It's easy being green!

Well, it is a bittersweet day in the Emerson family. My beloved '99 Honda Civic with lowered suspension and beautiful TSW wheels and 104,000 miles on it is gone. I never got the chance to add neon running lights underneath, or to add hydraulics or airbags to lift the car up while cruising the streets of Eugene.

On the other hand, last night Becca and I went to the Eugene Toyota dealer, traded in the Civic, and bought ourselves a brand new Toyota Prius. It's Silver Pine Mica (a really striking shade of green), and it's a package #6, which means it has leather, nagivation, bluetooth connection to cell phones, an upgraded stereo system with an AUX input for an iPod, and I'm sure it has a button to make waffles and hot cocoa somewhere on the dashboard. Becca did all of the negotiation and we got exactly the deal that we wanted, and our buying experience was smooth and painless. Huzzah!



Since we bought it late last night, Lena didn't see it until this morning. We went out and Lena had the key fob and went up to the door and held the handle, and the car unlocked for her. She then got in the driver's seat and turned on the auxillary power by pressing the Power button (the car won't actually start unless your foot is on the brake) so that she could roll down the window and have me take a picture. It's wonderful to have a car that gets such amazing gas mileage, and Becca really appreciates the fact that her spine doesn't get shaken when she goes over the bumps around our house.

I haven't driven our Prius yet, although we did take a different one out for a test drives some weeks ago, and really liked it. When you first start driving it, it runs completely off of the battery, which will take some getting used to.The view out the back window will take some getting used to as well, due to the horizontal window split in the rear, but the car does have a backup camera that activates when it is in reverse, so I'm not worried about backing over anything or anyone. The only problem with the car is that Eugene is filled with Priuses (Prii?), so we might need to put a Red Sox license plate holder on the car to make it stand out a little bit!

Lena's new glasses

Lena has new glasses! During a routine 5 year checkup, the doctor discovered that Lena's right eye is not seeing well. We then scheduled a meeting with an ophthalmologist, who determined that the communication between Lena's eye and her brain was not right. Apparently this is a reasonably common occurrence, and if caught before the age of 7 or so, can be reversed to at least some degree. He also gave her a prescription for glasses. So, Lena and Becca went eyeglass shopping, and this past Wednesday, the glasses arrived. I took Lena to the optician and watched her get fitted and adjusted. She looks beautiful, of course!



She is very excited about the glasses, and is working out how to easily put them on (they wrap behind the ears, so they're a little more complex then normal glasses). She's wearing them all the time except when showering or sleeping or swimming.



Lena will wear the patch over her good eye for a number of weeks to help retrain her eye. Then she'll go back to the ophthalmologist for a re-evaluation, and we'll go from there. At first she was quite shy and didn't want anyone to see her eye patch, but the glasses have helped, because she really likes the way they look. Becca said that Lena tried many different shape glasses before choosing the ones she has, and in my opinion, she picked exactly the right pair.