Doctor my eyes

The saga of my eyes, my cataracts, and my new glasses is entering the home stretch — la dernière ligne droite, as we say in French. Yesterday I drove over to the optical shop my insurance agent recommended to me a couple of years ago. It's only about 10 miles from our house. I had gone there about 10 days ago, after my doctor certified that my eyes were healed after the two surgeries (in June and September) to pick out new glasses frames and talk to the optician about prices and time lines for receiving the new lenses.

I was supposed to go to Montrichard earlier in the week, but a short-lived snow event a few days ago convinced me to wait until temperatures outside got up above freezing again before making the drive. I should get my new glasses in about 10 days. I can't wait to see if my vision is improved even more than it was after my second cataract operation in September. My next appointment with the ophthalmologist, barring some unforeseeable emergency, will be in about two years for a check-up.

I took the pictures in this post on March 5, 2007 — my birthday. Walt and I had driven up to the Mont-Saint-Michel for the occasion. We then spent the night in a hotel room on the Mont itself rather than on the mainland (sur le continent). I had never done that before. The photo above shows the big town of Avranches (pop. 10,000), about eight miles east across the mud flats and salt marshes from the Mont, on which I was standing when I took it.

By the way, the population of the Mont-Saint-Michel is 25. That's not a typo. More than a thousand people lived there — it's a commune (meaning "municipality") as well as being a geographical feature and a church — until the middle of the 19th century, when it became a major tourist attraction and its permanent population declined to about 200.