Coffee Share 210521: Feelin’ Blaaa

This is a Weekly Coffee Share Essay. I’m part of a small group of bloggers who stay in touch and chat about blogging, writing, or just about anything else that might be of interest.

Link to This week’s full list

Link to my Story Blog:  Table of Contents.

Good day. I’m glad you’re here but a not sure I can be much of a host today. Yesterday I suspect I eat something that disagreed and last night and this morning I just feel run over.  I recognize the symptoms of something I’ve dealt with before and the best I can do is rest with lots of fluids.  I don’t think its contagious as my family has never caught it so we can stretch out and relax.

If we were having coffee, I’d be right upfront about not feeling like writing much as one of the symptoms is a foggy brain. So I’ll share a couple of things but be short about it.

I finally got my new Bio-Card done and deployed.  You’ll see it at the bottom of almost all my WP pages.  That old photo was really getting dated because I started 2020 with a full beard but beard and masks just don’t get along well so I shaved most of it off leaving what you see in my newer photo in the card. It was much easier to use by mixing my entry page to my story collection link right over the card.

Then, about my stories.

I’m still very please with how my new short story came out, except that I was hoping it would be shorter. It’s about a 17 minute read and is a fun little Sci-Fi piece. I don’t want to say much about it other than I think you would enjoy a quiet 17 minutes alone with a good mug of either coffee or tea. It has a surprise twist but so far no one other than one friend who had something of a advance hint, saw it coming. If you’ve not checked it out yet, you can find it via the link below.

Click right here ===> In a Foreign Forest Found

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Pexels.com

Next, It occurred to me that we have several new faces and voices on the coffee share. About 4 years ago I started blogging in earnest with the goal of designing and sharing a story blog site with collections of my somewhat rowdy, 1st person, very short (2000 words or less), autobiographical essays. There were lessons learned along the way and laughs to share but these have been pretty popular with those I met and came to call friends over the years.  That collection is nearly complete so I’d love to find new readers to laugh with.  These things actually happened but I promise no dull data dumps, just stories that might come up if we could find ourselves at a real coffee house, just sharing life and stories together.  The model for these essays are very tight regarding size, tone and being family friendly. They are all a 10 minute read or less and I’ve had friends read them to their kids and everyone had a good laugh.  If you need a quick laugh, I’ll give you a link to the first in the set which is one of my earliest memories of disrupting my mom’s day in a big way.  If you have kids or were one, this story should sound familiar and tickle you.

Click here to read ==> The Indoor Tsunami Adventure

Do you collect life hacks?  I have a few I like and thought you might have use for one or the other.  Here’s one for today that I doubt you’ve seen. My eyes are getting old and while I started life not needing glasses, somewhere around age 25, they went from being an optional thing to now, leaving me unable to focus on much of anything without one of the 3 lens balanced on my nose. My company has a nice insurance program for eye-care and both of my girls pretty much started life needing glasses so it’s been helpful.

I don’t play sports or work in construction (any more) or step on my glasses so each year when I get a new set, I’m always torn because while I may or may not need new lenses I rarely need new frames and for a while just told the gal to “just take this old frame which works fine and drop the new lens right in.” She was always willing to do just that but one day pointed out that, “You know, if something does go wrong with the old frame, the warranty is expired and you’d then have to pay for the new frame without insurance help. So this is how I’ve collected a drawer full of older glasses and frames.  I have a certain simple style I like so most of them look similar enough that I was rarely sure which was which.

Then I decided to make it worse by designating a couple of frames to hold just one type of lens (driving, computer or reading are what I call my use cases) and each well matches what I need to do each. But since they all look alike, I was doing this optical dance too often of picking up a pair so I could read only to struggle because I actually grabbed my computer set and so forth.

So I decided to solve this somehow.  I like the wire-rim frames but they don’t leave much room to add notes – which I couldn’t read anyway most of the time. So for a while I tried these tiny rubber bands my kids had left over from their days wearing braces, but those were still way too big and gave me a distinct nerd look I was not fond of.

The solution thus far has been tiny o-rings which I easily found inexpensive bags of on Amazon. They are all of 1mm inside diameter x 2mm outside diameter. They fairly easily stretched over the ear piece and are barely noticeable, almost too much so. But I can feel whether a frame has 1, 2 or 3 which tells me  what power the lens are without putting them on and looking around like a lost tourist.   Now these, I like. If noticed at all, I can tell folks that I’m going for a retro-Jetsons kind of look and even with no glasses on which means I can’t focus on anything, I can still tell which power of glasses I have in my hand. But, no one has noticed, so I had to burn that gag line here.  So, if you’re not switching to new colors and styles each year, this idea might be just your find for the day.  Here’s what they look like in use.

Okay. I’m going to go rest up since work is kind of slow today anyway.   I really would love hearing that you checked out a story or two from my collection. I found them really fun to create, but wildly fun to share.  Regardless, I’ll be around to check out your coffee share this weekend as it looks like we’re not going anywhere this round.  Thanks for stopping by.

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Blessings all! 

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