House in a smallish town....

Well, here we go again....I found this house online that I thought was maybe an hour's drive from DC, and it reminded me so much of our old house in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, with the porch and the big lot (space for a garden!!) that I just sort of fell into this feverish craving for a house in a small town. Me, the city lover. Go figure. It is over 1700 square feet, has 3 bedrooms, a dining room, a den (and kitchen, living room, and bathroom)...all for the grand price of $25,000! Cripes, for that price, (I thought giddily) I could put it on my credit card!

I contacted my mortgage guy yesterday and asked him what he thought. He works for one of the bankers (recent college grads, by the looks of 'em) who convinced me to buy TWO apartments and combine them when our building went condo way back in 1998 or 1999.

"You're crazy," I said. "I can't even afford ONE!"

"Sure you can," they said. "You just have to change your lifestyle."

Well, there was a novel thought! My lifestyle had pretty much consisted of being broke half the time and near-broke the other half and spending every cent as fast as I made it. A friend used to say, "We've got to get you OUT of that vow of poverty!" My favorite of the old pre-Disney cartoons, which used to run very early on Saturday mornings in Bismarck, was "The Grasshopper and the Ant." The music was a sprightly folk band accompanying the Grasshopper as he fiddled his theme: "Oh, the world owes me a livin'..."oompah oompah oomp.

I loved it. I loved the grasshopper's esprit, compared with which the ant's life seemed joyless and driven. With a grand leap of faith in the universe, I took the bankers' advice and bought two apartments, combined them, and then sat back after the construction dust settled to watch the housing market (and the taxable valuation of my new condo) go up and up and up. I've had lots of fun renovating old places but never so much fun as that.

Back to the house at the top of the post....the mortgage guy felt there was something that didn't quite match. The house had over 1700 square feet, 3 bedrooms, etc., but was only $25,000. So he called the listing agent and asked him why. And the listing agent told him.

The house has been totally gutted. Everything has been cleared out down to the studs. It will need new everything: HVAC, plumbing, wiring, kitchen, bathrooms, the works.

Oh...and the other thing...it's several hours' drive from here, and the trains don't go that far. I have dark, judgmental thoughts about commuting long distances in a car these days. I sold my last car in 1991, and it was one of the happiest days of my life! Goodbye to gas, insurance, freakin' repairs, standing by the roadside in my weenie nylons thumbing a ride when the car broke down. Ha.

Well, now what? A normal woman would say, "Oh, my. Well, too bad. I need a house that already has a toilet and a furnace. A kitchen sink, too. Thanks for your time. Buh-bye...."

Instead, I am SALIVATING at the idea of doing a TOTAL REHAB job! A couple of years ago, we had a solar-powered house competition on the Capitol Mall. A bunch of students from different colleges and universities entered the competition and built houses on the mall that were completely powered by solar energy, including enough for a small electric car to drive x number of miles per week! The houses, as I remember, had a living area, a kitchen, a computer room, a bathroom and a bedroom...plus whatever else they could think of.

The kids from the University of Colorado in Boulder built my favorite. I still remember the lights that went on in my brain when I saw their bathroom floor was solid, tastefully tinted CEMENT, and it had a drain in it, too. Have to wash the bathroom floor? Get a big bucket of hot soapy water, and toss it on the floor...sweep the water down the drain, scrubbing away the grimy spots as you go.

Well...the Little Red Hen commented on a recent cochlear implant post that she didn't know if she would have the patience for that much uncertainty. Red, you don't know the half of it!

Wot next??

Go check out Ronniecat's blog:

The Wordsworth rap, Ronniecat??

Word, indeed....

A week and a day....

Yesterday was one week from turn-on. I went to the audiologist with some questions, all mainly having to do with how to get MORE VOLUME from this thing?! Ryan, the audiologist, mainly told me to have PATIENCE and to quit fiddling with the processor!! He said my BRAIN is gonna do all the heavy lifting from now on, and that I should just stick with the standard program (as he set it). He said that some day in the future I would arrive at that happy place where I would not have to STRAIN to hear anyone talking, and that I would be able to identify (and subsequently ignore) background noises. Wow.

So I've been good. I went and got a new permanent last night after wurk. I was soooo tired to seeing my fine hair sprawled all over....like Flannery O'Connor's "her hair was like ham gravy trickling over her skull" (think I've mentioned THAT before). Anyway, everyone seemed to like the curls today, including me. I woke at 2 a.m. this morning to the sound of something FRYING in my right ear, and I was worried that the permanent fumes had penetrated to the implant and was cooking it to death. But then this a.m., the frying sound was gone, and the implant worked just fine.

Meanwhile, I can distinguish BETWEEN voices now (including my own North Dakota accent), and I am hearing a few more variations in the birds' songs. And I could TALK with people: the guy in Georgetown Optician, where I picked up my new glasses after work, and the young woman in the wine shop down on P Street. I can't say I liked the wine all that much, even though she said it was "GREAT!" It was a Bastianich wine, and I told her how much my daughter loved Becco in NYC and admired Lidia Bastianich. That conversation would never have happened last week. I also got her to order some Frascati for me, which now is available only at Rodman's and Litteri's here (well, probly lots elsewhere, too, but you know....I am just a little old lady in tennis shoes, and I don't rod around much). But, gee....thanks, dear universe, for that CONVERSATION! what a great treat that was!!!

Milestone...and a good joke

MILESTONE

Sitemeter informed me this a.m. that as of yesterday, I have had more than 5,000 visits to XtremeEnglish since startup on July 4 last summer! Imagine! As of now, visits are averaging 40 per day. Gee. For an 'umble little blog, that amazes me.

GOOD JOKE (well, oldie but goodie)

George Bush goes to a primary school to talk to the kids to get a little PR.

After his talk he offers question time. One little boy puts up his hand and George asks him his name.

"Stanley," responds the little boy.

"And what is your question, Stanley?"

"I have 4 questions:
First, why did the USA invade Iraq without the support of the UN?
Second, why are you President when Al Gore got more votes?
Third, whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?
Fourth, why are we so worried about gay marriage when 1/2 of all Americans don't have health insurance?"

Just then, the bell rings for recess. George Bush informs the kiddies that they will continue after recess.

When they resume George says, "OK, where were we? Oh, that's right, question time. Who has a question?"

Another little boy puts up his hand. George points him out and asks him his name.

"Steve," he responds.

"And what is your question, Steve?"

"Actually, I have 6 questions.
First, why did the USA invade Iraq without the support of the UN?
Second, why are you President when Al Gore got more votes?
Third, whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?
Fourth, why are we so worried about gay marriage when 1/2 of all Americans don't have health insurance?
Fifth, why did the recess bell go off 20 minutes early?
And sixth, what the hell happened to Stanley?"

Easter

The Writer's Almanac has this good bit in today's entry:

The word "Easter" comes from an ancient pagan goddess worshipped by Anglo Saxons named Eostre. According to legend, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit became our Easter Bunny. Eggs were a symbol of fertility in part because they used to be so scarce during the winter. There are records of people giving each other decorated eggs at Easter as far back as the 11th century.

I thought of Miles Davis and the egg gatherer in Day to Day Life of a Very Lazy Gardener....

Happy Easter!

Oops!

Raised the shade on the kitchen window this morning and saw this! Reminds me of the old poem--forget who wrote it.

How I luff der vinter season!
Brings us ski und schnee und schneezin!

The Lenten fast used to end precisely at noon on this day when I was growing up. What my parents ate, I don't know. They were kind of old school...which means there was no wild gorging at 12:01 because it was still officially Lent. Doubtless the fast ended at noon on Easter Saturday so the priests would not faint from hunger during the Easter Vigil service.

TGIGF*

Had enough of moping around the pews? Here are some truly tasteless jokes to brighten your day:


A cowboy rides into town, hitches up his horse and walks into a bar. He goes up, gets a beer, drinks it, and walks out. Half a second passes and he bursts back into the bar and says "ALRIGHT WHICH ONE OF YOU MOTHERS PAINTED MY HORSE'S FACE YELLOW?" A huge man-mountain stands up, looks down at the cowboy and says "I DID". The cowboy looks up at him and whispers "The first coat's dry."

"Don't cry darling, Daddy had to drown the cat."
"Yes I know, but he promised I could do it." [Mojito, that one was fr u!]

Tonto and the Lone Ranger were lost on the prairie one day. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto: "Use your Indian instincts and get us out of this mess." Tonto bends down and puts his ear to the ground. He turns and says to the Lone Ranger, "Buffalo come." The Lone Ranger says to Tonto, "How do you know?" Tonto says, "Ear sticky."

