Well, that didn't go as planned.

Got laundry done this morning. Also got some more work done (yay, work!). Headed off to get my contacts. Got there on time, was sent back to put them in immediately.

They felt funny, irritated my eyes. Right one settled after a little bit, left didn't. Doctor looked at both, said the fit looked good (this is the doctor who said that last week too, though), and that I'd somehow gotten lint in my left eye. Great. So she had me take the thing out, wash it, and put it back. Apparently (her assessment) this just added more lint. It sure irritated the hell out of my eye. So, I took it out again, and drove home in glasses. I'm still wearing them; the eye is still irritable. We'll try again tomorrow.

'Cause actually I agree with her: these may be a good fit. Even when my eye was bugging me, until it teared up really bad, the view did clear pretty quickly. Right eye, at least, seemed good all the way through.

On the way home, as planned, I stopped for milk and several other things I'd realized I needed between when I initially made the plans and when I got there. I almost forgot the bread, but I remembered it at the last minute, and I still haven't remembered anything I wanted and didn't get. Yay, yay. Checking out was a pain and a half: I parked in the side lot (by the garden center/home center), because it's the only part of their fucked-in-the-head parking lot that can be gotten out of. I'm impressed: the parking lot reworking during the remodel, actually managed to make the already-sucky traffic flow worse. That's amazingly impressive. Side lot's still okay to get out of, though, so I park there.

Note the first: checking out by the garden center with a lot of groceries means that if something doesn't ring up, or you have veggies, there will be a delay whilst they look it up, because they haven't bothered to learn it (ironically, most of us checking out there had generic groceries...).

Note the second: the blonde lady who was cashiering my checkout lane is a bit slow, clumsy, and I never want to go through her lane again. Her conversation was bright and very interesting, but perhaps she might have learned at some point how to scan something and not immediately swipe it back across the scanner toward the bag, thus scanning it twice (but she did have the cancel keystroke very well-memorized, it appeared). And perhaps she might have taken, oh, half the time she did to check us out, and tried not to bag the squishable fruit with the cans, and....

Hopefully she's just new.

And then I got home, and I'm vegging, 'cause that eye is still bugging me a little.

Pictures. And thoughts.

I have a few pictures to share, but first I have a statement.

One of the things I would love to do (and no, I have no intention of actually doing so) is amass a collection of pictures of this sort, put it all onto a CD, and send it off to L., who taught the poetry-writing class at my college. I wanted to work on my poetry, and have more of an incentive to do it than my own desire, so I took it. (Two years running. I have no idea what possessed me the second time.) He preferred free verse to anything else, which honestly disappointed me - I would have loved to work on the forms. But I also like writing free verse, and a great deal of what he taught made a lot of sense and helped me.

A great deal of it didn't, of course. But - unlike a couple other students who, I know, got very frustrated - I had expected that. I didn't expect our styles to mesh perfectly. But in the end, it wasn't our styles that made for the most frustrating parts of non-matching.

It was content. L. decided to tell me to stop trying to imitate Frost (whom he knew I read and liked) and write what I know. And I, insufficiently sharp-tongued at the time, only bitched to my friends about it, instead of demanding of him that he decide what the hell he wanted.

Because I wasn't imitating anyone, I was writing what I know. Now, if L's experience tended to the city (it did), and the sordid (certainly his poetry did at times, when I read his books), that did not mean that all his students' did. I was decidedly the farthest one out, however, being somewhat shy and never having gone to a dance club (or wanted to), etc., etc.

My poetry took a turn for the worse, for a while: in the end, I resorted to whacking my original images apart and turning them surreal, allowing L. to find whatever he wanted in them. He seemed to think this was excellent. I thought it was horse-crap, but I also kept extensive notebooks of every step of the process. Nothing was lost; all can be salvaged and put back to what I needed it to be.

What does this have to do with pictures? Quite simply, these are the pictures I wish I had had then, to stuff into his face.

This is what I know. This is the place I spent most of my childhood, this is the place whose clean air I breathe when I close my eyes and imagine peace and happiness in a stressful moment. These are the hills I drove, when I learned to handle a car. I walked here. I stared at evenings like these.

Oh, they've changed. It's been over twenty years since we first moved there. The top of Bald Peak is far more developed than it was then (a fact I somewhat resent, as it was much prettier before). But they're not very different, honestly. They match the memories of my heart, most of them quite well.

As I noted in the entry yesterday, most of these shots are from inside a car. Sometimes it's more obvious than others, for which I apologize. They are up in my Yahoo photo album, in the '2001-12-29' folder. The album is here:

[Link removed; pictures down. Sorry!]

Whee.

Got a little more code done for work, though not as much as I would have liked. I spent too much time doing something stupid and making my processing harder than it had to be, and then had to go back and undo it and redo it right. And either way, I owe that section one BIG block comment, 'cause it's convoluted. Lucky me. Ugh.

Did some LJ support in between coding efforts. Do the slave databases particularly hate us tonight? We got a fair slam of requests like that. If they reopen and haven't cleared up in a couple hours, I'm gonna be very unhappy, but hopefully it's just the normal lag (that's what it looks like so far) caused by heavy usage.

If they reopen, it'll be time to escalate, I suppose. I wish I knew better the correct place to put such information. Though, since I'm going to bed shortly, I suppose it will be someone else's watch anyway.

I have to work tomorrow. Umm. I mean, "be in the office", not just work. Heh. I've had to work a lot of days lately. I'll be working New Year's, too, but not in the office. At least, that's my plan.