I remember my first computer, a little, square, black, magazine sized block called the Timex Sinclair 1000.  It was 1982, it sold for $99, it had 2 kb memory (that's right, kilobytes), a quite respectable 3.25 Mhz operating speed, and, this is my favorite part, a resolution of 22 x 32 text characters.  It was made by Timex - you know, the watch company ("Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'!), and Sinclair - okay, I have no idea what else they made, aside from this.  Sporting a flat membrane keyboard, the entire thing was fairly solid with no moving parts. At the time I thought it was the bee's knees. Last year when I was sifting through some storage boxes, I found my cell phone from 1997.  Like my buddy the Timex-Sinclair, it also was a black brick with a black and white display.  It had a nifty button top walkie-talkie plastic telescoping antenna for better reception.  I always suspected it was a technological placebo to make me think I had better reception, because I couldn't quite understand how a completely plastic antenna was picking up anything.  Crumpled up next to my 1997 sidekick was a piece of leather origami which sprang into the shape of the phone as I prodded it.  Windowed cutouts allowed the screen and keys to poke through.  It was perforated with a stylish hole pattern like you would find on the leather wrapped steering wheel of a sports car - you know, to let it breathe.  Aside from keeping my plastic brick snug and cozy, it's 0.2 mm of thickness served no other appreciable function.  Besides, you could fight off a bear with that phone without denting it.

So, this leads me to last week, when I found myself shopping for two tech accessories:  a case for my iPhone, and a case for my snazzy new Macbook Air.  The iPhone is the model with the metal sides that form the antenna, and the shiny glass back and front.  As anyone knows who grew up holding rabbit ear antennas on TVs to improve the reception, you become part of the equation when you touch the antenna.  To avoid you messing up your own cell phone signal, you need a case.  Plus, a phone made of glass is somewhat subject to breakage.  The MacBook Air, on the other hand, is not made of glass, but instead has a beautiful brushed aluminum unibody shell.  Its problem is scratches and dents, and it too needs some loving.

I was thinking about my phone, which, with its 8 GB of flash memory can store the contents of 4 million Timex-Sinclair 1000s, and my 1997 cellphone.  30 years of progress has evolved devices from indestructible bricks with cases for looks to elegant glass and aluminum works of art with cases required to function.  There's definitely a side commentary on the trade-offs of art versus form and function.

As I scrolled through endless webpages of iPhone and Mac cases I saw it all: rhinestone encrusted cases, chrome cases, matte black cases with giant alien heads screen printed on them, Hello Kitty cases, glow in the dark cases, and the complete Michael Kors collection of cases on the Apple store.  On the other end of the spectrum were rubber encasements suitable for industrial use.  Is there no midpoint between bedazzled and basic?

Finally, after all my searching, I came up with something which simultaneously went against and with all of my artistic instincts: clear.  My MacBook Air has a nice, thin, clear snap-on case (Moshi iGlaze) which lets me see all of the beautiful brushed aluminum, as does my iPhone.  I think the analogy is picking out a frame for your artwork: sometimes it's tempting to pick out a frame to make the art prettier - but maybe letting the art speak on its own is the way to go.

Every year we snap a picture of the tree in our backyard when it turns a brilliant gold during fall.  This morning the sun was hitting it just right and it was radiant:

Not too long ago I wrote a post about my trusty, 6 year old Macbook Pro, and the many technical surgeries to fix its ailing parts.  Six years is ancient as far as laptops go, and it's a testament to just how good that line of computers is that I've had it this long.  I use my laptop heavily - not just for rambling blog posts, but also for photo editing and as part of my art process.  One of the things I loved about my Macbook Pro was its brushed metal body.  It felt indestructible.  It also felt like a set of gym weights sitting on my lap.  As I thought about next computers, the appeal of portability started to weigh as heavily (perhaps even more so) than tech specs. I would love to have an iPad.  I keep making up mental excuses for why I would need one.  But, in reality, the programs I use just don't exist as iPad apps.  There's photo apps, sure, but you can't yet run the full version of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, or Aperture on a iPad.  If only there was something as thin as an iPad, but capable of running all my favorite programs.  Enter my new toy: the Macbook Air.