What are the best ten years of an Irishman's life?
Third grade.

*Thank God it's Good Friday
[thanx and a tip o' the rabbit ears to Sally, who sent the cartoon]

Day Three and 5/6ths....One last revelation

By accident this a.m., I turned on the TV (to get the disk--"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"--out to send back to Netflix). The TV turned itself on, and I saw maybe two minutes of some interview show. Alas, television is even more banal when you can hear it than when you have to read the captions. That is, it's breath-takingly DUMB.

Of course, there's good dumb...a category in which "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" is firmly set. Nobody's ever accused me of having too much taste.

Day 3: Revelations...

The wind in my hair....sounds like several hundred thousand fairies, each holding up one strand of hair between their cupped hands and blowing on it--like we used to do with blades of grass in the summertime...remember?? Today is windy...ergo, LOTS of sounds to figger out. (Well, I SAID I was hearing EVERYTHING, right?)

Being able to TALK BACK AND FORTH with people....is very RELAXING. I've been going around with this goofy grin on my face all day once I figgered that out. It's just fun.

My voice sounds....less loud, less gravelly (or so I'm told--via the implant, everybody sounds just exactly the same, myself included). Gee.

I can still hear myself breathing and all the rest....if I pay attention to it. I've learned in just two days to ignore it completely!

Some computers....make hissing noises! Must be Macs, cuz mine at home does it, and so does the one here. The others don't hiss.

Sirens sound like....mosquitoes being tortured. Not loud, just weird.

HMMMM.....

Do you suppose babies go through this process of converting all these minute splinters of noise to meaning?

Day Two: The Manual....

Went back to Hopkins for turn-on #2 today, and Ryan the audiologist added two more programs--which I don't know how to use yet cuz I'm still learning how to work the switches! Meanwhile, Cathy met me for lunch at Union Station after I got back, and the background noise was overwhelming. One of the new programs is for situations just like that, but I couldn't figure out how to switch to it. The MANUAL was at home, not in the big box of accessories and other necessary items Ryan asked me to bring along today! Cripes! They never told me there'd be a manual!

We did leave Union Station for a quieter spot, and sure enough, recognizable sounds started turning up again. I actually heard Cathy's laugh--a great sound. We've known each other for about 10 years and in all that time i've never heard her actual laugh, even though she's a cheerful soul and laughs a lot.

After I got home from lunch, I took a loooong nap. (No, I didn't have any wine...just a glass of rosemary lemonade, which was just fabulous.) But when I woke up, oh, no! The damn thing did not work at all!!! Couldn't even get the magnet to stick to the implant under my scalp. I was just about to go get the big box of CI stuff to change the magnet when it dawned on me (helloooo, m.e.....) that i had it on the wrong ear! Er...ahem!

When I got out of the taxi this aft after lunch, the birds were singing loudly in our neighborhood. What a lovely sound!

Turn-on #3 is five days from now, Monday, when Ryan'll add some "features" (described in the MANUAL!) and see how the CI is working. I hope I'll have figured out how to listen to music. The taxi driver this aft in DC was playing music on the radio, but I heard it with my OTHER ear...the little deaf cousin who lives across the vacant lot. Who knew?

Day One: What I Heard Today....

A series of double beeps of various tones
A rattle rattling (my favorite of the audiologist's noisemakers)
A little hand bell (which did not sound like ringing)
Birds (every time I was outside)!! Yay, birds!
The doorman's whistle as he summoned our cab
The arrivals/departures board flipping every time a train moved up
Money falling on a counter
The public address system in Baltimore's Penn Station and on the train (as a disparate sound--weebly oobly--from the background noises)
Sally and Cathy talking (but not recognizable as human speech)
Myself talking (ditto)
The pager keys tapping as I typed
The computer keys (ditto)
Two or three test sentences ("It's a nice day today" is only one I remember)

Note on pager, 11:55 a.m.: "Waitin fr train back to dc. It's incredibly different to hear all these sounds I haven't heard for over 40 years. But it's not like HEARING. It's like hearing every single particle of every single sound and not knowing how they fit together. V interesting! Back tmw for more tweaking. I can't have it up as loud as I need just yet. [And only have two of the 4 programs installed so far] Also, it's like hearing splinters of MUSIC."

Yeah, music...who could have predicted this?

Note on pager, 4:07 p.m.: This is a trip! I cn hear the keys on this thing clicking fr the first time. And I cn hear Sally and myself speak [Cathy in another car], but it doesn't sound like talking yet. Can hear self chewing crackers....munch, munch, munch. Best of all, when I go outside, I DEFINITELY CAN HEAR BIRDS! Dunno wot kind, but birds fr sure. very reassuring, them birds."

Most of the time I hear weird background-kinda noise--eggs frying, crickets having a rock concert. Having the TV on in the other room was too distracting--had to shut it off.

Peggy called while we were in Baltimore Penn Station waiting for the train back. Sorry I could not hear you over the phone, Peg-o, but once I get the hang of phone calls, you'll still be the first person I call.

I keep thinking of the whole cognitive question. I asked Ronniecat if she'd noticed any cognitive changes since she got her implant. She's thinking on this and will write about it when she formulates her reply, but I can think of one: how the brain takes all these tiny splinters of music and comes up with the recognizable sound of a human voice speaking. My brain as processor seems to be waaay out of practice. Except, there's so much missing. Hmmm...

Well, it's changing hourly. I'd go back outside and listen to some more BIRDS, though it's past their bedtime.

One other thing that is very nice about the implant sound is that it's not painful or overwhelming or constantly stressful like with hearing aids. LOUD sounds are just different--so far, anyway. Now that I'm not hearing with a hearing aid, I realize this. One step at a time.

Oh, man!! Two more sounds I just picked out of the haze: my soda fizzing in the bottle as I lift it to my mouth to take a drink, and myself breathing! So all this breathing sh*t is what's contributing to the background noise!! How do you hearing people DEAL with this???

This is fun. This is very different from what I could ever have imagined it to be. This is like learning Martian.

Thanks to dear Cathy and Sally for being with me today. No gurl is an island.

DAY ONE AND A HALF....

I'm realizing that I'm hearing EVERYTHING...even the individual fibers in my shirt scratching together when I move my arm!! Hearing folks must just tune this stuff out completely. Ha. They'd have to or they'd go nuts.

This must be why one of the most devastating experiences as my hearing went away was when I could no longer hear myself walking around. I felt like a ghost.

She's ready!

My implant has proven so lifelike, I've given it a name: Arbella. Arbella also is the name of the woman (Lady Arbella Stuart) I firmly believe wrote the plays credited to Shakespeare--or many of them, anyway. She's the only one who COULD have written them. She was a member of the nobility, lived in the royal palace, and could read and write four or five languages. While the actor William Shakspere's peers in birth and education were writing urban comedies (which Shakespeare never wrote), Shakespeare's plays were set in royal palaces and in various cities in Italy. Arbella led a list of prominent writers in Shakespeare's time, a list on which William Shakspere was nowhere to be found. Shakespeare's plays are famous for their strong women. I submit that's because the person who wrote these plays was a woman. Many of Shakespeare's plays were first performed before the Queen, also. None of his peers' plays enjoyed such a venue on their opening nights.

My Arbella is raring to go. She hears my fingers scratching my right ear, and she is alert to taps on the knob on my skull. Tomorrow in less than 10 hours, Doogie Howser will turn her on, and as my mother used to say, "we shall see what we shall see."

O Canada!

I got this notice when I joined Connect2Canada this a.m. The invitation came in the monthly Canadian Arts newsletter of the Canadian Embassy here. The newsletter tells of all the Canadian performers and artists whose work will be available or on display in DC in the month of April.

Meanwhile, just look at these eye openers that were in this morning's communique!

*Canada is the United States' largest source of imported crude oil, more than Saudi Arabia, and Canada has the world's second largest proven oil reserves. Much of that oil is located in the Alberta oilsands, an area that contains at least 175 billions of recoverable oil located under an area approximately the size of New York State (more information).


*We have rotated 15,000 troops in the war on terror, over 40,000 troops through the Balkans since 1991, committed $300 million dollars to reconstruction in Iraq, and are deploying a 2000 troop strong Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, one of the most dangerous regions in Afghanistan, making Canada the second largest military presence in Afghanistan -- second only to the United States (more information).

