Ocular Disaster

On the plane back from Auckland on Saturday one of the lenses (the right) fell out of my reading glasses and was lost. I didn't discover it had gone until I was in baggage claim - someone had abandoned a small wooden crucifix there and I reached for my specs to take a closer look at it ... by the time I was home and had worked out how to call lost property the cleaners had been through the plane and the plane was on its way back to Auckland. Nothing had been handed in so they must have thrown it out. Or never noticed it at all. Since then I've been using one or other of two pairs of 2.5 magnifying glasses I bought at the Reject Shop in Ashfield last time this happened. Then, I found the errant lens lying on the grass at the verge of the path that leads from this apartment building to the street. It happened once before too, but I don't remember the details. Third time unlucky perhaps. The glasses I had before that disappeared mysteriously one day from the outside table on the deck of the house I lived in in Cornelian Road, Pearl Beach, in late 2004. Perhaps a bird, a magpie or a currawong, or a sulphur crested cockatoo even, took them: they had bright shiny buffed steel frames, of Italian manufacture. There wasn't time to replace them before I went overseas so I travelled around Malaysia and Indonesia with a pair I bought for $20 in a service station. They were a great talking point in Malacca and Labuanbajo and rather better to look through than the Reject Shop glasses but are now too painful to wear because one of the supports has fallen off, exposing naked wire that gouges into my nose. Trying to go through the editor's mark-up of the ms of The Supply Party with these current glasses is excruciating: there's no depth of field whatsoever so I have to poise at exactly the right distance from the screen in order to see the tracked changes. Afterwards I can't do anything much that involves reading or writing, though (obviously) (why?) I'm making an exception here. Help is on the way: this morning I went up to the local optometrist and within about twenty minutes I'd had my eye test, chosen new frames and coughed up a little under $300 for a new pair. Now all I have to do is wait until Friday, or perhaps next Monday, for the new specs to arrive. In the meantime, I guess it'll just be spicks.