Intraocular Lenses And Vine-Ripened Tomatoes

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There are times when I get really mad at myself for not thinking to do stuff that's as simple as simple can be. In this instance I didn't think to Google up the readily available information about cataracts and cataract surgery on the internet. I literally asked people I correspond with to tell me what to expect, and none of them thought to tell me to look it up on the internet.

When I did that I used Jack's mention of IOLs as portal to get into this conversation. Intraocular lenses. The Results page reported ten gazillion hits. Apparently cataract surgery is a popular subject. More popular than ever with the Baby Boomers reaching the cataract stage of life.

The questions I've had about whats going is suddenly staring me in the face. This type of surgery has been in common practice now that every possible question about it from the patient to the doctors has been considered. Even when I clicked on the link to the first web site about it I got excited I had to stop reading after just a few paragraphs. That's why I'm writing about what I'm gonna read before I read it.

There is no obsession like my own current obsession, and when I'm not obsessed about anything I start getting depressed. I know better than to let that happen because I've done it deliberately before and may be lucky I came out of that little experience alive. Reading the first paragraphs was all it took to delight me with the prospect of a new obsession.

I've obsessed on the visual modality before and read lots of technical material I probably didn't understand all that keenly, but I did get it in there and left it for the rain to settle it down. There's nothing more embarrassing to me than to be handicapped in some way and not knowing it.

After a while, the psychological implications of what the foveal, parafoveal, and peripheral focus areas resolve to, reframed itself into a more intriguing insight that permits me to create more terse, unexpected, smart-ass remarks on the spur of the moment. What else is life for? '-)

The result of my getting obsessed makes me excited. Sometime so excited I have to get up and move around to contain myself. That's why I walked out on to the second-floor deck just outside the room my computer is in. Out there is where I keep the one plant I didn't take to my brother's greenhouse for the winter.

It's a pleasant ritual for me to go outside and look at this tomato plant. I put it in this big ceramic pot I borrowed from my sister-in-law, and it's produced fruit in two cycles. In the spring when I bought the plant at Lowe's and repotted in the ceramic pot it started growing and produced some tomatoes about the size of a golf ball.

In mid-summer the plant produced blossoms infrequently, but they didn't pollenate so well. I thought it was because of the problems the honey bees were said to be having, but that was wrong. Tomatoes are self-pollenating. Who knew? I figure my quest to produce some vine-ripened tomatoes had come to an end for this season.

Although I figured the plant would eventually die I decided to apply some fertilizer I had and keep it watered. By this time my goal had changed from farming my own vine-ripened tomatoes to finding out how long I could keep this plant alive before it croaked or Jack Frost bit it's nose.

If I stand out on my deck looking west at the sun setting in the sky and it's reflection off the family pond producing the impression of having two suns, the ornamental cabbage plant I've kept alive for over a year now has leaves that are getting greener with the cooler weather and the reduction of the length of the day. I like keeping stuff alive, including me.

The tomato plants had a second season. All of them. The upside-sown tomatoes I planted coming out of the bottom of the five-gallon plastic buckets I cut a hole in had twenty-four tomatoes growing on them when I hauled them on my should over to my brother's greenhouse.

The second cuttings I replaced the smashed plants that got killed when the handles of the plastic buckets broke got broke when I carried it over to the greenhouse, so I took a serrated steak knife from my kitchen and lopped off a couple of branches from the right-side-up plant in the ceramic pot.

With those two cuttings in hand I walked over to the greenhouse, took the steak knife and jabbed it up through the hole coming out of the bottom of the bucket to loosen the dirt in the bucket. Then, I dipped the cuttings in rooting hormone, and jammed them rudely up into the loosened potting soil, and they hadn't lost a single leaf in their new home when I looked at them yesterday.

This is a very exciting development. Growing tomatoes is opening itself to me slowly, but surely. I learned something today. My brother told me about how to know when a blueberry is fully ripe on the bush. The way you tell is that the stem of the berry turns brown. I can taste the difference even if the blueberries are approximately the same color.

It's the same way with tomatoes. When I walked out on my deck to take a break I saw one of the tomatoes on the bush in the ceramic pot that had been bright red for a week or more laying on the deck. It had fallen off the plant. I inspected the still attached stem, and it had turned color to a dark, brownish green. When the tomato was fully ripened, it fell of the plant of it's own volition. Now I know when tomatoes get as vine-ripened as they can be. It's when they become wireless. '-)

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