bronze coloration. It’s a low-key look I much prefer over every other glasses frames I’ve ever worn.

Corrected and clear eyesight; the best birthday present I could have asked for.

That’s what I find most aggravating about Facebook (and that’s what I’ll continue to call it). I had to search externally via Google (meta delete account) before I found the correct set of instructions within Facebook. If you try and search within Meta/Facebook, you will be led on a wild goose chase and never delete your account. That constitutes a dark pattern of the worst kind.

This isn’t the first time I’ve deleted a Facebook account. This is, in fact, the fourth. I’ve been on Facebook starting in the early 2000s. I remember wasting tremendous time playing Farmville. I never spent any physical dollars, but in hindsight time is certainly money so I wasted quite a bit. In the end I dropped it because Zynga kept updating the game to make it ever more difficult to play without spending real money in-game. Changes would also wipe out progress I’d made up to that point. After that happened twice I just walked away.

That makes the last of the Really Big Social Media platforms I’ve dropped. I still have an Instagram account, but I’ve not been on it since sometime last year. I can’t stand to be on Instagram because of all the ads and accounts I don’t follow overwhelming my feed.

The only new social media accounts I’ve joined in the last twelve months have been Mastodon and Bluesky. I don’t spend any time on them anymore. The idea of wasting time on any social media platform has become anathema to me.

In a word, COVID.

Last week I battled COVID, starting sometime Saturday or Sunday (17 or 18 August). I had a follow-up appointment that Monday (19 August) with my regular doctor. She was very happy with my blood work. My A1C level had dropped down to 6.4 from a prior level of 7.8. I’d also lost weight so that I was down to 250 lbs. I didn’t feel good in the office, and I told my doctor I’d tested for COVID at home with both tests in the kit and they came back negative. She gave me an up-to-date nasal swab. By the end of the day it came back positive, but “abnormal.” Nobody has yet explained what that meant.

The doctor’s office immediately sent out a prescription for Paxlovid to my local pharmacy, so that I started taking it that Monday. I had enough for seven days (at two doses/day), so I took the prescribed doses through to the following Sunday. During that period I plummeted from mildly annoyed to deeply sick by Wednesday morning. I didn’t want to eat. All I wanted was to crawl up into a ball and be left alone. The best I could do was to keep hydrating, so I had a big 48 ounce insulated mug next to me that I kept filled with ice water.

By Friday I was back to the same mildly annoyed feeling I had Monday. I kept taking Paxlovid until it was finished by Sunday.

The impact on my surgery recovery was profound. I couldn’t finish my last two physical therapy sessions. Now that I’m catching back up to all the time I lost last week, I’ve noticed that I lost more than just a calendar week in time, I lost needed PT workouts. Fortunately COVID did not affect the incision or left knee replacement. In fact the incision is just a thin pink line now; all the puckering along the incision is completely gone. So is the swelling above the knee. But I can still feel that the left knee is weaker than it should be.

I’m very thankful that my wife didn’t get COVID, or if she did, it was so mild as to not be a problem.

So what are the other results of my finally catching COVID? In no particular order:

• I’ve grown paranoid again about going out into crowds, such that I’m back to wearing a mask. I intend to keep that up at least through the end of this year.
• As soon as the next COVID booster is available my wife and I are getting ours. We’ve always gotten the boosters, but this year even more so than ever.
• I managed to dodge COVID from the time it first showed up in late 2019 until this past week. I have no clue where I might have caught it.
• I’m so thankful for Paxlovid. It wasn’t available until late 2023. I’m 70, and COVID can still kill someone my age without proper care.
• COVID hasn’t altered my sense of taste.

And because my appetite dropped the way it did last week, I’ve lost another six pounds of weight. Absolutely not the way I wanted to lose weight.

Mobility continues to improve. I can walk unaided across uneven ground, which means I can garden around the house and walk around the neighborhood. I started to drive on my on yesterday, when I drove from home to a local Publix to pick up a few items. I didn’t take a an electric cart, but use a regular push cart to walk around the store.

