....the family gathering that we will be attending is my younger brother [actually, they are both younger than me, but DizDaD7 is younger than my brother who's been in the hospital]; my brother Keith has already had two operations on his eyes - for the one eye, there is nothing else that they can do [he'll be permanently blind in that eye] and the other one, they have to wait a few weeks to see if it was a success or not...meanwhile the Commission for the Blind (who graciously paid for the 2 operations) is going to program the new phone he got for his birthday (he was 52 on Wednesday) so that it will be completely voice-activated for emails, texts, google, phone calls, etc.