It’s Good Not To Be Blind…

I had one of those oh crap moments a the Tuesday before last. My glasses fell off at night, and when I went to look for them, mostly in the dark and of course not being able to see clearly because my glasses are now on the ground somewhere, I stepped on them, bent the frame severely and ground the lenses into concrete making big pits and scratches.

Amazingly, even though one of the arms was bent almost 90 degrees, I was able to bend it back but looking through the lenses was extremely ugly, especially at night.

This pair of glasses was a polycarbonate lens type that I had gotten at Lens Crafter because I had destroyed accidentally my previous pair and had no usable spare and they were able to do it in a hurry. But after having a set of polycarbonate lenses I didn’t want to do that again, the chromatic aberration off the center of my vision drove me nuts (red/blue fringes around high contrast lines) and in addition they scratch easily.

I don’t know exactly how long I have had the Lens Crafter glasses but it’s been long enough that they no longer had my prescription. Lens Crafter only would do plastic or polycarbonate, I wanted glass, and they were expensive.

So I shopped around for places that would do glass, and Walmart was pretty reasonable, $59 for the exam, $39/lens, and frames $15-$150 where most other places frames started at around$150 and tended to go up to around $1500.

Turns out my vision has changed quite a bit and I no longer need glasses nearly as strong as the ones I had, did have 2.25 diopter, needed only 1.5 diopters. I thought my eyes had pretty much totally lost their ability to accomodate but actually with the new glasses I can focus from infinitity to about 16 inches with the glasses, and up to about 10 inches without, so not all that bad.

Things are so much clearer now, being able to focus over a greater range, distant is clear, I can see the cross elements on the Queene Anne towers from ten miles away, as as well as read the lowest line on the eye charts, it’s strange how bad things can get out of focus but not be noticable when it happens gradually over time.

And then with the glass, I no longer have the issue with noticable chromatic aberration at the sides of my field of view. It’s an accident that turned out to be a positive.

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