Not all is sunshine and rainbows. The swelling is nearly gone, which is a good thing. However I’m having “uneven” days where my left leg is tired and the area around the need feels sore. This is to be expected as the knee is still “settling back in” to a regular state. My physical therapist told me that there would be down days as well as up, which is to be expected. However, the overall trend is still upwards towards full healing. My only concern is not to perform any activity that would mess up the surgery. These periods won’t stop me from performing prescribed exercises.

One other interesting health metric is my weight. I’m now down to 245 lbs, which is still too high, but nowhere near what I weight when I retired in January 2020: 285 lbs. I’ve lost 40 lbs over 4 1/2 years, which is a great and sustainable weight loss. I attribute the weight loss, in part, to a massive dietary change. I’m now fully vegetarian (not vegan!). This means eating a healthy diet of greens, vegetables, and complex carbs. No red meat at all. When I do eat animal protean it’s a bit of chicken or some fish and shellfish. What I’ve dropped completely is eating heavily processed foods and I no longer eat out at any fast food restaurants. I’m hoping to keep this up, because I would like to drop another 15 pounds.

This period has been an eye-opener to the issues that the physically impaired have to deal with. The biggest is a how the unimpaired seemingly go out of their way to ignore me and will do everything possible to rush around me and get in front, because to them I’m a moving obstacle to overcome. God forbid I should impede whatever vitally important task they’re intent on completing. A classic example of this was yesterday at my local Costco. I make it a habit to return my electric cart back to the front of the store for someone else to use. While I was driving the cart to its parking spot a regular healthy shopper was leaving the store. She did her dead level best to try and beat me, to run in front of me, but she couldn’t judge neither the distance nor speed I was moving at. Instead she stopped within inches of hitting me and just glared daggers while I pulled into the cart’s designated parking spot and stopped. The Costco greater at the entrance saw all of this little drama play out and went out of his way to thank me. I always try to return those carts to get them out of the Florida summer sun so that the cart’s battery won’t prematurely discharge due to the heat.

I’ve seen a lot of this discrimination towards the handicapped with my wife, who is herself partially handicapped. But I’ve now personally experienced it. The older, white and rich in this country feel a level of entitlement they have absolutely no right to indulge in.

Exactly two weeks ago, on 18 July, I had a full knee replacement performed on my left knee. Since then I’ve been healing and having a physical therapy specialist come to my house, three days/week, to help further my recovery. Each day has shown progress, with some days seeming to have me slide back a bit, but the overall trajectory has been one of healing and recovery of functionality. I still have a ways to go before it’s complete, but I’m to the point where I can walk about the house without an aid; if I need to leave the house, I can walk with a long oak walking staff I picked up over a decade ago at the Gettysburg national military park.

The photo at the top was taken by my wife as I was napping in my chair. This was five days after the surgery. That’s Luke in my lap. I had the blanket across my lap so that Luke would have something comfortable to lie across. All the little animals in this household have been concerned that “the big guy” is recovering from an “injury.” They’ve expressed that concern by shadowing me as I move around the house, and when I’m resting, the cats at least either want to lie atop of me or right up next to me. The two dogs want to be next to me in the same room. Everybody has wanted to be a nurse.

All the PT and animal nursing has helped me to reach the point where today I’m going out to shop for groceries at my local Costco and Publix. The last time I went shopping was the day before the surgery. I haven’t been out since. But supplies are running low and we need to refill a few things. Before you write in the comments I should use a delivery service to delivery groceries, please don’t. I tried that back in late 2020 when the pandemic was really taking off and my first (and last) foray into having groceries delivered by a third party pretty much was a mess. I placed an order with a local Publix using their app, and when it finally arrived, the items weren’t what I ordered, if the items were filled at all. I paid for everything, but I’ve never used any delivery service again, and never will. After that I just wore a mask and went out to purchase what I needed. Today my wife will drive us both and I will ride around in a cart to keep from walking too much.

As I said, progress has been steady, if a bit slow. I’m working on range of motion, trying to bend my knee at least 90°. Next Monday I go see the surgeon and he’ll take a few pictures of the knee as well as check the joint. The incision has sealed, with nothing left to show but a scab and adhesive flaking off where the surgeon literally glued me back together. I actually look forward to that visit.

