schooo's out!

Hello everyone. I'm back at home after my last mobility leson. I believe I've now learned the route to the Symposium Cafe as well as I'm going to. Five months, numerous batteries and something approaching three gigs worth of recorded lessons and independent practice walks later, reaching this point has been a long time coming. With Ray's help and the guidance of the Trekker Breeze, I can now go there for meals or simply an afternoon drink. It's a damned good feeling. You can check out the site for the restaurant which wil serve as my new social haven in the real world at:
http://www.symposiumcafe.com/

Yesterday's brunch with Minnie was terrific fun. I managed to get there in plenty of time. She had no trouble finding me and we enjoyed omelets, toast and potatoes. She sounds just the same in person as she did last time we got together. Hopefully, it'll be a shorter time between visits this time. We must have been there eating and talking for a couple of hours. A very pleasant way to spend a morning. Having a female friend I found in life there to share the experience with has at last completed the process of moving on with life after losing Janene. It's been quite a long road. Near the beginning of the Summer, a neighbour sympathetically offered that cliche about being at square 1.2 rather than back to square one. At the time, I thought it was about as far from the truth as one could get. Time seemed to have be gripped in absolute stagnant frustrated despair of my life ever changing at all. If a woman could come to love me and still end up ultimately walking away, what cause did I have for hope at all? I felt so confined and discontented with circumstances that I remember being somewhat surprised at the well-meaning neighbour's remark. I figured that it must be visually obvious that I had been sent back far into negative squares. Now, at long last, I believe I really have arrived at suare 1.2. I have somewhere to actually go on my own where there's at least a chance of new developments taking place outside my family. I can come and go there on my own terms. Treeting her to brunch was an absolute pleasure. I had wanted to do that with someone all Summer.

Minnie came back with me wanting to see how my Trekker Breeze worked and how I got places. She seemed quite impressed. We sat on the patio out back for a while enjoying a cold drink. She met my father who is still getting used to being at home more of the time now that he's retired. It always feels somewhat strange having friends over. Once you've lived in your own place, one's parents' home just isn't yours any longer no matter how much they might wish that it were. My parents don't mind me having people over at all and likely wish I would more often. Yet, it just always has that sense of intruding on someone else's domain. for the foreseeable future though, it's just how things are going to be.

In the evening, I went out with Adam for a meal and gaming cession. Turtle Jack's did an excellent job of my barbecue chicken salad. Unfortunately, I had been awake since five yesterday morning and ran out of mental steam around ten o'clock or so. I believe I got a better sleep today.

In around a month, I'll be heading to Winnipeg for a trip to see some relatives. Other than that, there's really nothing else ahead of me. Life will revolve around working on Enchantment's Twilight, going to church, seeing friends, and walking over to Symposium once or twice a week to break up the stale routine. There'll be CBC Radio1, the BBc, NPR, documentaries, and podcasts as well as music to keep my ears and mind occupied. Enough, I hope, to keep me open to new ideas and interesting to other people. This Summer has certainly shown me that there's no way of fending off the ordinary other than being as ready as one can be for the extraordinary. I've at last made it out of that hellish emotional valley to a point where I can actually practice what i preach again finding the positive in life on a more constant basis. It feels very good indeed to be back in that zone of being once again.

Delicious Victory

Hello everyone. I've finally worked up the nerve to try and get to Symposium on my own. After writing since around five A.M., I figured I just damned well wanted a good breakfast and a break. I've placed my order and am writing this blog entry while it's being prepared. I've essentially been waiting all summer to be able to do this. At last, I've succeeded in getting here on my own. There's still the getting back part. However, I made certain dad was around in case I screw up irretrievably there. I don't expect to though. It's pretty quiet here this morning. I just overheard a man essentially get hired. Who would have expected that given these hard times? Very nifty. I expect I'll find out his name eventually. It was also apparently some little kid's birthday but I couldn't tell whether it was a girl or guy.

It's damned nice to finally be able to get somewhere on my own like this. I hope to come here once a week. Not certain I could financially sustain coming much more often than that. Breakfast was absolutely scrumptious. Bacon, eggs, home fries and toast. Delicious! Service has been very quick also. I got here somewhere around nine and it's now just ten after ten. I'm enjoying an orange juice before I head home. They don't rush you here which is something I deeply appreciate.

