In early February, I was planning on leaving Tucson, but my landlord, John, asked me to stay to be his ride across town to the eye clinic where he’d get cataract surgery. They won’t do it if they don’t see a driver for after. His surgery was on Feb. 28th. He offered to let me stay free. Well, hmm, had to do some plan changing and whatnot but I agreed. And than, not a week after I’d planned on leaving, I woke up one morning and discovered an anomaly in my left eye. Looked it up on Google and self diagnosed it as a torn retina. Since that is a serious condition, I jumped in the car and drove down to the VA hospital ER. They looked at it, and made an appointment for surgery for a few days later. What a coincidence that I had eye trouble just like John.
The day arrives, John takes me to surgery, I never get into the op room, they send me home and have me come back the next day. After the surgery, I discover that my vision is now totally fuzzy. I’m told that is a typical side effect of laser surgery used to tack weld the retina back in place. So, okay than. And with that, I was stuck here in Tucson. Instead of leaving on March 6th (it’s April 10th as I’m writing this), I’m here getting the follow up care including cataract removal. The cataract surgery and the new lens installation happened 2 days ago. And there looks to be a complication. I may need another surgery because it looks like the retina didn’t get fully attached the last time by the laser.
I’m getting so antsy, I got the wanderlust but I’m stuck here! And to make things even worse, the neighbor behind my RV decided he didn’t like looking at 2 RVs here on John’s property so he called in and reported it, even though John told him that I was only still here because of emergency health reasons. The county sent a nice letter to John about it and said they’d be out to check up on the possible rule violations on this property with an RV being a living space for someone and perhaps being too close to a utility building and that will happen in 5 days. I might need even more laser surgery (though I’m told it wouldn’t damage the new plastic lens they put in) and I’m getting nervous because I don’t want a big tow truck pull up and try to attach to my RV (unlikely). More likely there’ll be a fine or an order to move the RV within a certain period. I don’t know what kind of enforcement the county can do either? Can they put a notice on my RV’s door that says I have to vacate in 24 hours or something? I have no idea, neither does John. There’s a lot of assuming going on. I have scouted around and found a suitable RV park several miles west of here but I’m a bit nervous about driving my RV out of this space with only one working eye, I’d rather have my eye working better and somewhat healed before I try driving my RV out of this tight space with all the big rocks everywhere and the difficult driveway with cactus on either side ready to scratch my paint if I get too close.
So that’s what’s going on here in Tucson on this nice sunny day with 86F temps. If I’d had my druthers, I’d have been back on the road by Feb. 6th. But life got in the way.
Okay, with that bit of news out of the way, I’ll try to focus (eye joke) on some of the stuff John and I have done around town. Much of the time I’ll be checking things out by myself but occasionally, John and I will head for a brew pub in the region we’ve not been to yet. So far, since November 2021 we’ve checked out 18 of the 30 brew pubs in the region. And I’ve found my favorite regional beer, Dragoon IPA. Yum!
On one of our trips, took these because it’s kind of interesting how much open space there is around the downtown area.
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But I did take some pictures of the trip between Mojave and Rosamond as there’s interesting terraforming going on with the Golden Queen Mine. It’s been there for over a century. I would pass by it every morning as I headed south the 13 miles to Dan’s place.