Update

I went out and succeeded in picking up everything we needed. At both Costco and Publix I used their respective Amigo electric carts to travel about and pick up everything. When my wife and I got home we piled our purchases into a wheelchair to move them into the kitchen. That took four trips. I was able to put everything away. After that I took one of my meds and collapsed to rest. It was harder than I realized. Before the surgery I never gave shopping a second thought. Now I have to give it a lot of forethought and plan accordingly.

I would have gone back to the original surgeon from 2012, but the group he’d been a part of had changed hospitals, and he’d moved out of the area. That’s when I decided to use the same surgeon who’d replaced my right knee with a full replacement. So yesterday I went into a same day surgery center and had the procedure done. They spent 45 minutes working on my knee and I spent about two hours in post-op recovery before I went home.

I had to wait for a while in the waiting room, as I was the last procedure of the day. By the time I finally went back and was prepped for surgery it was 1 pm in the afternoon.

Here’s the surgical team right before the important work was to start. The surgeon is the second from the left, looking straight into the camera.

I’ve now been home for a while, taking my medications and doing my basic exercises. I’ve had a physical therapy nurse come by and work with me, and to get me going. I’m required to get up and walk every hour, and to exercise three times per day. All in the comfort of my home. When the nurse came by to change my dressing today there were four little tiny spots of blood. No discoloration, no indication of infection. The incision had been glued back, and the surface of my knee was very smooth. It’s swollen because of the procedure, but that will go down over the next days and weeks.

I’m motivated to get through this and to come out of the end of this in better shape than when I went into it. This left knee has kept me from doing what I need to do, and I needed to get it fixed now while I still have reasonable physical health.

These photos are the matching set to go with the photos they took for me back in February 2016. And I used the same camera, a Sony NEX-5N with a Sigma 2.8/19mm EX DN prime. An old camera still going strong.

In any event the left partial will get replaced and I’ll find out if the left will go as well as the right.

If you ask me what my attitude is right now, I’d say a combination of apprehension and fatalism. I’ve had more examinations and pictures made in the past four weeks than I’ve had in as many years, so that everyone concerned has all necessary and up-to-date medical information about me. That’s a good thing.

And I’ll be going back to the same surgery center I was in back in 2016. That, too, is a very good thing. If either the doctor or the center weren’t up to scratch then they wouldn’t be around.

The length of time between procedures is also comforting if for no other reason that major advancements in joint replacement have been ongoing. Unless something unknown should occur, I expect this left replacement to be my final replacement.

But I’m still nervous.

The combination of old age and Florida’s bright sunny environment creates many opportunities for unprotected folk to develop skin cancers, yours truly included. Big wide brimmed hats are now haute couture for me.

I’ve been visiting a dermatologist regularly for a little over a decade now. Visits have grown more frequent, as have the nitrogen freezing of pre-cancerous spots on my skin, and the surgical removal of two more advanced spots for biopsies. I’m in healthy shape, all things considered.

Because I garden and do other outdoor work, I’m now in the habit off reflexively donning a hat every time I go out. Even if I’m going off to shop I’ll put on a hat and make sure to wear it when I’m outside my car. As I’ve gotten older the brim on my hats have grown wider until I’m now wearing this particular hat with a 6″ brim that spreads out over my shoulders. The hat itself has a mesh opening on the side that allows the sweat to evaporate. I know there are creases in the brim where it was folded when it was shipped, but I don’t care; I bought this for my health, not to make a fashion statement. It cost me $25 from Amazon, and as far as I’m concerned it was worth every penny. I have other wide-brimmed hats, but none as wide as this one, so as a consequence it winds up being the one I wear the most outdoors.

If it isn’t obvious, I wear hats to help avoid skin cancer. Skin cancer isn’t a joke. Go see your dermatologist, do what he or she tells you to do, and when you go out at least make sure you’re reasonably covered with a wide hat and a long sleeved rash shirt, such as what you’d wear swimming. If you’re going out on the water down here in Florida always go covered.