*None of the September 11, 2001 terrorists entered the United States from Canada (more information).

*Canada-U.S. trade, at more than $1.5 billion US per day, supports over five million jobs in the United States, and two million in Canada. Our shared Smart Border helps ensure the safe and secure trade of over 200 million border crossings per year (more information).

An indigestion of greenness....

...One must have constantly before one's eyes the very presence of life. the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. That is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one's good where one finds it....

The painter passes through states of fullness and of emptying. That is the whole secret of art. I take a walk in the forest of Fontainbleu. There I get an indigestion of greenness. I must empty this sensation into a picture. Green dominates in it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge hiimself of his sensations and his visions....

It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.... What interests me is the uneasiness of Cezanne, the real teaching of Cezanne, the torments of van Gogh, that is to say the drama of the men.


-from Picasso's Guernica: the Genesis of a Painting (U. of California, 1962)

Book Review!!

The mail keeps bringing amazing things these days....yesterday it was a copy of Sally and her friend Francine's new book, The Handbook of Style: Expert Fashion and Beauty Advice. Congratulations, Sally!!! It's gone right to the pride of place on my desk: the top of the stack!!

It's full of great stuff: "How to trim your bangs," "How to tie a scarf like a French woman," "How to get and keep smooth skin," "How to bundle up without looking like a walrus"....

Following each chapter is a cute q&a sidebar, and the last question is always "What is your favorite fashion scene from a movie?"

Rest assured, most of the answers, given by the experts in their fields whom Sally and Francine interviewed, go right over my head. These experts in fashion and beauty are serious movie fans.

For example, after "How to choose an overcoat," the favorite movie fashion scene of expert Rick Weinstein of Searle (a NYC coat design firm and retailer) is "Any scene from Sleepless in Seattle, the raincoat's finest hour." Did you notice any raincoats in that movie? I was too busy being freaked out by Meg Ryan driving down the freeways and not looking out the windshield!!

Actually, I could have helped Sally and Francine out on the "How to choose an overcoat." My advice would be "Drop hints around your son-in-law...with luck, he'll give you his old coat after he gets a brand new one!" [I've gotten tons of compliments on that coat, Jay. It's still the best of the best in my closet.]

Shad run in Rock Creek LAST WEEKEND....oops!

Shadbush blossoms

Last weekend (when I didn't have my camera!!!), the American shad were doing their annual run up to their spawning grounds near the head of Rock Creek. They swim from the ocean to reach the many small freshwater streams emptying into Chesapeake Bay from Maryland and Virginia and do their fishy thing every year about this time. Ignored in all of the hoopla surrounding DC's Cherry Blossom Festival, the blooming of the shadbush or shadblow (also called the serviceberry or Juneberry) announces to anyone who cares (like Native Americans of the past who were hungry for fresh fish) that the shad are doing their spawning run and can be found in great numbers in the small freshwater streams.

For a fairly long time, the shad were not able to spawn in Rock Creek because of various obstacles: dams, bridges, sewer outlets. But in 2003, the National Park Service began to remove these barriers, even constructing a fish ladder at one point to help the shad make it upstream, and now the shad are back in business in Rock Creek.

The American shad is sometimes called the river herring, which is actually what its genus name, Alosa, means. From colonial times up until about two generations ago, there was a lively shad fishing industry in these parts. George Washington fed his troops at Valley Forge with shad from the Delaware River. In the late 1790s, Washington even worked for a year as a shad fisherman. The shad's delicate flesh is considered the best eating of all the shad. Its Latin name, Alosa sapidissima, means "most delicious river herring."

When not spawning, it's a beautiful fish, also, with blue-green scales appearing lavender toward the tail. Shad also have a row of black spots along both sides near the "shoulders."



Cathy and I were walking Squeak to the doggy swimming hole which is upstream about a mile or so from my place. The creek was full of lively brownish fish, schooling and splashing. The shad's color fades to a pale, almost translucent-looking light brown when on its spawning run, although the black spots remain vivid. They were not too different in color from the creek bed (shown here, late this afternoon, sans a single fish!!!)



There are signs along the banks announcing that with a proper license, you can catch the fish in Rock Creek. The signs don't say much about whether it's advisable to eat your catch, however. Flecks of foam dot the surface of the water, especially downstream from the storm sewer outlets. The water is fairly low most years--and today it was noticeably lower than it was last weekend!



The creek was not completely void of wildlife, however. This momma mallard was trying to stay out of sight near the bank when I came along with the camera.





In all of the time I've spent walking along Rock Creek in the eponymous park, I've never seen a genuine fish until last weekend. Every year around July and August, however, I've happily pointed out "minnows" in the sheltered pools to anyone accompanying me on these walks. Well, guess what? Those were not minnows. Those were the very young shad making their way down to the Bay. There's a name for what shad are, but I've forgotten it. It means they are born in fresh water but live their adult lives in the ocean. Some of the parent shad survive the trip upstream and the spawning and make it back down to the Bay, also.

I can't wait for next year when the shadbush blooms. There's one by the bridge on P Street. I'll be keeping my eye on it.

Dizzie and doily

These are the first photos taken with my new camera. Dizzie, a hand-carved box (yup, Dizzie's head lifts off to reveal a storage area for something very small--an implant? oh, groan...), arrived yesterday with the hand-written greeting card next to him. What a cool surprise from Ed & Martha out there in Granrabbits. Thanks, thanks...you guys sure know how to make an old c'row smile.



Here is another wonderful handmade gift--a pink doily from Mary, Al, & Delaney--my niece and her husband and their youngest daughter. I love it--it looks very nice on my dresser, don'tcha think? Mary does this kind of thing in her spare time--ha--when she's not knitting or home-schooling Delaney. A vocabulary note for Delaney: the word doily is an eponym, named after a successful 1792 London milliner or draper. With a name like Doyley, he must have been IRISH! Thanks, Mary!

Barack and the Big Guy

As the Big Guy said, "He had me at 'Hi, Jimmy'!" The Big Guy was my first crush in 5th grade, when my parents finally gave up and sent me to parochial school--St. Mary's in Fargo, ND. On Valentine's day that year, the biggest card I got was from the Big Guy (it probably was not the biggest card he sent, but I'm talking about what I got).

Big Guy was one of those golden boys all during grade school and high school, too. He was a page in the U.S. Senate, and he wound up with a gorgeous girlfriend from Across the River. They're still married (and she's still gorgeous).

He never forgets his old pals from Fargo. When I arrived back in DC after an edjicational tour in NYC back in the late 90s, I opened my email on 3/14 and discovered a funny Valentine from the Big Guy. Aw, gee....

He's always been a true dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Thus, he showed up at a reception for Barack Obama in Palm Beach earlier this year and had his picture taken with the Senator.

You go, Big Guy...and you go, too, Senator! I'm committed to John Edwards, but I'll still contribute to your cause.

Can't hardly wait!

For what? Not that dime coke-ly-ear implant nonsense!

Nope! I'm gettin a new CAMERA!!! an the UPS tracker thing says it's on the way right now!

Big whoop....like you don't already have five cameras??

Not like this one! Not that work, anyway....feast yer eyes on this baby:



Hmph....that's just like the one blogginginparis got. Monkey see, monkey do...

You don't hafta be such a sourpuss about everything! Where's ur sense o' adventure?

And by the way, guess who I saw this mornin at Union Station? None other than Vincent in Dupont! If I'd had a functioning camera with me, I coulda taken his picture again, maybe even done a brief interview.

Ain't It the Truth??

* This picture is from the delightful Montana State University news service. The MSU news service story about the life of a sheepherder has nothing to do with this joke, but it's interesting.

[Thanx an a tip o the war bonnet to M'reen, who sent this one tday....]

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany .

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep. . . .

Now give me back my dog."

"A JOYFUL NOISE" ....CI and a 9-year-old girl

Ex-Shammickite sent an article from a Canadian newspaper about a 9-year-old girl who began losing her hearing when she was 3. Hearing aids worked for a while, but then they became ineffective. Now at age 9, she has received a cochlear implant, and the title of the article is "A Joyful Noise." It took her six months to get used to the implant, but now she sings and plays the piano. Congratulations to this brave little girl whose world has opened up dramatically with the addition of sounds, imperfect and limited though they be. I am reminded of one of my favorite sayings from the original Whole Earth Catalog: "What most you fear is where the gold is."

http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=18184&sc=85

[Thanks, Ex-Shammickite for sending this along. I've been admiring your "zipper in the sky photo" and the spotted dog next to the fairy door. Your blog won't let me comment, though. We have fairy doors here in Georgetown, too, but the mice use them....]

