Happy Fourth of July to all of my US readers! And folks outside of this country are certainly welcome to celebrate with us as well, if you wish. Little to no excuse is needed for a party, right?

By its very nature, this day always makes me think of and assess my own state of dependence/independence. Interdependence is truly what it is, for no man or woman functions entirely separate from all others. I think this has already been a banner year for me in that regard, though.

I so often feel fortunate to live in the era that I do. I’m reading a fictionalized account of the esteemed Laura Bridgman, called What is Visible, by Kimberly Elkins. Bridgman attended Perkins School for the Blind (then it was known as Institute) in the mid 1800’s. As you probably know, she was both deaf and blind, as well as lacking a sense of smell and taste.

The story paints a rather harrowing picture of her life, from the degree to which her destiny was controlled by others to the longing and loneliness she often felt. I hope for her sake that much of the events that were portrayed were a bit overdramatized, but who knows.

She and her blind cohorts rarely had chance to leave that facility, spending much of their time attending exhibitions to be shown off to other dignitaries, and receiving what little education was available to them. Braille was just coming onto the scene in Europe, but instructors at the Perkins Institute, most notably its director Samuel Gridley Howe, known as “Doctor” to most, did not accept this as a learning tool. Rather, they had to read things produced in raised print, which I suppose is doable but probably quite cumbersome.

As stated though, the thing I would have found the most challenging would be not being able to move around much on my own. As I discovered when writing for White Cane day, blind folks didn’t even start to gain this ability till the early 30’s. And even then, I doubt they were doing a whole lot of wandering.

Me? I’m kind of crazy! Especially with the advent of GPS and ability to key in an address and learn tons about it before attempting to venture out, I’m likely to just take off and go to somewhere even unfamiliar. The main questions I have to cope with are: what does the bus stop look like? Will I have to cross any busy streets? How likely is the weather to hold up for me? The street crossing issue is still and will likely always be my biggest impediment, but I’m hoping that tech will soon at least mitigate that someday. I wouldn’t put myself among the most savvy blind navigators, but maybe I’m a bit above average, at least. My underperforming hearing will continue to present its own challenges.

With regards to the connectedness/loneliness thing, I think this is the biggest reason I am glad to be among “normal” society. Even dragging myself to and from this job helps me to remain part of my community and not just sit in this apartment passing time. Additionally, I think I spend so much time getting coffee at Dunkin Donuts that I may have caused them to lower the price of that beverage during “Happy Hour,” which I’d guess is from 4-7. Finally, I am happy to have someone who enjoys walking this road with me, who helps me and whom I try to help.

So, those are just some of my disjointed thoughts on this day in which this country celebrates its often not lived up to ideals. I suppose it’s always an effort though, and one worth continuing; to strive for the betterment of self, neighbors, and humanity in general. Now enjoy the fireworks, safely! And apologize to your poor doggies, as they no doubt dread this day.

Today’s Tidbit

Why can’t someone enact a law against leaving loud truck engines idle in excess of five minutes! This happened while I was out today, and after standing there for nearly 15, I finally had to chance it and cross. Luckily, things weren’t too terribly busy. It does annoy me, though.

Whether the weather is cold
or whether the weather is hot
The weather the weather whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not.

Did you ever sing that silly song? We used to warm up with it in my high school chorus. That and one that went “Scotland’s burning Scotland’s burning, look out look out, fire! fire! fire! fire, Pour in water pour in water.”

Once, as we belted that out, the school’s alarm happened to go off. So as we made for the door, we started saying “Pinecrest burning Pinecrest burning…” It was amusing only because of course we were just having a drill.

Anyway, onto the substance of my post: our finicky summer weather. I think maybe this week our prognosticating forecasters may have gotten it more wrong than I can recall seeing. If you’d checked on Monday, they were saying the 4th of July period was to feature temperatures in the upper 90s. Now? We’re barely breaking 80. I guess I can’t take too much issue with that though, as it certainly makes sitting outdoors more tenable.

I think it’s part law of averages. After something like 16 days of 90s, a stretch not recorded since the early 50s, it had to cool down some.

But the other side of it is the return of moisture. Ah, rain! Yes I know we need it, otherwise we’d shrivel up like grass in Winter. And it feeds me and gives me drink and yadda yadda yadda.

Trying to maneuver through it, or plan around it, puts me in knots though! It keeps sneaking up this summer and ruining my fun.

Most notably, last weekend. My girlfriend and I hung out with my cousin and his wife in Charlotte on a sort of double date weekend, our second such get-together. First, I suppose I should just be glad I didn’t come down with another yucky cold, as had happened on the first go-round.

