Obsequious optics and other illusions

Technology never ceases with its constant daily barrage of hilarity and delight. 

In the hilarity category, there was the story today about the Houston realtor who forgot to tell the client to put the toys away before taking sale pics of the condo.  The result was, as they say, stimulating, and it is now immortalized for all e-time on blogs everywhere!
:-)

In the delight category, one of my buddies hooked me up with a website called Zenni Optical through which one can buy cheap prescription eyeglasses.   With top-of-the-line specs now approaching a thousand dollars a pair (!!!!!!!!) for us "special eye-needs" folks, we need some lower-end fall-back pairs so that we don't have to endanger the daily-wears during our more dastardly duties (say THAT three times fast).

But can one really make a proper choice of eyeglasses, even cheapies, on the internet? 

You might be surprised at how far this technology has come.  Here's how it works: 

First, you take your current mugshot, front-on direct, straight across and level, like I did here by holding the camera at arms length.
 
Yeah, I know.  If ever I start taking myself too seriously, all I have to do is look in the mirror at that nappy hair and all hints of superiority complex promptly evaporate. 
When God was passing out hair,
I don't know where the hell I was. 
Probably out collecting rocks.
To make things even more ridiculous,
the brows remained reddish
when the hair turned gray.

 And then you upload it to the site.  It's more precise than I expected - you actually have to input your "PD" (no, not VD) - the distance between your pupils, which is given on your prescription.

And then once the photo and the PD are input, you start "trying on".  Bear in mind as you look at these grabs below that the fits as shown are EXTREMELY accurate.  My eyes are desperately bad and on top of that my face is very narrow and hard to fit.  I've tried on hundreds and hundreds of frames in my lifetime and I can tell instantly how something should fit, just by looking at it on the shelf.  And these are accurate.

I'm partial to the classic, understated look, although I prefer more of an arc in the bridge (it's a more artistic continuation of a wide-open eyes effect).  But traditional stuff like this is by no means the only choice...

Trendier wires?? 
Nah - they look too severe to me,
pinching down toward the nose.

Silicon Valley, anyone?? 
Nah - they make me look droopy.
I'm heading for the half-century mark here!!!
I don't need to look one tiny bit droopier
than I already am!!



The eighties called,
and they want their glasses back.



Harry Potter called,
and he said he can't believe that people
actually buy crap like this!!!



When I saw this, I almost ran SCREAMING INTO THE STREETS!!!  Break out the Photoshop and add a bit of brown back into the hair and a bit of plump back into the cheeks, and this IS me... THIRTY YEARS AGO!!!  I can't believe they actually still sell glasses that look like this!!

I don't care how much I pay (Too much, the Magic Bus)!
I wanna drive my bus to my baby each day (Too much, the Magic Bus)!
Magic Bus, Magic Bus, Magic Bus!
Magic Bus, Magic Bus, Magic Bus!

One of my opticians (I have several!) told me NEVER to buy brown tints.  She said they allow too much yellow wavelength to the brain, and it causes headaches.  I was dumbfounded - I own a very expensive pair of Serengeti sunglasses, tinted brown.  I can't wear the things.  My head splits every time I try.  I had no idea that might be the reason.

Star Trek called, and they want their Borg hardware back... but wait:
This might actually work, for sports and whatnot.  This ridiculous thing ACTUALLY FITS - the inner lenses are the right sizes for my eyes (remember, I had to upload my pupil distance to the nearest millimeter).  I would NEVER have considered trying on something like this if I had seen it in a store.  But fooling around with an internet program, I find it worth considering.

"Well, Your Honor, I was walking between two parallel sets of tracks when suddenly the damnedest thing happened - two trains started coming at me from opposite directions!!  I squeezed myself up as skinny as I could as they whizzed by me, and I think I came out of it all right!!"

But none of that free entertainment above can compete with the joy imparted by the look on my daughter's face when I picked her up from school today.  She thinks I look like a complete beauty queen when I wear contacts (a rare event - I can't tolerate 'em).  There's no accounting for taste, but I'm willing to do just about anything to see that sparkle appear in her eyes!

For the first time
in the history of the known universe,
a pic where SHE is the one in specs,
and I am not!
:-)

Live and let grow

There are new signs of life in the garden, PLUS, I haven't gotten my neck wrung yet.  Lawrence prefers an uncluttered landscaping look, whereas I would rather have stuff growing in every possible square inch - where plants are concerned, "uncluttered" to me means "empty".   

So at this point, in making incremental improvements to the landscaping, I have to walk the fine line of spousal approval.  Here's another addition I made last week, with the old adage in mind, "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission":

I had picked up this urn last fall on sale for about sixty-five bucks, thinking we might turn it into a fountain.  We've decided we want a more upscale fountain than this (don't know what kind yet - just know it should be more substantial), so I decided to try placing it here, between two mulch beds.  This move met with both C's and L's approval (whew!) so, voila - I have squeezed in ONE MORE space in which to grow three varieties of basil!! 

