Finally went to doc to have my eyes checked out. She looked with a light, but I’m not sure she checked for scratches. There was a student there — students used to be at the doc’s once in a blue moon, which I accepted, but now there’s a student in the room every time I go.
The doctor decided I had dry eye due to dust allergies or hayfever, and prescribed some ‘artificial tears’ or Lacri-Lube.
I can handle eye drops easily, but this stuff is in a squeezy tube. It comes out in a ball and sticks to your eyelashes, melts, and runs down your face… my eyes are redder and sorer than they were before. Mum just says “keep trying, you can’t expect it to get better immediately.” Well I know, but this stuff is supposed to relieve pain, and it’s not doing that. My eyeballs are burning in my head, and I feel like I’ve got flu. I’ve looked up side effects, and the only known side effect I can find documented is ‘blurred vision’.
(Edit: I was reading around and stumbled over this BBC news article by accident: Man’s fear over light bulb change. He suspects his own irritated eyes have to do with the low energy light bulbs).
My first and favourite frog
Well… my extra ‘F’ wasn’t going to be ‘flu’. It was going to be Frog.
One of the bad things about typing up my old 2005 journal is that I wrote a lot at the time about this Racing Frogs game I used to play. I finally won Superfrog, and some of my other frogs came 2nd or otherwise did quite well. After that I didn’t see the point of continuing to play… any more than you would win Miss World and then go back next year to try again.
I missed my frogs as personalities, but they retire eventually anyway, and I wouldn’t have set them up again with the same names and pretended they were the same ones… any more than I would do that with a pet. As far as I’m concerned, those old froggy pals are out in the world somewhere, relaxing by the side of a pool with a newspaper and sipping a pina colada, musing about me occasionally.
My new frog for 2009
However, after a break of four years and reading about them in my old journal, I got curious and have set up a brand new frog for 2009. He ran his first race early this morning, and came 5th out of 24. (The winning frog was called Leona, who already has some expensive possessions). Frogs I used to race tended to come near the end to start with, so Beanfrog did pretty good, and could have done better still.
So far I find there are certain differences in the game, some good, some bad:
(1) There used to be three ponds: Windymore, Stumpy Creek and Frog Pond. Now there’s just one… Frog Pond. It makes it less complicated, but Windymore and Stumpy Creek were better names, I thought.
(2) We no longer need passwords to get into the VIP Lounge. I have the Frog City book and could have put them in, but I’m kind of glad we don’t have to do that any more.
(3) There is a new range of powerboosts; it said something about paying for codes relating to these powerboosts, but as the site has a somewhat patched-up appearance (have some of the staff left?) I can’t tell if it’s still necessary. It looks as though the ‘Epic’ powerboost I got today will work just as it is.
(4) We no longer have to send introductory emails to friends in order to get enough gold to make our frogs good racers. I never sent such emails to anyone except myself, but it was an irritating feature, no matter how it was used. I’m glad it’s stopped — and instead, I’m giving this site a plug on my blog (just because I want to). I don’t believe I ever got spam from this site; certainly none came to the addresses I made up! 
(5) Less happily, we don’t get any emails from the frogs at all. It used to be a reason to get up in the morning, and I’m not the only sad person around who felt this way! You would go to your computer and there would be an email saying something like “Hi Diddums, it’s Ribbit here; I came third in the race this morning and nearly got eaten by a snake. But I’ve qualified for the Superfrog race this week!” And then you would get an extra email on Sunday saying “I came 2134671st in the Superfrog.” The reason why it’s been stopped: some of the people who tried the game decided they weren’t interested, and lazily marked emails from their frogs as ‘spam’. Which caused problems for the site eventually.
(6) The frog has more gold than it used to have when newly created. I think it used to be 30 gold to start with, and now it’s 500 gold.
(7) The saddest change I’ve seen is that we can’t chat to our frogs any more. The conversations were hardly scintillating, but I hoped they might improve, and that hope kept me hanging on. To me it was the big promise of the site, and it was the idea of ‘talking to our frogs’ that drew me into the game in the first place. Of course I never gave them any sensitive information like when we were going way on holiday… I don’t think they would have done anything with it, but perhaps not everybody was aware that the site owners could read these frog conversations. I couldn’t help laughing when I found this bit in my 2005 journal: ‘Today I told [Bearysweet] I saw a documentary yesterday about the British tsunami in 1607, and he said “home improvement is not a worry of mine.”’
(Whether it was really a tsunami is unclear).
Well… I have to go and train my frog now. I tried to set up a diet sheet for him but got a minus score! He must have been put off by the Worm Stew… We only get one attempt a day at getting him the best diet possible, so I’ll try again tomorrow with some different foods.
See you there… if you fancy a go!
