Sunday, November 13, 2011

One downside? Once you can see clearly, you start to realize that a lot of those football players are just big fat guys.

We have two TVs in our house that are available for adult use. (There are actually THREE TVs, but one TV is required to always be tuned to a Disney or Pixar movie. Currently, we are on a continuous loop of "Peter Pan". Last week it was "Howl's Moving Castle." I don't know what the coming attractions are. But one TV is always on a cartoon. It's Mr Bunches' Law.)

Of the two TVs we have for ME to use, the downstairs one is the nice, big TV that I like to occasionally watch a sports game or two on -- taping a football game and then watching it while I relax with only the gentle background sounds of "Toy Story" wafting down from the other room.

I prefer to watch sports on that TV because it's big, and I thought that the smaller TV made it too hard to see the games -- I'd complain to Sweetie that the guys were too small and I couldn't see the ball and she'd laugh and think I was just agitating for a big-screen TV.

But then yesterday I was giving a seminar and tried to look at my powerpoint presentation and it was all blurry, and it was only 10 feet away, and I was about to say "Hey, your monitor is all messed up" when it occurred to me:

My eyes are 42 years old.

And they may not be working so well anymore.

I mean, my eyes are not little Brett Favre's eyes, able to keep going at a high level forever, so it's not surprising that as I come out of the locker room and start the second half of my life (that is a great sports metaphor, is it not? Makes that fourth quarter of life seem as if might be exciting rather than a dreary melange of Ben Gay and jell-o cups.)

So what I need myself are some good, cheap eyeglasses, which is lucky for me, because for years now, I've known about Zenni Optical, a company that has long been one of my heroes in the marketing world, because Zenni has always championed the idea that glasses aren't a $200 fashion statement -- they're a medical necessity.

Zenni knows that if you need glasses, you may not be dying to pay twenty billion dollars for a pair of glasses, but you still want to see and look good, so what they do is they take modern materials, a unique manufacturing system and marketing method, and let you buy the glasses directly from them. With no marketing middlement, the costs are lower.

How much lower? Frames start at SIX BUCKS.

Six bucks, for glasses that look really good and more importantly, LET ME SEE THE GAMES. Or my seminars -- I had to make up my topic and the only thing I could think of to talk about was "Froot Loops." Not my best professional moment.

The lesson here? You can't go wrong mentioning Brett Favre, but you can go wrong mentioning Froot Loops. So what you want to do is make sure that you're not overpaying for your glasses. If you, like me, need something to help you see, why pay more than six dollars for a pair of glasses? I like paying less, I like the ease of ordering them online, I like the selection, and I like being able to realize that I've actually not been watching football at all, all this time. Who knew that "PBS Night At The Opera" resembled a football game so much?

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