1. My friends and family – near and far – were overwhelming in their support and well-wishes as I underwent my LASIK surgery, none more so than my sister-in-law, who spent the day with me and made sure I was OK.

2. Though I am told to expect “halos” around bright lights for a while post surgery, no one mentions that they may be rainbows. It’s more than a little magical to have rainbow vision, even if it is temporary.

3. I can see an ant crawling on the wall behind my television while I am still seated on the couch, using only my eyes. Having any kind of bug in my apartment is, of course, not beautiful, but the fact that I can actually see it: amazing.

What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

I believe this may be the exact moment I looked up and saw myself on the jumbotron.

One thing I didn’t mention in writing about my LASIK surgery yesterday and Wednesday was the somewhat wacky lengths I went to to get it. Like embarrassing myself on the jumbotron at a hockey game.

At every Caps home game, there’s a promotion called “two minutes to 20/20″ sponsored by Eye Doctors of Washington. Unlike many promos at sporting events, it does not involve the participant doing anything humiliating, like riding a tricycle on the ice or wearing a giant puck suit. All you have to do is say your name on the big screen, and hope the Caps score within the last two minutes of the second period. If they do, your LASIK is free… and if they don’t, you still get $1,500 off.

I decided to give this a try last spring, and went to get my pre-screening. I qualified, but all of the slots were already filled for the regular season. I was told I might get the call for a playoff game, which I eventually did. Because it was the playoffs, though, there were no free tickets to the game included, so I was given the chance to participate without actually having to be up on the screen. It seemed like the best of both worlds – a chance to win with no one staring at me. Unfortunately, the Caps didn’t score the necessary goal in that game, and I didn’t win.

At that point, I figured that was pretty much it… Even with the discount, I didn’t have enough in my flexible spending account to pay for the surgery, so I knew I’d have to wait until 2012. Much to my surprise, however, I got a call from Eye Doctors of Washington in September, offering me another chance. They didn’t have anyone signed up for the first few regular season games, so were giving the playoff contestants another chance. This time, though, I’d be at the game and would have to go up on the jumbotron.

This didn’t seem like that big a deal. All I had to do was stand there and say my name, right? My assigned game was October 15 against the Ottawa Senators. I wasn’t nervous at all, but I’ll admit that I did spend a little more time doing my hair and makeup before the game than I would have ordinarily. At the beginning of the second period, I was whisked across the arena by one of the “Red Rockers” to await the time out when they announced the contestant. I chatted with Guerin, the impossibly tall and perfect-looking woman who is the onscreen personality at the games, and finally it was go time.

And this is where things went wrong. As Guerin is explaining the promo, I made the mistake of looking up at myself on the jumbotron, and I froze. Completely. She handed me the microphone to say my name and I said “Sarah Hmmmernmmm.” (Where Hmmmernmmm = unintelligible gibberish.) I mush-mouthed my own name so badly that after the camera turned off, Guerin turned to me and said, “Did we spell your name wrong on the screen?” Uh, no, dear. You did not.

Adding insult to injury, the Caps once again did not score the goal I needed, so I’d humiliated myself for nothing. And you can bet that my brother has mocked me at every single game since then, every single time that promo comes up: “Hey, that person can pronounce their own name!”

Sigh.

My sexy post-surgery sleep goggles.

My LASIK surgery was a just a little more than eight hours ago, and while I am not 100% vision-wise, but I can read the guide on the tv and see my laptop using just my eyes and nothing corrective for the first time since I was 12. This is pretty cool, even if everything in my peripheral vision is still blurry. I am trying not to spend much time on the computer, but thought I would share a few impressions:

• Valium is horrible. It made me feel woozy and stupid, not calm and relaxed.
• It is intensely freaky – even when stoned on Valium – to be able to see the suction thinger and lasers coming at your eyes.
• I didn’t know I would be given the choice between a stuffed raccoon and a football to occupy my hands during the surgery. I chose the raccoon because it was already out and squeezed the living daylights out of it. I doubt it will ever be the same.
• Nobody told me the laser would smell like burning hair. That was most unsettling.
• Everyone I had talked to about LASIK told me it was painless, so I was totally unprepared for the fact that my eyes hurt like crazy for an hour or so. I think this may be due to the fact that it was really sunny – sunnier than even my freebie sunglasses could block out. My eyes felt like they were on fire.
• Once I had taken the two-hour nap recommended in my post-operative instructions, the pain was gone.
• I thought the instructions to put drops in my eyes at least every 30 minutes seemed ridiculous, but as it turns out, my eyes want them about every 20 minutes.
• The giant plastic sleep goggles are not designed for people like me, who sleep on their belly.
• It was incredibly helpful to have my sister-in-law there to bring me home. I was told I’d be fine to get home on my own on the Metro, but I am pretty sure that would have been a disaster. She also bought me lunch and waited until I woke up from my nap to make sure I was OK. (Thanks, Jen!)