I’m now reaping the rewards of a reckless young lifestyle with regards to sun worshipping, when many boomers such as myself went out to “worship” the sun and work on our tans. We were warned even back then what would happen. What fools we were.

Links

Leotruny Super Wide Brim Bucket Hat UPF50+ Waterproof Sun Hat for Fishing Hiking Camping — https://a.co/d/gBSciML

Consider these two examples; Silk Soy Milk, Vanilla flavor and Canada Dry Ginger Ale Zero Sugar. Tonight I had to stop by a Publix supermarket that was next to a CVS, because I needed both Silk and a prescription. First the Silk from Publix, followed by how much Walmart charges via its app.

The price at Publix was $5.55.

The price via Walmart, at all Walmarts in my area, is $2.98 for the same item. It costs almost twice as much to purchase the item from Publix.

Now the soda example.

This is a six pack of 16.9 oz/500 ml bottles. A bit pricey for soda if you ask me.

Once again, Publix sells the item for nearly twice what you would pay at Walmart.

These are just two examples of the wide diversity between a Walmart grocery and Publix. What makes the comparison even starker is that within a three mile radius of my house there are three Publix supermarkets, while there is but one Walmart Marketplace. The Walmart Marketplace is just a grocery store, every bit as large as the Publix across the street (one of the three within a three mile radius).

All the basics such as butter, cheeses, eggs, coffee and teas all show this incredible price difference. If I didn’t have a Walmart in the area I don’t know what I would do budget wise. I’ve already cut back on a number of items in my diet that I can do without, items I used to purchase without a second thought before I retired. I’m always looking for ways to cut back, either dropping a product all together, or finding cheeper substitutes. The insane cost of animal protean everywhere (beef, poultry and fish) is the primary reason I’ve gone vegetarian, and I’m now looking for ways (finally!) to grow some vegetables in my back garden.

The rising cost of basic food stuffs is what’s making people mad, yours truly included. I’m sick and tired of hearing about how good the economy is, then going to the grocers to buy the next week’s selection of foodstuffs and looking at how high prices are. As appreciative of how inexpensive Walmart is compared to Publix, I still think that food at Walmart is also too expensive as well.

One other unintended benefit comes from the cost of chocolate-based sweets; those costs have gone through the roof, pricing them right out of my budget. Since I can’t afford any of them anymore I’m finally learning to get rid of my sweet tooth. My dentist in particular is appreciative as my last visit continues a years long trend where my teeth only require a light cleaning every six months. With research showing that gingivitis might be a cause of Alzheimers it becomes vital to maintain good dental health by all means possible, especially by cutting back on refined sugars.

One other observation; I can always check the price of any item, especially food items, via the Walmart app. The Publix app does not have pricing and requires you to visit the store. Things that make you go “hmmm…”

I’m facing another knee replacement surgery. I’ve experienced two so far, a partial on my left knee in late 2012, and a full on my right knee in early 2016.

I’ve been dealing with issues on my left knee since before I retired, but I kept putting it off hoping that when I retired and stopped the long daily commutes that the stress would lesson, and thus the problems with my left knee would somehow dissipate. It actually did at first, but then they slowly crept back. Unfortunately the bad symptoms started to reappear during the height of the pandemic; I wasn’t about to go get surgery during all of that. Now the pandemic, and specifically the pandemic lockdowns, have long since come to an end. The pain in the left knee has now increased to the point where no amount of wishful thinking combined with physical therapy will allow me to ignore it.

The practice that will be doing the work will be the same practice that performed the 2016 surgery. I much prefer that group because they perform the replacement as an out-patient procedure. That meant in 2016 I was back home the same day and recovered at my home. I much prefer home recovery if possible.

I’ll get a call this afternoon telling me when the procedure will be performed and who’ll do it. I asked for the original 2016 surgeon, but he’s booked out to November of this year, so I’ll use one of the other two orthopedic surgeons in the practice. Hopefully that means my procedure will be scheduled sooner than November.

There are problems with this sidewalk which required they be dug up and re-poured. Instead they painted yellow caution stripes around the problematic areas and called it a day. If these are temporary, they’ve been down a while now as evidenced by the environmental staining from rain and being outdoors in general.

