Broken Glasses

I mentioned that I had my eyes tested a few posts back. I had intended getting new glasses made up from the prescription in a month or so's time, possibly in the New Year. At any rate, once the expenses of Christmas was out of the way. But, unfortunately, I managed to break my glasses yesterday. I don't know how, exactly, but I was clearing up a load of magazines and papers which are in a basket under the table I had next to my armchair in the living room, and somehow or other my glasses got dropped on the floor and when I picked them up I found that one of the arms (for want of a better word. I don't know what the correct term is for the arm that is joined to a pair of glasses and has the hook bit that goes over your ears.) got bent up in an awkward position. I attempted to bend it back carefully, but without success, because it broke off the main frame of the glasses completely. I had thought it might be able to be repaired with super glue or similar, but having had another closer look this morning I can't see how it could be done. I'm just going to have to go and order a new pair in Spec Savers in Milton Keynes, where you can have two pairs of glasses for £69. So I can have one pair for reading and another for driving, watching television or when we go to the theatre or cinema (which, incidentally, we do very infrequently.) I had hoped to have a pair of bifocals, which have both in one pair of glasses, so I can read things like product labels in the supermarket when we go shopping, which we do a lot these days, to check on such things as sugar content, as Carol is diabetic.

The weather has got a good deal colder over the past few days. We've had to put the central heating on.  I put it on early this morning when I was making our mugs of tea. It's on most of the day if I'm in the house. There was a real chill in the wind when I was outside about to take Carol to work. This morning I had to melt the ice off the windscreen of the car. The leaves are virtually finished falling off the trees and things are looking a little bleak.

Eye-Test and Sky Upgrade

Last Friday I had my eyes tested. I haven't had an eye test for quite a while. You're recommended to have this done every two years at the most. It is well over two years. When Carol and I went into the Milton Keynes Central Shopping Centre a few weeks ago we managed to go into the Boot's opticians and booked both of us for eye tests. Carol's is this Friday, after work. I don't mind having my eyes tested, but the only bit I don't like is when they more or less clamp your head into this machine and you have to look at a small green dot of light and then they shoot a jet of air onto your eyeball. It has something to do with detecting pressure of your eyeball which will show up any deficiencies or other. I'm not sure what. But just as the jet of air strikes it's a natural thing to blink and it took several attempts to get the test done. Really don't like it. Probably not as bad as giving blood, but it has to be done. Then, when you go into the main testing room you do a test which shows how good your peripheral  sight is. You have to look directly at a red dot and then they turn on and off white blobs of light and you have to press a button when the lights come on. I passed this with no problems. Anyway, it turns out that my distance vision has improved and officially I shouldn't need to wear glasses to drive. I'm somewhat amazed as I would have expected my sight to have deteriorated as I get older, but apparently not. My left eyes require lenses to adjust my sight for close reading. So, not as bad as expected. I will have to wait until next month to have new glasses made up and I'm having varifocal lenses made so I can see distance and close-up with one pair of glasses. They will cost in the region of £250.

Yesterday we had our Sky television package upgraded to what is called Sky Q. It comes with the latest Sky box, recorder and broadband router, and we also have a television in our bedroom. I bought a small HD television in Sainsbury's the other week and the whole system includes a mini Sky box so you can have all the Sky channels on two sets. A vast improvement on the old Sky+ box and superior picture quality. We had considered putting the set which is in the lounge upstairs and getting a slightly wider screen set to go in the lounge, but on going to look at sets we decided that a bigger set wasn't really required. If it's too big it would just dominate what is a fairly small lounge. Which is why we went for the 20 inch set for the bedroom and left the original 32-inch set where it has always been in the lounge.

A few years ago we decided we wanted to improve our television system. When we moved to this house, which must be around 5-6 years ago, we had Freeview, which comes through a conventional television ariel. We didn't have access to a decent outdoor ariel, so we had to make do with a rather inefficient indoor ariel which sat on top of the television.  The quality of the television picture was not very good as a result.  So, around three years ago, we decided to look at having a new television provider. We imagined we could choose between perhaps two, for example, Virgin and Sky. It turned out that we couldn't have Virgin because that comes through cable and apparently Milton Keynes doesn't have the cable infrastructure. Quite a surprise when you consider that Milton Keynes is such a modern city, no more than 50 years old. I would have imagined that there would have been a cable system in place when the city was built originally, but apparently not. So we had no choice but to get a Sky multichannel package. We also wanted to change our broadband internet  provider, having been TalkTalk customers and not finding them a very good company. Which is why we had Sky providing television, broadband as well as our landline telephone service.