Hmmm...I wonder if we're out of the drought now?

It's been an interesting evening meteorlogically. We had a tornado warning around 830 or 9pm. (that was fun) With all the required lightning, thunder and hailstones. (the tornado stayed a little south of my house. It was actually right over the area of my OLD house. I havent seen any news reports of damage, but there was apparently a LOT of rain. The weatherguy said that some manhole covers were blown off by the rainwater in some areas.

After that storm, my dad and I went out to pick up some photographs he had printed at Walgreens...on the way home, the next storm decided to hit.

Ever seen Titanic? The scene where Jack and Rose are running thru the corridor towards the little kid and his grandfather and the water is chasing them down the corridor...that's about what the streets looked like tonight, but with a lot more water.

I thought we were going to need pontoons on the side of my dad's Rav4. Halfway home, the hail started. It wasnt bad...wasnt big, and stopped about 10 seconds after it started...and then the rain got worse.

We were getting close to our house, came around the curve where the nimrod neighbors have to always park their cars and some asshat was coming towards us, VERY FAST, and didnt even wait for us to get past the cars that were on the side of the street. I'm sure that in the morning, if I go and look there will be tire tracks from that guy's car on the neighbors front lawns. Who drives 60mph IN A MONSOON on a street that curves like the letter "S"?????

After that we just had to float to the front of our house, drive out of the river that our street had become (gotta love fulltime 4wheel drive!) and made it into the garage. Just before the next batch of hail hit.

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I may have mentioned before that I've had a problem with my vision. Well. I went to the eye doctor the other day for him to check the progress of the problem. He confirmed that it's optic neuritis. (inflammation of the optic nerve) and he agreed with the ancient neurologist I saw earlier this month that it was migraine induced optic neuritis. This time he told me the optic nerve was swollen (it wasnt when he looked the first time last month) but said that was normal.

Told me that he could give me steroids to make it heal quicker, but that the steroids come with all sorts of icky side effects and that it's probably best to just wait for it to heal. As much as I'd love to have this heal quicker, I agreed with him that I didnt want the steroids. So, now I may have wonky vision for the next 2 to 3 months. (why do the estimates for recovery keep getting longer???)

Yay...I might get my vision back for Christmas.

It's not the fuzzy, dim vision in my left eye that's bugging me so much as the mild loss of some of my color vision. As you can tell from the title of my blog, I love yarn, and from most of the content of my blog, I love to crochet. It's pretty freaking boring to crochet when one of your eyes cant see some colors very well. Sure I could close that eye and just use the one good one, but things look weird. I never understood what it meant to lose your depth perception or color vision until this happened. Believe me, I'd rather lose my hearing than my vision. I am so hoping that when my eye heals (in 2 or 3 months...argh!) that my color vision in my left eye comes back with it.

I have a cabinet full of all sorts of different colored yarns, and none of them look appealing to me right now. It's really messing up my love of crochet. I really want to make something, but I lose interest after the first few rows.

I cant wait for my eye to heal.

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At least I can still read, and when I need to rest my eyes but I still want to read, I discovered a way to still read. My dad bought me a computer program called Text Aloud. It comes with realistic sounding computer-generated voices. I got it yesterday, and I just love it. It reads text on the computer to me. I can copy fan fiction stories to the program for it to read, or I can go to Project Guttenberg and download a book to the program. It'll read whatever text I put into it. It's probably one of the coolest programs I've ever had loaded into a computer.

The thing I like about the program is that I can turn the text into an audio Mp3 and then transfer that into an iPod or some other mp3 device. I can even burn it into a CD if I want to, altho the size of the file kind of limits you to what you can put onto a cd. I could end up using lots of disks if I do that.

I dont have an Mp3 player (yet) and saving the stories to a CD to play on a car stereo is ok, but all I've done so far is save some stories to Mp3 format so that I can just play them off of my computer. If I get an iPod for Christmas (hint, hint) this program will come in handy.