These are sidewalks that are used by both healthy walkers as well as people with handicaps. My wife is in the later category. I always go with her now to help her navigate problems such as these. What I find disturbing is that this is next to a multi-story doctor’s complex, which is next door to a major hospital. How they’re able to get away with something this lazy, and why they can’t find the funds to perform a proper repair, is beyond my understanding.

I got a new pair of glasses last week, a week after Ian passed through. I need glasses because my eyesight is so bad at 20/700+, meaning I can clearly see at 20 feet what people with normal eyesight see at 700 feet. Yes, I’m blind. This is my second pair this year. The first pair, purchased at Costco, broke in two at the bridge when they fell off my face and into my hands. I don’t know why, but it was a single clean break. That forced me to go back to the pair before those so I could see well enough to legally drive. I tried to get Costco to sell me a new pair of frames for $50, but after two months of waiting I gave up and went to my insurance company and asked them if I could order another pair from a different optometrist. I became eligable in late August, and that’s when I went to a local Visionworks (Visionworks at Millenia) to get an eye exam and order a new pair. Visionworks had a deal with my vision insurance, so I went there to keep my costs as low as possible.

These Penguin brand frames (“The Princeton”) are big, bulky, kind of homely, built like a brick outhouse. Stylish they ain’t. Style be damned, I want a Brutalist kind of practicality. There’re more heavy screws holding everything together than I’ve ever seen before with glasses frames. The plastic top is a lot thicker all around than the last pair that didn’t last worth a damn. Where there isn’t plastic, there’s thick metal everywhere, including a heavy band across the bottom of each lens. These frames stay attached to my head a lot better than the pair I purchased at Costco. Even when I’m outside working and the sweat is pouring off my head because I’m looking down while working, the glasses stay put. Out and about and wearing a mask (because COVID is still out there) I don’t have any problems keeping everything firmly planted on my face. Total cost of these new glasses, including examination and lenses, was less than the cost of the frames by themselves.

I call them dad glasses because my wife calls them that, and she calls them that because she says my new glasses look almost identical to what her dad wore. That’s fine by me.

Since retirement I’ve been paying better attention to personal health and hygiene. It started with the simple things, like greater activity rather than commuting and sitting behind a desk for hours at a time five or six days a week. Diet was another target for cleanup. Proper dentil hygiene was another.

Since last year’s checkup I’ve included the use of GUM Soft Picks and an H2ofloss Portable Dental Water Flosser when I brush every morning. When I went back in today my gum “numbers” were 1’s and 2’s and some 3’s, instead of mostly 3’s and 4’s and a few 5’s sprinkled in. What’s more my gums didn’t bleed this time, which surprised the dental technician who was cleaning my teeth. I had no bleeding at all compared to the last time where there were spots sprinkled all over my gum line. Even the cleaning was shorter and faster than before.

Diet changes and exercise are showing results; for example my blood work from the prior week showed my A1C level was back down to 6, the top of the “green zone.” Even my blood sugar level is back down to the 110’s, although it should be below 100. All the numbers are moving back into healthy territories.

None of us will live forever, but while we’re here we can all live as healthily as possible. That means breaking bad habits with regards to personal living. Too much of contemporary living is self-destructive. It’s never too late to wind that back enough so that the quality of your life improves. While I’m still here I want to be as productive and contributory as reasonably possible, to help others rather than having to depend on someone else because I was too lazy to do the right things. You can’t help others, and the world at large, if you’re too busy living a thoughtlessly destructive life.

I am blessed with great health, far better than many. I am on occasion ill, with occasion being measured in years between incidents (so far in my life, but going forward, who knows?). Except for yesterday.

Yesterday around 2 in the afternoon I began to experience vertigo. Over the course of 30 minutes it went from mild to severe, where I could barely stand erect long enough to move from the T.V. room back to my bedroom. This was the same intensity of vertigo I experienced in September 2019. That period of vertigo was so intense that I went into a local hospital and spent the night for observation as well as some rather strong medications to bring it under control. This time I didn’t want another trip and stay. Instead I was trying to perform the exercises with my head to bring the vertigo under control. Those exercises are supposed to calm the inner ear, which when it goes wonky is how you wind up so dizzy.