[Miscellaneous CI tidbit: The building in which I work every weekday also houses the Cochlear Implant Education Center, mainly focusing on information for parents and teachers of deaf and hard of hearing children. Its director, Deb Nussbaum, is a gracious, knowledgeable lady. She has written an article on the Clerc Center website about navigating the forest of information about CIs, one tree at a time.]

BUMPER STICKERS WE'D LIKE TO SEE....

Let's Fix Democracy in This Country First

If You Want a Nation Ruled By Religion, Move to Iran

Bush. Solid Like a Rock. Only Dumber.

Impeachment: It's Not Just for Sex Anymore

America : One Nation, Under Surveillance

Jail to the Chief

1/20/09: End of an Error

No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq?

Bush: God's Way of Proving Intelligent Design is Full Of Crap

We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them

Bush Doesn't Care About White People, Either

You Elected Him. You Deserve Him.

When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $1.46

The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century


[A tip o' the war bonnet to Helen, who sent these this ayem]

Cochlear Implant 15...GUEST BLOG

Ronnie, the author of a great blog on hearing loss and other events in Canada, our friendly neighbor to the north, has graciously agreed to let me post her activation story as a guest blog. (At last! Something interesting!!) Here's Ronnie's post from her day of activation in 2005:

Turning the damned thing on; or, what kind of Mickey Mouse setup is this anyway?

Driving across the MacDonald Bridge to the activation appointment, Husband and I confessed to each other that we were both hella nervous. More nervous than before the surgery. Or nervous in a different place, anyway.

It took quite a while to unpack all the basic compontents, which each come separately packaged, and about which more later. 'Helen', the audiologist I will be working with from now in, showed me how to put the basic unit together and then she put it on. I was almost surprised to discover there really is a magnet under my skin and the headpiece really does attach!

Helen handed me a card with a range of comfort levels on it - from "inaudible" through "barely audible", "very soft", on through "comfortable" "loud but comfortable", up to "painfully loud".

"You're going to hear a series of beeps," she said (I was part-lipreading, part reading notes Husband was writing for me). "When you do, I want you to indicate on the card how loud they are and we will adjust them."

I swear, as God is my witness, when she said "You are going to hear a series of beeps," my internal response was, "Yeah, right!!!" I just could not let my guard down and believe this was going to work.

She turned to her computer - which my CI was plugged into - and I grabbed Husband's hand.

And then, I heard a beep.

It was deep inside my head... as if that "silent voice" that you hear in your mind suddenly vocalized to you. I was astonished. I jumped in my chair and my head snapped involuntarily. I gripped Husband's hand. There were more beeps now, and I was struggling to calm myself down enough to remember what we were supposed to be doing.

"Uh...uh... s-soft... soft, I would call that," I stuttered, jabbing at the "soft" level on the card. "Okay, I'm going to turn it up," Helen said. I heard what she said and understood it. She turned the sound up. "Yes, now, now it's louder. That's, uh, comfortable." I looked over at Husband and burst into tears.

"Ahh," Helen said, reaching for a box on her shelf. "This is where we get out the tissues."

I sobbed into the tissue. "I don't think I let myself believe it was going to work," I said. I looked up and Husband was crying into a Kleenex as well. And so, I realized, was Helen. "You have the best job in the world," I blurted out.

Once we all composed ourselves, there was a lot of work to be done. Each of the electrodes had to be individually tuned to a level which was loud enough to hear but not uncomfortably loud. I realized that as long as I was facing Helen or Husband I could hear and understand whole sentences, although everyone's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse on helium. (Interestingly, I could not tell Helen's voice from Husband's initially, although as the appointment progressed he started to sound like his own voice again.) Helen was surprised that I could understand so much so quickly (she'd only had two other patients who could understand complete sentences at activation, she told me - one, an 81-year-old woman) but told me that of course the Mickey Mouse effect was normal and everyone experienced it.

The whole process took about two hours and was pretty intense. I realized how much of this is going to depend on me; Helen can't hear what I hear and relies on feedback from me to tune the device. I, however, don't know what an implant is "supposed" to sound like, so I hope I am making the right choices regarding loudness levels and so on.

Helen asked if mechanical noises - knocking on a desk - sounded different than more variable, organic noises like voices. Oh, yes, I assured her. Very different.

We later saw 'Stacy', the speech language pathologist, who asked me some questions with her mouth covered by a black hand-held screen (so I could not lipread). Although I had to ask her to repeat the first question, I understood all of them and responded correctly.

As we left the clinic the audiologists reminded us that it was going to be difficult in noisy situations, and that it is a "noisy world out there". As we strolled down the sidewalk in Halifax I caught tiny snippits of conversation as people went by - just noise, really, rising and falling as they passed. We walked past an HMV store. I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Music???" I said.

Husband laughed. Yes, they were playing music outside the store to lure in customers. I could tell that it was melodic but couldn't identify what it was or even what genre it might be.

We went out to dinner that night and it was really hard. Everyone in the crowded restaurant sounded as loud as Husband. There's still quite a ways to go to figure out how to understand this thing.

They sent us home with a great big box of manuals and videos and accessories and gadgets, some of which were a complete pleasant surprise because I didn't know they came with the original kit.

The CI itself, for the techno-curious, breaks down into these components, and when not in use, it's pretty much put away broken down this way, too:



You'll note there are three earhooks in this picture; all three came with the CI but each has a different purpose. The standard one is just what the name implies; the t-mic is best for use with telephone and using with t-coils and other assistive listening devices (some people, like me, however, find it gives the best day-to-day results, so it is my usual hook), and the extremely cool direct connect earhook, about which more later.

The whole thing comes together like so:



One of the accessories I wasn't expecting but was really glad to get right away was a direct connect cord. Believe it or not, when I am wearing the direct connect earhook, and plug this cord into that earhook, I can plug an audio device like my discman or my computer directly into the CI and therefore directly into my cochlea. Isn't that amazing? This, for example, is how it connects to my discman.



When I'm wearing this setup, I can hear ambient noise and also whatever I am plugged in to; but an external listener cannot hear the discman or computer. For now, I've managed to listen to some of Husband's music with it (music is MUCH BETTER through direct connect than through the air) and done some computer gaming, but I need a lot more practice before I can interpret such complex things being piped directly into the cochlea.

Well, hearing is all very well and fine, but a girl has to look good, and I was tickled pink that they threw in some of the snap-on covers that let you change the colour of the unit. I don't know how well you'll be able to make this out, but here are the four "blending colours" (designed to blend with hair, obviously)and the four "Sophista metallic (don't you love marketing?) colours" which are dark metallic green, blue, purple and (on the unit) red. Very sharp if I do say so.



Finally, this is what it looks like when I'm wearing it, more or less; normally in daily use my hair would probably cover the headpiece (disc) more because I'd try to get most of it out of the way of the connection between the magnet and my scalp. (At least most of the bald spot is covered now but in order to achieve that, I'm dead shaggy and badly in need of a haircut!)



It's been an absolutely wild two days and there is so much more to talk about but this post is way too long as it is. I will just finish by adding that when I got home I begged Mojo (the vocal one) to meow for me. "Make a noise, Mojey! Come on. Meow! Come on! Make a noise!" No dice. So I made the ASL sign for "hungry".

"MEOW!" he bawled. I hear ya, brother.

[NOTE from XE: My CI won't look exactly like this, since it's made by a different manufacturer. I also turned down the various color panels--especially the leopard print!!]

E-MAIL, BLESSED E-MAIL

And even more fun is the e-mail she send this evening. She's a gracious and generous writer to be telling me all this stuff. I feel very lucky she stumbled on my blog. Talk about synchronicity and serendipity!! Thanks, Ronnie...what a gift!

...
I had convinced myself quite seriously and sincerely that there was no
possible way this was going to work so I was completely astonished when I heard the first soft "bong" inside my skull. That's how it felt - like the noise was *inside my head*, like the "voice in your head" had suddenly vocalized. I mean, I can't *describe* how astonished I was, and that was after only a year of deafness. You've been deaf a lot longer than that, so be prepared :)

The most important thing I want to tell you is not to be put off by your first experiences with the implant. (As in, the first day or days.) I remember while waiting for my implant, I posted on my blog about a website I'd found where a guy posted sound files of what his first implant sounds sounded like. (He ran a sentence through some kind of filter until it was as close as he could get it to what it sounded like on activation, and then after a couple of weeks). I noted that it was ironic that, being deaf, I couldn't hear them so still had no idea what to expect!

