Not stalking Crazy Aunt Purl. I swear.

We are both Cancerians and maybe that's why we are on the same page right now. Because I had already decided yesterday that this weekend would be devoted to Cleaning this House, and lo, she blogs about: the same subject.

Whenever I am really stressed, like, stressed beyond chocolate or wine or any of the lower-tier mood fixers, I clean. It was a running joke with my husband, if he came home and found me cleaning the kitchen obsessively, tackling grout with toothbrushes, or rearranging furniture, he wanted to turn and run. When I am content, or mildly depressed, or in any of my normal mood ranges, a little mess doesn't really bother me. But when I'm IN A MOOD, I clean. Furiously. I haven't been IN A MOOD in a long time, and honestly, the house would benefit from a mood.

I am not really In A Mood right now, but I think this is just one of those seasonal yearnings to live in a serene and decluttered space that doesn't have cat hair and cat puke stains. So this weekend I will crank up the stereo and get into the Cleaning Zone. My goal is 10 additional Bags of Shit at the curb come garbage day, plus two carloads to Goodwill.

I am off on Monday, I am doing something about my eyes. My close up vision is, I believe the diagnostic term would be Can't See Jack Shit Up Close.

My distance vision is as bad as it always was - you're talking to someone who has been in corrective lenses since the age of 8, and who almost certainly needed them since preschool. My parents thought it was cute that their "city kid" daughter couldn't tell a cow from a horse when we went for our Sunday drives in the country. I now realize that I couldn't SEE the difference - a brown blob in a field is a brown blob, and if you never could see it, you don't know what it is supposed to look like - but my close-up vision is now as hosed as the distant.

I had the normal 40s presbyopia happening before the SAH, but the old corrective lenses don't correct anymore. I have been living with this since the aneurysm, muddling through with drugstore-type reading glasses over my contacts, grateful that the really bad vision I had right after the surgery improved quite a bit, and now it's time to see if different corrective lenses will fix what the brain blowout hath wrought.

And I realized that I am willing to give up wearing contacts if I can get proper correction with no-line bifocals, because the current state of affairs is annoying the living shit out of me. I've worn contacts for over 30 years, and then moved to occasional reading glasses over them, but right now I need reading glasses over them to recognize my own hand, and this is stupid. So I am taking all of the day off, so I can wear my current glasses for a day before this appointment, and wear them TO the appointment, so my eyes will have relaxed from the underwire bra effect of gas perm lenses, and they can dialate my eyes and all that jazz, and I will be Mrs. Magoo for several hours after that, so I might as well make a day of it.

And even with my vision plan this will cost several hundred dollars, so I'm thinking that I may as well go whole hog and buy new frames as well as pop for new lenses in my current "contacts out" glasses, and make a glasses wardrobe of TWO whole choices! I never got to have more than one pair of glasses at a time as a kid, went into contacts as soon as my parents finally agreed to it (16). My kids both needed glasses at a young age but they had contacts by middle school, because they were as smart and responsible as I was, and I had the scars of having to wait for no good reason other than that my father enjoyed control so much nothing was to petty to exercise it, and those scars never go away, trust me. As soon as my kids expressed a desire to get contacts, they had 'em. Never had a problem with them either.

So conceding that I am willing to wear glasses full time is huge for me. It's evidence of how bad my vision really is, because this is a psychological barrier I'm climbing over here. I may chicken out and end up in some compromise of contacts and reading glasses, but I suspect my vision has gone beyond that fix.

I'm so glad it's Friday, and I'm giving myself a three day weekend. I think I'll finish that Falling Water scarf this weekend.