Live and Learn

So what on earth is this picture? Well, it's not relevant to anything else I'm going to write about, so we'll get around to it later -- I don't like a series of posts with photos.

I learned something today from an unlikely source. For many, many years I've been telling everyone urging me to get flu shots that I haven't had the flu in memory so no shot. I am still coughing, though less often and less violently than I did earlier the week. That's really the main symptom. So my ophthamologist convinced me that I have the same kind of flu that her children both have had - not a stomach flu, just this cough and, for me only a brief fever, resolved quickly with a couple aspirins [much more serious for her kids].

What an enlightening visit I had today! First of all disabused of my prideful feeling of being immune to flu. Then, happily, finding that a cataract first noticed by her two years ago is advancing with only a glacial speed so it's not time for surgery yet. And through the wonders of technology she showed me photos on a computer of the inside of my eye, the optic nerve and slight cloudiness of the cataract, the little blood vessels. I find it amazing that she can actually look into my eye and even more amazing that it can be photographed then and there for me to look at too. Of course I never leave her office without my credit card unscathed. My contacts are okay but the glasses I use about half the time need their prescription rebalanced. Ah, well ...

So the picture above is a stunted little pine tree full of pine cones, all liberally covered with a bluish growth that I am too ignorant of botanical matters to define as normal, fungal or whatever else it might me. You had that all figured out, right?