So, last October, I was warming up at home for a concert that night and suddenly I got floaters in my right eye. I’d never had them before, but I knew what they were. This was like having a tangle of hair wafting vaguely back and forth. “Well, fuck”, I opined. So I scheduled an appointment with my eye doctor later that week, and she looked at it and said, ‘yep, you’ve got floaters, but the retina looks fine. You may want to see a retinal specialist’ and gave me a card.

Well, I got used to the floaters, and with one thing or another, never scheduled the retinal appointment. Well, a few weeks ago – coincidentally or not – the week of a concert, I coughed and suddenly I got floaters in my left eye. “Well, fuck” I opined. The left eye floaters weren’t nearly as bad as the right eye ones had been, but still.. and I was like, I know brass playing puts pressure on the eyeball – is this the thing that’s going to make me have to put down brass instruments? Arrgh.

So I made the appointment (in Forest Hills) and took the whole day off because I didn’t know whether they’d have to dilate me (er, my eyes) or whatever. This was yesterday and the appointment was about noontime.  (I spent the morning working with my new PC, starting the process of moving all the info over from the old one.)

Forest Hills is a short subway ride away and I hadn’t been probably since I went to buy new interview suits back in late 2018. The doctor’s office was crowded, but they had a real assembly line going on, but they were all very nice.  First there was a tech session with the eyedrops and all (they did dilate) , and then there was another tech session with some sort of scan, and then there was what I thought was the doctor’s visit with two young doctors, which was a lot of peering into the eyeball, and then finally a visit from the actual doctor, who did kind of the same stuff.

Bottom line, the floaters are a natural product of aging and will be ignorable in time and my retina is fine and I do have to come in for a followup, but that’ just because the left eye incident happened recently.  But I should come in immediately (or the next day if it’s nightime) if my vision suddenly gets very worse or there are like a million floaters or flashes of light – that seems to be the thing they asked about over and over again and I said, no I haven not had flashes of light, only dark spots and jellyfish and clumps of hair.

By then it was two o’clock or so.  I’d planned to walk the shopping streets of Forest Hills and then pick a place for lunch, but I was hungry.  Luckily the first street available off Queens Blvd. was one of the restaurant streets.  So i went to “aged”, which was a steak place, and they had a lunch special, so I had a rather nice burger and fries and a glass of complementary champagne.  (bleu cheese on the burger)

Then to the shopping street, noting almost immediately that there was a really interesting looking bakery right at the foot of that street.  Did the walk, dodging a lot of very loud teens who’d just gotten out of school or whatever.  Popped in some stores.  Had my eye out for a nail salon, and finally got a pedicure, that was nice, didn’t take very long and the pedicurist didn’t try to talk to me.  (I’ve been meaning to find a regular pedicurist for forever, but have yet to find a place in Jackson Heights.) Was reminded that there are a couple of other restaurant streets which I didn’t know well, and should check out in 3 weeks when I have to go back.

Walked back, went to the bakery which, to my surprise and delight, had a sit-down waited-table section.  I’d seen a really neat purple-mousse cake in the window, and ordered that (I thought). , a “raspberry layer cake’.  What I got instead was in fact a layer cake, chocolate cake and raspberry cake with chocolate ganache.  I liked it, although it seemed kinda fake… and I’m going to have to look up that bakery.  It seemed like the shelf-stable oil-based cakes you get in diners rather than the insanely fresh insanely good stuff you get at Cannelle.  But a nice treat.  And good lord, they had a lot of interesting choices to go with for next time.

I’ve now had enough calories in two hours to get me through the next week, headed back home.  By now it’s about 430 and I’d wanted to spend considerable more time on the new PC, but ended up falling asleep in the recliner (“You take afternoon naps now!”).

Dinner was light, thank goodness, crabcakes.  And we started Bridgerton, which I wasn’t looking forward to, but turns out to be delightful (and made me guffaw from time to time).  I do have a problem keeping the two families straight in my head, although that got better as it went along, and the fact that the 3 Bridgerton men look almost identical doesn’t help.  Again, not good eyesight, and I’m terrible with faces anyway. Wasn’t the 2nd brother gay last season, or came within shouting distance of it?

We also have been going ahead with Our Flag is Death. So far, just silly, but apparently it gets very gay later and I’m here for that.

Oscars this weekend – that’ll be fun, and then we can finally get off the Oscar picklist and watch Turning Red and The French Dispatch and some other movies that have looked tantalizing.