Well, after posting that message to my blog, something strange happened. I got one email from a friend, then another. Then another and another. They were all, "out of the blue", urging me "Not to be discouraged" when I was activated, "Not to be frightened" of my first results, "Not to give up" if things didn't seem to be going well at first. I thought it was awfully strange, this sudden outpouring of concern for my emotional strength following activation. It wasn't until much later, when I revisited the website, that I put two and two together. After my blog post, my hearing friends went and listened to the files and were so horrified by what they heard that they immediately rushed to reassure me (without, of course, telling me
*why*, so as not to scare me).

Well, as it turns out, my own first sounds weren't nearly as bad as the robotic voice on that website so they needn't have worried. Everybody's voice sounded identical, and far too high (Minnie Mouse after inhaling helium). It was not until the night of the first day that my husband started to sound like himself again.

I am going with the assumption that your path back to hearing is going to take longer than mine, because your hearing loss has lasted much longer. I don't know how much memory of sound you have. Whatever memory you have, begin exercising it. Think about how it used to sound to hear a car go by, a dog bark, a person speak, music playing. The reason is because this is a very real training process you're going to go through in the beginning. You are going to hear an indecipherable "blat!". Then you're going to think (in nanoseconds), "There is a truck over there." And your brain is going to go, "Wait, wait, that 'blat' was recognizably what a truck horn used to sound like." And soon the connection between that sound and "truck horn" will be automatic and part of your everyday life. So you will need to use all your memory of sound to help connect the dots. How people deaf from birth are able to successfully learn to
hear with them is a real miracle to me, because at least in my case, that "training" relying on my memory of hearing was a very real and present process. Of course, the human brain is an inconcievably amazing instrument, and yours will do whatever it needs to do to connect the dots.

However, deaf-from-birth people do learn to hear successfully with them, so even if your memory of sound is not strong, it isn't a non-starter.

As for using the phone, I would tell your sweet but overexcited friends to cool their jets a little bit :) I was not able to recognize speech on the phone for a couple of weeks, I believe, after the activation. Your mileage may vary and I hope you can do it from day one, but I wouldn't encourage you to expect to be able to. [NOTE from XE: You mean, like, don't call us, we'll call you??]

Finally as for music: music is really, really complex and is the most challenging thing to hear and understand. Don't expect to hear anything recognizable as music right away - if you have unrealistic expectations I fear you may you fool yourself into being disappointed too early. Do keep in mind that your recognition and enjoyment of music will improve and improve over time (in my case, it did dramatically, but the first several months music on the radio was a muddy mess of percussion and sound). If you have a CI processor as I do that can plug directly into devices like iPods or computers (one of my processor "earhooks" has a place to attach a cord which I can then plug into any standard-sized speaker inlet), you'll find it 10,000x more enjoyable. You may also find, as I do, that live music and music played on a good-quality stereo is much much easier to interpret and enjoy than music from the kitchen or car radio.

...

I suppose I've bored you into a coma, or else I've terrified and worried you, neither of which was my intention. It's just that I know how you're feeling right now - you simply cannot IMAGINE how this is going to work or feel, and it's the scariest part of the trip, much scarier than the surgery, I found. So I want to make sure you and your support system are not needlessly disappointed (i.e. expecting to use the phone right away only to discover you can't) while also sending you every bit of my support for the exciting adventure you're about to go on as the alien noises rapidly change and morph and every day you amaze yourself by discovering something new (the clock ticking on the wall of my office irritated me. Hooray! And yes, I overhear conversations. You do *not* want to hear cell phone conversations, I promise you, but you will).

BE AWARE....VIRUS

I got THIS message from M'reen this ayem, and try as I might, I can't forward it to anybody. The attachments don't forward. Anyway, see if this works!

I am sending this to everyone who sends me email.

One of you sent a virus.

It is a very severe virus.

LOOK WHAT IT DID TO MY MOUSE!!





Just thought this was cute and you might want to send it on to others. Have a great day.



LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!HAHAHAHA

Cochlear Implant 14...Patience!

It's less than two weeks now till activation (turn-on) for this CI. I am beyond excited, but also chary about the whole thing. What if it doesn't work? If so, I won't be the first person to experience a grand failure. Having a cochlear implant is not the same as hearing. It's simply and profoundly the new manifestation of my deafness. Because whatever happens, it won't be the same as hearing as I remember it--sharp, clear, effortless. It'll be more work as I learn to identify what I'm hearing.

What has it meant to be deaf all these years? In my case, because I communicate with nonsigning hearing people largely through lip reading, it has meant I spend a lot of time on the edge of conversations waiting to see (hear) the ONE WORD that will make all the other words make sense. It has meant I've spent a lot of time in noisy restaurants almost bored but not fidgeting, smiling and laughing at jokes I haven't really heard. (All those Holy Thursday High Masses in Latin, which we school children had to sit through quietly without understanding a thing we were hearing, was great training for being deaf.) It has meant that as things have fallen out of my experience--crickets, the ineffable sound of the cottonwood tree (called the "singing tree" by the Native Americans) that I loved so much, the incredible variations of the mocking bird--I've had to let them go, and I've probably forgotten many, many sounds even exist. One woman was startled by the sound of frogs croaking in a marshy pond near the audiologist's office when she left the building on activation day!

Family, friends, neighbors are very anxious for my implant to succeed. They want me to be able to hear again the minute the audiologist turns it on. Mary Lou's promise, "I'm going to call you on April 3 and see if you can hear me," is typical. But what if I can't? What if the sound produced by the implant in conjunction with the processor is so strange I can't figure it out at first? This happens to many people. Some CI recipients have described people's voices--even their own--as "hollow, toneless." One woman said her little dog barking sounded like "a cow mooing in a barrel." Bev Biderman's book Wired for Sound details the long process she went through to make sense of what she was hearing. Among other things, she listened to a tape of Make Way for Ducklings while reading the children's storybook at the same time. Biderman is my hero in that she simply refused to give up. She knew what she wanted from this implant--to understand speech, to listen to music--and she went after it.

What if I can understand almost everything right away? What if I can hear speech but not music, or vice versa? [Ha...I'll never forget the looks I got back in the early 1960s when I asked, "What song is that playing on the radio?" "Um...Jingle Bells."]

Among other things, I want to OVERHEAR. I want to get on the bus in the morning and OVERHEAR what people are saying into their cellphones. [I know, I know....] I want to hear the rhythm of everyday speech of all kinds of people: the DC taxi drivers from all over the world, my neighbors--from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Sweden, and Virginia--our secretary from Nigeria. And my best friend, who was born and raised in Baltimore and, save for two years in France and one year in Arizona, has never lived more than 25 miles away from her birthplace. And my children and grandchildren...what do they sound like now?

The world of sound I'll reenter is far different from the one I left in 1963. I can't quite believe I had the nerve to go through with this. As the ineffable Martha says when talking about our class reunion, "It'll be interesting...and possibly even enjoyable." More than that, surely!

Cochlear Implant 13

I have a lot of spare parts these days: one cochlear implant, three stents, two hearing aids, one plastic lens (thanks to a cataract), a few dental things, eyeglasses. Isn't modern medicine...what's the word?....wonderful?

Day 13...Here's where Iyam....

The incision

This is healing nicely. No more scabs to pick, and I'm enjoying scratching my scalp. Cathy gives me hell for this, but it FEELS GOOD. Further, I still have 5 different colors of hair on my head. This is a genetic variant common among the Celtic races. The reason I know I still have all five colors is because some of the scabs I've picked have had little BLACK hairs in them--mine, all mine. Even though most people would describe me as "strawberry blonde," it's a mixture, an illusion, folks. Further, people on my mother's side of the family especially don't get grey so much as their hair color simply f a d e s away.

Curiosity

People are very CURIOUS about this operation, and I spend part of every day doing show & tell.This mostly grosses them out, but now they know. This is an OPERATION in which there is cutting and bleeding and that. But they are reassured when I show them that it's all growing back together. One of my ears has wound up lower than the other, and it sticks out farther, and it's kinda RED. But that's getting better (i.e., going back to normal). They GLUED the ear back after cutting it loose to scrape out an indent for the CI. The glue did not hold perfectly. They say even the slightest cut on a woman's face is very traumatic. Hmm...I've been through this before with eye surgery back in the 70s. It IS weird, but there are other, better things to be thinking about....like impeaching George W. Bush.

