TARTAN!

The title will become clear when you've read to the bottom. 

Now, I think it is clear to everyone that knows me… I’m (as good as) deaf. An acquired deafness, not born so, but I’ve taken to saying deaf, rather than hard of hearing because HoH is just a useless indication altogether. Just HOW hard of hearing is the person (in this case me)? Just a bit? Medium hearing loss (what’s medium)? Nobody can tell. So we ‘deafies’ are confronted with various approaches to our ‘disability’ such as:

1. The Ignorer (‘You are after all wearing an aid so I’ll just act like there isn’t a problem.’) There really is! Aids are just that, aids. They don’t magically make everything clear.

2. The Shouter (‘I’m helping you I’m sure’) No, you really are not. The louder you get the more deformed your words sound.

3. The Articulator (‘I’m aware of your problem so I will speak to you like you are an imbecile’.) Words pronounced over-exaggeratedly, of use to neither man nor beast and pretty embarrassing actually.

There are more categories I’m sure… all equally useless, embarrassing and basically INSANE. The only thing that helps anyone with any level of hearing loss, is to face them, show your mouth and speak clearly. Yes, articulate, pronounce words properly but don’t grimace at them with your mouth stretched into impossible, unimaginable shapes not relevant to the word spoken! Often as not, they still won’t get all you have said, despite whatever hearing aid they might be wearing, but they will feel understood and appreciated if you just try and include them. Counts for loads!

I am not 100% deaf, maybe like 98%. If you speak loudly right up at my right ear, I’ll hear it. Yell all you like in my left, I won’t. So what use is it to say I’m HoH? None, that’s what. If I wear my one hearing aid, I pick up quite a lot but if you see me (anyone!) with just that, just call me (them) deaf and handle accordingly. With patience and a bit respect, please. Do not assume I can just hear you as you hear me. I really don’t. I often enough say I do, but even I know, I really, really don’t. I’m envious of hearing people, I used to BE one.

If my CI is on (Med-El Rondo2, fabulous, thanks very much), AND my hearing aid, which is all day, every day now, barring accidents, I am 98% hearing, but still HoH. I really am! I hear stuff I never knew I didn’t before but there is still stuff that gets missed! And that’s me. Not everyone with a CI (and/or hearing aids) hears as well as I do, and you can’t know. And sometimes I, for whatever reason, am not wearing my HA, just my CI, and then, what I pick up can be slightly less than with, so… the degrees and combinations are endless.

My point is, none of us can know just how much another hears, with or without aids. If you, yes you, notice in whatever way, that someone is obviously not hearing right (perhaps you even notice their, often minuscule, aid(s) ), give them a break eh? Assume ‘deaf’ and include them in the conversation, take a bit of time, help out a bit and don’t treat them like they had their brains removed in exchange for a hearing aid. Be glad you can hear! I have made huge advances in my hearing since getting my CI (I actually, usually feel I’m the hearing one in HoH company because of it) but I am acutely aware that ‘come the apocalypse’ I will be snookered. I need batteries, I need a charger!

I still wish everyone would learn signing from primary on. I try, but it just won’t flow. Partly because I do hear ‘too much’ to make it feel necessary for me I think, and even then it’s only useful to me among other signers  of course. But if they started now, officially, in the curriculum, ten/twenty years from now it would be so commonplace that we’d wonder why it took so long to start it up! It is now an officially recognised language in The Netherlands (not sure about the UK?) so that’s a start. It’s not that long ago even the deaf in NL were not permitted to use it and were not taught it at school!

So, dear reader, we, the (late) deaf (born deaf use a capital I read somewhere, they’re Deaf, and I’m not speaking for them as even with aids, they’re a different category, if similar) would appreciate a bit of understanding and patience. Walk, in another man’s shoes once in a while why don’t you. There are lots of different ‘lesser-abled’, I can’t speak for any of them, just the hard of hearing… no, deaf. Like the BLM campaign, which was hijacked by the ALL Lives Matter nonsense (nobody said they didn’t Patrice!) I’m starting an awareness acronym that is for us – A not-that-other-groups-are-any-less-important-but-it makes-for-a-way-too-long-acronym, acronym. I’m calling it PLAID - Please listen and include deafies. So if you see it on a badge (button) anywhere, you’ll know! Actually… plaid is another word for TARTAN, so, just by association, if you see THAT on a button, you know it means PLAID - Please listen and include deafies! 

I think it’ll take off, what do you think? TARTAN YA BASS! :-D

Ramblings until dawn

Up at the back of four after tossing around in bed since about three with jumpy legs driving me potty. Thinking, I’ll see what Facebook’s doing, I’m scunnered by the WiFi being off overnight. I forget the reason why, it is not normally a problem, given I’m not wont to frequent my desk at shitey o’clock. When I do, like right now, it’s bloody annoying. Any emails? Who knows - no WiFi! Okay, so I’ll just write in the blog… argh, no WiFi! 

Note to self, find out how in the hell you set the Wifi on again, for those rare nights you’re up and about! It’s one of those things where (apart from the obvious), if he kicks the bucket, I’ll be snookered. That and the central heating. And the buckets. And the cooker which didn’t work for months except sporadically and if you were lucky, and now magically does, but only for him.

Then I spot my camera and remember to replace the SD card after yesterday afternoon’s walk lugging a redundant camera about with me. The card was left in the slot on the laptop after uploading the latest pics. I only noticed at the third photo I took! I take the camera with me every time ‘just in case’ and always find something to aim it at. It now occurs to me… yesterday was the 23rd and we’ve gone out every day for a while now, but the 19^th is the date on the last photo on the chip. So it hasn’t just been yesterday I took phantom photos, it was the 20^th and the 21^st too. 22^nd, it rained and we didn’t go anywhere. I wouldn’t even know that so precisely but I somehow managed to stamp the photos with the date recently and haven’t figured out how I managed that, nor how to take the stamp off again.

I shouldn’t even need to take the chip out of the camera as you can upload photos wirelessly, directly to ‘the cloud’, but it’s such a faff I prefer just taking it out. Actually, that’s a faff too but one I work around that little bit quicker, if with the usual hair-pulling. I’m constantly reminded that technology and I are not the best of pals. My many years of messing with cables under office desks, lying on my back ‘sorting’ things, stood me in no good stead if I’m honest. We’ve had a ‘home computer’ since the early eighties but they just don’t like me. It has been said, not least by those closest to me, that I have some sort of magnetic field around me that sends things haywire at odd intervals. 

I actually only ended up getting my own laptop instead of the shared one here in house because the thing would explode any time I took a shot on it. I also drove many an office fixer-upper daft with weirdness happening that ‘couldn’t possibly happen’ and could never be replicated, despite being witnessed! Here at home, he’d be using it to do, whatever, for hours, so ‘my turn’, (which sounds silly now as I’m on this thing so much now). I’d be on it for mere minutes and it would crash, or the mouse wouldn’t work and he’d have to come and fiddle with things before I could continue. It got to be spooky! ‘What have you done now?!’ No amount of caution seemed to help avoid things just blowing up on me.

That said, I’m glad I have had my own machine to mess on, for many years now, and several laptops have already bitten the dust. Not that what we already had was any less mine, just that I did most of my usage on any computer at the office. Mostly to avoid crashing the thing or have someone around that could fix it who couldn’t shout at me with impunity. Now my ‘office’ is here at home of course where all is fine, as long as the bloody thing plays the game.

I’ve always backed up regularly but never once been able to ‘restore from backup’ when required, so do wonder why I bother. I also have many thousands of photos, sorted nicely in findable folders on a separate hard drive to avoid clogging the laptop, that recently conked out on me. I try and ignore the pest lying there looking at me until I can afford to buy another one, in the hope I can somehow transfer what’s on there to the new one. I honestly don’t have much hope. I mean, it’s not like I don’t try and do it right! It’s rather disheartening to lose so many photos though. I already have a big box upstairs with CDRoms full of holidays photos and this laptop doesn’t have a CDRom player so I can’t look at them ever again. Not without a rigmarol.

I think it was the American holiday we came back from that I had a pile of 12x36 spools back from the developers, presented in like pizza boxes. Ludicrously including all the rubbish prints too but the pile of boxes themselves made a great photo. Egypt was already digital I think, but still had everything printed and negatives produced. Since then though, the SD cards have had ever more room on them. I’m no ‘photographer’, strictly point and shoot me, but I just like to take photos and I love deleting rubbish ones and blurry ones and stuff that would otherwise have been developed and printed, only to lie in a drawer (witness the piles upstairs). The tablet/mobile phone camera doesn’t get used much, which is a shame as dead handy, but it wobbles… or rather, I wobble it, and being a tablet, it’s daft anyway, too big.

