Adventures at the eye doctor

We got up r-e-a-l-l-y early (5:30 AM) to make the trip into Phoenix for my 9:00 AM eye appointment. Even at that, we still ran into gridlock once we got closer to Phoenix! We made it to 5th Avenue & Thomas around 8:00 AM...and tried to find a place to park, which we had no luck in doing. All the parking lots around the medical center and hospital are permit parking areas (i.e., you have to have purchased a permit and have it displayed on the windshield) except for a small lot which was completely full. There is the parking garage, but since we were driving our Lazy Daze, we couldn't park there since it has a 7-foot height limit. We finally found a Safeway parking lot about 1/2 mile away, so Earl dropped me off in front of the medical building, went back to the Safeway parking lot, and then I called him when my appointment was over.

After having my eyes dilated, Dr. Bloemker took a look at the spot and came to the conclusion that it wasn't anything serious. He told me that malignant melanomas can start out as spots, but if it was that, he wouldn't be able to see through it -- which he could. He did want to have a picture taken of the spot for future reference, but since the person who takes the pictures was booked up, I had to make another appointment to come back!

My next appointment was made for the Monday after Thanksgiving. Since it will be the end of November, we've decided to stay for a few days and do Christmas shopping.

While waiting for Earl to pick me up from the doctor's office, I called Kate to find out if they'd found our place in Quartzsite OK -- that's when I found out they had spent the previous night at Saddle Mountain RV Park. They were on their way to Quartzsite, and since they were about 50 miles or so closer to Quartzsite than we were, they made it to our place before we did.

After we returned, I set up my modem so that Kate and I could download email and surf the web. We were doing fine until suddenly I noticed that a couple of lights were out on the modem. This happens occasionally when the NOC (National Operations Center) is doing some maintenance, or is having bad weather, so I didn't pay any attention to it at first since it usually comes back online within a half hour or so. When it didn't come back up, I started looking at the modem more closely and noticed that the "Power" button was flashing -- not a good thing!

I called my installer, and Margo walked me through a few things, none of which worked. Since it was getting late, I decided to try again tomorrow.

In the evening, we all went to dinner at Taco Mio.