Ringing in my ear

This is calming down a bit, but I still get two variations fairly often: the symphonic (when I bend over or cough), and the "New Year's Eve in Times Square" when I take me pills at night. Better living through chemistry just sets it off. Doesn't last long, but it's spectacular.

Taste disturbance, black eye, etc.

Thanks be, my sense of taste has returned--and (not so hot) brought my appetite back with it. Just when I'd lost almost 10 pounds, too. The bruising has mostly gone from my face and neck.

Office Joke

Our secretary sent us a good one today, and here it is:

HOW TO PROPERLY PLACE NEW EMPLOYEES

1. Put 400 bricks in a closed room.

2. Put your new hires in the room and close the door.

3. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.

4. Then analyze the situation:

a. If they are counting the bricks,
put them in the Accounting Department.

b. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.

c. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks,
put them in Engineering.

d. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order,
put them in Planning.

e. If they are throwing the bricks at each other,
put them in Operations.

f. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.

g. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.

h. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.

i. If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.

j. If they have already left for the day, put them in Management.

k. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.

l. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management.

m. Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, put them in Congress.

Why I Don't Live in Iowa Anymore.....

Click on the link, and you'll see IDOT photos of one of Iowa's recent blizzards (maybe the one I looked up in the Cedar Rapids Gazette?). Gack!

(Thanx and a tip o' the old seed cap to Erda, one of Iowa's great gardeners)

http://www.iowadot.gov/2007_blizzard.html

Fine...Now Move the Government to Peoria

When the kids were small, we lived on a 2-acre spread on the south edge of Bismarck. We had a little horse barn and 1 acre of pasture, which we rented to our friends Walter and Margaret. Walter was a successful insurance salesman who had the old cowboy image down pat. I never saw him without his big hat, string tie, and fancy boots. Margaret worked for one of the state departments up in the Capitol Building Monday through Friday, but after hours and on the weekends, she was a horsewoman and a champion barrel racer. They rode their horses for exercise every night after work, and when their ride was over and the horses were brushed and put into their stalls, Walter often would open the trunk of his big Cadillac and bring out beer for the grownups and watermelon for the kids. The kids were crazy about Walter and Margaret. They were kind and generous and affectionate with them. Katie's first words, spoken one evening when Margaret rode into the yard on her horse Fly, were "Hi, Margaret." None of us had heard her say much of anything--she got what she wanted by pointing and grunting, her shorthand way of communicating with her deaf mom--and when she came out with that, it caused a sensation. And after that, she just kept talking.

One evening, Walter and Margaret stopped by the house after their ride, and we sat on the back porch. Margaret told me that several of their friends in the horse club recently had lost saddles and other gear when their barns and stables had been broken into. She asked if I had noticed any strangers driving slowly past the house, and she wanted me to be aware that the possibility existed for burglary.

I asked Walter if he could recommend a handgun for me. I said that it made me nervous to be home alone with the kids during the week, and I thought maybe I should have a gun handy.

Walter said, "You don't want to kill anybody, do you?" I said no...it would be just to scare an intruder off. And he said, "Well, the only reason to have a gun like that is if you're going to kill somebody, and since you don't want to do that, then don't get a gun."

The end of last week, the Federal Appeals court ruled that the District of Columbia's law forbidding residents to keep handguns in their homes is unconstitutional. The suit was brought by six DC residents who say the law breaks the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which affirms U.S. citizens' right to bear arms. D.C. Major Adrien Fenty said he was "outraged" at the ruling. D.C. police harvested more than 2,000 illegal handguns last year, and Fenty plans to appeal the ruling.

Opponents of D.C.'s handgun laws, the most stringent in the country, say they are mostly ineffective. Handguns are readily available on the street to anyone who wants to avoid the registration provisions, and deaths by handguns made up the majority of homicides last year (137 out of 169 total). Not all of the handguns used in these murders were registered prior to 1976, one of D.C.'s first laws aimed at abating the flood of handguns here: if you are a D.C. resident, unless your handgun was registered prior to 1976, you may not keep it in your home. Silberman, the judge who wrote the majority opinion, noted that the black market for handguns in D.C. is so strong that it effectively means the only people who don't have ready access to handguns are the law-abiding citizens.

That last statement reminds me of all the pickups out in Bismarck. Most pickups had a gun rack in the back window, and many also had a bumper sticker that read "When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns." Good, solid NRA fare for those who envision themselves blasting intruders away from home and hearth. But sensible people, even self-styled cowboys, know better.

I moved to D.C. in 1992. Peggy said, "Oh, Ma...Now I'm going to worry about you!" D.C. at that time had one of the worst images for crime in the U.S. I think it no longer was the "murder capital of America"--I think other cities had taken over that distinction. I was more worried about other things: getting run over by yuppies driving their SUVs and other gas-guzzling monstrosities through the stop sign in front of my house, or getting barked at by any of the ugly dogs kept in the neighborhoods around Gallaudet.

I walked a lot in those days. I sold my last car in 1991 when I was preparing to move eastward, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. Goodbye, gas, insurance, repairs, standing by the side of the road in high heels thumbing a ride when the car broke down. But I digress...

My late friend David lived in Capitol Hill, and I often walked to Union Station from his place after paying him a visit. I'd stop to rest on one of the park benches lining Pennsylvania Avenue where it intersects with North Carolina Ave. There's a little park there, and the benches are shaded from the broiling D.C. summer sun. And as I sat there, I noticed that on Friday afternoons, especially, young men in athletic jerseys and baggy jeans would park their old cars on one of the little side streets on the other side of Pennsylvania. And a steady stream of other young men wearing suits and ties would drive up in their Audis and BMWs, doublepark alongside the other young men, have a few words, shake hands, and then drive off. It didn't take me long to figure out I was seeing a piece of the marketplace in action. The drug marketplace. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, either, to figure out which of the two groups of young men paid the biggest price for this criminal behavior. Hint: It wasn't the guys in the suits and Beemers.

I think that we could clear up the crime and get rid of the handguns in D.C. if we did just one thing: Move the federal government someplace else. The drugs and the handguns would follow.

Walter Reed Hospital, the Hospital of Presidents

On August 25, 2005, the 8 members of the Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC) Commission, under the chairmanship of Anthony Principi, George W. Bush's Secretary of Veterans Affairs, voted unanimously to close Walter Reed Hospital in northwest Washington, D.C.

I mention this to point out that the decline in funding and attention for Walter Reed Hospital is not exactly news.

When I was a teenager, Walter Reed Hospital was where the President, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower, went when he got sick. Walter Reed was the gold standard for military hospitals. Ike finally died there, and so did Generals Black Jack Pershing and Douglas MacArthur. It was a famous hospital with a fine culture of excellent care, and even foreign dignitaries stayed there.

Back in 2005, George W. Bush had this to say about Walter Reed Hospital, which a PBS Newshour story notes he "has visited" (without citing how often*):
http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Every time I come to Walter Reed, it confirms that which I know, which is we're providing the very best -- the best care, the best compassion. We're moving these soldiers from the battlefield to hospitals as quickly as we can, so they can begin their rehab.

Walter Reed enjoyed a fine reputation as a rehab hospital over the years. It's known as one of the birthplaces of rehabilitation medicine. That was before the mold, the lice, and the mice took over under the watch of the "supreme commander" currently in the White House.

Kind of reminds you of "Brownie, you're doin a heckova job," doesn't it?

Why this man is still in office is beyond me.


*http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec05/walterreed_8-25.html

Cochlear Implant 12 - Progress Day?

Some wags in the convent used to refer to March 4 as "Progress Day" (MARCH FORTH....groan). Day 4 (which also coincided with Progress Day this year) dawned with Sally driving back to NJ to do last-minute prep for the week ahead with her family. Day 3 (Saturday) had been mostly uneventful save for visits from Cathy and Lida, a brief walk down to the corner for supplies, and a quick shopping trip to Whole Foods with Sally. She and I had agreed that I was coming along fine and strong enough to take care of myself, especially since Cathy was available at the flick of the Blackberry if anything came up. I was a little dizzy when I got up on Day 4 to see her off, but nothing bad. Went back to bed for a snooze, then woke up about 10 a.m. or so.