That didn’t work. Instead it made me even more nauseous to the point I stumbled into the bathroom and threw up. And I mean full ballistic vomiting. I stayed over the commode until it was just dry heaves, washed out my mouth and then stumbled back into the bed. That unfortunately wasn’t the end of it. Over the next hour I went back in three more times for three more sessions. After the last session my body told my mind it was finished with my stomach. That’s when the G.I. tract decided it wanted to chime in, so my next visit was for diarrhea. Fortunately that was only one trip, but once was enough. By the time I was completely finished with my bathroom trips I was dripping cold sweat and worn out. I went back to bed and slept solidly for three hours.

By the time I woke up the nausea was pretty much gone. I drank a fair amount of water to avoid dehydration, but I wasn’t hungry so I ate nothing. I went back to bed later that evening and unfortunately woke up around 4 am this morning.

A lot of folks at this point are probably thinking “COVID!” I almost thought that as well, except it has all the earmarks of food poisoning. The only question is by what. I sure didn’t eat anything from outside of the home yesterday. And considering how quickly it came upon me, and how quickly it subsided, along with the symptoms, leads me to believe in food poisoning. But none of the typical vectors of food poisoning in the home came up. For example I can’t stand mayonnaise, or other types of condiments, and thus don’t eat those. Everything I ate that morning was either cooked or heated except for some fruit I had later in the day, and it was washed as usual. Right now, no clues.

This morning I’m mostly back to normal. There is some residual tiredness, and a very minor headache on the right side of my head around the temple, but it’s nearly gone now. No nausea to be sure. Just a very intense period of illness for half-a-day yesterday.

I just wish I knew what happened to me.

Update

I took the iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test at home. I tested negative.

As I’ve grown older my diet has changed away from what I used to eat and drink in my youth. One of those changes is my ability to handle sodas, and then diet sodas. I gave up sugared sodas thirty or so years ago in my late thirties. There wasn’t much in the way of diet sodas, but fortunately for me I was able to switch over to Diet Coke, which had been released back in 1982. I didn’t care for the taste all that much, but I didn’t have much choice as I was rapidly gaining weight; my doctor at the time told me to drop the regular Coke habit or basically die young. So with that rather blunt choice I chose to drink diet Coke.

Over the following decades I switched around to various diet sodas as they became available, keeping diet Coke as my fallback soda. The only diet soda I couldn’t stand was diet Pepsi. I just couldn’t drink it. If I went to a restaurant that only served diet Pepsi then I switch to ice water.

Over the last few years I’ve been dropping diet soda consumption to zero. I discovered I was reaching a point of intolerance; I couldn’t handle the taste nor the after effects of consuming it. So I would stop cold turkey, usually for a month or so, then “fall off the wagon” and start drinking it again. After another period of abstinence I picked up a bunch of twelve ounce diet Coke packs (eight bottles to a pack) because a local Publix supermarket had a buy two, get two free sale. So I stocked up and started binging diet Cokes again, usually three or four at a time.

Over the past week I haven’t felt particularly well. I felt tired, wound up napping a lot during the day, and in general felt like I had low energy. I also had a ‘vague’ headache; nothing painful, but annoying. Then I ran down the diet Cokes and stopped drinking any of them three days ago. It was almost magical; my energy slowly returned and the vague headache went away. Right now I’m feeling pretty good.

I think my body is trying to tell me something about consuming diet Cokes, as in, don’t. Since switching back to ice water (you know, ice out of the freezer mixed with water in a glass) a number of little things are better; my mouth doesn’t have this permanent aftertaste, my stomach isn’t bloated, and other minor complaints seem to have just gone. I can comfortably live with my body again.

I’m completely done with the witches brews of diet sodas, especially diet Coke. Ice water, and maybe brewed teas (I used to make pitchers of brewed unsugared tea), are the drinks for me, especially water.

Firstly, all the grocery stores have suffered from panic buying. Toilet paper was the biggest visible buyout, but other items were being scarfed up and hoarded for no good reason. These included bottled water packs, eggs, and bread. I’ve read that pastas were also being scarfed up, and I’m sure there are even more items.

