All of the stressful stuff is behind me and now I can relax and enjoy VancouFur!

Well, when I get there. As I type this, I am still at home and have not been to the con yet. I will try to be there for a panel at 5 pm that I want to attend. After that. I will register (I know it’s supposed to be the other way around, but according to the schedule, reg does not even open till 6 pm (???).

So what is a fuzzy to do but ghost that first panel? Answer : nothing.

Besides, I’m a fox, we’re supposed to be sneaky and naughty.

Part of me, however, just wants to take a nap. I am going to try to fight that part off but there are no guarantees of success. I could really use a bit of a lie-down right about now, and my bed is call me with its sweet song of not having to deal with reality for a while.

Had my little adventure today, getting myself to my eye appointment at Ironwood Optical. That was easy enough, I just had to get on my trusty 405 at the spot where I usually get off, Eckersley Road, and get off at the Steveston Highway stop. Delivered me quite close to where I was going.

So the only bad part was waiting for the bus. Because it was seriously raining out. No messing around, no piddling around, just straight up movie scene raining.

That meant I had to sit there in the rain for ten minutes or so. That was unpleasant. I entertained myself by trying to remember all the lyrics to this song :

Oh, and this one too :

Had Billy Joel on the mind, apparently.

The eye appointment went fine. The usual stuff. Is it better like this, or like this? Number one, or number two? Now I am going to shine a super bright light in your eye and tell you to look at various points in the room. And now, I put drops in your eyes to make your pupils dilate because it amuses me to make you look stoned. Er, I mean…. so I can examine your retina!

Didn’t have a hard time with the dilation this time. Thank goodness for overcast skies. Other times I have had it done, it has been a bright sunny day, and that rendered me almost totally dazzle-blinded and needing Joe to lead me to the car. Very irritating.

But this time it was pretty cloudy out and so all I experienced was being bothered more by the usual brightness of the world than usual and fighting the urge to close my eyes even five mins or so.

There is one problem, though. According to the receptionist, they can’t give me my glasses until April 26, because it has to be two years to the day since I last drew upon my disability vision plan. But there’s one small problem with that.

I haven’t used my plan in like, five years. It should be totally refilled by now. So I would like to know who got their eyes checked on April 26, 2014, because it sure as heck wasn’t me.

Oh well, worst case scenario, I wait for my glasses for almost two months. Big deal.

Then it was a quick trip to the local 7-11, and home. Now I am pondering how badly I want to go to that panel. Naturally enough.

Therapy went fairly well. I shared my recent crash and burn on the Linguistics test. Told him that I was anxious/depressed while I was failing the test, but as soon as that was over, I bounced back pretty quick. There’s nothing I can do about it now and we have moved on to Phonetics, which seems super fun to me and way way more my speed. Learn the Phonetic Alphabet^[1]? No problem, it’s just a table of symbols, I learn those pretty fast.

Plus I am genuinely interested in learning it. I think it’s super neato and I can’t wait till I can read and write it myself. So that’s no big deal to me.

And if I do well enough in Phonetics, I might even pass the course!

The only other complication to my unalloyed enjoyment of the convention is the fact that I have History of Popular Music tomorrow from 10 till 1 tomorrow morning. So I can’t get the early start to a convention day that I usually prefer. Oh well, the course is so damned fun that I can’t get mad about it.

If all my courses were as enjoyable as that one, I would never leave school. I would end up an old man with like, three doctorates or something.

Found out I left my tablet at the therapist’s office. D’oh! I don’t feel like taking the bus to pick it up today, so I will have to do without for now. Hopefully, I will be able to get Joe to drive me out there to pick it up tomorrow.

Migosh, this might lead to me actually reading for a change!

Oh, the optometrist found a tiny bit of diabetic damage to my retina. Which I am taking as a warning that I better smarten the fuck up about controlling my diabetes and get my act together. I sure as hell don’t want to end up blind! Plus, he said that if the blood vessels are weak in the eye, they are weak all over, so I might develop a problem anywhere, not just the eyes.

And I don’t want to end up losing a limb to diabetes either!

So I am going to order a new glucometer and strips, and get back into taking my diabetes seriously. No more fingertip testing though. That’s a dealbreaker. Whoever thought “Hey, we have this great invention that only requires people to stab the most dense nerve cluster in the human body multiple times a day!” was an idiot.

Well, I had better get going. As usual, blogging during a convention is not guaranteed.

I will talk to you nice people….. soon.