Whoa! I was not only VERY dizzy but nauseated this time when I tried to get up. The docs at JH had given me a prescription for suppositories to be taken "as needed for nausea." Well, the papal we didn't need any suppositories, did we?? After throwing up all over the bathroom and going back to bed, I still didn't get the picture. Looked up natural remedies for dizziness and nausea in Alternative Cures by Bill Gottlieb, a very handy book from Prevention. Ginger, it said, was one of the primary cures for nausea and dizziness. So I staggered to the fridge, found the last bottle of ginger ale from last summer, and sipped it.

Got up to retrieve a glass of water and threw up again, this time in my handy little Ikea wastebasket. Decided to try the suppositories. An hour or so into that, I could sip water and ginger ale and even nibble on saltines. The idea of eating or drinking anything else was impossible. I didn't like what I saw in the mirror, either....lots more bruising, hair looking (in the immortal words of Flannery O'Connor in Wise Blood) "like ham gravy trickling over her skull."

And so it goes. This morning Cathy stopped by on her way to work and called CVS to renew the prescription for suppositories. I finally got up, took a bath, fried a couple of eggs, and made a piece of toast. After eating that, I slept until 2:30 this afternoon.

Healing never occurs in a straight rising line....it's up and down, up and down, then finally up. I'm somewhere between up and down right now, having cancelled two visits (from Mary, my niece, and Barbara). But no more throwing up so far. Food, btw, tastes WEIRD, and that's a certified side effect of getting a CI, too. Don't know if this is from the implant disturbing my sensory perceptions or from the tube they had down my throat during the operation.

It's been lovely lying in bed watching the day unfold itself outside my big window. Paula wanted to know if I spent the time meditating. Um, no. I can't separate the spirichal from the physical right now. It's just me, being here now.

Cochlear Implant 11

[This is me this morning - day 2 - at breakfast. See, it's not so bad. The reality was pretty pedestrian, and not anywhere near as bad as my imaginings. The main thing is that I've been showered with good thoughts, prayers, white light, love, good vibes, the works from all kinds of family and friends. Cathy gave up two whole days to take me to the hospital and stay with me. Sally is giving up today and at least part of the weekend. Lida has offered to help me order in from Joe's Noodle Shop, and Barbara intends to look in at some point.

Peggy has been pulling for me from afar via her blog and email (check out her blog for another view), as have my old friends Paula (who sent poems by email from her favorite writing website) and Annie. Other bloggers I've "met," Ex-Shammickite, Little Red Hen, and Ronni also have offered their good wishes and encouragement.

Helen sent a most beautiful card, and her mom sent good wishes and prayers. Medea sent good luck, and Ian promised to send me "lots of music." My brother Gene typed an encouraging note with great effort--he is fighting against both post-polio and the after effects of a stroke.

The folks from work, especially Linda, Yinka, Cat, Anita, Tim, Ricky, Margaret, Marteal, Mary (ex officio), and Susan, are pulling for me.

Then there are Bev, Deb, and Ronnie, all great women with CIs, who have offered their encouragement and celebration, too. Their experiences have really been part of the tipping point in pushing me off the starting gate and over the finish line.

To every single employee I encountered yesterday at Johns Hopkins--from admission clerk to head surgeon to the guy who wheeled me out the front door when it was over, a great big THANKS! Their friendliness and competence are awe-inspiring. It's one of the world's great hospitals.]

Anyway here's what it's like to get a cochlear implant. Cathy and I take the train and a taxi to Johns Hopkins. I sign in, fork over the co-pay, and head down to the outpatient surgery (most implants are done as outpatient procedures). They ask me a bunch of questions (same ones, over and over, to make sure they're not implanting the wrong person or the wrong ear).

They lead me to the pre-operative holding area, which is a bunch of curtained cubicles with those reclining chairs that flop back. They pull the curtain closed, flop a pile of hospital garments on the chair, and tell me to take off everything, rings included, and put on two hospital gowns, one frontwards and one backwards, some of those footie things, and what looks like a shower cap.

When I'm dressed in the floppy cotton garments, I pull back the curtain. The interpreter comes in and sits in one visitor's chair, and Cathy sits in the other. We chat about housing in Baltimore, and the interpreter tells us about her roommate buying a house and moving out without telling anyone she was leaving. (No problem, a nice replacement roommate moved in.) A nurse comes in and hooks me up to a saline IV drip.

After I'm hooked up, the anesthetist stops by and goes down my medical history, which has been faxed over from the primary care physician. Somehow she misses the line which says I have three stents. When Cathy asks her if she knows I have three stents, she says, "NO! Did you have a heart attack?" (No, I didn't.) I do tell her I'm having the right ear implanted so I can lie on my left side; I can't lie on my right side because everything kinda stops. Now SHE'S looking worried.

The information IS on the chart, she just missed it. The beautiful Chinese resident (see Cochlear Implant 3) stops by, and Cathy asks her "Do you know she has three stents?" This doctor says "Yes." Then the surgeon himself comes in, shakes my hand, and marks my right ear with a blue magic marker. I ask him how HE is feeling today, and he says "Good!" Today is his light day...only three implants, and I'm the second.

Then another anesthetist comes in with a needle. He says it's time to go, and he slips the needle into the IV line. "Whoa....whoa....Am I in Moscow?" I babble. Cathy answers, telling me not to dance on the operating table, but she says my eyes have gone blank. "She's out," she says. The anesthetist says "She's a cheap date!"

And what seems to be immediately after this, I'm back in another one of those chairs, but this time in recovery, and I've got a soft white cup held against the incision by a velcro strap around my head. There's no pain, but my ear is ringing off the hook! The interpreter says, "Hi...How do you feel?" and I just smile and SIGN some kind of gibberish. The nurse says, "That's a great smile!" One of the possible risks is losing control over the side of your face by the implant. They're happy I can smile with both sides of my mouth.

The beautiful Chinese resident comes in and says they will call me tomorrow to see how I'm doing. And then it seems it's time to go. They wheel me down the hall and out to the front, where I climb into a taxi. The driver takes us to the Peabody Court hotel, which is a beautiful little hotel in Baltimore. The doorman helps me out of the cab and down to the registration desk. I hand over my credit card, they give me the keys, and we go up to the room.

I climb into bed with all my clothes on because the room feels cold, and I take a pain killer because my head is starting to ache pretty good. Cathy turns up the heat and calls room service. I drink the ginger ale that arrives, but don't want the soup. And I conk out for a while. It's dark when I wake up, and Cathy is watching "Law & Order"....she asks if I want anything, and I ask for a grilled cheese sandwich so I can take the antibiotic. The sandwich arrives, and I eat half and conk out some more. I wake up about 10:30...Cathy is reading with the TV still on ("Law & Order", which I like, but I can't see without my glasses. My head is too fat from the swelling to put them on.)

I get up to go to the bathroom, and notice I have a nice little shiner developing under my right eye. I get back into bed and reply to some text messages from my wonderful grandson Ian. And then I conk out for good.

Today when I wake up, I feet pretty good, more like normal, and with no pain. My face looks a bit less pumpkin-like, but the bruising has blossomed.

And that's what happened when I went to the hospital and got a cochlear implant. Now I wait a month, and then they'll turn it on. From what I've been told, that's when the fun/hard work starts. We'll see....

Cochlear Implant 10

A wonderful Daily Om meditation arrived in my e-mail this morning, and how appropriate it is! It suggests that we have a ceremony to say goodbye to a role before we welcome a new one. Tomorrow I will begin the process of shedding a role that's been with me for almost 44 years: the deaf person. I'll still be deaf, but with the help of technology, I'll be able to hear much more than I have for a long time. What kind of ceremony would be fitting to mark this transition to the new role? Shall I donate my right hearing aid to a deaf person who needs it but maybe hasn't got the $3000 to buy one? It's a powerful digital hearing aid, just a couple of years old. After the surgery, my right ear will never again be able to hear with a hearing aid. Once the implant is turned on next month, however, it may be able to hear music, voices over the telephone, small children's voices, radio programs. It may not be able to hear all of that, but it'll hear more than it has for 43 years. My ceremony will consist of boxing up the hearing aid in preparation for giving it to the next person, lighting a candle, and enjoying a Rob Roy, Grandpa Carew's favorite beverage at family dinners. I'm sure I had one the weekend when I started taking the antibiotic that killed my hearing. Bottoms up!

