Sometime between grade 7 and grade 10 I found myself becoming interested in girls. The really good looking girls seemed to already have boyfriends so I started taking a closer look at the other girls, and I discovered that there were a lot of pretty cute girls that had to wear glasses. Some of them also had boyfriends but there were enough girls wearing glasses that were without boyfriends and were available for me to ask them out. That is how I became extremely interested in glasses wearing young ladies, and although I wasn’t what one would consider a stud, I now had my share of dates. My affinity towards dating glasses wearers lead me into doing a bit of research on why people needed glasses. In young people, which was the category that most of the girls I dated fell into, the most common reason for girls to need glasses was because they had myopia. And of course I also found out that there were 3 classes of myopia. Low was for those people that needed between -0.50D and -3.00D of correction. Mild was where most of the young ladies I dated fell, and that was between -3.00D and -6.00D. High myopia was for those that needed over -6.00D of correction, and I don’t think there was even one girl at my school that fell into the high myopia range. When I went off to university, where I studied Civil Engineering. I finally got to know a few girls that needed prescriptions that were in the -6D and over range, but in this category most of these girls wore contact lenses. This made then fairly hard to spot, but I did manage to date a few high myopes during my university years. During my final year at university I was sent out to work for a company in Davis County to get some practical experience in land surveying. I did have a car, but the weekend of the Davis County Fall Fair saw me staying in my motel room for the weekend so I could attend the fair. The fair started on a Friday with a big parade, so I watched the parade and then paid my entry into the fair grounds. It was interesting, but a little disappointing as I had not spotted any decent looking myopic young ladies. I stuck around and had supper before I went out to watch the tractor pulls. That evening there was supposed to be a young folk’s dance in the arena, and I wanted to go to it after the tractor pulls finished. I went into the arena, where the group that was playing for the evening had already started their first set, and looked around. The crowd was young, but there were a few kids that looked to be in their final year of high school so that only put them 3 to 4 years younger than me. I bought a soda and sat at one of the tables while watching the crowd. I soon zeroed in on a rather attractive young girl with shoulder length brown hair. She was doing something strange, as she had a pendant around her neck that she seemed to be bringing up in front of one eye and scanning the crowd. The dance ended and a couple of girls left their partners and came back to the table to sit with the girl. I watched as they all sat out the next dance, but for the following dance both the other girls were asked up by the same guys they had danced with before. As I got up to ask the single girl to dance with me it dawned on me that possibly the pendant she was wearing was in reality a monocle. She was an easy girl to dance with, and when her girlfriends didn’t return to the table I stayed on the floor with her for a couple more dances. The crowd was getting bigger, and my single table was being coveted by some of the new arrivals, so I mentioned to my dance partner that I really needed to move my soda or I wouldn’t have a place to sit. She then suggested that I could join her, as it appeared that her friends were busy now. I walked her to her table and she sat down while I went to rescue my soda. When I returned to her table I introduced myself and she told me her name was Angelina Brookman. The band was loud enough that it made it hard to talk, so I asked Angelina to dance again. I had gotten a better look at her pendant, and to me it really did look like an optical lens, but I was hesitant to say anything to Angelina about it. We spent the rest of the evening together, dancing and chatting. During one of the group’s short intermissions I managed to ask Angelina about her pendant, and from the way she blushed when I broached the subject I knew she was embarrassed. Then I told her I thought that it looked like an optical lens and that when I had first seen her she appeared to be holding it in front of her one eye and using it to look around. She confirmed that this was indeed the case, and that she was actually very nearsighted. I then told her that it was fine with me if she put her glasses on, as I rather liked the looks of a girl who wears glasses. “Mine are pretty strong.” Angelina said hesitatingly. “It is no fun for you if you can’t see what is going on around you. It honestly doesn’t matter to me if you wear glasses.” I responded She reached for her purse, took out a glasses case and removed her glasses. As she slid them onto her nose I could definitely tell that there was quite a bit of strength in the lenses. They looked quite good on her though. “Well, you were not kidding about them being fairly strong, but they look really good on you. They soften your face a little and make you look a little more alluring. If I ask you to go to the dance here tomorrow night, would you come with me and wear your glasses?” I asked. Angelina agreed to wear her glasses the rest of the evening, and she also agreed to go to the adult dance the following evening. By the end of the next night we liked each other very much and we went together for the next couple of years