It would have been infinitely better had there been a friend or two available to share this personal victory with. Eating here alone is comfortable enough but one does feel the absence of companionship. Even facing yet another personal victory by myself, I still feel like I'm on cloud nine. Making the podcast documentary of this isn't going to be easy but I ought to have enough source material. I'll look at that starting on Monday. it'll take a while before I feel completely competent with the route. In particular, the part going back. However, I've done it once now. That counts for quite a lot indeed. I'll finish my drink, pay my bill, and head back home.

I'm back safe and sound. It's approaching eleven thirty. Guess I was walking out there for around an hour. Going there was just so straight-forward and went so well that I guess I was a bit overconfident. There were a few little adventures on the way. I got confused and took some guidance from Al, a friendly man who saw me in a moment of confusion. He unfortunately took me to the right intersection but wrong corner. It took quite a bit for me to sort that out. I need to have a couple more lessons about the initial part of the route going home. However, all's well that ends well. Breakfast was awesome. I wouldn't dream of having lunch today.

The netbook didn't find any wifi signals within range. However, I can easily do without the Internet should I choose to go and do some writing there for an afternoon while enjoying a fruit smoothy. Now there's something to look forward to. Better yet would be to line up a few people near my age for an afternoon chat but one can't have it all I suppose.

I still have to find an offline encyclopedia somewhere which I can load onto the netbook. Haven't solved that problem yet. However, I did manage to round out my sound effects collection this week using some of the money my grandmother sent. I can now be absolutely confident that I have everything I need in the sound effects department courtesy of Sound Ideas. I got the XV MP3 collections since they have a 30-percent-off Summer promotion on. Guess that's almost over now. The only thing I'll eventually have to take care of in terms of assets for the game is a suitable opening and closing theme. None of the music I've already acquired quite works for that. Once I've developed more of the soundscape and audio presentation overall, I'll be better able to choose those pieces of music wisely. I have what I need for everything else. All that's such a very long way off. I don't kid myself that my current creative burst is going to last especially given current social circumstances. I need there to be more to life and there just isn't anything now.

I've started reading a book called Haulted State by Charles Stross. Hope I got his spelling right. It's about a poor hapless cop who finds herself called in to investigate a bank robbery which took place in an online fantasy game. I've barely scratched the serfice but it's pulling me along so far. I've also started listening to a series of documentaries I grabbed from the BBC Documentary podcast all about gold. There's also a nifty series of discussions they're doing called the Athiest and the Bishop which I have to make certain I catch the rest of. The first one was absolutely awesome. They're going at the harder questions and not pulling any punches. Other than that, there's not a whole lot else on the horizon. I've pretty much given up on hearing anything more from that teacher I was starting to have some slight hope for. There's certainly a degree of dark amusement at the thought of overwelming a teacher with too much information but it's still disappointing. Haven't heard from Sarah up in Niagara Falls either. She was going to be pretty busy until the Autumn though so I guess we might still actually get together eventually. God! This has been an extremely solitary Summer. There's no end to the status quo in sight either. I've picked up some more online penpals and found another chat community to join which is mainly populated with blind Christians although they hope this changes over time to be more inclusive of other Christians as well. They've survived for around four years so far. Not too shabby at all. It's certainly better than total isolation but when you've been praying for more time with friends and/or a special lady who's actually present in person, it just feels like putting a square peg into a round hole. There just aren't any alternatives within my reach. At least it passes the time a bit more pleasantly.

back from a walk

Hello everyone. I've just returned from this week's orientation lesson. I'm hot and a bit out of breath. My legs aren't too bad but I'm not thinking of climbing any mountains today. Crossing Battleford is going a little better. It'll always be a strenuous crossing but I'm now somewhat more confident that I won't accidentally end up on the wrong corner. The Glen Erin crossing is still tricky due to the curb direction and actually being able to hear the serge of parallel traffic correctly.

I've grabbed a nice berry cooler and some ice. Been having one of those on most days lately although not usually anywhere near this early. Mom and dad are babysitting Ava and Amia. I went with them on Monday. The kids were certainly cute but I just found it too long a stretch of time. It was hard to get anything of substance done and I couldn't really help a ton since I don't know where things are. Once I get my own place, I could probably do a better job of it. Yesterday morning, I got quite a bit done on the game. I just hope this creativity lasts. It feels very precarious.