Remember the ads for these when they launched in 2008?  A hand reaches down and opens up a manilla envelope, then pulls out an impossibly thin laptop. And that was 2008.  Imagine what the 2012 model looks like.  Well, no need to imagine...here's a picture!

Last week Kiersten was talking about how she's gotten so used to lifting up Emma, who's now around 15 pounds, that when she reaches down to scoop up our cat, Iggly, she overcompensates and launches him into space.  I've had a similar experience adjusting from picking up my old Macbook Pro to picking up the Air.  It looks like I'm hamming it up like an actor from a 70's sitcom, juggling the computer and briefly spazzing out for no apparent reason other than to give the studio audience a laugh.  Fortunately, the studio audience is busy prying the cat off the ceiling from the recent space launch attempt.

Aside from the lightness, one of the other big differences is that the Air has no hard disk drive; instead, it has a solid state drive.  That means instead of a drive that spins and whirrs, it's all flash memory.  The computer is utterly silent when on, and instantly accesses programs and files.  There is a downside, though - my fancy SSD is only 128 gb.  It's actually a downgrade in size from my Macbook Pro (which was 180 gb).  So, this had made me completely rethink how and what I store on my computer.

For being such a technology geek (hey, I am an engineer, after all), I've been slow to embrace the Cloud (files which are stored and accessed over the Internet, via services like Apples iCloud, for instance).  There's something about not having your files in your possession that makes me a little uneasy.  But it's everywhere now.  If you buy a Kindle Fire tablet, it has very little storage.  All those movies and songs are accessed via Amazon's cloud and streamed on demand.  I realized that much of my storage space was being eaten up by things like my iTunes library (which I've imported every CD I've ever owned into).  It turns out, for about $2 per month, you can move your entire music library to the iTunes cloud, stream it on demand, and re-download it anytime you want.  This has freed up a ton of space.

Anyhow, just some tech ramblings as I slowly give up some tried and true technologies and migrate into somewhat unfamiliar territory.  And, of course, continue to admire just how cool the new Air is (here's a few more pics)!

I remember when my wife and I first met:  She was a Mac, and I was a PC  We were like those commercials with the young, cool person seamlessly using the Mac while Jonathan Hodgetts fought with blue screens of death and system crashes.  After peering over her shoulder a few times as she typed away, I became entranced by the glimmering technology and the intuitive interface of her Macbook, and I was swayed over to the Mac side.  In 2006 I opened my newly ordered MacBook Pro, ogled over it's all aluminum body, backlit keys, and glowing white Apple logo when it was powered up.  It was love at first sight.  If this were a movie, this would be the cue for the montage scene of me and my Mac skipping merrily along together, eating cotton candy at a carnival, riding a two seat bicycle and being bestest buddies. At 6 years old the miles are starting to pile up, and the once gleaming shell has scuffs and scratches; the most used keyboard keys have the letter print worn away, and more than once I've needed to take the entire computer apart to replace a failed part, mostly notably the motherboard, which required a stripping of the computer to a bare, empty case.  Our feline friend, Iggly, has devoured several power cables.  The battery only holds about 10 minutes of charge, and the CD drive has given up the ghost.  When a recent buzz developed in the screen, I was slightly concerned, but when it stopped it was not a good thing, because the monitor went black.  A little trial and error showed there was only a narrow range of angles where the screen would now turn on.  It was maddening trying to type with the screen opened at a 35 degree angle!

You might think: time to get a new computer - those Macbook Airs look pretty nice - but...cut to the montage scene...me and my buddy, writing blog entries, editing photos which would later become artwork, Farmvilling....all those dings and scuff give it character.  It's like that well worn sweatshirt you had in college that has holes in the sleeve, but is your favorite thing to wear.  So off to eBay I went hunting.