When I got to the Costco closest to where we live, I discovered that the Costco staff had closed off the front of the store with stacks of blue flats at least waist high (at least to me), and we were directed to start a queue off the side, single file. The the staff let us in a few at a time. I was able to get in after a five minute wait outside. Note the sign at the entrance about social distancing.

I got in and picked up the few items we needed. As I moved through the store I kept hearing staff saying “one egg, one bread, one water.” By one egg they meant flats that contain two dozen eggs. Two dozen is all the two of us can consume even in a single week. It usually takes about a week-and-a-half before I have to go back and get more eggs. A single bread purchase from there lasts a week, and as for water, well, tap water is actually pretty good around here. Once I got to the checkout, the Costco staff had set up the checkout lanes so that every other one was closed, helping to maintain social distancing.

And to give you the obligatory empty toilet paper isle, this is from the Publix closest to where we live. This was taken right before I went to Costco. All the other Publix isles were still fairly full, at least at a glance. I didn’t spend any time in that store because it was too crowded to suite me; I was in and out in under two minutes and kept my “social distance” the entire time.

I don’t know a “good” way to end this except with this latest COVID-19 map update. The numbers are steadily climbing, especially for the US. We could have avoided the worst of this if we’d acted eight weeks before we finally did. Now, we have to get through this as best we can.

I traveled to Atlanta this past weekend to visit my 87-year-old parents and to spend quality time with them. As a newly-minted retiree I now have far more time to make such trips and for longer periods of time. Which isn’t to say I’ve not been up to visit before now, but with the restrictions of work and other issues in Florida, it made scheduling to visit more complicated and the trips much less frequent than they probably should have been.

And now I’m in the midst of watching my father fall to dementia. My uncle, his younger brother, died from Alzheimers in the early 2010s. My uncle’s fall was swift and brutal, less than two years from diagnosis until his death. Now my father appears to be in its grips, although his progression is slower. There are periods in which it seems to be abated, such as this visit. Or so it seems to an outsider looking in. My mom is his caregiver and has the unenviable task of watching over him constantly as well as watching him…

My mom isn’t alone in this. My brothers and sister are living in Atlanta, and all of them lend a hand, especially my older brother and my sister. And my sister is very close to my mom (just like my daughters are with my wife), so there’s that. My mom misses me very much, as does my dad. And when I travel up to visit I do odd jobs around the house for her, and she sits and talks with me while I work. Before I left I set up out iPhones so that my mom can “see” me with the Find My app, and I can keep an eye on her and my sister back up in Atlanta. My mother found solace in watching me travel down Marta from Doraville back to the airport, and then saw I’d made it back home to Orlando. I text and email and talk to her constantly, but Find My seems to give her that little bit of extra comfort that she can see and reach out to a specific location. Where I’m at isn’t abstract anymore.

Over the years while he’s been in retirement I’ve made the trip up to visit my parents. I have a photo from January 2012 that is a reminder of what he once was.

This photo shows him smiling and happy, especially to see me. He loved me very much (he loved us all equally) and he was always glad to see me when I came home. We were upstairs in his home office at the time and I was talking to him about the Olympus E-P2 with the 45mm f/1.8 lens, and as I was demonstrating it I just lifted the camera up and grabbed this quick photo. Nothing planned. Later we went into Conyers and walked around taking photos like a couple of tourists.

That’s my father with his Olympus E-300 and kit zoom. My father was always the avid photographer, going back to when I was a little kid. He got me hooked on photography, helping me get my very first 35mm camera, a Yashica Electro 35 rangefinder. Later in the 1970s he used nothing but Olympus, starting with one of the first OM-1 film cameras to be sold in Atlanta. Over time he purchased every version of the OM series, from 1 to 4, along with a number of lenses and the Olympus flash kit. He was pretty good photographing orchids, which he raised in his greenhouse out back. Back around 2015 he gave me one of his last OM purchases, an OM-4T. I have it in on of my bookcases, kept carefully clean. I pretty sure it still works, even as old as it is. But I’m afraid to take it out for fear I might damage it, or worse, loose it.