On the plus side, a teacher has shown some actual interest in me on Plenty of Fish. Usually, they've tended to be in the "I don't want someone I have to take care of" category. She seems genuinely interested in getting to know me rather than just about what it's like to be blind. What's more, I believe she may be close enough to actually get together with. How utterly refreshing. Here's hoping this time, things might go somewhere lasting.

these early hours

Hello everyone. It seems my victory over insomnia might well have been prematurely declared. As I begin writing this entry, the majestic swell of John Debney's new age piece Resurrection enthrals my headphone-covered ears at around three thirty AM. I couldn't sleep now if my very life depended on it. I was dead tired at around ten thirty and suppose I slept pretty solidly from around a quarter to eleven right through until near two thirty. I lay there hoping to drift back into sleep only to find I was propelled in the opposite damned direction for no good reason. Grump! Snap! Snarl! Roar! There. Got that out of my system. I feel ever so much better now.

I suppose the first thing to do is to update everyone on the few things which have actually happened over the past couple of days. The mobility lesson went pretty well Wednesday. I got a good recording of the route back from Symposium on my digital recorder. Whether our attempt to get it properly into the Trekker Breeze was successful remains to be seen. There was a part relatively near to home where the GPS seemed to lose me for a bit. I hope it hasn't recorded that erratic stuff as part of the route. Thank goodness it's during a stretch which is relatively simple where I don't really need its guidance so much. Still, it would be better to have both ways recorded properly before I'm done with these lessons. My memory of the route might not hold up so well over the Winter when I expect it'll be too dangerous for me to walk it. I shudder to think of crossing Battleford under even rainy weather let alone snow and everything. It's one of those six-lane monster crossings. It's somewhat like Trafalgar in Oakville but doesn't impart quite the same sense of being inches away from death as one crosses. It's just too damned wide. I'm getting more used to it in good weather but wouldn't ever feel comfortable crossing something like that in rain or snow. I was going to go out and test that earlier part of the return route which I worry hasn't been correctly recorded by the Trekker Breeze but the weather is against me. It rained quite a bit yesterday and is supposed to do likewise today. The air has a stuffy humid quality which seems to be effecting me more than it has in the past. I hope I can see some friends this weekend. I haven't seen anyone other than my instructor outside of family all week. I dearly need a more active social life. Online chats and the forums on Plenty of Fish have actually been quite interesting this week but it all begins to seem very empty. Is there nothing more out there for me? There must be! God must have something more in mind. I just have to try to be patient and positive despite feeling simultaneously like time is dragging along at a snail's pace and my youth is slipping away without its full potential being tapped. As usual, I've been provided with just enough interesting material to keep chugging along.

I've heard back from a woman who i contacted regarding a transportation service which sounded promising. It still ultimately may turn into something I can use but isn't at all set up for that right away. They're focusing on getting people to and from all-day programs for various cognitive and physical disabilities. However, she was apparently impressed enough with my email to want to share it with other people. Maybe, some good will ultimately come of it. I can only hope my online efforts eventually open up more of the offline world to me. It's becoming more and more tempting to forego shaving and such these days. Other than my general dislike of feeling too scruffy, there seems damned little point when you never interact with people and nothing changes. If somebody comes up with a treatment which forever obviates the need for shaving other than something extreme like death, I'm all for it. My only reservation would be any side effects caused by not manufacturing all that facial hair. Where would all that extra protein end up?

Yesterday, I thought I'd look at:
www.audiobookradio.net
I heard what I believe to be an abridged version of a book on Sherlock Holmes. This included the thoughts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Interesting in and of itself, I was moved to look in the CNIB digital library for more on Doyle and Holmes. Two items caught my immediate attention. One was a book on the science behind Sherlock Holmes's mysteries. I'm saving that one for an occasion when I'm in desperate need of something new and captivating to dig me out of a theoretically blue funk. Such an occasion may not be all that far off if the rain and lack of social life continue. Additionally, I found "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" available in mp3s and actually read by a very good narrator. There were something like a hundred files to snarf down but I did it immediately and backed up both excellent finds. I've read A Study In Scarlet as well as the preface which was quite well done indeed. It's good to have the complete stories as well as the audio dramas. I should have looked for The Complete Sherlock Holmes ages ago.

