Today's Walking Photos: To avoid burying the lede, I’ll start off by saying Happy Birthday To Me. But there’s more to the story, so do read on if you dare.

Aaaarrrrggghhh, unbelievable – my last post here was on February 12th. See, remember the snow and ice in my last post? Well, so that got worse, we got more snow and ice and wind, and a few days later our power went out. For three days. And then there was the downtown company that we’re working on emptying out, and things got really busy there and I never seemed to have time for a walk. And then March arrived and I thought okay, weather’s calmed down and work has calmed down and hmmm I just might have spare time again to squeeze in some walking and then NOPE SORRY BUDDY IT’S DETACHED RETINA TIME AGAIN.

Yeah, in the same dang eye where I had cataract surgery in August and then a detached retina in September, I now suddenly had a fresh and new detachment in a different spot, and it was severe enough this time that it couldn’t be repaired with an in-office procedure like the one in September. This called for a full-on surgery in the hospital, called a vitrectomy. Inexplicably avid readers of this blog may recall the gas bubbles that were placed in my eye during the September procedure – well, for a vitrectomy the eyeball is actually nearly filled up with a single gas bubble which serves the very important purpose of placing necessary pressure on the surgical repair site, but which in the meantime completely occludes the vision in the eye until it is gradually absorbed into the body. Did I mention that the bottom edge of the bubble – which appears at the top of one’s visual field because everything is reversed in our vision – undulates like the surface of a dirty fishbowl as one walks or moves one’s head? Or that when one is at rest, the bubble pulsates with one’s heartbeat? Well, consider it mentioned.

So yeah, I haven’t felt terribly inclined to walk. BUT. It is long-standing tradition here at Pat’s Walking Photos that my birthday is the one day each year when I post a photo of myself. As a result I realized this morning that today was the day when I needed to resume walking. Your reward (?) is the top photo in which you can see the rakish eyepatch I’m wearing much of the time in order to decrease the disorienting and fatiguing visual information that my addled, gas-inflated, post-surgical eye is constantly sending to my brain. It doesn’t completely eliminate this extraneous information, but it does help. 

I included the second photo because a) I’ve been away so long that you clearly deserve a bonus photo; and b) it would have made a perfect Birthday Throne for my self-portrait, but it was too squarely situated in someone’s front yard for me to make such an audacious move. But it’s fun to admire, right?