The offending part is the backlight inverter, which (surprise!) turns on the backlight.  The screen itself was actually still on - it's just that I couldn't see it because the backlight behind the screen was off.  In keeping in theme with Mac design, you must take apart everything to get at the inverter board, which is tucked right behind the MacBook Pro logo on the bottom of the display screen.  The hardest part of the job is not taking everything apart...it's taking everything apart without breaking any of it.

And, in the end, it all went back together again, and the screen is now on for a full range of angles, sans buzzing.  Me and my Mac are cozied up on the couch, happily typing this blog post ready for further adventures.  Yay!

It's amazing how quickly the nursery has evolved.  We thought it was fairly well stocked two weeks ago, but after putting it through its paces and several Babies R Us trips later, it's got plenty of new gear.  A few things have really proven to be invaluable, and I thought I'd make a small list of some of my favorites:

1. Fisher Price Rock N Play Sleeper - Lightweight and portable, Emma naps in it downstairs with us as we go about our day.
2. Swaddle Me - There's a bit of an origami like art to folding a blanket into a good swaddle, which is even harder with a squirming baby.  The velcro closures and custom shape of the swaddle me blanket makes life much easier.
3. Itzbeen Timer - After the first few nights of trying to constantly reset the alarm clock in the middle of the night and do math to calculate the next feeding time, we got this timer.  There's a simple baby bottle button you press when you feed her, plus a diaper button for changing, etc.  You configure an interval for each, and it will alarm you when it's elapsed.  If you glance at it's backlit display, it will show time since the last event.
4. Diaper Genie - Anything that makes managing the sea of poopy diapers easier is worth the money!
5. Boppy - the boppy has many uses, but my favorite is as extra support to rest the baby when feeding
6. Motion Activated Nite Lite - Not baby gear exactly, but I bought a couple and set them up in the hallways I travel to get from the kitchen to the nursery to the bedroom.  They're very bright and turn on automatically as I  walk down the hall.  Great when you're carrying a baby!

And, of course, I can't have a baby post without posting a baby picture, so here's a cute one from this week:

I love browsing Etsy (okay, shameless plug, I also have my own Etsy shop for selling prints).  Recently I bought three prints for our nursery there, and wrote this post about matting and framing them in my studio.  As I was browsing for those prints, one of the things which caught my eye were birth announcement prints.  Etsy has plenty of cute typography designs which list the details of when your child was born, birth weight, etc.  As my finger hovered over the click to buy button, I suddenly thought wait, I can do this.  It's funny how sometimes I completely forget I'm an artist, or that I was a graphic design major. After a couple of proofs and revisions, I printed and framed it yesterday, and hung it in the nursery.  By doing it myself, I was able to incorporate an actual scan of Emma's footprints inked at the hospital. Here's the final announcement:

When Kiersten and I discovered last summer that we were expecting our first child, we set about learning everything that we could.  Before falling asleep each night, we read side by side in bed, Kiersten thumbing through a paperback of What to Expect When You're Expecting, and me reading The Expectant Father on my Nook. We perused The Bump and followed along with their checklists and suggestions.  Early on, we did an extreme baby room makeover of the den and spare room, creating a nursery and guest room.  By fall, I realized my two door, 6-speed manual bachelor mobile wasn't going to cut it as a baby mobile, hugged it goodbye, and traded it in for a new Honda CR-V.  The baby shower rolled around with it's dizzying array of baby gear, gizmos, and tiny outfits that made your heart melt.  In January, we completed childbirth classes, pre-registered with the hospital, and took a tour of the maternity ward. All in all, we were feeling pretty well prepared for our March 14th due date. Last weekend we felt restless and decided to focus on some of the final details.  On Saturday we installed the car seat in the CR-V, set up the plush rocker we bought from Babies R Us in the nursery, and I downloaded "Kiersten's Baby Mix" onto her iPod.  On Sunday night before going to bed we finished stocking the hospital overnight bag.  Since we were both off for President's Day, we stayed up late and went to bed around midnight.

