Have you been to your local eye doctor or hearing specialist lately?  What about the dentist?  If not, you’re missing a way to get professionals to sell sheep for you.

      Some years ago, while handling hay in a swirling wind, I got a tiny little horse nettle thorn caught in my eyelid, which raked and scratched the surface of my eye every time I blinked.

Anyone who has ever had to put up with these horse nettles in the hay (also called sand briers or Sodom apples) knows how troublesome its thorns are.  No part of the plant except the root and the tomato-like fruit is free of the thorns.  The thorns easily break off and stay in your flesh like a barbed splinter.  Sheep eat these plants to a certain extent but it’s far from their first-choice forage.

      After several days of being unable to retrieve that little thorn stuck under my eyelid, my eye surface began to become opaque—like a lamb’s eye does when it has an in-turned eyelid (entropion).

      Overcoming my “sheepskate” tendencies, I finally went to an ophthalmologist to see if he could get it out.  His secretary squeezed one last appointment into the end of the doctor’s busy day, so I sat around the waiting room with at least 10 other people ahead of me, while I read the latest sheep!  (Reading sheep! in waiting rooms is a good way to pique folks’ curiosity, often striking up a conversation that can lead to profitable retail sales.)