adjusting

I Ain’t Dead Yet…

Fandango17 Comments

Seriously, I am too old for this shit. It’s been eight days since we moved in to this house and we are still barely half way through unboxing things and figuring out where to put everything.

My wife keeps holding things up and asking me if we are ever going to use whatever it is again or should we just toss it. Most of the time my response is, “just toss it.”

I have barely been on WordPress over the past week. My FOWC with Fandango prompts, which are scheduled through mid-March, but other than that, I have spent little time here. I was hoping to read your posts and write some new ones of my own at night, but I am so exhausted by the time I get in bed, that I can’t keep my eyes open for more than a few minutes.

Bear with me for another week or two and eventually I promise that I will get back into the swing of things.

Sunday Poser — Adjusting to Change

Fandango4 Comments

For today’s Sunday Poser, Sadje wants to know:

How do you react to a change? Do you accept it easily or find it hard to adapt to different circumstances?

Alas, I am an old man and old men generally are a little less welcoming to change than younger men. And when it comes to how I personally, react to change, it depends on the nature of the change and the relative permanance of the change.

For example, a change of scenery when going away on a vacation can be a welcome thing. Or when Apple changed the iPhone charging cable from its proprietary Lightning connection to the universal USB-C connection, I was happy because my wife and I could use the same connection cable for her Android phone and my iPhone, even though it immediately obsoleted my more than half a dozen on my Lightning cables.

But the changes that accompanied the inexplicable election (re-election, actually), of an egotistical madman to President of the United States and what he is doing to the American democracy (i.e., destroying it) are not a welcome changes at all.

I can enthusiastically embrace change for the better but I abhor change for the sake of change. My general philosophy about change is “if it ain’t broke, don’t ‘fix’ it,” a philosophy apparently not shared by the folks at WordPress.

That said, change is as inevitable. So there really isn’t much of a choice. Change happens and if we fail to change, we stagnate.

45 Days

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I got fitted for hearing aids yesterday. Now I’ve got 45 days to decide if I like them. 45 days to retrain my brain to hear through them. 45 days to get used to them.

So far, everything sounds a bit tinny, including my own voice. I’m getting the sense of a bit of an echo chamber inside my head. And I can hear things amplified that give me pause, like the sounds of a deck of cards being shuffled when my wife and I play 500 rummy or the sound of my stream hitting the toilet water when I pee. (TMI?)

But on the other hand, I can watch TV without having to wear headphones or to have the volume up so high that it blows my wife out of the room. At the same time, I have to remind my wife that she needn’t yell at me to make herself heard. Have you ever tried telling your spouse to keep her voice down? Take my advice, don’t try that at home!

And when I go outside now I can hear birds tweeting during the day and crickets chirping at night, sounds I haven’t heard in a long time, so that’s a good thing.

I have three biweekly follow up appointments with the audiologist for adjustments and fine tuning over the next 45 days. Hopefully, those will address any kinks and give my brain the time it takes to acclimate to hearing aids.

I’ll let you know how it’s going 45 days from now.