2018, 3d Quarter

July dawned hopefully when on its first day I toured the wine country in Virginia with a friend and we settled into a delightful afternoon of sampling wine offerings from at the Stone Tower Vineyard, and the future looked bright.  The month closed out with a medical emergency which I am still recovering from--the sudden loss of sight in my right eye due to a torn retina requiring immediate eye surgery.  Two more eye surgeries later, it finally seems that perhaps I will save much or most of my sight in that eye.

In between that yin and yang, I attended a memorial service at a lovely church in Ambler, PA  in honor of a cousin of mine, Andrea, who led a notable life as a social worker.  Enroute to that somber event I enjoyed a minor-league baseball game in York, PA, once the capital of the USA for a short while, and paid tribute to a friend of mine who lost his life in 2010 defending our freedoms in Afghanistan, whose likeness was emblazoned on a flag alongside the road on a hill overlooking downtown York amidst a sea of other flags honoring other fallen heroes from the York area (Adam was born in York) in this century's wars.  I also watched July Fourth fireworks from my back steps after enjoying a holiday lunch at the local gourmet pizzeria, forlornly hoping that any or all of my estranged children would finally show up, had lunch with my mentor from my former workplace, ran a few miles on the Mall with a colleague from my former agency where we ran by and momentarily joined in with an active rally for a woman's right to choose the medical provisions she desires or needs for her own body, and hiked the Billy Goat Trail in MD with a friend.

August was tied up with healing from my two surgeries of last summer in a mode of recuperation  known as face-down recovery, where you lie face-down in stillness for 14 hours a day for a couple of weeks following retina surgery, an infamous procedure known only to those unlucky persons who have the onset of torn or detached retinas, largely, I am told, due to genes and can suffer from multiple eye surgeries in amelioration of the condition.  It sucks bigly, and in the second surgery the medical team filled my eye with oil to get the retina to adhere to its bed of cones and rods, a procedure which requires a subsequent surgery to get the oil back out again.  Late in the month I did go for a walk around Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River with a friend, ate out a few times with friends and had a friend take me to see a baseball game at a minor league park in MD.

September was similarly spent sedately, wherein I enjoyed a holiday lunch on Labor Day at my local gourmet pizzeria, discovered that some miscreants had stolen my spare tire sometime during the prior months from my vehicle while it was parked in my driveway most likely, and armed my household following this second expensive invasion of my curtilege during this century.  Mostly I hung around waiting for the day when the oil would be scooped out of my afflicted eye and replaced, naturally, with eye fluid, a procedure I yearned for because the eye never felt right, being filled with a foreign substance within a closed system, and it led to the infrequent but maddening onset of white flare outbursts within my vision in that eye when, as the doctor explained to me, the optic nerve was momentarily uncovered by some movement of mine, a condition which I scrupulously sought to avoid by trying not to have any sudden movements of my head.  Late in the month my sister came to town on business, and we spent a wonderful evening and a day wandering around the District visiting museums, eating in Chinatown and drinking in Irish Pubs.