I can change my pc back to a normal sized font. I was running on 300% for a few days.

I had a horrible scare with my eyes, being burned by exposure to the sap from some weeds I pulled by hand.

Before we moved up here I had a couple of handover visits with Greg, the previous owner. On one of those visits we went for a walk, and he pointed out some of the problems he had been dealing with. Weeds was one issue, and he showed me some of the trouble-spots, and the prime suspects.

One plant I had seen in gardens in Melbourne, but up here it spreads prolifically along the river banks and roadsides. Greg didn't know its name, but called it "pineapple weed" because of the shape and pattern of the leaves on the young plants. It's lightly rooted, and easily removed, but it seeds a lot and spreads efficiently.

So along with the thistles, cape weed, carrot weed, blackberries, golden rod and many, many more, we keep an eye out for the pineapple weed and pull it whenever we see it.

The bottom paddock has been locked off since August, for hay. It's overdue for cutting - that's another story - but it means no one has been in there for awhile. The thistles are heading up now, and when they get ready to pop they are high above the rest of the grasses and we can see them from a distance. We went down to the clump to hack them out.

The good news is that spot last year was a mess. I went and mowed it a few times to stop hundreds of thistles from seeding. And it worked…there were thistles there this year, but dozens rather than hundreds.

But while we were dealing with the thistles I also pulled maybe 50 pineapple weeds, stacked, them, then collected the lot in my arms and piled them on a burn spot.

Then, as a reward for an unpleasant task on a hot, sweaty day, we went down to the river for a swim.

Already the river is shallowing up, and it’s a flop and soak experience now rather than a freestyle event. I flopped in, doused my head, and rubbed the grime off my face.

And shortly after that, my eyes started hurting.

Around here there is a summer bug that appears late December. No one knows what the bug is, whether its waterborne or a flier. But is bites you on the eyeball and the resulting painful infection is called Christmas Eye. I've also been getting slightly worse hayfever each year, and the rye grass and fog grass is heavily pollinating, and we waded through dust clouds of pollen to pull the weeds.

So we were thinking maybe I had encountered Christmas Eye, or had a bad does of hayfever.

I won't go on about it, but the pain got incredibly intense, and we spent the rest of the weekend going to hospital and doctors. My eyes were red raw, and on Monday the skin around my eyes started peeling off. Thankfully I saw an eye specialist in Albury on Monday, and things started getting better..

I'd effectively burned my eyes, as if with a chemical. I had an ulcer on one eye, and pits and gouges on the other. My vision was very poor. I had been starting to think I might have scarred my eyes and would have permanent damage, but the specialist was optimistic it would all heal up, and a week later, it has.

Part of the debrief for us was to work out what went wrong, and the culprit, we think, was the pineapple weed. Or more correctly, euphorbia lathyris. Common name is Caper Spurge.

Here's a case example very similar to my story….

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2783056/

If you are going to mess with this plant, wear gloves…and goggles.