In 1985, I got together with a couple of friends after school for a game of football.  It was a half-day of school, we had an actual field to play on, and it had just rained, giving us some nice, muddy ground – all in all, perfect.  In the course of the game, I got whacked in the eye.  The injury caused the lens and iris of my eye to fill up with blood, and I lost vision in my left eye.  After a week in the hospital, my vision slowly returned.  It took another month before my pupil undilated. After assorted follow-ups, the eye doctor said that everything was fine, but that 20 years from now, I may have some problems.

As it turns out, he was correct.  There is a tubing meshwork that moves fluid through your eye, and some of my meshwork was permanently damaged by the injury.  When I was younger, my eye was able to better compensate for the damage, but in my late 30′s that changed.  As a result, I developed glaucoma in my left eye.  Three years ago I was upset when I learned I had a condition which had no cure, that caused blindness, and would require daily medication for the rest of my life.  Other than the knowledge of it, however, there were no other symptoms – no pain, no noticeable loss of vision – just a routine of visual field tests, retinal imaging, and pressure measurements every 6 months, plus eye drops to try and keep my eye pressure down.  There are different types of glaucoma – for those interested, mine is secondary open angle.

About 2 years ago I noticed my eyeglass prescription seemed to be changing.  Even though I am nearsighted, I was losing the ability to focus on near objects in my left eye.  At first, my eye doctor thought I needed bifocals.  After ordering glasses and discovering the prescription was still wrong, I started to become frustrated when no eyeglass prescription would allow me to see clearly.  Not only was my near vision affected, but so was my distance.  Everything in my left eye was blurry, even with glasses.  An examination with dilated pupils revealed that I had a nuclear cataract.  Although cataracts are common for people later in life, injuries, as in my case,  can cause them to occur earlier.  As mine progressed, it was like looking at the world through a dirty windshield; sunlight, or headlights at night would wash out the entire scene. Colors became progressively shifted towards yellow and brown.  The distortion caused double and triple images of text and lines.

Although cataract surgery is routine, for someone with glaucoma there is additional risk, I was hesitant.  In the spring of this year, however, my routine check up showed that my eye pressure had elevated further, and my doctor was considering laser surgery to reduce the pressure.  He also suggested the option of having the cataract surgery, which may also reduce eye pressure.  We talked through the risks, and I chose the cataract surgery, since it was inevitable.  I had the surgery this past Tuesday, and Kiersten was there with me (and has been taking great post surgery care of me)

In cataract surgery, your existing natural eye lens is completely removed, and replaced with a synthetic one.  In the process, they also give your new lens the correct prescription so you’re no longer nearsighted (I chose to also have my astigmatism corrected).   The downside is that it’s fixed focus; like most middle aged people, you will need reading glasses for text closer than arm’s length.  Considering I couldn’t read anything with my left eye, this sounded pretty good to me.

Today was my post op appointment, and I was a bit nervous.  I showed up with the plastic clear eye patch and giant sunglasses that LASIK patients are probably familiar with. My eye surgeon told me that everything went perfectly, and he was pleased with the outcome.  We checked my vision on the eye chart, and we were both surprised that I had 20/20 vision in my left eye, one day after surgery.   A measurement of my eye pressure yielded the lowest pressure to date for me, even lower than my right, healthy eye.  The surgery wasn’t a cure for my glaucoma,  but I’m happy that it helped. It was a cure for the cataract, though. The colors I see in my left eye are crisp, and clear, and untinged. I really can’t voice what it’s like to get your vision back, or to go from not being able to see clearly with any glasses to seeing 20/20 with no glasses.  My next follow up appointment is Monday.

That top shelf has a few seedlings merrily growing.  Notice anything familiar about that splash of green on the right?  Let’s have a closer look…

Recognize it?  That’s the little green glass vase that posed for my drawing, Verdant.   Now it’s living up to its name and truly going green.

