Old and new

Well, I've been back in Reading for a week now, and have managed to get a certain amount of things done. I have not one but two new pairs of glasses, one with reaction lenses so they'll also do as sunglasses. They're two different colours (metallic blue and red) of Ray-Ban titanium frames... for children. Or "adults with smaller faces". Ahem. I spent a lot on them, and it still feels wasteful to have more than one pair of glasses, but they're the first frames I've seen in years that I've liked.

I also got a surprise - I'm able to wear contacts again! I ended up at a smaller chain of opticians, mainly due to finding nothing I liked in the main chains, and so had a new optician who I got chatting to and told I hadn't been able to wear contacts for 6 years. She fitted me with a pair and gave me 5 days of free samples, and I had them in for 12 hours yesterday! Very happy with that.

I've also caught up on sending out information to various people as promised, and have lined up some people to catch up with. And done an awful lot of cleaning in the flat - I feel like I've been replaced by an alternate reality version of me!

What I haven't done much of yet is study - I had some freelance work in during the week, and a guest for the weekend, so I'll try to get down to it seriously next week. I'm actually still very tired.

I was rooting around in the attic, looking for a few things and finding more that can go in the bin, and mildly depressing myself by seeing all these things that I meant to do or make or study at some point. Well, I can't go back and undo anything, so I just have to start from now.

My guest had asked me to check some English for him over email ages ago, which I happily did, and he offered to pay me for it. I had totally forgotten about it, but he hadn't and handed me some cash last night. I treated myself to a kiddies' craft kit, "Winter Birds" from Buttonbag. Quite cute, if a little rudimentary.

Other than that, all the travel is booked for going to Spain for Christmas. Now I have to book a trip to Dublin and one to Japan for next spring. I really, really want to go now but there's just too much going on right now, so if anything slips by even a week or two I'll need to be in the UK or at least not on holiday in the other side of the world.