by Mum went back to the eye clinic in Timaru on Wednesday morning. The sight in her left eye hadn’t improved as much as she’d hoped following her cataract operation. It turns out that many of the central blood vessels in that eye have basically died; I think it’s a form of macular degeneration. This came as a bit of a shock. She’s been given some treatment to stop it from regressing further, but I don’t know if she’ll ever get her central vision back to anything like normal. She’s having the cataract operation in the other eye (which hopefully hasn’t suffered the same fate) in a couple of weeks. Before Mum had her eye looked at, my parents went to the travel agents to book their flights. They’re flying to the UK on 18th May and returning in the second half of July. They’re flying Singapore Airlines, as they usually do. I wonder, if they’d done the eye business and the flight booking business the other way round, maybe they wouldn’t have booked those flights at all. Anyway, it’s good (and somewhat surprising) that they’re making the trip.
After I talked about all of this with my parents yesterday, conversation turned to my trip to New Zealand later in the summer. I didn’t have to read too closely between the lines to figure that Mum would rather I didn’t bother. That’s despite anything Dad said to try to make me feel better. The expense, finding someone to look after Kitty, and the journey itself, it’s a lot when your mother can’t really be arsed whether she sees you (even if she only has one half-decent eye to see you with). It’s a shame because New Zealand is a beautiful country and I’d already psyched myself up to go there, but I think I’ll wait till next year when my parents may not come to Europe. (There is always the possibility that Mum and Dad end up cancelling their flights for whatever reason, like in 2019 and 2020 and nearly last year too, in which case I probably will make the trip, even if a later booking hits me in the back pocket.)
When I spoke to Dad on Monday, I said that Mum would score above average on an IQ test, the values that she lives by are admirable, she has a good sense of humour, and she’s always been extremely helpful on a practical level. But unfortunately her emotional intelligence is similar to Kitty’s. Dad didn’t disagree with me; in fact he just laughed. I also said that he should make more use of Mum’s good sense of humour to help defuse stressful situations. Since I said that, Kitty has been lovely; she’s shown more affection that I can remember. The only snag is that once she’s fed up with sitting on my lap and snuggling up to me, she then uses me as a launching pad. Her back legs are so strong that when she digs them into me to launch herself, it can hurt. That’s a small price to pay though.
The latest round of the Scrabble league started earlier today, with me now up a division. In one of the games, my opponent opened with ZED in the middle of the board. Any six-letter extension to the left (and there are lots of these when you consider all the -ized words) would hit the triple word square. A bit later, with the extension still unused and unblocked, I found CAPONIZED for 72. I think to caponize (or -ise) means to castrate maybe a goose or a turkey, but I’m not entirely sure. That game, along with all the others, is still ongoing.
