Good eyesight is a blessing. Losing it is a curse. To live in a country where corrective eyewear is readily available is a blessing. Having to wear glasses is a curse. I try to count my blessings and see wearing glasses as a blessing not a curse though I curse a lot about them and my eyesight.
Half a dozen pairs of glasses are stashed – in the stationary pot, behind the TV, in my handbag, beside the bed, in the kitchen, on the table – different glasses for reading, for cooking, for watching TV, for looking at road signs and map reading.
Sometimes I double up the glasses on my nose to peer at the small print on the road atlas. Wouldn’t want to make a mistake with my navigation would I?
Considering that all of these convenient places are no more than 30 feet apart in our trailer life it always astonishes me when I can’t find my glasses.
It’s a curse.
After a pleasant swim in a campground pool, I didn’t have a pair of glasses with me in the shower house. Why should I? It wouldn’t matter as I had showered more or less successfully the day before and had puzzled out the plumbing.
The cheap shower head in cubicle number one had misted my hair into a froth rather than rinsing it so I chose shower number two on day two.
For those of you who only shower at home – step in, turn on, soap up, rinse off, dry – considered yourselves pampered. Every campsite shower is different. They range from clean to marginal to disgusting, from scorching to cold only, hot knob on the left to hot knob on the right to one central knob with no possible way of ever achieving the right temperature, overhead blasts that you can’t escape to drizzles that barely make you wet, from dry floors with nice mats to swamped slithery tiles and why is it always my knickers that I drop in the puddle?
Some shower stalls are spacious; some take the skin off your elbows. Many shower fixtures are mangled, rendering them almost useless where the heavy-handed, impatient, lefty-righty-on-off challenged or half blind have damaged them.
The showers that day were clean. There was nothing else good to say about them. As an added nuisance they were coin operated. The day before I had popped a quarter in the slot of the coin meter, turned the dial clockwise then anti-clockwise several times, fiddled with the hot and cold knobs which gave no indication whether they were on or off, twiddled a lever on the shower head and stood under a fine spray five minutes longer than I needed to just to see if my quarter would run out.
Today, after setting myself up in cubicle number two (with a desirable-looking showerhead), towel on first hook, shower bag on second hook, clean clothes on third hook, shampoo and shower gel on shelf in shower, flip flops on feet, a quarter in hand and swimsuit still on I continued the complex process.
This shower came with instructions stapled to the wall in a font just small enough for me to have to squint and guess at what it said. I turned the dial on the coin meter to start, popped in the quarter, turned the dial fully clockwise, then back as instructed. Nothing happened. I twisted the hot/cold knobs violently, unable to make any on/off sense of them. I flipped the lever on the shower head back and forth and back and forth with increasing vehemence. Nothing happened.
I swore loudly. Nothing happened.
I snatched up my towel, shower bag, clean clothes, shampoo and shower gel, burst out of the cubicle and stomped – as well as anyone can stomp in flip flops – into cubicle number three. Everything was neatly redistributed on hooks and shelves. My last quarter held up sacrificially to the coin meter, and me stinking of chlorine thus badly in need of a shower, I squinted and peered again.
Aha! That’s where on is on the dial. My other quarter should still be ticking. Hesitating just long enough to grab a nearly empty shampoo bottle, I flip-flopped back to no. 2, clicked the dial to on, stood in the shower, turned the knobs and whoosh, I was nicely drenched.
Now all my kit is in no. 3 and I’m dripping in no. 2. Shall I dry off and collect it back to no. 2 while my time runs out?
Nah, I washed my hair three times with dribs and drabs of shampoo, then watered down
shampoo, then the bubbles that were left in the bottle, all the while encouraging the shampoo to run down inside my swimsuit in lieu of the shower gel I’d left behind.
That accomplished I remembered I had some crème rinse and with water still running I flip-flopped back to cubicle no. 3, brought it back, ran it through my hair and rinsed it out just as the water stopped.
Thankfully, in all this time, no one entered the shower house to witness my shenanigans and hear my hisses of s**t, s**t!, S**T!!, unable as I was to restrain myself to the oh gee, golly, gosh and shucks type of swearing heard on American prime time TV.
With a triumphant grin and a wonderful all over scent of shampoo and crème rinse, as well as a clean swimsuit ready to wring out and hang up, I toweled off and dressed.
No problem! Who needs glasses?
Where are they anyway?
Note to WordPress: I have messed with the captions on the above photos from Zemanta and lost the photo credits. SORREEE! They are Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Flickr and Flickr. I won’t do that again!
Which Way Now 101 