A report from yesterday (2/13), a day that began with painfully low barometric pressure and included deluges of cold rain, but brought two occasions for real joy: brilliant hearing and the magic clock.
Brilliant hearing. The story begins back in the final week of the Christmas season, during which I lost (almost all of) my hearing, in both ears. Wispy bits of very loud sound — I had to turn the tv’s volume way up to catch anything at all — but otherwise deep silence.
An old problem, but never in both ears at once: impacted ear wax, blocking sound from reaching my eardrums. I’ve suffered from it for decades, and have gotten used to having my family doctor’s aide wash the wax out of my affected right ear with a spray of warm water. (Inevitably, it turned out that my other ear was partially blocked as well, so it had to be washed out too.)
This time it happened in a week when almost every day was a holiday and getting an appointment was out of the question. But after New Year’s I got on my computer and was able to schedule one on Monday 1/6. Which returned me to hearing in both ears.
This lasted a couple of weeks, and then my left ear went deaf. On 1/25 I reported on Facebook that I was “still half-deaf”, and I put up with this infirmity for quite some time, in the hope that spraying warm water into my ear would open it up. But to no avail. So I scheduled another lavage appointment for Wednesday 1/12.
This one took hours. The tech assistant doing the actual lavage labored first on my apparently good right ear, which turned out to have a gigantic glob of earwax in it, but off to one side of the eardrum, so that some sound was getting through. Eventually it submitted, came loose, and could be carefully extracted with a tool. And suddenly I had brilliant hearing in that ear — not just loud and clear, but bright and rich, utterly delightful. I realized that I hadn’t actually been hearing properly for months. (Then, when I got home later, I discovered that I had been slowly turning up the volume on the tv, so that now it blasted the sound out; you could hear it clearly everywhere in the house, even in the bathroom with the door closed. This must have been damn annoying to the people around me. It’s now down to a reasonable level, though I still pause every so often to marvel at the complex timbres of sounds.)
My left ear, which had a layer of (as we discovered, rock-hard) wax covering the whole eardrum, was another matter. It took four spray bottles of warm water, over a very long time, to get it free so that it could be extracted. Uncomfortable, verging on flat-out pain.
And then it was gone, and I had brilliant hearing in both ears, which was close to overwhelming. I complimented the aide on her patiently dogged persistence. And then the physician’s assistant came in to pronounce both ears “squeaky clean”, and we all celebrated.
By then my day was shot, and nothing I had planned for the day was going to get done (except that I got myself lunch, over two hours late), but I was punch-drunk with listening to things so I didn’t really care.
Until yesterday, when I had a ton of stuff to do. All the usual Thursday stuff — stripping the bed (getting it ready for my new caregiver J to put fresh sheets on) and doing two loads of laundry and doing a grocery order (to be delivered while J was here and could help me with it) — plus doing things postponed from yesterday and setting up other tasks for J. So I now turn to our joint efforts.
Radios and clocks. Starring the magic clock. It began a few days ago, when the appearance of the first blossoms on flowering fruit trees reminded me that, unlikely as it sometimes seemed, spring was coming, and with it, the onset of Daylight Saving Time, which meant dealing with the two clock radios in the house, which are fabulously tedious to adjust (requiring complex and unintuitive manipulations of tiny little controls that my poor disabled hands can barely manage; I have often been reduced to tears). Everything else is a piece of cake: two appliances with clocks that are easy to adjust by hand, and then all the other devices, which change automatically — or, as I prefer to think of it, magically.
One of these is a clock radio that once served as the clock for the living room (a function now served by the microwave oven) and as access to radio, especially KQED. The other is a small clock radio whose function is as a bedroom clock and, very occasionally, as an overnight radio. Both of them were pretty expensive when I bought them, so I wondered what new and improved replacements would cost. And, to my surprise, the answer was: hardly anything.
The new living room radio is smaller than the old one, with much better reception, and controls designed with the elderly in mind. The new bedroom clock is as small as the old one, but comes with a computer in it that picks up date and time information from standard sources, changes the settings when the time changes, and recovers all the settings if the power goes out — all this for about $20. Exactly the magic I get on my iMac. Happy happy joy joy.
All this came in a small, lightweight cardboard box, with the two smaller boxes inside it, so one of J’s tasks was to reduce the boxes and some wrapping paper to stuff that can go in the recycling bin. For which I have a box cutter, whose name J enjoys (not only is he earnestly working to improve his English, he’s also a demon for analyzing the language — well, he’s an engineer by training, and comes at language like one, plus he thinks it’s fun).
Then there was the original setup, which surely was going to be challenging. There were pages of fine-print instructions, which appeared to be saying that all we had to do was tell the device what time zone we were in. Surely it couldn’t be that easy.
J asked me for the instructions, and asked me if I’d read them. I said yes all around, adding that it was kind of a joke among women in my country that their men never read instructions, maintaining that they could figure it out on their own. J found this genuinely funny, but as an engineer he was appalled that there were people who wouldn’t read the instructions, so he launched into a passionate explanation of why instructions were crucial.
We turned the device on. It searched around for a bit, then displayed the year, the date, and the ET time, and asked for the code for our time zone if it wasn’t ET (Pacific Time was 5). A couple seconds later, there was the current PT. We were done. We both stared stupidly at the magic clock.
J: I’m going to unplug it. And did, counted to ten, and plugged it back in. Magic ruled. We were very happy.
For a later posting: J confronts English. More or less constantly. The two of us get diverted into pretty much everything having to do with the language: pronunciation, spelling, history, morphology, lots of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, usage, geographical and social varieties, language learning, whatever. He’s constantly asking penetrating questions, wanting the details.
He asked about reference works on the syntax of standard English, I showed him the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, so weighty that it’s hard for my disabled hands to pick up. He then asked if there were textbooks, I thought of several possibilities, then lent him my copy of Pullum & Huddleston’s Student’s Introduction to English — which he has been methodically working his way through!
Within the first few minutes of our acquaintance, we were into the little puzzle of why
*I enjoy to read books
BUT INSTEAD ✓I enjoy reading books
DESPITE ✓I like to read books AND ✓I like reading books
and there’s more every Tuesday and Thursday.
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