At four am I was gently shaken awake by Kiersten.  Childbirth classes had coached us on the average times for the different stages of labor, as well as what week of pregnancy first time deliveries usually occur.  In reality, things zipped along much differently for us.  At 9:59 a.m. we had a baby girl, and we named her Emma.

  

The past 7 days have been a single, long, wonderful day.  Day and night have blurred together; quiet times and crying times, sleepy times and cuddling times, lots of diapers and burpings, and mom and dad promising to take a nap themselves, always tomorrow.  In hindsight things didn't unfurl the way they were planned, but all the planning helped things unfurl a little easier.  Now, we've got a new book to read: What to Expect in the First Year.

Our Charlie Brown Christmas tree is getting ready to be filled with presents.  We have many favorite ornaments, including this little painter guy.  I'll bet he's hoping that giant stocking underneath him gets filled with art supplies!

For those who haven't seen the Facebook posts, Kiersten and I are expecting a baby, due March 2012. We've been frequenting The Bump website, and I liked their countdown tickers and thought I'd post one on my website.  We're a little more than halfway there!

This weekend Kiersten and I did our annual pumpkin carving, which felt a little out of place this year with 7" of snow falling outside.  Happy Halloween!

The past weekend I decided my blog wasn't getting much TLC.  It's actually 5 years old this year, and has had tweaks and upgrades here and there, but on the most part it's looked pretty much the same and hasn't used all the latest bells and whistles of Wordpress.  It started innocently enough: add some snazzy thumbnail previews to my posts.  This involved modifying code, which, like most of my Wordpress tinkering, resulted in a subsequent run of days where visitors were greeted with "error!" and a white screen, instead of an art blog.  After much hair pulling, I discovered the offending piece of code was one single space (ah, computers are great that way).  Anyway, along the line I started thinking about how my blog is different than my Facebook page is different than my portfolio page.  I tend to use the blog a little more like a diary, with posts including everything from how the cat ate my latest computer cord to photos of the pumpkins we carved for Halloween.  It made me want to change the look of the blog, and I stumbled on this diary theme.  I'll try it out for a while and see if it fits - kind of liking it at the moment.

A few months ago my trusty MacBook's motherboard fizzled up in smoke.  I vividly recall staring in disbelief, poking at the keyboard with one finger, staring in disbelief again,  cursing the computer gods, pouting, going through the stages of denial, getting a repair quote,  scheming how not to pay the repair quote but instead fix it myself, stalking Ebay, cackling as I tried out all 24 bits of my new precision screwdriver kit, and, amazingly, actually repairing it.  All in all, a great experience. So, this past Saturday when Kiersten announced that she saw a spark when disconnecting the magsafe powercord from her Macbook, I initially envisioned "static charge type flash".  It wasn't until she replicated it in front of me that I realized it was "Fourth of July big finale!" type of flash, complete with burning smell.  It looked like a bad special effect from a 50's sci-fi movie, like one of those toy plastic ray guns that spews forth a shower of sparkles as you crank the handle.  That's not good.  Using my awesome powers of deduction, I concluded, "Magsafe adapter....baaaaad."  Being very experienced at the replacement of magsafe adapters due to the voracious appetite of a certain orange furball who co-resides with us, we quickly logged onto Ebay and ordered our favorite discount version of it.  Then I offered to share my power cord with Kiersten.  She popped it onto her computer, and instantaneously we were greeted with Gzaaap...sparkle sparkle sparkle! and the smell of more things burning.  We both stared for a second, then I said, "I'd like to revise my theory."

A quick inspection showed the port itself was damaged, with two of the power connectors pulled out and partially melted.  Some Googling showed Macbook innards, and that the part could be removed just by unplugging/unscrewing it (once you surgically removed everything around it), and, amazingly, could be bought for $29.  The engineer in me excitedly rushed to dust off the precision screwdriver kit.

And, in the end, it worked.  There may have been an extra screw left after I put it all back together.  But I'm sure it wasn't to anything important.

