Managing the eyes through the winter....

Moonlighting as tinyhome-dwellers-slash-modern-day-homesteaders has proven, on balance, good for my eyes.

It's always been a little challenging to maintain that precious balance for my PROSE lenses where I wear them enough to maximize benefits (and, of course see enough to drive safely, work etc) without overwearing them to the point where I'm forced to take a break from them at an inconvenient time.

I worked from home for several years. Last fall, shortly before moving to what I'm euphemistically calling the farm (hey, it's a work in progress), I rented a premises for my business a few miles away that had enough space to include a kind of living-room area, which is where my daughter does her homeschooling stuff while I'm working.

So now, all our electronics are at the office. I have no computer at home. (Theoretically, I can use my laptop there with the iphone wifi hotspot, but I almost never even try to because the hotspot is always flaking out - at home, that is, nowhere else - and I've given up trying to get Verizon to do anything about it. Truth to tell, I wasn't very motivated.)

No screen of any other kind either, except my cell phone.

So consolidating all my screen time to work hours is, I'm quite sure, helping my eyes. It was always the evening hours I'd sneak in here and there on the computer that were so hard.

Another benefit has been that I can take my lenses out around dinner time instead of bedtime. If I don't need to drive or be on the computer, I really don't have to have them for vision... most farm chores this time of year really don't require great vision, and the days are short so we often tuck in quite early for a nice quiet evening. I read out loud to my daughter a ton in the evenings and if I don't have the lenses in it's a little harder on the eyes vision-wise but surprisingly it actually seems better this way - since reading a lot at night with the lenses in makes my eyes pretty ragged by bedtime. Lensless with an occasional drop of NutraTear (don't ask me where to get that, it isn't made anymore and I'm using stuff that theoretically expired a few years ago), I feel pretty durned good. There seems to be a happy medium with lens removal time... early enough that my eyes haven't gotten 'tired' of them, late enough that I don't run out of tolerance for naked eyes.

Then there's the heat & humidity aspects. If you're living in a very small space, that's decently insulated, but not too tight on all the sealing, it gets and stays warm easily and doesn't need the heat on too much of the time, and the air isn't too dry. (Of course, we're in a wet climate - Pacific Northwest - and practically surrounded by wetlands.) My eyes are so much happier than with central heating and that awful forced air. Of course, we're running a little oil electric thing now and next year when we have a wood stove I might be singing a different tune. But I'm enjoying what we have for now.

Happy Monday all.