Damned if I do, damned if I don't

My eyesight sucks.  I've worn glasses since I was a little kid, and later in life tried contact lens, but found them to be more trouble than they were worth.  They were just very uncomfortable, and besides, by then I was totally used to glasses.  And oddly enough, as I'm nearsighted, I sometimes take my glasses off to read if the print is too small.

Then about 8 or 9 years ago (I never did have a good sense of time) I had a series of detached retinas in my left eye....they kept lasering it back on, it kept coming back off.  They finally got that fixed, but the result is I have zero peripheral vision on my left side.

My right eye has gotten substantially stronger to compensate. (Thank you God!)  You learn how to get by.  For example, I put one of those tiny convex (?) mirrors on my driver's side rearview mirror to help me with my blind spot when I drive....so far so good.

A couple months ago I had a spot on the side of my nose (where my eyeglasses rest) removed as it was diagnosed as skin cancer.  The cancer is all gone, but in the process they mucked up the tear duct in my good eye.  GRRR!  What was it Roseanne Roseanna Dana said on SNL?..."It's always something".

Now here's the other side of my conundrum:  I hate carrying stuff around.  Unlike what the late actor Karl Mauldin said in his TV commercial, if it won't fit in my pockets, I DO leave home without it.  "Travel light, freeze at night."  I finally broke down and started carrying sunglasses, which for me was a major concession.

E-readers have been a mixed blessing.  I loved my Kindle, but it was limited.  I wanted to be able to check email and the internet while on the move.  iPhone to the rescue.  Sort of.  It met my requirement of being small and "carryable", but dang that print was tiny!  I mean, you can only stretch/enlarge something so much.

Next, the iPad.  UGH!  Waaaaay too big to tote around.  How about a tablet?  Better....  I bought a Samsung Whizbang III (this was before the iPad mini), and it's worked pretty well.  Still a hassle to carry, but all things considered it could be worse.  Yesterday it was a beautiful day and K and I settled in to a nice table outside Starbucks to drink coffee and read, but the sun's glare off my tablet made reading virtually impossible.  UGH again!

What I need is a screen the size of my gigantic iMac screen that folds in half, then half again, then half again, then half again, and fits in my shirt pocket.  Can any of you really smart geeky-type people help me out here? Invent me one, oh, and dip it in that non-glare stuff, too, while you're at it.  And please hurry....I'm not getting any younger.

S

An open letter to Audi

Dear Audi,

First, let me say how much I enjoy the car you built for me.  It's really fast, but it doesn't look like it should be.  Most cops don't even look twice when I slam on my brakes then coast through their speed trap.  They just assume it was the kid in the red Camaro running beside me that pegged their radar gun.  Haha!  And it gets good gas mileage and doesn't break, either, which makes me very happy.

That said, there is one little thing that I don't like about the car you built for me.  See that tiny little space between my seat and the console? ^ It's about 1/4 of an inch wide.  My fingers are wider than that.  A LOT wider.  So whenever I drop something down into that narrow gap it's pretty much gone forever.  

That's not so bad if it's just an old french fry or a freebie pen that says "Stolen from Mabel's Whore House" or something, but occasionally something of value drops in there.  Like today, when I was sitting there minding my own business, eating a brownie after lunch that K (that's my wife) made for me.

That's when I dropped my stylus....it's like a pencil with an eraser on the end (but with no lead) that I use to push the little bitty keys on my tablet keyboard.  Have I mentioned that I have "not skinny" fingers?  Well, without a stylus to push all those little bitty keys, a tablet is pretty much just a rock with a data plan.  I pushed the seat all the way forward and tried sticking my hand under from the back seat, but all I could grab hold of was a bunch of wires.

Then I tried running the seat all the way to the back and stuck my hand in from the front, but just found a bunch of petrified french fries and something else I couldn't begin to identify.  I tried sliding a ruler down the crack (that sounds really gross, doesn't it?) but didn't find my stylus that way either.  Did you know Tic Tac's have a shelf life of years?  I swear, they're like Twinkies!

Anyway, I finally went and got one of those telescoping thingys with a magnet on the end and that did the trick.  Here's my point:  Please, either make that gap at least an inch wide so us guys with clumsy "not skinny" fingers can get down in there, or put one of those telescoping magnet things in the toolkit you pack under the spare tire.

Thank you....er....Dankeschön.

Lowandslow

Frisco, Texas USA