I was thinking idly about cross stitch, as one does, yesterday, and wondering if that was another seeing ability restored to me by the cataract surgery. One of the curses of severe astigmatism is that it confuses the outlines and directions of what you're looking at.
Mostly I adapted , but anything built on diagonals such as cross stitch, is, except for big gauge work, close to impossible. Not that I felt it as a big loss, it not being a favorite stitch. But it was annoying in the same way as my bafflement with kumihimo, many part braiding, same diagonal and directional problem.
The recent studying of braiding brought this to mind, and I realized this isn't half the issue it was a few weeks ago.
And I also realized I can probably dust off my birding binoculars, same reason.
I tested yesterday and they work a lot better. I don't see one and a half jumping birds now, yay. Just bird by bird.
This serpentine train of thought came about after I'd been out walking and saw the fluttering of what looked like a couple of warblers.
A bit early for fall migration, but nothing has been on schedule this year anyway. We have some year round warblers, yellowrumps, but these were much darker, flitting about like butterflies ss they do.
And of course, having given up my binoculars years ago because of the vision issues, I couldn't get a close view
Home again to one of my favorite pages in Peterson's guide, Confusing Fall Warblers. If even Peterson got confused, fine for me to be, too.
I still don't know what I was seeing, except they were much darker than yellowrumps. Since we live bang in the middle of the Eastern Flyway, could be anyone. Particularly if storms have blown them off course.
Anyway my binoculars can come to the Preserve with me again now, good. And I may or may not bother with cross stitch, jury's out.
In other unimportant news, I seem to have run out of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, but there's still the writer giving very funny interviews and well worth tracking down.
He's all over YouTube at book events.
And, to show I can be as trivial as anyone, remember the titanic struggle I had with the mouthwash bottle cap a while back? Where I concluded that it was a bad batch since the interior prongs were too long ever to slip past the other bit? I opened a new bottle yesterday, just squeezed, turned, it opened. Because the prongs were about half the length of the faulty ones.
