Then and now

I finally sucked it up and replaced the sunglasses I lost last summer. They were prescription sunglasses, which translates as "pricey", so I was reluctant to declare them irrevocably lost. Plus, I kept expecting them to turn up. I last remembered wearing them as I parked my car in front of my house one afternoon. But they somehow went missing before I made it into my room just a minute later. Logic says that they have to be somewhere in the house!

So I suffered through our October campaign of fieldwork without sunglasses. My eyes really hurt! But now that summer is upon us again and it's really starting to get bright out (seriously, is the sun brighter here than elsewhere?) and I have at least a month in the field coming up, I decided it was time to move on.

Check them out. Here we have side-by-side portraits of the new (right) and old (left) sunglasses, modeled oh-so-compellingly by yours truly (gotta love that crooked grin):

Which do you prefer? I have to say, I'm more a fan of the old ones. I really dig the cats-eye style. But aesthetics aside, I think the new ones are better. They fit better, for one. The old ones were always sliding down my nose. When I bought them, they told me that you just had to warm up the frame to bend it a little, and recommended using a hair dryer. But I'm a bad girl; I don't actually own a hair dryer! So I was doomed. Plus, they let in a lot of light from above. So much so that they weren't super effective unless I also wore a hat. My new ones are slightly larger and sit much closer to my eyes, so they do a great job at blocking light from all directions. Hooray.

I'm a little annoyed with Lenscrafters, however. In all their advertisements they claim that your glasses will be ready in an hour. Mine took 3. Urrr. Fortunately, I was prepared for a wait (since I wasn't about to drive to the far side of Sacramento and back twice) and had brought my backpack complete with reading matter. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that I'd left my New Yorker in lab yesterday, so I finished reading last month's Scientific American instead. You know you're a nerd when you're loitering around a mall reading Scientific American on a Thursday morning...

My new sunglasses are supposedly the same prescription as the old ones and as my current glasses, but I'm not so sure. They seem subtly off. It's not that I don't see with the same crispness or clarity with them, that's fine. But they've been doing funky things to my depth perception today. I keep trying to take steps up when the ground is actually level. Hmmm... Maybe it's because I'm not used to the combination of prescription and shading/polarization/glare protection (yeah, I got all the bells and whistles, but it seemed important in light of the fact that I'll be spending at least half of June on a boat). Or possibly the prescription of my current glasses has changed slightly in the past year and a half of wear-and-tear.

The most disturbing thing is what you're able to see with polarized prescription sunglasses. Every mote of pollen in the air and covering my car is now rendered visible in crystal clarity. Yikes! Of course, the presence of said pollen has been made unavoidably clear to me by the fact that I can't stop sneezing and blowing my nose. But add to that the sight of all of those allergens and I really wish I were somewhere far away and unvegetated.