I’ve also created a Facebook page.  For a while I wondered how a Facebook page would contribute, when I already have both a blog and a static webpage – but I think Facebook is naturally social, and updates populate across friends’ walls automatically.  I’ve changed my mindset to realize that the blog, webpage, and Facebook page each have a different purpose and voice, and it’s all about connecting more with people.

As an aside, I was thinking about the development of my own art career, and how much it was affected by the internet and social websites.  Participating in art forums like Scribbletalk really opened up my eyes to a much wider range of approaches, supports, techniques, and styles, and commentary from the artists gave insights I could never get from browsing a static site.  The distinct speckled look of my current style is due much in part to drawing on Colourfix paper, and I didn’t know Colourfix paper existed before seeing Nicole Caulfield’s and Ranjini Venkatachari’s work on Scribbletalk.  My latest piece, Opaline Dreams, which used, in part, Neocolor II’s, was also due to seeing work completed with Neocolors, and a desire to experiment.   And of course, if you’re reading this, it’s because I spied several artists using WordPress, and decided to give it a whirl.

After a last ditch snowfall a few weeks ago, winter finally gave way and suddenly it was sunny days in the 70′s.  Perusing our yard, the daffodils are in bloom, the bushes are sporting some green, the birds are munching away at the feeder, and splashes of color are emerging everywhere.  Six years ago the house was a new construction and had no landscaping.  Everything which has come since then was planted by me and Kiersten (and Kiersten’s really the green thumb – before we met I was lucky if I didn’t kill a house cactus).  I was thinking about all of the funny things that we learned along the way, and decided to compile a list:

1. When deciding between the cheap and expensive version of a tool, you’ll end up with the expensive tool either way.  The only question is whether you’ll buy the cheap tool first.
2. When the tree nursery asks if, for a fee, you would like them to dig the hole and install the tree, the answer should be yes, not “Pfff…I have a perfectly good shovel…”  As it turns out, there’s a reason their trucks have hydraulic lifts.
3. The extra step of staining a sample area of “Honey Wheat” deck stain will avoid the experience of having a “Pee Yellow” deck two days after you stain the entire thing.
4. Squirrels have their own core of engineers.  I suspect they have a morning meeting complete with hardhats, blueprints, and whiteboards to lay out the day’s activities.  Not only are they much smarter than you, they actual enjoy the opportunity to defuse your Rube Goldberg squirrel deflector machine in the quickest manner possible.  If you happen to be an engineer, this is especially deflating.
5. Regardless of your “mad climbing skills”, a ladder is a good thing to own.
6. Poison ivy looks a lot like regular ivy.
7. The longer you live in a house, the more tools you have that you don’t know what they do, and can’t remember why you bought them.
8. A hammock is bigger than it looks in the catalog.
9. When Archimedes said, “Give me a big enough lever and I could move the world”, he most likely was trying to dig a hole in our back yard, which appears to have been built on a rock quarry.
10. Sore muscles, broken tools, replantings: many.  Enjoying the first spring blooms, and thinking of all the colors to come in our garden: priceless.

For those with WordPress blogs interested in setting this up, I used the Advanced RSS plugin and created a custom template.  Once you install the plugin, just go to the settings page, click “Create New Template”, then replace all of the code on the template page with mine.

This upgrade required updating my web hosting account with Godaddy from PHP4 to PHP5, as well as the mySQL version of the WordPress database.  The later part required backing up the current database, creating a new version, and restoring the data to the new version.  Surprisingly all of that went better than I expected.

Except you may have noticed that every sentence of all my posts now ends with a capital A with an accent mark.  Gah!  So if you’re reading my posts wondering why I have a strange fondness for capital A’s, it could be worse.  Ah, well.

1. Toplisted Pencil Artists
2. The Colored Pencil Society of America
3. Scribbletalk
4. Artspan
5. Facebook

In spots 5-10 are other colored pencil artist’s websites who link to mine, mixed in with search engines like Yahoo and Altavista. Coming in at 11 and 12 is Colored Pencil Central and Prismacolor‘s gallery.  Top of Blogs and Blog Catalog scored a whopping zero.  Something to noodle on if you’re looking to drive traffic to your site.