On Saturday, after having already survived a wet Friday night return from retrieving me at the train station “Maybe it’s getting all that stuff out of the system now!” we initially went clothes shopping at Concord Mills Mall, just outside of the Queen City. Oddly, it is, or at least was, the number 1 tourist attraction in North Carolina. I guess people like to shop, though certainly the Internet is taking a bite out of the brick and mortar infrastructure. This happened early in the afternoon, and with her help, I managed to get a couple of nice looking outfits for this upcoming conference without breaking the bank.

4:00, we got back on the road and decided to give Carowinds, the area’s amusement park, a shot. It’s all the way across town, straddling the line between North and South Carolina, and as we approached the weather steadily turned worse.

“Do we get a discount?” Yes, all four of us, totaling about $16 a head. Nice.

Also, they’ve implemented a system wherein we, I guess people with disabilities though I don’t know how wide-ranging a group is covered, don’t have to physically stand in line for a ride, but we must still board in such time that we have basically waited. You have to approach the boarding area and sign up for the first available time, which could be hours away. Our first choice required a two-hour wait. This was ok though, because it could still allow us to maximize our time there by making it so we could just jump onto rides with shorter lines while awaiting our go on the more peopled ones.

“Now you know what’s gonna happen as soon as we get in here,” I leaned in and whispered to her. “It’s gonna pour down!”

Hey, I didn’t do anything! It was pretty obviously going to occur. Our hope was that maybe we could wait it out. So my cousin and I went into a souvenir shop and got panchos that were little more than glorified plastic bags. They did have all-important hoods to keep our hearing aids dry.

In line for the intimidator, the ride named for NASCAR’s Dale Earnheart, already fairly close to the stairs going up to the ride actually. DRIP. “I’ma wipe that away real quick because it was actually just my imagination!” I thought to myself. DRIP DRIP. No no NO NO NO! Then, out came the plug from the sky.

A mad scramble through the bag where she’d placed it, and a quick dance to wrangle the pancho over my head, first through the buttoned sleeves then more correctly with the hood oriented as it needed to be. And all who were left squeezed into the small amount of shelter along the rails and hoped.

“Ah ok, the sky is clearing,” she said. “And, now it’s slowing down.”

To the top of the stairs, we were then stymied by the operator’s inability to re-open the ride until he’d received the proper clearance. C’mon come! on! I wanna at least ride one coaster! iPhone out to check likely conditions “Severe Thunderstorms, chance of rain 66%. *sigh*

And sure enough, an impenetrable wall of grey soon began approaching and the skies recommenced their works. This drove most everyone, including us, to the exits. WAH! Ah well, we gave it the ole try. And I guess that dough at least bought me a crazy story.

So yeah rain, leave me alone! I’ve actually been remarkably fortunate most times though, somehow just missing dangerous thunderstorms. But needless to say that even one spout can make life challenging when trying to cross the street and the like. I guess it comes with the territory in our summers, so I’ll just have to suck it up, and try to stay dry.

Yeah yeah, I know what you’re gonna say.

You said you were gonna do this last time!”

And you’d be right, except this time I’m taking concrete steps to begin designing my path out of sheltered employment and into that as a writer/social media person/advocate/doer of good. I’m going to make one of the strongest declarative statements I ever have, and say that it’s now my time! If you know me, you know how hard it is to not write words like “hope,” “think,” “try,” and other such modifiers. But right now, I just don’t have a choice.

So what does that mean in practical terms? Well for one, it should mean I will no longer be blowing the dust off of these computer keys, as I literally am now. Goodness, I’m surprised this system is still working.

And, as I’ve said before, it probably means that not every work will be worthy of publication in the New Yorker or magazines of its ilk. Well ok let’s be honest, most won’t be on that level. But I will never even approximate such ability without rigorous practice and the willingness to come up a bit short sometimes.

This week has been speckled with inspiration that I have gleaned largely from previous connections I made during my time at UNC’s grad school. These meetings have both occurred after the long work hours had concluded, which made them hard to go through with, but I feel I need to get that momentum going and keep with it, even if I suffer temporary sleep deprivation as a result.

Yesterday, I spoke with Dr. Daniel Wallace in a large academic building on the UNC campus. This chat had been facilitated by another professor who works mostly in the hospital, but who has decided that she wants to help me succeed in any way she can. I can sense how serious she is about that, and that drive is rubbing off on me.

Anyway, Wallace, a well-known writer, told me that the most important thing I can do for myself is to sit down and do what I am now; cordon off at least 15 minutes to whack out some words. I can’t promise that I will write every every day, because well, life is crazy. But I am gonna get a heck of a lot closer. I guess I have to just try to draw topics from my day and its inherent chaos.

