Category: State-of-Being

Eyes vs Crow’s Feet …

The story about the lack of posts last week? It all started with a trio of crow’s feet. The wrinkles aka grooves and ridges beside your eyes, resulting from years of scrunching up your eyes against too much sun. Everyone over forty will have them.

Last Monday, as I planned to go into the sun light burgeoning down, I spread SP15 over my face not taking the required care as it turned out. After about an hour my right eye started twinging.

Oh right, I thought, sunscreen has sweated down the grooves of my crow’s feet into my eyes. Because that is a thing, right? Well, I hope you’ll tell me I’m not the only person that happens to.

It’s the way that Thorny Devils (Moloch horridus) get their water. They don’t drink. Their ‘crow’s feet’ all lead to their mouths and moisture leaks into them.

By KeresH – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3716812

When I got home, I washed out my eyes. Washed the remains of the sunscreen off. Got the eye-baths out, and the eye drops to soothe my eyes.

Next day, I didn’t go out. Eyes about the same. Did it all again, about three times. Eye-baths. Eye drops. All to be expected. I was prepared for a two-day recovery.

Rest of the week? Right eye the worst. Like sand in there. I lost count how many times I filled the eye-bath with cooled boiled water, pressed it into my eye-socket and fluttered the eye-lid, hoping to dislodge the … what?

Crystalized sunscreen lotion? Yeah I know, we grasp at anything to make meaning. A deep ache developed. Who knew eye-balls have pain receptors? The left eye, though not suffering the original disaster, refused to work by itself and went on strike. It wept non-stop.

Then it was the weekend. No GPs available even if I’d decided to brave the relentless light out there. Monday AM I called the eye specialist. They are lovely people who said, Come down right away, we’ll fit you in.

I wrapped my head with a scarf. Pulled apart the windings so I could see a thin sliver of light, and where I’d be going. I felt like an Inuit in a snow storm despite that it was 35 degrees Celsius outside. Then put on 2 pairs of sunglasses one over the top of the other to make it dark enough.

Once the unidentified muck was plucked from my right eye-ball it started to recover. However, the inflammation had also to be addressed. Result of that, I’m on a once-a-day antibiotic for a month. The kind where you can’t go out in the sun because you’ll get burnt.

In the expectation that my gut would be my next concern, I bought probiotics too. So far so good.

On the way home, popped into the local St Vinnies (thrift/secondhand store) and bought a couple of long-sleeved shirts from their 50% sale. Kind of a synchronicity, I suppose. And stay out of the glare was the other thing.

Apart from all that, it’s pretty amazing to have something more than the usual stuff in common with a 20 centimeter Thorny Devil.

Cheers, all.

Modem vs IOS

When I finally knuckled down and dedicated a couple of hours to the problem, I learnt that the trouble was the ever-renewing IOS, macOS Sonoma 14.1.1 in this case, that was refusing to shake hands with the now five year old modem. How is that good for the world to come, Apple.com? We need tech that is compatible to old as well as new.

Let me tell you this image is 20! years! old! I think I made it using one of the first versions of the ProCreate design program installed on an early iPad I had a taste-test of. It represents a techie, of course. How we imagined techies in those far gone days.

First the wait for contact on the help-line. Twenty minutes. Then the wait for my turn with a technician. 45 minutes. By about half an hour of waiting, I settled in, having already spent/used/wasted too much time to want to do it all again at a later date. Nothing has changed in 20 years in that respect.

I don’t know how many people have got an Archer VRI 1600, Version 2 modem but if it was a popular one, there’ll be a lot of people like me out there with modems stunned into silence, even hibernation, by new and brashy operating systems. Hence the long wait. Which is how I comforted myself.

I told the technician helping me reset the system, it is almost as if new operating systems are sweeping the old out to make room for the new.

Madam, she said, we don’t recommend our customers to just update their systems willy nilly.

I wanted to tell her I just do as I’m told, and my technical equipment the same. We upgrade to stay in the game. I don’t know what’s in an upgrade. Who out there is going to explain?

Yeah yeah. I could go to a forum and find out there. But tell me … do you do that?

But anyway the point is moot. Rion gave me a task that needed my attention. Find the xyz in System Settings and tell me what it says.

She is good, knows her stuff, and she’s patient. Took me through the process step by step. Even tested my mobile while we were at it. There, she said at the end, no new modem needed.

Her name is Rion and she works at the TPG call centre, if you need help retreading your modem.

Lego: MILS Again

I’m sure Lego fans will get sick of me posting about MILS plates. They’re great but I don’t have the dollars to make eight or twelve of them and only then add landscaping.

So when I decided to raise my town to above so-called sealevel, I built a Duplo + Lego foundation plate in the MILS format.

Tomorrow another one …

Lego Robot

My new not-yet-totally-complete robot posing against the experimental terra-forming.

The robot is from the Dreamzz series, set 71454. He’s called Z-Blob but I will be thinking up a name appropriate to the role he’ll be playing in the the ongoing storying.

The terra-forming needs over-painting in places, and a way to attach the long sides to each other that will allow changing the pieces around. Maybe.

In the story, there’s a city in the background on the other side of the mud-flats and river channel, that I’m still cogitating how to make. Paint and draw? Collage? A 2D Lego build? What do you think?

Art Journaling

Header on latest page

One of my favourite meditative activities is working on the decorated margins in my dream journal.

They are always different and often suggest living creatures, such as here a beaked being on the right, and a fox-like entity in the centre.

The process is simple. I use my water colour paints and a 0.4 Artline 200 pen. Today I used Quinacridone Gold and Scarlet.

Since this book is new and the paper is an unknown quantity, I’m starting with primary colour mixes. I’ve already noticed there’s a vast amount of spotting on this paper. Don’t yet know why.

I painted patches and streaks of the first colour round the margins surrounding the blocks to be saved for writing, and waited till moderately dry.

Sloppily over-painted with second colour, leaving some of the gold patches and streaks, and making new patches and streaks over the first, and any unused areas.

It doesn’t pay to be too exact. Wait until thoroughly dry. Some people use hairdryers to speed the process.

In my next session I use the outliner—I prefer black—to make lines wherever the colours change including in areas of shading, though it’s easy to go too far.

It pays to keep checking how the work looks, and whether any recognizable entities are cropping up, and then to give them an eye or ear.