I got in the car last night to go home and the sun was shining brightly. I noticed my glasses were pretty dirty and reflecting all the goop on them so I took them off to clean them. Untucked the front of my t-shirt, started wiping the left lens, and promptly broke the frames in half.

Fucking typical.

I called Jenn at home, who pointed out that in the interim I could wear my prescription sunglasses for the trip home, and had her call around to the Binyon’s and Lenscrafters franchises in the local mall and find out who would take our insurance and who would do an eye test on short notice (my prescription was old and my right eye needed some serious updating).

She called back and got me an appointment at the Binyon’s - they said they’d take the insurance (Lenscrafters said they would bill me and I’d have to bill insurance; thanks, but what a pain) and they had a doctor on staff to do the eye test.

I raced home, picked up Jenn, and barely made it to the appointment.

The eye doctor experience was different than I remember it being a few years ago when I last did it. Then again, I went to a different doctor then, so maybe it’s still the same there. Now they have this digital imaging technique where they take a digital picture of the inside of your eye rather than dilate your eyes and look in there that way. It’s $20 extra, but I wanted to try it for novelty’s sake, so I paid. Pretty cool. The only down side is the flash - it goes off, literally, right in front of your eye so you see spots for the next 15 minutes or so. They also had this machine that you look into and it auto-focuses on your eye and prints out a baseline prescription. Very cool, particularly from a techno-geek standpoint. I dug it, and had I been given the opportunity, I’d have played around with it for a while to see how it worked.

Anyway, I got my prescription, and it’s slightly stronger than my old one but things are much clearer. I gave it to the salesperson/technician and picked out some new frames.

We started doing paperwork and it turned out they were having a buy one get one free sale on lenses, so I handed over my sunglasses to get updated lenses in those, too. The salesperson started running the numbers and all that, then said, “Okay, cool. We’ll have these for you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?!?!

The guy on the phone said an hour. When we got to the store, he said an hour. All the way through the process, the phrase “one hour” was key. Tomorrow?

Apparently, because it was after 5:00p and the insurance company was closed or something, they couldn’t verify coverage, so I was fucked.

Awesome.

So today I’ve got no glasses. I’m not totally blind or anything, but don’t give me directions by street names because I can’t read the signs. Thank goodness my job is sitting in front of a monitor; I’m near-sighted, so I’ve got no problems there. I do feel a little naked, though. Hopefully I’ll hear from them today and pick up my new glasses tonight. (I do have a spare pair… but I packed them and I don’t remember which box they’re in. So I have to wait. Fucking typical.)

I do surveys and tests and crap online when I find them. I’m a sucker, I admit it.

I just took this “Super IQ Test” over at Tickle and got 147, which is pretty much in line with every other IQ test I’ve taken since grade school. Apparently, I’m also a “Visual Linguist.” Here’s the longer description:

The way you think about things makes you a Visual Linguist. This means you are highly intelligent and have many diverse talents. You have especially strong linguistic talents and are very good at interpreting visual information. You’ve got your feet on the ground, but your mind is capable of very complex, abstract thought. Compared to others, you are easily able to see situations from many different angles. You also understand how things work in a very practical way.

The real kicker came in an email later, though:

Visual Linguists know what they know and don’t particularly enjoy having to explain why or how.

That’s probably the most accurate statement any test ever has come up with. It’s exactly how I function. I know what I know, just trust me and don’t make me explain it to you. All it’s doing is wasting your time and mine.

This weekend was pretty eventful. Besides spending the majority of Sunday packing, cleaning, and painting, Saturday afternoon was spent in a pyrotechnician training course put on by Western Display Fireworks. Jenn and I both went, and over the course of about five hours they went over all of the Oregon State Fire Marshal rules for fireworks.

The first part was a little dry because it was geared for people who transport fireworks (like, commercial drivers and such). I’m not a driver, so it wasn’t too interesting. The second part was better, though, as they reviewed the rules and regulations for putting on fireworks displays and such.

After the class, Jenn and I both took the General Operator Certification test, so we can be licensed pyros. We’ll have to shoot three shows in the next couple years if we want the actual certification, but we did one last year, so only two to go. Might be cool. (Interesting side note: the guy teaching the class, who is also the president of Western Display Fireworks, has pyro certification #1 in the state of Oregon. Kinda cool.)

After the test they had a product demonstration where they’d announce what kind of firework they were going to shoot and then fire one off to show you what different things do. During one of the demonstrations, a box of two-inch mortars either split or fell over or something and started shooting at us. Pandemonium ensued, but thankfully no one was hurt. One guy fell off his bench and hit his head, but he was fine. It was sort of funny to watch the instructor guy, though - he just sat there and took it all in. Didn’t even flinch. I guess you get comfortable with some things after you’re exposed to them for long enough.

Friday afternoon my home loan officially funded and recorded, which means the house is officially mine. Part of the offer agreement was to let the current owner live there rent-free until the fifth of April, though, so I don’t have keys yet.

Turns out the current owner will be out on Saturday, April 3, so I’ll get keys then. We don’t have the utilities scheduled to be turned on until the fifth, though, so we can take a couple of loads of the fragile stuff over and that’s about it. Maybe just run around in the empty house and enjoy the fact we’re moving.

The packing process kicked up a load of dust this weekend so my allergies are going nuts. I think this is the worst part of the whole process - the packing and actual moving. Next time I’m going to try to budget to have our stuff packed and moved and everything. I’m taking the opportunity while packing to get rid of stuff I don’t need anymore, but couldn’t I do that while unpacking just as easily?

We also started painting this cobalt blue wall in our apartment back to white. We’ve got two coats of primer on there and we’ll put a third on tonight before painting it back to the original white color. The primer’s doing a great job of covering the color up; I’m not sure why people complain so much about colored walls.

I love that Microsoft has gone on a security kick and is starting to lock things down, but let me offer a thought: The reason most desktop users don’t use Linux is because it’s too fucking complex to configure. To that end, I just read an article about how to enable remote debugging once you’ve installed Windows XP SP2. What a pain in the ass. I can only imagine what other software hoops I’m going to have to jump through to get the simplest things to work. I should probably read up on that.