Kiersten finished another piece on the loom this weekend, and Iggly decided to model it for us:

After completing a few hand woven Christmas presents for family, Kiersten finished a dish towel for us.  I love that we have custom designed, hand woven towels!  It's also fun to be working side by side in the studio, with me scribbling away on a new piece and Kiersten on her loom.  I think she's contemplating a rug next.  Here's a few shots of the towel, and the loom:

We actually put the tree up just after Thanksgiving, but I wasn't able to get any of the pictures of my camera due to my Macbook losing it's mind.  Now that my computer has had a brain transplant, the pics are up.  Just a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree that we put up every year, but filled with plenty of ornaments, many with their own stories and personal memories:

We've had this orange cat ornament for a while, and we noticed it looked like our feline friend, Iggly.  It'll be his first Christmas with us this year:

I snuck a peak at Kiersten's cooling cookies.  We had to try a few, strictly for quality control purposes:

Two weeks ago I curled up into my favorite corner of the couch, pulled the blanket over my legs, reached over to the coffee table to fetch my trusty Macbook, and pressed the power button.  The usual happy apple with a bite taken out of it was absent, and replaced by a blue screen of gibberish. I stared in disbelief for a while.  I pushed power buttons, clicked mice, and did obscure CTRL key combinations as if trying to invoke the computer gods.  Safe modes were invoked, OS X boot disks dusted off, and all of it led back to a blue screen of gibberish.  Finally, with my tail between my legs, I packed up my Mac and headed down to the apple service store.

"Your logic board is toast."

"Ah.  I see.  Have one of them handy?"

"Nope, but I can order it.  $1500."

"What?  This computer is 4 years old. How much is a new Macbook Pro?"

"$1500."

"Gah!"

So, after a brief fit, we came up with a Plan B:  If I could find the part cheap on Ebay, he could install it for $300, which translated in my head as, "If I can find it on Ebay, I'll completely disassemble my laptop on my own and use my mad engineering skills to swap it out."

You must pause to understand at this juncture that the technical challenge of disassembling, repairing, and reassembling something incredibly complicated is, to an engineer,  like a dangling feather on a string to a cat; you simply can't pass by without taking a swat at it.

The internet is great.  You can look up how to do just about anything, including changing out a logic board.  To get the board out, it turns out, you must first remove everything else, and I mean everything. Everything is connected via screws, wires, and connectors which would give a neurosurgeon pause.  But, one jillion microscopic screws later, and here's what the emptied case looked like.  You can see the fans and memory sitting off to the left, and the optical drive is out of the picture.  Those three copper squares are the heatsinks for the GPU and processor, and needed to be cleaned with isopropyl alcohol before having a dot of thermal grease reapplied:

Here's the new board installed:

And, after putting everything back in and hooking it back up, there was a final moment of truth when I had to push the power button.  I considered diving behind the sofa for cover, but was transfixed by the outcome after two hours of work.

And there it was!  My old buddy, ready again for countless Farmville-ing and rambling blog posts.  The original estimate was $1800, and my final cost was about $300.  Plus I got 2 quality hours of engineering catnip to entertain myself with.

This weekend we carved our pumpkins.  Check em out!

Anyone's who's been to my Facebook page has seen the occasional pictures of Iggly, our feline friend adopted from a shelter earlier this year.  Here he is.  So cute and innocent looking.  Little would you guess behind those blue eyes gears are ceaselessly turning to conjure up fresh schemes of destruction:

Since then, our house has progressively been taken over by cat distractions:  there are blinking balls for a rousing game of cat soccer, feathers dangling from sticks for cat fishing, remote controlled micro-mice, cardboard box kitty forts, carpet covered scratching posts, kitty bed(s), kitty window perches, and even his own Garfield towel folded on (what is now) his recliner.  His favorite toys, though, are my toys: computer keyboards and laptop screens are irresistible to him.  In fact, he's a master at computer keystroke combinations, somehow always stepping on the CTR-ALT and some other key to magnify the screen 2000%, select everything in Kiersten's email folder and delete it, or upload photos of himself to I Can Haz Cheezburger.  But that's a whole other post.