OK, that’s probably enough computer time for now. Many thanks to everyone who shared well-wishes here and on Facebook/Twitter. It was nice to know folks were pulling for me.

My school photo from 1983 – 7th grade.

I first got glasses when I was 12 years old, in the seventh grade. I hated them from the get-go, which I know is hard to imagine, given their ginormous 80s awesomeness. I didn’t really wear them as much as I should and seem to have avoided wearing them for photographs. The picture at right, in fact, is the only school photo of mine where I have  them on.

At some point within the firs year or so of having glasses, I somehow got my parents to agree to let me get contact lenses – on the seemingly impossible condition that I pay for them myself. (Soft lenses were fairly new in the mid-1980s and were very expensive.) I babysat a lot. And delivered a lot of papers. And shelved countless books at the library. And had my first pair of contacts at 15.

From that point on, I never wore glasses regularly again until about a year and a half ago, when I realized that what I had taken for an allergy-induced bout of itchy eyes had been going on for six months – far outlasting allergy season. Over the course of six months I tried wearing my contacts less and less,  switching the solutions I was using, changing out my lenses more frequently… all to no avail. After 25 years of wearing contacts, my eyes were just done.

I went back to wearing glasses full time last spring, and have hated it as much as an adult as I did as a 12-year-old. From a vanity perspective, I don’t like how I look in glasses, but much more importantly, I don’t like the way I see. After so many years in contacts, with full peripheral vision, being allotted two tiny rectangles of clear sight just doesn’t work for me.

And so, tomorrow I go under the knife – well, laser – for LASIK surgery to permanently fix my eyes.  I am kinda nervous about the procedure itself, but am so excited by the idea that I’ll wake up Friday morning and be able to see the clock from my bed. The era where I can’t see squat without help will finally be over. I won’t miss it.

Please! Don’t make me answer this!

It took me a while to think of 10 things to include for today’s list prompt – things I wish I liked – from Carole, mostly because I kept coming back to things that I don’t care that I dislike, like bananas and mornings. But eventually, I did come up with 10 things that I do wish I could enjoy. Here’s my list:

1. Talking on the phone. I have never liked talking on the phone (well, except maybe when I was a teenager) and current technology – text messages, email, social media, blogs, etc. – has allowed me to get to a point where I almost never use the phone. But realistically, there are times when a call is the next best thing to being there, and I wish I was better about calling people.

2. Exercise. No shocker here. I like almost none of it, and the few things I do (yoga, swimming, ice skating) I don’t necessarily enjoy enough to go out of my way to include in my schedule.

3. Rollercoasters. A developing plan by some friends to go to Kings Dominion this summer reminded me that I don’t like rollercoasters – or really anything else at amusement parks. I could figure out how to gut through my fear of heights if they didn’t make me so damn pukey. I am not especially prone to motion sickness in cars/trains/buses, but everything at the amusement park requires sitting dead still for an hour afterwords so I don’t vomit. Not fun. I’ll have a sno-cone and hold your purse, thankyouverymuch.

4. Fashion. I would like to care enough about clothes to always be in style, but it just takes more work than I am willing to give. Instead, I strive for (mostly) good-fitting, un-rumpled, and clean.

5. Costumes. So many of my friends love Halloween and events like the Seersucker Social that involve dressing up in costumes. I used to be fairly good about playing along, but the older I get, the more I am becoming an absolute crank about wearing anything other than “normal” clothes.

6. Lipstick & fingernail polish. Other people look so nice with lipstick and fingernail polish, and I just… don’t. I think I missed the day in “how to be a girl” training where keeping lipstick on and nail polish unchipped were on the agenda, because no matter how I try with either, it just never works for me, so I’ve mostly given up.

7. Winter. Given that I think snow is pretty and my favorite sport is hockey, I should like winter a lot better than I do, but it’s too cold and too gray and too wet for me to enjoy it.

8. Space. All of the news lately about the retirement of the Space Shuttle program and the first commercial spacecraft launch have reminded me that I am just totally disinterested in space (something I also recall whenever my nephews want to go to the Air & Space Museum). I am totally on board with space exploration being important, but I am so glad other people deal with it, because wow, it bores the snot out of me.

9. Sci-fi books. This is clearly related to the item above, but what interests me about this is that not so long ago, I would have said “sci-fi/fantasy books.” Over the last few years, though, because of the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games trilogy, and  the A Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones, etc.), among others, I’ve actually come to like some fantasy novels – so maybe there’s hope for sci-fi someday.

10. Bike riding. So many of my friends love to ride and having Capital Bikeshare now makes hopping on a bike nearly anywhere super-easy, but I still just don’t like riding. I have horrible balance and spend pretty much every moment expecting to topple over and be crushed by a car. And that makes it hard for me to like it, unsurprisingly.

So, what activities do you wish you liked?