until she finished her nursing course and we were able to get married. By then her glasses had gotten a few diopters stronger and her newest lenses were pushing -20D. One of the things Ange and I liked to do during the winter was to snowmobile. We each had our own machine, and we often went off into our cabin up in the forest. We could drive in over the summer, but in the winter we had to park the truck and trailer just off the gravel main road and go in to the cabin on the snowmobiles. I checked it one time in the summer with the odometer on the truck and it was a little over 2 miles off the secondary road to the cabin. This weekend a good snowfall was expected, so Ange and I loaded up the snow machines and headed out for 2 hour drive to the cabin. I backed the trailer into the driveway and made sure the truck was off the road before I unloaded both of the snowmobiles. Ange and I then headed down the snow covered driveway to the cabin. The solar panels on the cabin roof had done their job and the battery bank was fully charged. We always turn the refrigerator off and drain the water lines when we leave, but it didn’t take long before I had a roaring fire going and the cabin warmed up fairly fast. Ange had turned the fridge back on and had unpacked our groceries. We only kept canned goods and unopened dry goods in the pantry so she put the newest food behind the older stuff so we could eat it first. We were both tired from our week at work, and from the ride in over the fresh snow, so we made an early night of it. The next morning the propane heater had kicked in after the fire had died down and the cabin was cool but comfortable. I got the fire blazing again; we ate our breakfast and cleaned up the dishes. Now it was time to head out on the machines and attempt to pack down the trails in the fresh snow. We were having a great time, although it was a little slow going for me in the powder. Ange was doing better because she could use my tracks. I always go first, because Ange, even with her strong glasses, doesn’t really see well enough when everything is all white to break a trail. We had been out for a couple of hours and I looked behind me to see where Ange was. I couldn’t see her, so I turned around to find her. She wasn’t very far back, but her machine must have slipped off my tracks and it rolled onto its side. Ange had gone off into the deep snow, and she was on her hands and knees in the snow searching for something. I had to struggle to get over to her through the knee deep snow, and when I saw her my heart almost stopped. Her glasses had come off and I could tell she was having no luck finding them. When Ange and I had married, her prescription was close to -20D, which almost matched her age. Since then, over our 5 years of marriage, her prescription had increased to the point where the glasses that were now buried in the snow had a -25D prescription in the lenses. At -20D Ange had been pretty helpless without her glasses and by the time she reached her now -25D her helplessness had only increased. My love for girls who needed glasses, along with my liking for outdoor recreational activities had placed my wife, who I loved dearly, in this position and I had to do something to help her out. I searched all around in the snow, but I didn’t have any better luck than Ange had. I tipped her machine back upright, started it again, and tied a rope between both machines. I convinced Ange that all she had to do was to try to steer in the direction I was going, and to give her machine a little bit of throttle to help me out if I seemed to be getting bogged down in the snow. It was slow going, but we finally made it back to the cabin. Once inside we thought about, and discussed our situation. We could not leave one machine unprotected at the cabin as it was more than a possibility that it would be stolen. She could not see well enough to drive, and to head out for the truck with her snowmobile tied by a rope to my machine was going to take us even longer to get to the road than it had taken to get the mile we had traveled back to the cabin. Finally we decided that our only option was for me to drive home and get her spare pair of glasses, but that was going to take me 5 or 6 hours. I headed down the driveway. Our tracks from the night before had been completely obliterated and when I got to a couple of open spots in the driveway the wind was really drifting the snow into whiteout conditions. When I reached the truck I soon realized that I would never make it into town. It was getting dark, and the road had not been plowed recently. Conditions were such that it likely wouldn’t be open until the following day and I couldn’t take a chance on leaving Ange alone at the cabin overnight if I couldn’t return. I turned my snowmobile around and headed back. Ange knew that I had returned too quickly for me to have gone into town, and while she was disappointed to have to go around functionally blind for the next 24hours she was glad I had not left her blind and stranded. Wishing that we had either placed a pair of Ange’s glasses in the truck, or had left a pair at the cabin did me no good. I was tossing a small glass snow globe around from hand to hand as I sat pondering what could be done to alleviate the situation. Her glasses lying in the snow lead me to thinking that her lenses in those glasses could really be called ice cube lenses now after all the time they had been lying out in the cold. And then it hit me. The snow globe I had in my hand felt to be around the same size as the myodisc bowl in the lenses in her glasses was. I had no idea of the optical qualities of frozen water, but I suspected that