Which is another thing. I need an upgrade really, but definitely do want a tablet/phone again and not sure if they even have them now. Surely eh? When I look at specs though, it’s a bit like reading Chinese so, I just don’t know which to get. A big screen, tablet-sized is best for me as I generally do not phone on it, more text and Skype/Whatsapp video calls than ‘normal’ phone use. I also watch Netflix on it and type with the keyboard easily, compared to a hand mobile. If I just knew what to go for if/when this packs in as it is sure to do at the most inconvenient moment. Funny how you get captured by the things eh? We were both quite late in succumbing to mobile phonery actually. I’ve even given up leaving it at home while on holiday because I use it to read books on too if nothing else. My ‘magnetic field’ seems to ignore the phone so… touch wood.

Nearly six a.m. now and still not light. Huh. Who knew? I was never an early riser but of course, saw the odd dawn over the years. I must have, as a child, been up and about early without a groan, but can’t say I remember. Barring Christmas morning. We have an ‘in’ joke here saying at bedtime ‘yaay, don’t have to get up in the morning’. It’s been so long since either of us had to for a boss, is what makes the joke, and it’s daft, but it still makes us laugh. Oh, hey, I see a slight line of light above the rooftops there, and a quick shufty at the phone tells me sunrise is 06:40 so we’re getting there. I should get back to my bed. I had a banana. They say that helps jumpy legs… is it potassium? See, I’d look it up but still bloody cannot!

So, I’ll away and will post these ramblings to my blog when I resurface, hopefully still in the a.m. It’s our wedding anniversary tomorrow (actual tomorrow, not just when I get up again). Forty-seven years. There were no computers, no mobile phones, man we barely had colour telly when we got married. Here’s me, lost without my digital diary nowadays, not to mention the camera (when the chip’s in!) I wonder what the next fifty years will bring. I might see the next 25 at least. Hmmm, interesting. I should predict a coupla things, see how they transpire when my great-grandchildren read back on me. I might get it spot on. What do you mean ‘not likely!’?

She THREW my phone!

Wait, let me tell you what happened.

She'd asked me if I had a tablet and could she borrow it, just for a second, she needed to do... something.
I'm nothing if not compliant (who said that at the back there?) and gave her it with a smile. 'Sure, just get it back to me.'
Then we all filed into this big room, like a cinema except, kitchen chairs, and I saw her up on the dais there and was just about to grab her attention, 'I'm here, so you know...' and she fired my phone, overhand! whoosh, over to someone away over there!
Well, I wasn't too chuffed with that and shouted 'what the hell?'
She just waved at me and sat down!
So I'm not having it and march over to where the other girl is bending down to pick up my phone... which had better not be broken!... and she just looks up at me like 'what's your problem?' and I snatch my tablet from her and march out in indignation, shaking an imaginary fist at the lot of them. I'm out of there!

And then I woke up.

Now, I do not have such a relationship with my phone! Do I? I know I look at the thing regularly, like every time the adverts come on haha, but why would I dream about it's possible demise. We have actually only recently discussed, what do we do if the laptops go wonky on us (skint, so nowt to replace them with), so I suppose that counts for phones too and I am overdue an upgrade but... no, it can't be that.

So, I'm left wondering:

1. Who were these people I'm in a group with?
2. Where was this and why?
3. Why would I ever lend my phone out to anyone without a worry?
4. Why didn't I recognise any of them?
5. What the hell goes on in my head at times?

Answers to my own questions:

1. I sort of thought, Tai Chi folks? (but that's was years ago) Deafies? (not one person I knew and I didn't get the idea anyone was hard of hearing AND everybody spoke English anyway.
2. Really not a clue, not been in such a place with the kitchen chairs. I don't think?
3. I wouldn't. You can't really anyway, no use surely?
4. Dreams where you don't know a soul freak me the hell out!
5. Don't ask. Sometimes it's amazing so I enjoy it :)

If nothing else, it's fodder for on here.

The incident in the night

I was up for a pee at daft o'clock so, dived back under the duvet, as you do.
What I then always do is reach over and give him a wee tap, just to check like. Even if we're not speaking, I do it, hoping he's asleep but never knowing either way. I just need to do it.

Being deaf in bed (no CI or aid in) I don't hear breathing or snoring (every cloud eh?) so, I chase the heebiejeebies with a wee feel, see he's still alive. To be fair, it's not the best method. He could have died 2 minutes since and not be cold yet. Or he could die five minutes later. Or he could be lying there having had a stroke and not able to reach me. I wouldn't hear and a quick feel wouldn't tell me. But it has become a sort of ritual, to me anyway. Probably more of an annoyance to him, on the occasions he perhaps notices.