This post is about the most delicious, delectable, satisfying thing in the world for our cat.....mmmmm, laptop cord.  Apple Macbooks have a thin white cord which dangles down from the side of the computer.  Kiersten's cable was the first to look like the cat had gone from one end to the other as if eating corn on a cob.  Even though the damage looked superficial, the little green power light on the cable permanently went off.  Shortly after the demise of her cable, my laptop was targeted and the little green power light on mine faded into darkness as well.  Since a new cable costs $90, it was just shy of $200 worth of damage.  Ouch.  We got two new cables, and decided how we would alter the Destructinator's behavior.

Round 1: Bitter Apple vs. The Cat

Bitter Apple is sold at pet stores, and is spritzed on.  It doesn't smell like anything, but tastes horrible.  I know this of course from experience, because every time I touched the power cord, some would transfer to my hands.  Inevitably I would eat something that required me to touch my food, and voila! Blech! Even just breathing while spritzing on the stuff caused the taste to appear on the back of my tongue.  Surely this would deter the ravenous destructo-cat.

Outcome: Iggly merrily munching on, and destroying the brand new $90 cable, oblivious to the spray.  Me Bitter Appling myself at least a dozen times, no matter how many times I made mental notes not to touch the cable.  Cat:1, Humans: -1

Fortunately the destroyed section was localized to about 4" of cable, and I was able to surgically remove and splice it this time.  Apple power cables are particularly vulnerable to pet damage, since they are coaxial and a simple puncture can short them by bring the outer axial wires in contact with the inner ones.  Aside of course from the equipment issue, there's also the danger that Iggly will use all nine of his lives at once as he discovers electricity.

Round 2: Out of Sight, Out of Mind vs. the Cat

We went to Lowes searching for cable protectors, and found some plastic flexible tubing which looks a bit like vacuum cleaner hose. Kiersten installed the hose over her line, but I instead opted to unplug my cable when unattended and place it behind the glass of the tv stand.  I found the cat would sit on the other side of the glass door and stare at it, like a kid looking into a bakery window.  I envisioned him smacking his lips hungrily.

Outcome: This worked until, inevitably, I went to bed one night and forgot to stow the cord.  The next day I found the little green power light had shone it's last light.  Fortunately we'd taken to the habit of always turning off the power strip when unattended, so at least the cord was munched on sans power. The vacuum hose was a suit of armor for Kiersten's cable, but was a bit awkward to have dangling from your lap.   Cat:2, Humans:0.5

Round 3: Stinky, Smelly Cable vs. Everyone

After surgically extracting the new damaged section of cable and splicing it, we proceeded with Plan C, the Stinky Cable.  It's not actually called stinky cable - it has some "pet guard" title - but it's a heavy, clear, flexible slit tube which has been coated in a citrus fragrance that pets find unappealing.  By citrus, they mean citronella-ish, and strong.  We had to let the cable air outside overnight. Now it's installed on both laptop cables, both little green lights are on, and the humans have been effectively repelled into other rooms.  We're not sure if our weird cat will be repelled yet, since we dropped some of the tubing on the ground and watched him merrily play with it for a while.  I have the strange feeling that he's very, very amused by all of this.

Outcome:  No humans in the living room.  Cat, tbd.

I've thought about writing a post about this before, and had some reservations, but it's something going on in my life right now, and something I had some good news on today, so I thought I would write about it.  It takes a little bit of storytelling. 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.

This weekend we had a fun getaway at Skytop Lodge, a remarkable historic resort in the Poconos.  Both Kiersten and I have taken ballroom dancing lessons at Vince Brust Studios (in particular, for our first wedding dance), and a few times during the year Vince organizes a dinner/dance at Skytop.   The lodge has its own big band - the Skytop Orchestra - and it's  a rare treat to swing dance to Glen Miller music played live.  The resort is amazing - the grounds, gardens, and architecture are breathtaking - and I look forward to returning there for the next dance during warmer weather.  Here's a few of my favorite pics form the weekend: