Life of Wry

This text is an apt snapshot on the day… (Referring to the one from this morning, not the others.)

Jim had left before I woke up this morning (unusual for me to sleep in, but I blame Matt for keeping me up into the wee hours playing Words with Friends, aka NonWords with Mutt the Butt, as I wrote about previously). So I must have thought he needed a play by play of my morning. Mostly, I was BRAGGING on my excellent Wordle score.

Now… I promise I will not turn my blog into a running commentary on how great I am doing with the daily Wordle. For one thing, luck plays a huge role in solving these and I fully expect to run out of luck soon. But I will enjoy a bit of beginner’s luck as long as I’ve got it.

Here is today’s thing of beauty:

Yep! I solved it in TWO tries! Hilarious, no?

And go ahead….. ask me how I did in the NYT Spelling Bee!

~~

So.. onto the other noteworthy items in my text to Jim this morning..

ONE: I got a new iPhone 13 Pro last week. Maybe I gloated about this already? Took me a week to turn it on because: electronic gadgets. But last night at about 9:00 or 10:00, I went for it. And by the time I went to bed, I had a functioning iPhone. (Time stamp on “first text,” above: 10:59.) (Let that be a lesson to me.) (I’ll never learn that lesson.) I had to do a whole bunch of electronic gymnastics to get it paired and synced to my Apple Watch, which required some operating system updates and such… so it wasn’t until this morning that I was really in full operation. But that is all Big News hereabouts. Last iPhone I had was a 6…. purchased seven years ago.

TWO: Aging. That will probably be a common heading to my life for …. well…. the duration. This adventure in aging had to do with putting my contacts in this morning and then not being able to see out of my left eye, and then not being able to find the contact. I looked, and felt, all over my eye — as you do when you are a contact wearer and have lost your contact — but couldn’t find it. So I assumed it had fallen out. Once out of your eye and/or out of the saline solution, a contact will dry and shrivel up pretty quickly. So I expected to find a stiff wrinkle of thin plastic stuck to a towel or on the bathroom rug or, as happens sometimes, on my person, usually in a ridiculous place. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. Looked high and low, literally, on hands and knees.. everywhere. This is especially hard when you have only one functional eye and are blind in the other. Still…. no findy. In desperation (relative desperation… this isn’t really the end of the world, just annoying as hell), I gave my eye one more once over, rubbing my finger along my eyeball, again, as you do. But no. Gone. So I get out another little packet and as I’m about to peel back the cover and fish out a fresh contact, I realize I can see. The world had come into focus. To be absolutely sure I wasn’t imagining this, I went into my left eye to peel off my contact… because, if I could see, it must be there, and sure enough it was. It was harder than usual to peel off, as though it’d been stuck there forever. Which it most certainly hadn’t. It hadn’t been there at all. Until it was. Which… what?

Ok, so this is a mystery. It’s a story of aging in several respects: /A/ How in the world had I lost the contact in the first place? I put these in daily, and have for forty-some years; it is rare beyond rare to lose one like that; /B/ How was it gone and then how did it materialize w/o my having been able to find it in my eye? Had I been mistaken about not being able to see? and /C/ How’d it get so stuck on my eyeball? That is a very dry eye! That must be an aging thing?

I’m not sure where the problem was, but one thing’s certain: it’s only going to get weirder. I still characterize most of these things as amusing, rather than disturbing. Let’s hope that’s the case for the next few decades.

But I do imagine… this is probably why I love these word games so much, and especially love getting good scores! Proves I’m not ready for the glue factory yet.