The eyes don't have it

More trashy treasures: this one an original painted serigraph by a locally reknown artist. Alas she is dead but lived a long life. Bought it for my brown room though said room is purplish brown and this is orangish brown so...clash. Looks fine in the hallway

Also original handmade paper with flowers but I can't read the signature Looks cute in the flower room which is becoming quite crowded

This goes perfectly in the green and purple room Haven't been able to find out much about Ed Cota. Also this museum no longer exists

summer salad from my class. Pasta was non-gluten made from quinoa and lentil flours

Today's bike ride as I still haven't fixed my odometer though it's sort of fun having my phone talk to me every 5 minutes. I now figured out how to have it in bike mode versus run mode. The first half was against the wind and largely on dirt; the second half had pesky stoplights and it is hard to turn the app off in it zippered compartment so my real times are more awesome

Turns out that hornet did sting me 2 days ago as a sore bump developed. Maybe I didn't notice it sting me with all the adrenaline flowing as I frantically tried to get it off of me. Or hornet venom isn't as bad as wasp venom. When my hairdresser poured all the chemicals on my head, ow, ow, ow. Josh was reading off the relative pain of various stinging insects once to me. The top three weren't even wasps but various kinds of fire ants. I should find that list to see how hornets rate versus wasps. We had a nest of tiny wasps. One stung me on my wrist and it later felt like I broke it whereas an enormous carpenter bee stung me and it hurt for only a few minutes.

 

I am phobic about stinging things. I once stepped into a yellow jacket's nest and quickly was covered with them. I screamed and screamed with my grandfather impatiently telling me to be quiet as it didn't hurt that bad. He usually was quite supportive of me but gee, I was only 8.

 

Big news locally was that a woman was bit by our tiny rattlesnake at the Botanical Gardens. The newspaper made it sound like it was her fault for looking up at the trees instead of the ground.

 

So my eyes. I do indeed have cataracts but not enough to justify surgery. The main thing stopping me from seeing are these things called floaters and there isn't much they can do about them. They might go away by themselves. Also my prescription changed in the bad eye but what is the use of getting new glasses when I have these things that look like mud spots on my glasses only they move. Extra bonus: they dilated my pupils and didn't give me any protection and it was an especially bright sunny September afternoon here.  More pain. So my dream of getting new lenses is postponed. The cataracts could be bad enough in 3 or 20 years. They weren't helpful.  My doctor, Skylar was his first name so I assumed he was going to be a woman, turned out to be just  a very, very young man. On the plus side, my eyes look healthy. As for blood vessels spontaneously breaking as one did a month ago, I can look forward to that happening more and more as I age.

 

On to Cooking for Survivor's. I was Sue, the sous-chef slicing and dicing. Tasty food this time: a salad of raw zucchini, squash and nectarines with a limey dressing; baked eggplant with a pesto made from oregano, parsley and capers, and a corn chowder. We each update our lives and make introductions if we are new. I talked about our classmate who was having her 5th and last day of the blast in which all of her bone marrow is destroyed causing lots of collateral damage and pain. I mentioned this  leukemia is a rare side of effect of the Red Devil. A woman piped up that they tried to give her that but she decided to go 'natural'. Turns out she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at the same stage I was. She was fine for about a year but then a swelling appeared under her arm that spread to her lungs. So stage 4. She is now on traditional chemo but still refuses the Red Devil. The chances of getting leukemia from the Red Devil is 1.5%. The chances of her surviving more than 2 years with  Stage 4 TNBC is less than that. I can't imagine how awful my friend who usually texts me at least once a day but is not responding feels right now but she most likely will survive