wherein Liz breaks her glasses

[edenfalling]

Today was a decent day until 9:30pm.

I was walking home (in the dark) after closing the smoke shop. As I passed a tree just on the north side of Cascadilla Creek, I felt a spiderweb on my face. I reached up to brush it off, touched my glasses, and felt/heard something small and solid fly forward and land on the sidewalk.

Good, I thought, figuring it had been something caught in the web, which I would not have wanted to actually touch me.

About ten seconds later I noticed my glasses suddenly felt funny. The plastic tab that sits on the right side of my nose seemed oddly cold and metallic, and the positioning of the right lens was drifting slightly downward.

I pulled the frames off to check and sure enough, I hadn't just knocked away a tendril of spidersilk. I'd knocked off a piece of my glasses.

I backtracked and found it on the sidewalk, using my handy-dandy keychain LED mini-flashlight, but when I got home and examined it under full light, it became obvious that it wasn't repairable. See, the plastic thingy is held onto the metal prong by a screw that passes through a little plastic loop. If the screw had come loose, I could have fixed that. (I have a lot of spare glasses screws.) But the plastic loop itself is broken, and there's nothing I can do about that.

Tomorrow morning I am calling my local optometrists/glasses shop and making an appointment ASAP. Because while I can get away with using the broken pair for reading (I am doing so now, in fact), and I do have my previous pair of glasses as emergency replacements for daily use, that combination is not going to cut the mustard for very long.

...

Damn it all. There goes more money down the drain.

ETA: Nevermind! rurounitriv suggested that I buy a cheap pair of sunglasses and use them for replacement parts, which reminded me that I had some old prescription glasses lying around, so I cannibalized those instead, and hey presto, my glasses are back in working order! *sparkles at the world*

Comments

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Maybe not so much money as you think. I had that exact thing happen to me a couple weeks ago, and I went to the local drugstore and got a pair of cheap kids sunglasses. A couple of minutes and I had the little plastic thingy off the sunglasses and onto my own. They look and feel exactly like my old ones. I think it cost about $6 total.

[edenfalling]

*ponders*

Oh, hey! That's a brilliant idea. And you know, I think I may even have an old pair of prescription sunglasses in a box somewhere, still unpacked from my move...

*dashes off to hunt the elusive dead glasses*

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Let me know how it turns out. :)

[edenfalling]

It worked beautifully! I found an unexpected trove of old glasses -- I thought I only had one pair back, but apparently I had three others as well, and the sunglasses -- so even though one pair had a different style of fastening for the nosepieces, I was spoiled for choice. Yay!

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Yay! You've even got spares, and all without a penny spent!