even if it was far from perfect a plano concave lens could be made from ice. The ice cube trays in the cabin were made from aluminum, and the inside was nice and flat. It was going to have to do. I filled the tray with water, and I put it outside, because it was a lot colder out there than it would be in the refrigerator. It didn’t take very long before there was a thick skim of ice on the top of the tray, so I brought it back inside and chipped the ice until I broke the top coating away and exposed the water. There had to be just about the same thickness of ice on the bottom and that was perfect for what I was about to do. I sprayed the glass ball of the snow globe with that no stick cooking stuff you spray on to a frying pan and I carefully placed the snow globe into the tray. Then I set it outside to freeze completely. By the time I checked on it an hour later the water in the tray had frozen completely. I managed to remove the ball from the ice, and then I warmed the aluminum up enough to release the ice from the tray. I immediately returned the solid block of ice to the porch and sprayed the tray, filled it with water, and set it outside to freeze again. It took another hour before it was frozen top and bottom, so I again chipped the ice away and put the snow globe into the ice. I then set the tray outside and now I needed to get some sleep. Ange woke up when I got into bed and asked me what I had been doing. I didn’t want to get her hopes up, so I just told her I was trying an experiment. The wind had died down by the time we woke up in the morning so I had hopes that the road would be plowed if and when we made it out. I cooked Ange breakfast, and then checked on the snow globe frozen in the ice cube tray. I managed to remove it so I now had 2 optically, but likely optically imperfect lenses. I had removed the lenses from a plastic framed pair of sunglasses I had brought with me, and I took a credit card that was ready to expire. I cut the credit card into the exact shape of the lenses of the former sunglasses. I knew Ange had a pupillary distance of 64, so I put the card in one of the lenses and measured to where a 32 mm point would be from the center of the nose. I then used my pocket knife to make a hole in the cut up credit card to be as close as possible to where her optical center would be. I had to work out in the enclosed, but unheated porch or else my work would melt. I took a hacksaw and shaped the ice as well as I could using the credit card as the template. Ange managed to stumble her way out to the porch to see what was keeping me so busy so I let her hold up the one lens that I had completed in front of her eyes. She was amazed that she could actually see – not well, but sort of and far better than she could with nothing to aid her extremely myopic vision. I went ahead and shaped the other lens. Now I had 2 lenses, but of course they would not stay in the frame. I had thought about that problem during the night and had come up with what I thought was a solution. I whittled a notch into each side of the lens that would allow me to put the lens in the frame, and if I could hold it there I could use an eye dropper to feed water into the grove in the plastic. I did the bottom of one lens first, and then I did the top. The right lens was now fixed in the frame after only a few minutes in the cold. I repeated the procedure with the left lens, and finally I had both lenses secured. The only problem now was to avoid bringing the ice cube glasses inside. But all we had to do was get both snowmobiles out to the trailer, and then Angie could ride home in the warmth of the truck. She didn’t have to see anything until we got home and I could get her spare glasses for her. Ange had a full face helmet, but I was afraid that if she used it her body heat would build up inside the helmet and melt the ice in her lenses. If that happened, or even if the lenses started to melt just a little bit the optical qualities that allowed her to see would soon be completely gone. Our only option was for her to ride very slowly, without a helmet on. With her tuque and her parka over her head she thought she would be warm enough. I closed up the cabin as we normally did, because I didn’t know when we would be able to get back and we started our slow ride out the snow covered road to the truck and trailer. The truck was a little temperamental to get started, but finally I had it running. I helped Ange inside, but first I had her take her glasses off and I placed them safely in the bed of the pickup. I had to shovel a little to be able to get the truck through the snow, but fortunately the county plow had not put a big bank across the driveway and I knew I would be able to get through onto the road. I loaded the 2 snow machines on the trailer, tied them down and managed to get rolling towards home. When I backed into the driveway at our house I didn’t even bother putting the snow machines away. I went into the house, grabbed Ange a pair of her spare glasses and brought them out to her so she could see to go inside. Then I backed the trailer into the garage and unhooked it so I could pull out and close the doors. When I came inside Ange asked me where the ice cube glasses were, and I had to run back out to get them from the bed of the truck. She wanted me to take a picture of her wearing them, which I did, and then she put them in the freezer. I guess they became the topic of conversation for a while with Ange and her girlfriends. That night when we went to bed I got plenty of thanks for making Ange the temporary ice cube glasses. Specs4ever August 2018
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