It's February, so you can see the damage done by the phenomenal cold snap of a few weeks ago.  Took the side right off the Wax Myrtle to the right.  But the Loropetalum is in bloom...

...in a most outrageous pink form.  I didn't think they'd survive the hard freezes - you can see the damage to the leaves.

  Anyway, we have tomatoes and tomato cages and other stuff ready and it's almost time for us to excavate the lettuce and put those in... maybe next weekend. 

Into every life...

...a little noise must fall, especially around here!!

Building a house turned out to be much cooler than I thought it would be, but everything has a downside, and mine starting today consists of this:

Oh hell yeah: the lot directly across has begun construction.  From a personal standpoint it doesn't bother me, but my clients are going to have to spend some of the next 100 days hearing me say, "WHAT??!  CAN YOU REPEAT THAT PLEASE!?" on the phone over the din of tractors, cement pumpers, forklifts, and of course, Tejano music. 

This is what we accept when we buy into new neighborhoods.  I feel sorry for the guys adjacent left of us - they just brought home a new baby five days ago, and they mark the start of their new son's journey through life with all this racket.  And the house adjacent right of this has a 4-month-old baby.  And if the house adjacent left of this doesn't have a baby yet, it will in a matter of weeks.  And MY baby (the really big one) is working backshift this week and trying to sleep during the day, so it's not likely to improve HIS frame of mind either.

Such is life.  With our luck, everything will get completed around here just in time for the next hurricane, which will blow it all back down and then we'll start the cycle all over again. 
:-)

Quote of the Day

Excerpted from emails in which the unintended consequences of accomplishing the impossible were discussed.  (In case it's not obvious, I strive to cultivate friendships with folks who are at least as blunt as I am).

"The problem of tackling a nasty project and doing a good job on it is that you become tagged with the reputation of producing good results on nasty projects. As such, you are rewarded with more nasty projects. To succeed in business requires the ability to spot such projects early and deflect them to someone else, preferably making it sound like you are doing them a favor in recommending them for it. Women once were easier targets of this tactic, but with more exposure to the workplace, they have unfortunately started to catch on."

Fourscore science lore

I blogged about it at inception, and I blogged about it in the rain.  And now I finally have Mom's Obligatory Trophy Photo of the child who I had to beg and bribe with Abe's Cajun pie in order to elicit a smile. 

And even that pie bribery didn't cut the mustard, because she's twelve and way too cool to smile.  Lawee had to give me ass-ears in order to drag this expression out of her as I was aiming the camera.  Or something - I don't know exactly what he was gesturing above my head, and I can only imagine.  Oh, the indignity of it.  All for a trophy pic that I roundly deserve anyway.  (Can we go back to the Terrible Twos now??  They were orders of magnitude easier!!!!)

Advisory:  DON'T do a google image search using the string 'ass ears fingers'. 
The results are not good.

So now she proceeds to the District competition, which I believe is on March 1.

Here's a cool shot from the display board:

Well, *I* thought it was cool.  But I'm just an old science nerd, which is one of the reasons why I don't elicit as many smiles as I used to.

All in the genetic family

Stan Musial has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

That guy on the left.
From http://www.stan-the-man.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=222

We don't know him, but he's a maternal relative [insert historical-family-feud-and-failed-reconciliation story here]. 

The first time I saw a photograph of Stan Musial, it was many years ago in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.  My first reaction was, "Oh my God, what did [my grandfather] do this time to get his picture all the way into an AMERICAN newspaper?!?"

My grandfather was a well-known environmentalist in our little part of Canada, so his picture was in the newspaper on a regular basis.  But that was mostly constrained to the local region, hence my confusion.  I had to sit down and read the Post-Dispatch article twice before it clicked for me that the man pictured was NOT Charlie Musial - it was just a guy who looked startingly like him, by obvious virtue of genetics. 

Finding that newspaper article was an odd experience I remember vividly to this day.   

Snow day

No snow arrived, but 44 roads are iced-over. We have no response equipment for snow or ice, so we just sit and wait until the stuff melts, which ought to be in another five hours or so. 

Well, MOST of us sit and wait.  Some people have tried to go out; there was one ten-car pileup on a freeway north of here around dawn, and plenty of other incidents:

Houston Transtar live road report from 0734 hours this morning.  Everywhere you see a red diamond is an accident.  Buncha people didn't get the memo, apparently.

Aaaaaand two and a half hours later,
no improvement.  One hundred wrecks in four hours, says the media.

It is AMAZINGLY quiet out there, because airports also suspended operations yesterday around mid-afternoon, and I don't know if they've resumed.  All schools are out, so even if someone wants to go to work, the kids are all stuck at home. 

Kind of an underwhelming snow day, but I think I'll go for a walk and enjoy the sound of silence.  And the sights of destruction.

Suckville as far as some of my landscaping is concerned.
There's only so much a person can cover up.

The raised gardens are all covered with 100 watt light bulbs run underneath but, after four days below freezing, I don't know if that's going to be enough to save anything.