A Sunny Monday

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all on this beautiful Monday! It’s mid-September but the temperatures rose to 29°C here anyway. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get even hotter weather, with temperatures rising to 34°C in some places in the south of the country.

I went for three walks today. In the morning, my regular day activities staff was in a meeting, so a substitute came. She took me on a long’ish walk. I think we took over half an hour. Then in the afternoon, I took my usual 20-minute walk when the regular staff had returned.

I was originally planning on taking some pictures, but ultimately I didn’t really have the courage. That little voice that says as a blind person I shouldn’t be interested in visual stuff like photographs, was pretty prominent in my mind.

In the evening, I took another longer walk. The staff who took me pointed out that there were some cows real close. I asked her to take a picture with my phone. Both Seeing AI and Envision, my two image description tools on my phone, didn’t get beyond calling it livestock, but my iPhone itself did identify cows in the picture.

Ultimately, I took over 12K steps so far today. This gives me an excuse to take it easy tomorrow, when it’s going to be so hot. I might make a soap then or maybe I’ll try out the matcha green tea in a smoothie. I doubt I’m going to try it as regular tea, as I’ve heard it tastes pretty bitter then.

I may also visit the sensory garden attached to the day center. I went there some weeks ago and loved smelling the herbs. There’s a birdcage there too, although at the time the birds didn’t make a sound.

I may try to take some pictures myself. What do you think? As a blind person, should I be interested in pictures, and if so, is it worth it if I try to take them myself? I mean, would you like to see more pictures on this blog even if they’re not good?

The Ordinary Moments

#WeekendCoffeeShare (June 14, 2020)

Posted on by Astrid

Happy Sunday afternoon everyone! I’m joining in with #WeekendCoffeeShare. I think I just ate all of the cheesecake that one of my staff brought for her birthday yesterday and I think the other residents ate all the cream cake she’d brought too. I guess we still have lots of cookies though. Have a cup of coffee and a cookie and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I would rave once more about the smoothie maker a staff brought me on Monday! I have been making smoothies almost everyday since. Yesterday, I made one with frozen blueberries in it for my husband. Its color was a bit grey or so my husband said, but it tasted good. Unfortunately, the staff left the blueberries in the fridge rather than the freezer, so we had to use them all up today.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you how much fun I’ve had with this staff member. She’s returning from long-time sick leave, so is slowly building up her hours again. This means sometimes she just comes as an extra staff to do fun things with us. Like, on Friday, she helped another resident and me make cards for a staff who just earned her carer diploma. We also played a game using a mallet and nails, in which you have to slam wooden blocks into a piece of cork. Normally the wooden figures are really relatively thin, so I don’t have the coordination to do it properly, but these were actually thick blocks.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I had a nice phone conversation with my former support coordinator. She was really nice. Like I said on Friday, I’d half assumed she no longer knew who I was, but she definitely still remembered.

Like I said on Friday, she told me my staff have been thinking of applying for more care for me. This did make me feel a little scared, as last year the application for long-term care was really hard.

Yesterday, I reread the application and indeed, some things are more severe now than my staff thought they were back then. This has me feeling all sorts of things. Isn’t care supposed to help me be more independent? Well, the goal for me is stabilization, not development, but yeah. My inner critic is shouting at me, but I try to shut her up.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I’ve been experimenting with my new phone’s camera. I’ve been taking random pictures of my room. I haven’t had a staff check them yet, so not sure they’ll ever go on my blog, but oh well.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d tell you that I got a Netflix subscription again yesterday. I’ll just try it for a bit and then may unsubscribe again, but I wanted to see the Netflix original Diagnosis. This, like the book by that title I’m currently reading, is based on Lisa Sanders’s New York Times Magazine column on hard-to-diagnose medical conditions. It’s very interesting.

What have you been up to lately?

I Saw…: Coping with Vision Loss in the Age of Social Media

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s optional prompt at Life This Week is I Saw…. We are supposed to share photos of what we saw lately. This got me thinking. I saw… nothing really, as I am blind.

I have been totally blind with some light perception since the age of eighteen or so. At age eight, my parents decided to give up on my eyesight, so all reports say I went blind at that age. I didn’t. Legally, yes, but I’ve always been legally blind. Functionally, maybe. I started learning to read Braille at the age of seven. Then again, as a person who lost his vision gradually later in life told me, going from 20/1000 vision to none is worse in some ways than going from 20/40 to 20/1000.

I have more or less accepted my blindness now. Even so, with just a tiny bit of light perception left, I still use it. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.

One of the most annoying aspects of blindness for me, as a blogger, is being unable to take pictures. I know some blind people have learned to take pictures, but my parents always instilled in me that photos are for the sighted and I shouldn’t want to pursue a visual activity like this. For this reason, I don’t feel comfortable trying to learn to take pictures. I mean, I feel pretty arrogant for believing I could even ever learn to take pictures.

I did mention to my staff that I may want a tripod or selfie stick or whatever for my birthday. Then again, I fear I’ll knock it over and ruin my phone if I’m not careful.

Maybe I need to ask other totally blind people how they take pictures and how they make sure they are blog-worthy or whether they don’t care.

I remember one day, when I was at the blindness rehabilitation center, the staff asked each of the clients in my group what would be the most important thing we’d do if we regained our sight. Many said they’d be able to travel more independently. I said I’d go into nature and enjoy the sights. Right now, I’d say I’d take lots of photos for my blog.