Fine things

Here are some fine things for today, my half-year birthday:

• It was warm enough to sit outside at Agate Alley Bistro, where I had my current favorite dinner, the muffuletta sandwich with shoestring onion rings. J. had macaroni and cheese with salmon and a lemon drop cocktail.
  
• Afterwards, I ran into Z. at the supermarket! She was buying a jar of kalamata olives, so I bought one too.
  
• I was disappointed to get to the venue for a talk by Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland, only to find that the talk was cancelled (with the hope of rescheduling it for next year), but that gave me more time to get things done, and I can make a point to read her book before she does come to visit us.
  
• While I was driving to the restaurant, they started to play the Nielsen clarinet concerto on the radio - I've heard it before and it's so cool! I understand that it's technically quite difficult, so I doubt D. would want to tackle it, but I can find it on YouTube and enjoy it that way.
  
• I watched episode five of Wolf Hall and didn't remember having seen it before, when I watched the series last year, so that was a nice surprise.
  
• Also I'm rereading A Natural History of Dragons as the series is now complete.
  
• And I learned an interesting and useful thing about eyes. As I mentioned, four weeks ago I had symptoms of a big "floater" and arcing flashes, so I went to make sure my retina was fine and it was not; there was a little tear that they had to fix. From that I learned that having a new big floater and arcing flashes means eep, potential retina crisis! Then this week on Monday I had symptoms like that but less so, so I went to the doctor again and was fine. But yesterday (Tuesday) the symptoms were worse, so I called today to make sure these newer symptoms, very much on par with my original symptoms but in the other eye, were still covered by Monday's diagnosis.
  
  I ended up talking for quite a while with a tech there, and now I have a new understanding -- the symptoms I had four weeks ago were not actually retina tear symptoms; they were just ordinary eye aging symptoms and yet I happened to have a retina tear anyway. So I'm going to hope that my right eye really is just fine but aging.