(A blogger I’ve been reading a long time, Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, has a great post on this topic, and it includes one of what she calls Secrets of Adulthood: that, “Just because something is fun for other people doesn’t mean it’s fun for me, and vice versa.” So very true – and yet, sometimes incredibly difficult to acknowledge, on either side of the equation.)

Well, not quite like that – the flash on my old camera was a little much; the blue is not quite that electric.

Anyway… I bought the yarn thinking it would make a nice pair of plain socks. I was wrong.

The colors pooled horribly and it looked so bad that I never knit the second sock.

Some time passed, and after a quickly abandoned (and unphotographed) attempt at using the yard for a scarf, I decided a lacier pattern would help the colors blend a little better. I picked a pattern I’d knit before, Monkey, but made the cuffs several inches shorter than called for, knowing I didn’t have enough yarn for two at the correct length.

My mini-Monkey certainly looked better than my plain sock:

But alas, even making it shorter had not left enough yarn for a second sock. At this point, I threw in the towel. Clearly, I couldn’t find a pattern that this yarn liked.

Fast forward… oh, maybe three years, and I stumbled upon the remnant of the yarn and single sock, and was reminded how much I liked the colors. I decided to try fingerless gloves, under the rationale that since wrists are smaller than ankles, the reduced stitch count might actually result in the stripes I wanted this yarn to make. Because I am not the world’s most creative knitter, I used the same pattern as the fingerless gloves I made for my friend Alison, which is, in turn, based on the pattern from the socks I made for Michael. (See? Not creative.)

But!

It actually worked! My Brightwood yarn actually made a pretty, stripey fingerless glove!

That left only once thing to do… Rip out the Monkey sock, so I’d have enough yarn to make the second glove. I did this at Stitch n Pitch on Friday, figuring that baseball and beer would lessen the sting of ripping out all that work. I was right… and now have a second glove on the needles. Just in time for the air conditioning to kick in in the office, which makes fingerless gloves welcome, indeed.

So, it only took five years for this yarn to figure out what it was meant to be. Not too bad, right?

I’ve been poking around on a site called OneBag.com, which is basically the go-to site for learning to pack small. It has lots of tips and techniques, as well as packing lists and luggage recommendations. Based on what I’ve seen there, as well as looking at suggestions from others (including Rudi and David), I think I have it narrowed down to two bags: The Aeronaut from Tom Bihn or the Red Oxx Air Boss. In a real departure for me, neither of these suitcases have wheels. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone with a non-rolling bag, but (not surprisingly, really, when you think about it) wheels tend to both add weight and take up space. I’d like this new suitcase of mine to be as light and spacious as possible, and wheel-free this seems to be the way to make it happen.

The main differences between the bags are that the Aeronaut is a little bit bigger and has the option to convert to a backpack, while the Air Boss is strictly a suitcase. The Aeronaut is also more expensive – especially since the shoulder strap (which I would definitely need) is not included in the price.

I am a little torn at this point… Is the additional money worth it to have a little more room? Or will more room just allow me to pack more and therefore make it too heavy to handle without wheels? Do I need a backpack option? (It would be far better for my back, obviously, but I don’t really like backpacks.)

So, dear blog readers, you get to vote. I can’t guarantee I’ll follow what you suggest, but I’m interested in hearing what you have to say. There’s a little poll below, and as always, comments are welcome.

Thanks for sharing your opinions!

The view from my porch this afternoon.

It’s Saturday once again – yay, weekend! – so time to look back at three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I played hooky on Tuesday afternoon to go to the Nationals game. Though there was a brief rain delay (and by brief, I mean they didn’t even get the tarp rolled out all the way) in the first inning, the weather got a hold of itself and was fine for the rest of the game. The Nats didn’t win, but a day at the ballpark beats a day at the office anytime.

2. An article shared on Twitter by my former intern fills me with 90s music nostalgia, and causes me to spend the rest of the week with Liz Phair’s “Polyester Bride” in my head.

3. Other than a little bit of rain, the weather this week has been stupendous, so I spent a lot of time outside – in addition to the above-mentioned baseball game (and last night’s game), I ate several of my lunches outside and have spent a fair bit of time reading on the porch.

What’s been beautiful in your life this week?

Tonight was the annual Stitch n Pitch knitters night at Nationals Park, so after work I met up with sprite and Rudi at the ballpark for the first game of the “Battle of the Beltways” – interleague play between the Nationals and the Orioles. It was a gorgeous night, perfect weather for baseball, and the teams even gave us a couple of extra innings to enjoy it. And though the Nats ended up losing 2-1, it was still a lovely night.

(Oh, and please note the bucket-head kid in the stands – he wore that for about five innings, and I tell ya, the kid was having a damn blast.)

So, since I haven’t got anything to say, why don’t you go over to my friend/colleague Julia’s blog and read the lovely rumination she wrote recently about aging. It’s worth your time. I promise.

With wishes for a more inspiring tomorrow, goodnight.