I can't be out in bright sun without sunglasses and not get a headache.

This is me too. I am even squinty and cranky on bright cloudy days. Maybe I have a little vampire blood in me.

I have prescription sunglasses, too, and they were well worth the expense.

Happy half-birthdays, Noah and Grace!!

For any baseball fans out there who've seen a Cubs home game on TV or at Wrigley this year, the Tribune has a nice article about the new tradition of playing Steve Goodman's "Go, Cubs, Go" after a win. I've liked the song for years, but hearing the fans bust out singing it even before the PA starts playing it is fun. It's included on the two-disc best of CD that I have, along with "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request," which is also referenced in that article, and Goodman's cover of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."

I squint a lot, have lost every pair of sunglasses I ever really liked, and also can't find my regular glasses. My eyes will probably pop themselves out and run screaming from my permanently pinchy scrunched-up face before I'm 50.

ita, your migraine-free wakening was the best news I've woken up to in a long while. And a multitude of yays for the good-hearted cab driver and for lounging and oceans and the opportunity to pack a lot of dresses.

That book everyone's been pimping to everyone else is by the fellow known chez Zmayhem as The Boy Who Broke JZ's Heart. We had an almost decade-long friendship-with-occasional-benefits that finally slid into a relationship and then imploded hideously about eight years ago. We met up again briefly about five years ago, at his request, a meeting at which he said all the right things: he'd made foolish choices, he felt the loss of me every day, he wondered if it would be possible to be friends again but he understood if I couldn't do it. Which I couldn't.

But he's a brilliant writer and was always the underachieving demi-fuck-up of his overachieving family (sister a sculptor, twin brother a novelist-journalist, parents with joint professorships at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Univ. of CA) and despite all the residual bruising and mournfulness I'm still kind of glad he finished something (that's getting better word-of-mouth than either of his brother's novels).

So, um, yeah. I will never read the thing, but other people should.

And in completely other news, happy half-birthday to Grace and Noah! It sounds like Grace's condition has improved since you made the wise decision to transfer her out of that hospital that was making all of you so miserable.

For what it's worth, my ophthalmologist told me that not wearing sunglasses during the day, especially when it's bright out, increases one's risk of cataracts. The risk is greater for people with light-colored irises.

I squint a lot, have lost every pair of sunglasses I ever really liked, and also can't find my regular glasses.

And there's a benefit of being as blind as I am! I can't lose glasses because I have to have them on when not asleep or in the shower. (although I guess I could lose my sunglasses)

This is my problem with sunglasses. And those are the cheapest they have. Somewhere between that and $10 lies the right sunglasses for me.

My first pair of reading glasses has clip on shades, which I do love. Hmm. Must find books to take with too.

These sunglasses are cool, by virtue of being invented thousands of years ago: [link]

And there's a benefit of being as blind as I am! I can't lose glasses because I have to have them on when not asleep or in the shower.

Exactly! I can never figure out people who lose their glasses, because how can you not know where you put them? The only time I ever panic over not finding mine is if I've taken them off while half asleep and then having them fall onto the floor overnight (or get knocked onto the floor by the cat pawing through my stuff on the bedside table). First, I worry about stepping on them, then I have to get on my hands and knees and pat around for them since I can't see where they are.

I'm still mourning the loss of my $125 pair of Serengetis. But I had them for 8 years so they had a good run. I'm in a $14 pair of Target sunglasses now but I want a nice pair eventually.

Are sunglasses like umbrellas, in that the more expensive they are, the more likely they are to be lost?