Your not-so-faithful correspondent isn't feeling so good this weekend.  I saw the eye doctor on Saturday and had an expensive test done which involves being injected with dye to make the vessels in my eyes show up while a guy takes a series of pictures of them.  The dye is yellow, and one of the potential side effects is to turn me yellow as well, but that hasn't happened either time I've had the test.  It did happen, very much so, when they did the pre-test test to see if I was allergic to the dye, so I was hopeful... but my skin remained resolutely pink.

(My urine was yellow, though, very much so.  I mean, not like normal pee, but a rather vivid shade of neon yellow.  I really wanted to take a picture to show you all, but then I realized you probably don't need to see that.)

Anyway, the vessels in the pictures were lit up like Christmas trees (this is a bad thing) and the doctor had a lot to say about dangers and risks and potential hemorrhages.  I have to go back for more shots and lasers.  The lasers aren't so bad, but the shots are awful.  They only do them on weekdays, too, so Chris will be working and I won't be able to enlist him for moral support/help getting home.  Since it's a surgery, I have to put on the hospital pajamas and go in there alone anyway, so even if he came to the hospital, he could only do so much.  Anyway, the alone part isn't really the problem; it's the needles in the eyes.  I read online that they're developing an oral medicine diabetics will be able to take for this.  Believe me, it can't come soon enough.

And just to complement the unpleasantness of the surgery itself, the fact that it can only be done on weekdays means I have to take days off for it, which means my school gets a free chance to complain at me.  Oh, and these needles are about $500 a shot, so my finances for the next few months are well and truly fucked.

Just to end this on a lighter note, and to remind myself that life isn't all grim, here's a little anecdote from our trip to the zoo today.  (I wanted to take pictures of animals, so I dragged poor hungover Chris along with me.  He bravely suffered through hordes of children, and took almost as many pictures of appalling English on t-shirts as he did of animals.  I, as usual, was captivated by the cute little meerkats and spider monkeys and tiger cubs.)

At one point we saw this huge spider up near a window above the lions' den.  (Thank you, Korea.  I will never sleep in this country again...)  My attempts to photograph it drew the attention of a little boy and his mom standing nearby, and they talked about spiders and Spiderman until the boy said wistfully, "I want to get bitten by a spider so I can be Spiderman too..."

I hope for his sake that none of the spiders here are poisonous.  If they are... then, uh, this wasn't such a light anecdote after all...