The 3 summers

Most folks agree that Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer.

Meteorologically speaking, summer begins on Friday, June 1.

And don't forget the summer solstice on June 20.

So take your pick: summer is either in full bloom, won’t launch until this Friday or is still three weeks away from arriving.

I’ve got a summer to-do list that is daunting but do-able. There’s something about writing things down and posting them in a place I can see them every day that encourages me to just do it. Many of these things are not of “climb Mt. Everest” magnitude, but they’ve just been floating around in my head in that vague, yeah, I ought to get that done, sort of way.

The first item on the list is seeing the eye doctor. Two years ago I got my first pair of bifocals. That didn’t go well. The doctor assured me my eyes would “adjust.” After several weeks of not being able to see anything through either the distance vision correction part of the lens or the up-close vision correction part of the lens, I went back and informed her the alleged “adjusting” wasn’t happening and could I please have my single vision lenses back. I would just take them off for reading and up-close work.

This has been followed by two years of taking my glasses off and putting them back on about 100 times a day. You do not want to know how many time I have lost them. You do not want to know some of the places I have left them.

And now I’m at the point where my take-them-off-to-do-up-close-things plan is not working so well cuz I’m not seeing so great up close either. The only ones liking this are the dogs, because doing nails is such a pain in the butt I’m admittedly not doing it as often as I should. I’m probably headed for my second “first” pair of bifocals. Maybe they’ll actually be helpful this time.

I finally made an eye doctor’s appointment for later this week. I am resigned to the fact she’s going to give me the lecture about how your eyes change “as you age.” I know this because she’s done it before. She’s very nice but needs to eliminate that word from her vocabulary before one of her “aging” patients clocks her over the head with her purse.

But it will be good to get that checked off the list. Maybe I won’t even have to take my glasses off to do it.