The Spectacle Gremlin Strikes!

This house has a gremlin. It eats my husband's keys, and it HIDES MY GLASSES. And, um, I kinda need those.
Every night, I take off my glasses and put them on the nightstand. Every night. And they're not there. We've opened drawers to see if they fell in, we've looked behind and under the bed, we've looked on Husband's side of the bed, we've looked in the bathroom, no glasses. The Spectacle Gremlin has them.
We WILL find them, if for no other reason than they're in this house, but in the meantime I am wearing my old glasses. I can order NEW glasses on October 30th according to insurance, but we're planning for those to be prescription sunglasses, not conceding this pair to the gremlin.
My eyes are already tired and achey. It's not so much about the prescription (okay, for my left eye it is), it's the lenses themselves. The missing glasses were constructed to compensate for my blasted cataract as much as possible (yes, I have a cataract). These glasses on my face now were bought at Sam's about four years ago, no anti-glare coating, squarish lenses, and yeah, an old prescription in the left one. I drove to fill the gas can for the mower this morning, had the sun visor down and was squinting something awful, thinking, "Oh good heavens the sun's bright today" and then remembered just how much had gone into making my glasses. And what a wonderful change they were when I got them.
So now I'm trying to remember how I LIVED with these old glasses, and I'm remembering it wasn't good. For starters, I had basically stopped driving at night. Couldn't do it. Couldn't see. I hated driving when the sun was out. I have, in comparison to my new glasses, no peripheral vision to speak of. I find myself turning my head to look at stuff I'm pretty sure I should be able to glance at.
That gremlin better return my glasses, and SOON. In the meantime, I need to write on my hand, "NO NIGHT DRIVING!"

Brand-New Spectacles!!!

So I finally, after three and a half years, have seen an eye doctor. We have a new one who actually specializes in stuff like cataracts, and I happen to have a cataract that hadn't been looked at in... three and a half years.
It was so funny. Getting the prescription for my right eye was easy. Then he went to my left, and it was seeing double! Took lots of "Which is better, 1 or 2?" before it wasn't seeing double, then several more lenses to get it as good as it WOULD get, which wasn't great. That one's no longer fully correctable. And now I know why - cataracts are supposed to grow from the edge inward, but mine didn't get that memo. It's growing from the center of the lens, outward, so it's already right there in my pupil and already messing up my vision.
Hmmm... not driving at night anymore.
Surgery? Sooner rather than later. We're to think about it and prepare for it as an eventual necessity, because I could have thirty years to think about it or I could have three. Cataracts in young people are unpredictable that way. So just, sometime in probably the next five years.
We thought, when we picked this place, that it'd just be good to have an optometrist specializing in vision problems IN CASE I need surgery one day. We didn't know that seeing a specialist really does get different results than walking into the Optical Center at Sam's Club. Not that they don't do good work there - but if you HAVE a vision problem beyond just needing glasses, you should be getting examined by someone who can tell you what you need to do about it. Didn't know that! For example, I'd been told before at Sam's, that the problems I had were caused by the cataracts, and so changing my prescription at that time wouldn't fix anything. There was nothing else glasses could do. Well, that's not entirely accurate. There are lenses and frames, and then there are lenses and frames. Anti-glare lenses, and frames that are not my boxy square ones. The cute, narrow, rectangular frames that were all the rage about four years ago? Fine if you don't have that bad of a prescription, but the more you need glasses, the rounder your lenses should ideally be. And smaller is better. Why, I forgot to ask.
So this morning I ordered new glasses, which should be here in a week. I have small, oval lenses, a cinnamon-colored frame, and the man fitting them pointed out that the doctor had actually underlined "anti-glare" THREE TIMES on the prescription, which was funny. They're going to be a polycarbonate stuff for "aesthetic reasons, to not be so thick" which kind of makes me want to see just what sort of coke-bottle lenses I'd be getting otherwise. :)
And I'm to give my eyes a couple weeks to get used to them. Apparently, my eyes and my old prescription are so unbalanced, the new glasses are going to feel like THEY'RE unbalanced!