He and the med professor suggested that one of the things I might most likely be able to do is to work with a hospital to educate others about my particular experience with disability and rare disease. So I took their ideas to today’s meeting with the good folks at the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF). I’ve talked about this organization before, as they were instrumental in helping me both to move out of my place in Carrboro and into my current apartment here in Durham. I have a lot of respect for the people who work primarily for homeless individuals in this org, but really for the good of the community at large, as they are mostly no doubt busy college students. Maybe if I’d shown that level of ingenuity while in undergrad, my lot now would have been better. I know though that I can’t change the past, can only work to improve likely future outcomes.

The young Duke student with whom I worked today helped me to find the links I needed to both Duke and UNC Hospitals, and I am thus tasked to dig through that info and locate the individuals who might be best able to provide me with ways to move forward from here. We shall see.

Today’s Tidbit

An idea I just came up with is I can end most entries with some new discovery/occurrence of each day that I do in fact write about. Probably not too surprisingly, given that I’m as much a sheep as everyone else, I’ve been playing around with the new Apple Music. I was enjoying tracks in the “New” section, and on the “Radio” stations, especially Beats One. But I finally worked out that the real fun is in searching for artists. I’m currently listening to Alicia Keys’ whole album “Elements of Freedom”. If you’ve known me for a long time, you know she used to be my wife! But alas, she’s chosen some other guy and laid down her own family. It’s all good though!

Looks like they don’t have her very first album, the one I really wanna hear, but they have most of the other stuff. This already beats Pandora, and if I could go ahead and pay I would. Yes, I know that musicians do still need to get some dough for what they do. Maybe they could take their cue from insurance, and charge a higher “premium” to those who listen to more albums. Ha.

I’m not sure what tomorrow will serve up for me to gorge on, but I guess that’ll be the fun of this process. Till then.

Ok, pardon me while I continue to experiment with writing entries on the iPhone. My last attempt didn’t go as well as I would have liked, because I couldn’t and still can’t get the HTML to look right. We’ll see if this goes better.

Anyway, today’s post is to be about my experiences with the car sharing service Uber, with which I have navigated Durham for almost a year now. Actually, according to the stats they emailed me when celebrating having been in the Triangle for an entire year, I’ve used these folks 62 times. Sixty-four now, as a href=”http://www.blindtravel.net/follow-up-my-first-uber-experience/” target=”_blank”>first trip with them, I went today to have my hearing aids repaired. (My trip to Charlotte was brought to a screeching halt by the right side’s clogging yesterday, not fun&) I was therefore forced to take a day off of work and schedule a last-minute appointment. Maybe someday I’ll master the skill of acting more preventatively, but in my defense this time I didn’t notice that I was losing hearing till too late.

Given the similar reasons for going, I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast those experiences. So, here we go.

It took me a while to force myself from the cover’s comfort and start the day. Once I did though, I took a relatively short shower because it was so hot out. It didn’t take long for that steam to become dangerous. It was 11:15 at this point, and after an hour of goofing around on Facebook I decided I needed to get going.

There are a few things I’ve noticed as Uber has matured in this area. The first is that they’re a lot more likely to go into surge pricing during mid day than they had been before. This means that fares can increase by up to three times, in order to get drivers on the road. I have to say though that their regular fare is now so low that I’ll likely still book at even twice the rate.

On initial launch of the app, after being told there were no cars available, it went into surge mode. Then, some began to arrive once the higher prices were activated. Fortunately for me, by the time I’d tried using Lyft, a competitor app that does the same thing, (also unsuccessful), I found that the surge had ended. A ride was available in five minutes.

A kind female driver, undergrad at one of the local universities, came to get me. That’s the other thing I’ve noticed about Uber: far more women seem to drive for them than for traditional taxis. She said it was only her second week, and she only does it when time can be taken from summer class. She did a good job getting me to my destination, huge potholes and long traffic lights notwithstanding, such that I had 45 minutes to kill before my 2:00. I spent this time working on my 25th book of the year, halfway through my 50 book 50 author challenge of 2015!

The usual audiologist who sees me calls me back. The first thing she wants is to have a look in my ears. Uh-oh!

“Now you know what I always say to you about this whenever I see you,” she says.

Ah, of course; I need to get that impacted wax cleaned! Only, any mention of this traumatizes me due to an attempt at UNC Hospital that didn’t go well.

After servicing the aids for me, she called said hospital to inquire about possibly having me sedated before giving it another go. Turns out that they will only sedate if it’s part of another procedure.

So, she offers to try cleaning the ears herself, breaking into different sessions if necessary. Once she gets started though, I find the process to be relatively painless, which allows her to complete work on both ears in meer minutes.

“Wow,” she says, “I can see your eardrums for the first time since I’ve known you.”

