Allergies

For the past three and a half weeks, ever since ragweed season started, I've been alternating between wanting to claw my eyes out of their sockets and blinking furiously because they were watering so bad I couldn't see straight. Being both frugal and lazy, I kept hoping they'd get better on their own. Well, they weren't, so today I gave up and went to the doctor. The nurse, the medical student who was working there, and the doctor himself all looked at my eyes and winced, so they must have been pretty bad. But now I have steroid/antibiotic eyedrops, and in the words of Johnny Fever, "I can see!" The old optics are still pretty sore, but at least they've started to improve already. I can type without the words looking like they're underwater, and I can read well enough so that I finished the manuscript of Hickam's THE AMBASSADOR'S SON, which is an excellent book, well worth reading when it's published next spring. But read THE KEEPER'S SON first, which is even better, probably because it has a broader scope in its story and a greater range of characters.

I wrote a little today and should finish the current book tomorrow or the next day. I thought I could "see" the rest of the book in my head a couple of days ago, but today I discovered I still haven't figured out quite all of it. I don't foresee any problem wrapping it up, though.

So far I've managed to keep to my goal of watching a chapter a night of ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP and have enjoyed it a lot so far. There's a nice touch of perhaps unintentional humor in the first chapter. The bad guy's henchmen go to the newspaper office to wreck it, but the hero shows up to stop them. Unfortunately, he stops them by engaging them in one of those epic, set-destroying, Yakima Canutt-directed brawls so typical of Republic Pictures, and the office winds up wrecked anyway (although by the next episode it's back to normal as if nothing ever happened).