That greenhouse is still out back, but it’s a shadow of its former self. My older brother still tries to keep it up, but where it once was crammed full of beautiful orchids, it now is pretty empty, and most of the pots that once held many an orchid are empty and piled up in back of the greenhouse. My dad doesn’t go into it any more, and hasn’t for some number of years. The path from the house to the greenhouse entrance, while quite short, is steep and difficult for him to navigate without fear of falling.

This year is going to be far different than any other up to this point in time. I have no idea where the journey will end, and refuse to think on it too much. But the keywords for 2020 living are going to be focus, calm, and supportive. Most importantly, providing as much strength as possible for the family, especially my mom and dad. Especially my mom.

I managed to get by Dorian’s passage unscathed (meaning that Dorian slowly went north up the Atlantic coast of Florida and missed us completely) with little more than some mild wind damage and a bit of minor flooding from the storms Dorian drug along with its passing. And then I had to wait for the facilities where I work to slowly open back up, as they’d shut everything down, including power off, planning for the worst. By the time I got back in on a Wednesday I was swamped with work, and stayed busy until that Friday.

It was on that Friday that I started to feel not so good and a little queasy. Nothing bad, but still not too fun and wonderful, if you know what I mean. That continued on through the weekend and into Sunday, when I drove up to Jacksonville to see my daughter.

That turned out to be a worse day than expected. I was beginning to suffer from bouts of vertigo, such that I had my wife driving up, then down, part of the way. When we arrived at my daughter’s I sat down on one of their sofas, sat back, and immediately fell to sleep. I slept the entire time I was there.

When we finally got back to Orlando I went to bed early, thinking it was an ear infection.

When I woke up the next day I had full blown nearly continuous vertigo: dizziness, nausea, spinning room, the who megillah. My doctor wanted me to head over to an ER, but I was so nauseated I went back to lie down and stayed there for the next two hours. We then went to see my doctor, who worked me in, and she couldn’t find anything. She suspected it might be benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), for where there are a number of causes. She ran a quick test and couldn’t diagnose it from that, so she sent me on to the ER. It was at the ER that they decided to keep me overnight for tests and observations.

From mid-Monday to mid-Tuesday I was a “guest” of the hospital. While there they gave me an MRI/MRA and CT scan, as well as a battery of blood test. I got so much saline solution pumped in me I was pissing saline through Thursday of that week; somebody (I don’t remember who) said I was dehydrated. From all that testing they ruled out a stroke, a tumor, or some other major physical issue for which major vertigo is a symptom. So I felt good about that.

Once discharged I stayed home for the rest of the week with no road travel at all. I kept having bouts of vertigo, which triggered me to go back to the bedroom, lie down and perform a specific exercise that performed Canalith repositioning. It was interesting in that it worked until another bout. But I could control it. I kept that up for some number of days.

Today I’m actually feeling pretty great. It’s been several days since I had any vertigo, but more significantly I feel really good. In looking back over what I was feeling I’m beginning to wonder if I also didn’t have some sort of an infection (sinuses and/or ear), because I can get tired and have a minor headache with a running nose if I do.

So that’s it. Between all of that happening I’ve been busy, only now “coming up for air” as it were. Once again God and nature have tutored me on the limitations and weaknesses of the physical human form.

When I married and settled down I noticed how I was getting fatter, and so I tried to switch to diet replacements as an aid to keeping the midriff from bulging too much. The first, and worst for me, was Tab. I tried other diet sodas including Diet Coke, eventually developing an “acquired taste” for it. I didn’t start drinking Coke Zero until I started traveling to Japan, where that’s the only diet soda they serve. I learned to like that, and eventually preferred it over Diet Coke.

Now we’ve got a re-release of Coke Zero called Coke Zero Sugar. And I’m here to tell you that as far as I’m concerned it’s absolutely horrible. I know many have written they can’t tell a difference, but I certainly can. The taste may be different, but it’s not improved, not by a long shot. Since, for health reasons, I need to completely switch off diet sodas, now’s as good a time as any. Thanks for the motivation, Coke.