SwimGym with Karola
My replacement Apple Magic wireless keyboard came with the morning mail.
We both had appointments with the opticians this morning, Karola just for a check up and me for a new pair of reading glasses. I had a battery of tests, similar to the ones done by my ophthalmologist Dr John Beaumont, and the optician, Mark Eagle, agreed that the eyes seemed pretty stable over time and in fact apart from the cell apostasy in the optic nerve (glaucoma), my eyes are in good condition (for someone of my advanced years – it goes without saying). My last prescription reading glasses cost $99 as a deal combined with my distance vision glasses, and it was these that I lost in long grass on a bank while attempting to rescue Byron Gregory and family from running out of petrol and a flat battery on the Napier-Hastings expressway a while ago.
My new reading glasses, which should be ready to take to the UK in July, are special “occupational” glasses with graduated lenses. The top part is set to allow good, low-stress vision on a computer screen using 12 point text. The lower part is for reading books and magazines – hardcopy. Muffled gasp – these new glasses are costing over $1000, about $400 for the frames, $600 for the lenses.
Karola suggested we have lunch at Taste in Hastings, we haven’t done that in years, and so we had their fish lunch, delicious. Then on the Countdown for the shopping and back home. I’ve bought Bangle some Tux dog biscuits as treats, these are big, hard, triangular dog biscuits (made in New Zealand, not Brazil), that maybe will take longer than the few seconds she takes to wolf down her usual meals. She certainly likes them but they too get demolished pretty quickly.
Mid afternoon I made some final touches to the reconstructed piece of fence near the wooden gate – crimping up the seven wires and nailing them to the intermediate (running) posts. Unfortunately, but not catastrophically, I tightened the wires to the point that the corner strainer that Henare put in lifted an inch or so. Thank goodness he reinforced the foot – the transverse piece of wood cut into and wired to the foot of the strainer – with long pegs made out of old battens to hold the foot down. Otherwise the strainer would have popped right out. If a strainer has a properly installed stay post, or in a corner, two stay posts, when excessive pressure is applied to the strainer it cannot bend over so it pops skywards in an arc which is rather embarrassing. That piece of fence is sheep proof and the battens need not be attached before we return at the end of July.
Oak Avenue Weather:3℃—13℃ no rain [72.8]
