Grazing

SUMMARY: Browsing among thoughts, experiences, activities, and...um...whatever.

• It has become clear that my electric hedge trimmer is no longer sharp enough. My hedges post-trimming look ravaged rather than ravishing. I've called around a bit. People suggest replacing the entire device, which would run me $70-80. A new blade assembly would be around $40. Haven't found a place that would sharpen, but I'll bet it's expensive. This would be like my manual mower, which I replaced earlier this year. It would've cost half the price of a new one to have it sharpened (yet again), and it was over a quarter of a century old, so it was time. But what a sorry statement about trying to keep things out of our landfill.
• How did I ever become old enough to have a lawnmower that was over a quarter of a century old? (I know, Dad, I know, don't say it...)
• My last pair of glasses became so badly scratched in barely a year that I had trouble seeing through them, although I did manage to survive in them for nearly 2. My new lenses I have been SOOOO careful with, you wouldn't believe it--and they've become so badly scratched in the spots where I look through them that I have to raise my chin and look out the bottom to see my computer, or drop my chin and look out to top to drive. Ah, ergonmonics! How does this happen? And why right where I look through them? Am I wearing out that spot by looking at things too much?
• And it's a good thing I bought a warranty, which I almost never do. WITH the warranty, 2 replacement lenses cost me $140, and that's after I said, no, leave off the self-darkening feature for the replacements, it's too expensive. But if I were to get simple ground glass (rather than high-tech, high-impact, super-thin plastic of whatever type this is, graduated for different focal points), I'd be wearing your proverbial coke-bottle-bottom glasses. Argh.
• Boost loves to fly in the air, grab, and shake vegetation as I trim it and toss it to the ground. I'm using the opportunity to try to teach her "mint" and "branch."
• A friend just discovered she has cancer and has had a few organs of little use removed. Things look good. (Well, the stapled belly doesn't look all that good, but you know what I mean.) But--why don't we have a cure for cancer yet? We don't even understand cancer yet. Cuz I'm thinking it would be better to keep the organs and dump the cancer, but we don't know how to do that, either.
• The weather has been absolutely lovely lately. Sunny, fairly clear (not too smoggy), not too hot, but much cooler at night, which feels so nice as the cold night air flows through the newly opened windows and chases out the day's accumulation of excessive warmth. Why would I ever want to live anywhere else?
• People all around me are turning 18 and becoming adults who have no recollections at all to share in response to many standard sorts of questions based on my own experiences from merely 1989, which was practically yesterday: What were you doing during the Loma Prieta quake? Can you believe that the Berlin Wall actually came down? I wonder what the world will be like with Hirohito no longer emporer? (I guess I'm in a "how did I get to be this age and not notice?" mood--) (Read more about what happened in 1989.)