Well, more about the trip BEFORE the train problems. I'm not going to try for any sort of order - well, maybe thematic order, that makes some sense.

From the first bit of the trip, I guess the biggest news is that I don't need bifocals yet. I went to the eye doctor (I figure if I'm paying for it myself, I might as well continue to see a doctor I know and trust, and who knows my health history).

He did a more detailed "nearpoint test" than what he had done in the past - a card, with different sizes of type, was placed a set distance from my eyes (with correction for my usual astigmatism and nearsightedness). In the brightly lit exam room, I could read even the smallest type without straining, so he said it wasn't time yet. And that once you went to bifocals, apparently there was no going back. (He said he had just gotten them himself - he is probably six or seven years older than I am.) He said I might need them in another two or three years (the not-being-able-to-read-text-in-low-light is symptomatic of the beginning of presbyopia), but not yet.

Which means I saved some money. Because my prescription had changed almost not at all, I didn't get new glasses. (As fun as it might be to pick out new frames, glasses are pretty expensive).

The other good news is that everything else he looked at (as much as one can without too much invasiveness) - corneas, macula, retinas - all looked healthy to him. Which is a relief - there is quite a history of eye problems in my family (both macular degeneration and glaucoma, and both my parents have small cataracts now), that it's good to hear that everything's healthy. (I also had the much-hated-by-me glaucoma test done - even though he said he'd make it optional because I'd had a good report the last time - but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry. And the pressure in my eyes was healthily low.)

He also said, after testing my peripheral vision, "Wow, no one could ever sneak up on you!" Don't I know it; I'm easily distracted by movement off to my side, stuff that other people might be able to ignore.

My eye doctor looks like Donny Osmond. I just realized that this year. I kept thinking he reminded me of someone but this year it hit me.

****

I did a lot of baking and some candy-making before Christmas. Homemade caramels, though they are good, take almost more patience than I have.

If I had enormous amounts of time, though, I would make more homemade candy (though maybe not caramels). It's fun, and it's kind of chemistry and physics too. And maybe a bit of crystallography; I've often thought that sugar syrup could be sort of an analogue for magma - if you cool it in different ways, you get different things - you can get long stringy bits (like they do on croquembouche) that are like the long strings of volcanic glass (known in Hawaii as "Pele's Hair"). You can also cool it slowly and get a very smooth and glasslike hard candy, or you can add in something (soda, in the case of candy) to make it foam up and get like pumice. And you can get small hard drops, like what are called "Pele's Tears" when they are made of volcanic glass in Hawaii.

I also made some black-and-white cookies using an old recipe called "Ethel's Sugar Cookies." I should have copied the recipe down; it's a good one. The black-and-whites were an attempt to recreate the remembered-and-missed-by-my-brother-and-me "Modernistic" cookies that the old Hough Bakeries in Akron used to make. (Though I remember the Modernistic cookies as being softer than the cookies I made). These were cookies that were half chocolate, half vanilla, and the bakers at Hough blended the two halves somehow so that the line between them was squiggly and intergraded - I presume the idea was it looked like an abstract painting. They were good cookies, and were a part of our childhoods that we both remember and sort of miss.

***

Christmas was good. I got a lot of books off of my Amazon list, since when people were asking me what I wanted it was at a point where I was busy and I just kind of referred them there. I got a couple of knitting and quilting books, and the Eating Well "Cooking for Two" book (which, of course, for me, will be "Cooking for me, plus leftovers"). And several of the lovely Schirmer's Music Library books of piano music - a Joplin book (I doubt I will be able to play anything in there yet), "Kinderszenen," and a beginner's book of Bach (which I think has some pieces I should be able to play at this point). I like the Schirmer's books, in part, because of their covers - a very plain, sort of manila-folder yellow, with a little green ornamentation around the edges, and then the title and composer in block letters. It's simple, and yet it appeals to me, perhaps because it seems timeless: I can imagine someone in the 1920s playing from a book that looked very like these.

All of those books are being mailed back to me. That's one of the challenges of Christmas when you travel like I do; there's no space to carry most presents back. And while it would seem logical to have people mail the presents directly here, and either I open them before or after the holiday (and then have nothing to open on Christmas Day itself), that's no fun. (Nor would the other option of just being given gift cards or gift certificates be much fun, I think).

I also got some money - my dad does that every year, so we can get things we want but didn't get. I wound up converting it into quilt fabric shortly after Christmas; the big quilt shop up there was having a sale where if you paid cash, you got a 25% discount. I got a few fat quarters and a "jelly roll" (I got a second book for making jelly roll quilts for Christmas) and a couple of yards of good "border" or "sashing" fabric.

I also got a new pair of dress shoes. I had been wanting some new brown dress shoes. These were actually an "after Christmas" present, as with things like shoes, you really need to try them on.



I have foot issues (the biggest one being that my feet pronate, meaning that there is a chance that my foot will "roll" laterally - I've actually fallen a few times in the past when my foot does that unexpectedly. It hasn't done it recently - I think maybe the exercise I do helps - but I could injure myself were I on high heels). So I go to the local "health shoe" store and get them there. These are "Primo!" which is a sub-brand of Clark's, a long time and well-respected British shoe brand.

This may be a better photo:



I'm always struck by how small my feet look to me in dress shoes. I'm more used to seeing them in trainers or field boots, which are by nature larger and clunkier. (I also tend to take a smaller size in dress shoes than either field boots or trainers - a full size smaller, in fact. These are 7 1/2s. I also learned that my left foot is a bit bigger than my right; my right foot is closer to a 7 in size.)

I would have liked the heels to be a bit higher - it's nice to have an inch or so of extra height when you are teaching and such - but these were the nicest looking and best-fitting shoes the store had.