Cochlear Implant 9

From: "Sue and Dan
To: "Mary Ellen"
Subject: adventure ahead
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:58:58 -0600

Hi M.E.! So, you're going in for the "procedure" this week? From what you've said, it sounds like they do it, then you just wait around for awhile until they start gradually tuning you in. I'll be thinking of you. Here's something to wait for: I'm listening right now to an album by a singer I'd never heard of - Eva Cassidy. She used to sing around DC and environs, but got cancer and died young around 2001. Did you ever know about her? She had a phenomenal bluesy, folksy voice. I thought it was an Ella Fitzgerald singalike, but she was this little bitty white girl! Anyway, here's to cochlear implants - long may they thrum. Love, Susan


My Reply:

eva cassidy? i've never heard of her, alas. and rest in peace. but i'll for sure look up her work if i can hear music in the future. only two more days without a metal probe in my skull forever. tune-in will be on april 3, then april 4, and april 9. so it'll be a while before anything changes, audiologically speaking.

i was thinking today that my children have never known me when i was not either severely or profoundly deaf. it'll be a new thing for them, too. i was trying to remember today when it was that i stopped laughing out loud. i used to laugh until i was red-faced and breathless (remember Grandma Peters??), but haven't for years. life always tickled the hell out of me, though it doesn't much now. maybe that'll return. as it said in my horoscope back in january, "the long meltdown of your life is almost over." interesting, that.

via blogging, i've "met" another CI implantee from Canada, and asked her if she'd noticed any cognitive differences since she got hers two years ago....and she said that question has inspired her to write a whole new post on her blog (www.hearingloss.blogspot.com). she hasn't yet, so i'm waiting for it. what kind of a change will this be?

you know, i wrote my master's thesis at city college on becoming deaf. the title was "the zen of deafness." now i think i need to rewrite it and at least give it a subtitle: "my life as a moron."

how wonderful to be able to share all this with you folks....

lots of love, m.e.

Mrs. Gallimore

Nosing around online this a.m. for news about the blizzard in eastern Iowa/southern Minnesota, I of course checked in with the Cedar Rapids Gazette gazetteonline.com, and after I read the storm stories, I of course checked the political coverage of Mike Hlas, one of my favorite sportswriters ever from our Iowa days. (We hired his brother Craig, also a writer, as an editor for my former employer out there, and he's done very well with the company. He now writes reports and travels around the country to present them.) Like Craig, Mike is funny and smart but not a smartass, which is probably why the Gazette also has him covering the campaign trail out there in "A Year in Iowa."

In one column on John McCain's Iowa appearances, he throws in a few of McCain's warmup jokes--
"Two inmates at a state prison are in a chow line. One of them said to the other one 'The food was a lot better in here when you were the governor.'"
AND
"Following Phil Gramm [who introduced McCain to the crowd] sometimes, I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband where on the wedding night he said 'I know what I'm supposed to do, I just don't know how to make it interesting.'"

In another column, Hlas gives light to why the MSM call Barack Obama a rock star--
When Hlas asked one 60-year old Cedar Rapidian what he liked about Obama, the man replied, "Just his charisma. He seems to have good ideas, he's intelligent."
AND
Another person in the crowd said, "He just has that ability to transcend generations, races. Very articulate. He just has that charisma."
AND
"Oh, that 'rock star' stuff? That became far more perceptible after Obama's 'conversation' as he oh, so slowly worked his way out of the gym while signing autographs and getting his picture taken.

"A girl wearing sweatpants that identified her as a member of Kennedy's cross country squad squealed and hopped around after Obama signed her copy of his book 'The Audacity of Hope.'

" 'I touched his hand!' another teenaged girl giddily shouted at a friend. 'I touched his hand, too!' was the reply. 'I'm not gonna wash it!'

"Who knew that advocating better pay for schoolteachers and a withdrawl of U.S. troops from Iraq by March, 2008 got kids so excited?"

Hlas also has something called "the Hlog," a sports blog about...duh...sports in Iowa, specifically Iowa basketball--"No Iowa State men's basketball starter scored more than seven points at Kansas Saturday. Guess who won by 37 points?" And on the Hlog, he has recommended sites, one of which is Mrs. Gallimore's Blog http://mrsgallimoresblog.blogspot.com/

Who is Mrs. Gallimore? She's a junior high teacher in a small town, and she blogs her assignments and instructions for homework, etc., for every school day. Mrs. Gallimore's Blog is subtitled, appropriately, Mrs. Gallimore's Homework Network. There is no way you can leave a comment in this blog, though. No matter how up-to-date they are technologically, teachers are still coming down firmly on the side of NO BACK TALK!!

I think it's a great idea. Wonder if any teachers at the Clerc Center are already doing this???

The good old Iowa ice storm, meanwhile, is scheduled to continue until noon today, after which utility crews will start the 24-hour red-eye labor of cutting down trees that have fallen across the power lines and restoring sagging, ice-burdened lines that have flipped the system simply by touching something. It's not too cold there--34 degrees above right now--so people have been content to stay off the roads and keep their refrigerator and freezer doors shut (not so it doesn't cool the house off, but so the appliances stay cold).

Son Tom in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, lives within walking distance of his job at Gary's Foods, which probably has a generator to keep the store's coolers going. I'll try to get through to his cell phone later today and see how he's doing.

Cochlear Implant 8

Had lunch today with Cynthia, a deaf woman I met just after I moved to my current neck of the woods...good god...9 years ago! How time flies when you haven't got a clue as to what's going on! She was in graduate school at Gallaudet at the time, and she lived very close to where I used to live on 17th Street. That was half a block from Safeway, of course. (Have you noticed the FOOD THEME in this blog?)

Cynthia lives in NJ now, and she got a c.i. almost a year ago. She says she loves it. Also, now that she can hear some of the things she's been missing, she says it's made it very clear just how deaf she really is. I can understand that. I remember the shock of hearing the grocery bags rustle after I got some great new hearing aids once. I mean, who knew grocery bags made all that racket? I can't hear them anymore now. Maybe they'll turn up again soon.

Cynthia also says that one of the best things is if she's in a relatively quiet restaurant, she can overhear the conversations at the nearby tables! Oh, joy! I hope I'll be able to OVERHEAR things. Listening to people's accents and ways of speaking used to be one of my primary pleasures. Now people all sound like me. BORING....

The Illustrious Co-worker says she's afraid that after I can hear her voice, I won't like her any more. She's a native of Bal'mer, which means her accent is half southern and half eastern. I can't imagine not liking it. The one time I heard a Baltimorean for any length of time was in 1960, when Liturgical Press send me to Liturgical Week in Pittsburgh (Cynthia's birthplace, btw). There was a young publisher there from Baltimore, and his accent was soft and enchanting. I decided then and there that I'd like to live in Baltimore sometime. It's not for lack of looking that I haven't found a house there.

Anyway, it's now only one week from today when they will thread that electrode into my cochlea and then sew up my scalp and send me home to heal for several weeks before they start tuning in the gizmo. Lo and behold, also, the student health service turns out to have the very kind of flu shot I need to prevent meningitis! And instead of the usual $65 a pop, I can get it free! Leap and the net appears....

Welcome, Ronnie!!

Ronnie, a 41-year-old policy analyst for a nonprofit in Atlantic(?) Canada, left a comment on "Cochlear Implant 7" and introduced her wonderful blog, HEARING/LOSS - A journal of a "post-lingual acquired hearing loss in adulthood" or how I went deaf - and got a cochlear implant - at 39. Please check it out: www.hearingloss.blogspot.com

i love her answer to that inane blogger question:

Do you believe that forks are evolved from spoons?

Don't be ridiculous. God created both forks and spoons, on the same day 5,000 years ago and anyone who says He didn't is going to Hell.

She also appears to be a cat lover. I love cats, but I'm wildly allergic to them. Still, one of the best parts of this book I'm reading now (Peach Cobbler Murder by Joanne Fluke, a former Minnesotan and "national bestselling author" according to the book cover, is Moishe, the cat belonging to Hanna Swensen, Fluke's detective/crime solver ala Agatha Christie. For example:

She was just sitting down again when her phone rang.
"Is it Mother?" Hannah asked the cat whose tail had suddenly swelled into a bush. Moishe wasn't fond of Delores Swensen and he'd shredded several pairs of her pantyhose to prove it. As the phone rang again, Moishe's hackles rose and he arched his back like a Halloween cat. It was definitely her mother, Hannah decided, and she reached for the phone. "Hello, Mother," she said.

Some of the most interesting bloggers I've "met" are from Canada. What's with those folks, anyway? They seem so smart and civilized. Not like us 'murkins. Well, I can't take time to think about this now...Rachael Ray is on the Food Network....ciao....