On wrapping up all the administrative niceties, including the pretty penny I had to pass on, (worth it for reliable, sensitive, last minute service), I am ready to call my return Uber ride. Thinking from the perspective of one who is totally blind and profoundly deaf, I wanted to see if I could summon a vehicle using only my Braille display. Certain onscreen components that defy my technological terminology to explain them made this task nearly impossible for me. My hope is if such individuals are using Uber, they have worked out effective means of interacting with it.

A neat feature that I did notice for the first time as I headed home, but that I know may already have been there, is an ETA to your destination right in the app. This could be quite helpful indeed.

So on the whole, I’ve loved Uber. It works well for me as a good complement to the city and regional buses, as when I needed to take a 1.5 hour bus trip to the Apple Store and opted to do this one-way, and shell out for a fifteen-minute car ride going the other direction. I haven’t heard in a while, but was disheartened by this company’s disregard for people with disabilities and unwillingness to work to stamp out discrimination in response to a suit brought by blind guide dog users who had been denied access. I sincerely hope that they will reconsider their stated position, and will take my business elsewhere if they don’t. I think that on balance, this kind of innovation has done and will continue to do us a world of good.

Hello. I come to you live from my iPhone, as I vacation in Charlotte. Well not a vacation exactly, but more to see my younger cousin graduate from high school.

Wow, that’s always an impressive achievement. I remember doing that eighteen (18!) years ago. How old am I, y’all? The weird thing is I can’t recall which day I graduated, but it had to be either the 22nd or the 23rd of May. The following standing ovation was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had.

Ah, that and college will always be my best days. But reality dictates that I must learn to function within the constraints of adulthood. They are finally becoming more palatable, thanks in no small part to my partner, with whom I have enjoyed the last three months.

We have a few exciting things planned for this summer. Of course, there’s the conference in August, which I’ve talked about a few times. Ah, the stress of setting that up! I kinda feel like the most useless President ever, but so it goes.

Is it any wonder then that I need some nice quiet time by the sea? To that end, we’re going on a trip to Carolina Beach in mid July. I’ve not stood on those oddly shifting sands and listened to pounding surf in at least 13 years. I love the awe of feeling like a little speck in this large universe. I might be mistaken for dinner though by a shark, aaahhh!

So yeah, I have a lot to look forward to. If this Braille display functions as well as it is at the moment, maybe y’all might finally! start hearing from me more. No promises, though. More when I get home.

Hi. In reality, I have absolutely no time to be writing this entry. There are about ten minutes till I need to skitter down the street and hop onto the bus that will convey me off to my eight hours of enforced confinement wherein I will madly stuff sticks into a box while singing, tapping, and otherwise engaging in activities to keep myself awake. So, apologies for spelling and other errors, as I have no ability to edit till I return. The problem is, of course, that I rarely have time to write anymore at all, but I need badly to get back on this horse!

So, I thought I’d tell you a couple of quick anecdotes about my experience really digging in to try and get the Third Internationan Norrie Conference off of the ground. I’ve helped some with the other two, but this is by far the most I’ve ever had to do in organizing the program.

Well, actually the only thing I know I’ve done right thus far is to get the tour of the Perkins School for the Blind set up. That’ll happen at 1 PM on the 13th of August, the day we register. I’m looking forward to it, especially as I have pondered perhaps trying to work at Perkins someday. Lots of opportunities, but admittedly maybe too cold for me there. Hmmm, who knows.

I’m trying at the moment to see if they can help us by brailling programs for the conference, but have yet to really hear from anyone. One of the most stressful parts of anything is sometimes trying to figure out the proper contacts who will help to accomplish a given task.

I guess the most of it will be coordinating with others and just trying to make sure that we all are able to get things set as they should be. Unbelievably, we’ve just entered the final quarter of the final year leading up to conference time. We seemingly have them every three years, and it still doesn’t feel like the one in 2012 was all that long ago.

I also have a story that I feel demonstrates the vast difference between monied people and the working poor, the latter category being the one to which I belong. It happened as I registered for a hotel room at this illustrious event. $786! Ouch.

Once I was done paying that hefty fare, I was directed to consider joining some sort of travel program with which the Wyndham brand is affiliated.

“First, we’ll ask you a series of questions to determine eligibility,” the guy said.

“Are you happily married, or happily single?”

“The latter”.

“”Do you enjoy a combined income of $75000?”

I didn’t exactly say it, but I thought”I’d ENJOY such an income, but I definitely don’t have it at the moment. So, I got bumped down to the poor man’s travel program, which cost a dollar to enter and $16 per month. I ultimately didn’t choose this one either, because I couldn’t obtain the materials in an accessible format. You could opt out after 30 days if you didn’t like it, but without all of the required info, I felt I wouldn’t be able to make an adequate decision.

So, that’s a little of the fun I’ve been having as the summer months get ready to unfold. I’ll write more and better soon, but at the moment I’d better go! As it is, I might in fact miss the bus. Haha