But this time was different. As my, probably freezing, from washing my hands in cold water, hand, reached in and under his duvet, I encountered, not an arm, not even a back or a side, but, well... you know. At first tippy finger, the dead-to-the-world J sat bolt upright with a yell. I myself let out a screech (probably, didn't hear so who knows) and my heart was in my mouth. He then flopped back down and went right back to sleep (probably... deaf etc.)

As my heartbeat subsided to normal levels, I was left chuckling to myself. Reliving the fright, enjoying it more in hindsight.
Took me a few minutes to drift off again but it was a nice way to fall asleep really. Smiling, no worries, no diedy lying next to me that's for sure.

It's the little things eh?

Du vin du pain et du... PANDEMIC!!

Seriously. Just when you think, ach, valt mee... the world explodes.

I was supposed to fly to Scotland on Thursday past. Had been swithering for days already, should I go? Should I risk it? But was thinking entirely in the wrong direction, to be fair. Of course, I shouldn't risk it! Not only is the virus hitting more and more people, but more and more measures are also being taken. Among them, flight restrictions. This... this *thing*, is building and building and for goodness sake, whole countries don't get closed down for nowt. I was scared I'd get stranded in Scotland. Sure, I'd have been comfortable, have a perfectly nice place to stay with my daughter, not like stuck at an airport or something, but then J would be alone, in horrible, uncertain times. So, had to take the decision. Gutted not to have been able to go though.

NL laid out a new advisory only yesterday and the shops were immediately inundated... like folks hadn't been told NOT to go nuts and like we haven't had time to slowly build up supplies. UK is running behind as far as I can make out and they don't seem to believe prior examples abroad. Now Spain, after Italy, is SHUT... I'm just not sure why NL is only like half shut. Nor why the UK seems a bit wishy-washy about it all. What do I know eh? I was the one still prevaricating only last week.

Bu now, I'm going nowhere. Seeing no-one and doing nothing. Cancelled prior-arranged meets and outings, and of course, postponed my flight to Scotland. Hopefully by the new date in May we will be good to go but, if I'm honest, I'm not all that certain of that. Not getting to see my grandkids here in NL as it is. J, of course, has been 'at the shops' and still walks the neighbour's dog but we have the handwashing down to a T now and being careful. We're otherwise staying in and, to be honest, no more shopping needed so, no more shops!

This is a major change to the world as a whole. Lots of stuff is going to be forever different. Offering a hand to shake, not the least of it! Lots less travel maybe? Even when restrictions are lifted. That's actually a good thing, environmentally, but everyday things will show loads of changes. More companies will finally realise their place doesn't crash if most staff works at home so there will be more of that allowed. They'll also realise they don't need such large offices and the knock-on effect of that will manifest itself in office supply companies at the very least. Schools will have more online lessons in place. Courses in remote teaching will be popular among teaching staff. Home deliveries for everything will explode... even more than it has recently done. There will be more taxis (and Ubers) than ever because nobody wants to travel on buses right now, never mind trains... and the knock-on of all that will be problematic too. Having said that, I wouldn't be a taxi-driver, or their family, for a pension! Online doctor consultations will become more popular and more easily available but not popular (who'd be a doctor or nurse right now, but very grateful there are such.) Also, not unimportant, apparently (although I can't for the life of me see how it came to it) people will figure out what to use other than toilet paper when it really does run out. Homemade, washable squares will become the norm and the hardware store better stock up on nappy bins to be storing used ones! You heard it here first!

Things should all pan out with summer coming up, but some changes will stay, I'm pretty sure of it, and the thing will probably only 'rear its ugly head' again next winter, having, by all accounts become endemic by then. The whole 'social distancing' will be put in place again and life, as we've known it, really will be changed. Who'd be a kid in this scary world eh? I could weep, really. Expect at the very least to see hand sanitiser hanging in pubs and clubs for the die-hards who won't play the game. Actually, such places might even be closed, sad to say! You thought the smoking ban was bad folks? Wait until you can't even go to the pub!

So hey people, think of how best you can look after yourself and get through this. But think of others too, because if you get infected, you will infect others. Me 'n J are being as careful as we can, having got the wind up through being in the demographic that is 'most at risk' (ok, 2nd in line after real oldies) but we all need to do our best. Let's all get through this together.

Stay safe out there.