aaah! i'm naked!

if you thought you were going to get to see boobs, sorry! that should have said, "aaah! my face is naked!" had a visit with the nice eye doctor at costco (if you have a membership i would like to highly recommend their services; not too expensive, they took my insurance, and the eye doc i got was surprisingly bullshit free. he didn't try to talk me into anything!), and got a pair of contacts to try out. as most of you know, i don't wear contacts. i used to, but i gave them up almost ten years ago, because my eyes always felt dry and weird. in fact, today i had that same experience! curious. although i think it's because 1) i'm out of practice and 2) the new prescription is going to take some getting used to. i'm not going to wear them everyday, but i would like to be able to wear them on occasion. like, maybe when i get married.

this is where i waffle. on the one hand, i'm very much "dude, i'm blind, i wear glasses, whatever." D met me in glasses. he thought then (and thinks now) that i'm foxy in them, but he thinks i'm foxy out of them as well. on the other hand, i feel like there's this idea that women who wear glasses normally should try to dress up for their weddings, and this usually means replacing their glasses with contacts. not many pretty-pretty princesses are shown in eyewear, just like not a lot of brides are shown with four eyes. my glasses are a part of my face, and they have been since i was 11. the few years i wore contacts i still always felt like a girl who wore glasses, like a bit of a fraud without them on. today my face felt naked and weird, and i had nothing to fiddle with or clean. my wedding will probably be nerve-wracking enough, do i really want to do it with a naked face? i guess we'll see.
in non-feminist wedding musings, here's a photo of one of the things i got D for valentine's day. yeah, i don't buy into all that commercial bullshit, honest, but i like being able to buy him weird or funny things anyway, so why not use this holiday as an excuse? plus, he is sort of my valentine, so there's that. it's this neat little cookbook i found at a used book store, called maverick sea fare. it's a caribbean cookbook, but so much more than that. it's all hand-drawn and lettered, as you can see, and has these charming illustrations on every page. it's also a bit of a journal, documenting a woman's life on board a chartered sailboat, as a wife and cook. there are quite a few funny little stories, hints and tips for living aboard a boat, along with all the recipes. at the time it was first published, in 1977, some of the ingredients weren't part of everyday american cooking and were seen as fairly exotic. now, of course, it's not too strange to see pineapple and fish together, or cashews migrating from the nut bowl to the dinner table. i admit, i bought this as much for D as i did for myself. he loves boats, he loves sailing and cooking, and i loved living on a boat. it's a secret fantasy we have, of building a catamaran and doing chartered tours to make money and spending the rest of our time sailing the seas and making awesome meals. well, he'll build the boat, but i'll cheer him on, and i'm all for sailing around and waking up in the morning to have coffee on the deck, getting cozy in our berths at night, and seeing new places. of course, i also kinda want to do this in an RV (old school, like an airstream) too. when we talk about it, we refer to it as our "caravan years;" after the kids are out of the house and set up on their own, we want to live a little nomadically for a while. doesn't that sound nice? it's a bit early to plan for that, but i can't help but indulge in thinking about it on occasion.