It's around a quarter after five now. I've been anything but brimming with industrious energy these past couple of hours. However, I've attained that state of consciousness where it might be possible to get something done. My body is telling me in no uncertain terms: "be grateful for the modicum of sleep thou hast enjoyed and count thyself fortunate!" As always, I'll attempt to do just that and make the best of another very long day.

this week's happenings

Hello everyone. It's approaching nine o'clock in the morning as I start writing this entry. I've been awake since around five thirty. Thankfully, my new Steelseries headset designed for gamers arrived yesterday. It looks like I've made another excellent move on the technology front. The headset works brilliantly with my soundcard. I'm hearing details through it that I've never noticed before. It took a lot of tweaking with Winamp's equalizer presets to get music sounding good but I've figured that out now. Movies have yet to be experimented with but I predict damned good listening without too much tweaking required on that front. When it comes to accessible games, I've had a few rounds of GMA Tank Commander and Superdeakout. My ability to move and act with precision while playing sound-based accessible games is definitely improved by this headset. I don't put enough time into gaming anymore to have any chance of making those top scoreboards many of them feature these days. However, if I had discovered these headphones five or six years ago, they might very well have given me enough of a technical edge to have achieved that. I'm likely going to be grappling with insomnia and these needless damnably early morning rises for life. Now, I can face that prospect a little more cheerfully. I can listen to things at a reasonable volume without waking either the dead or my parents. Also, as this morning has shown, I won't end up with that headphone fatigue you get after an hour or so of using less costly headsets by the time it's reasonable to go downstairs and grab some breakfast. A very worth-while investment indeed.

The other investment I made this week is one in which I have a lot less faith. You've doubtless heard of the dating site called eHarmony. I don't watch a whole lot of TV as a general rule but have heard countless advertisements from them. Frankly, I've spent too damned many lonely days and nights feeling like my potential for contributing to and experiencing more of life has gone untapped. It's like I'm a car whose engine is going at full speed but whose wheels float mere centimetres above the road spinning uselessly. Church certainly helps as do friends when they aren't otherwise busy. However, when you get right down to brass tacks, I don't think anything else can ever fill that void in my life other than a loving woman. I've never felt more at my best than when I was in a relationship. Given this, I would be less than human if curiosity plus the prospect of more solitary time stretching endlessly ahead didn't finally get the better of me. As with Lavalife and telephone dating, I just had to find out what was behind the door. You can read about my oh so frustrating and fruitless experience with Lavalife if you delve far enough back in the blog. It'll be in that large first entry which contains what can still be found in my initial blog at
www.blindspots.net
I signed up for a three-month subscription. Clearly, eHarmoney has some serious psychology behind it. The report it generated about me was pretty much spot on although the system may perceive me as a tad more athletic than I think I am. It certainly picked up on my creative nature. What it couldn't grasp was how much my disability has forced me to live a different life than I otherwise would. I don't think they expected unemployed blind folks to avail themselves of their services. Despite that, I've found the site pretty accessible overall with a few unfortunate exceptions. Uploading my pictures could certainly have been made easier. I had to use my jaws cursor to pull that off. There were also some parts of the initial questionnaire which I can't be completely certain were filled out correctly. They had to do with how important things like age, ethnicity, etc were to me when it comes to my ideal match. Beyond a certain point, none of these things are overly important. I wouldn't feel right hooking up with somebody my parents' age and would have reservations if she were much younger than twenty-five. Ethnicity doesn't factor into it at all as long as she can communicate reasonably well in English. Education-wise, I just need my partner to be able to appreciate and participate in deep conversation about things. I've met enough people to know that you don't need a degree to do that. Life has its own way of teaching us without classrooms. It's called the passage of time. As to income, what matters is how she approaches the fact that we would largely be living off of what she made. I'm used to living with very limited personal income available and certainly don't need her to be rolling in dough. As long as we have a roof over our heads, if she can face life cheerfully without a lot of spare cash, so can I. There are certainly things I'd love to experience with a loving woman at my side but they're secondary to actually sharing life with said woman. Given a small community of people who I could get to know, I could be quite happy. What's important is that there's respect, love and appreciation on both sides.

Another area which could definitely stand improvement there is their highly touted "guided communication". Basically, after going to all the trouble of finding likely matches for you, you're supposed to see if there are any sparks between you by exchanging short volleys of multiple choice questions at each other. I'm completely serious, folks. Had I sat down and actually tried to conjure an extravert's worst nightmare, I couldn't have beaten this in a million years. If anything screams: "You've reached the very bottom of the barrel in your quest for love on Earth!", this setup certainly lets you know how disconnected and desperate you truly are. Most of the people in the matches I've received so far seem to prefer this inhuman mechanistic method of introduction. For someone in my position who desperately wants to connect more with humanity in general and a loving woman in particular, it seems like a colossal step backwards to introduce yourself to prospective lovers in this way. The only place one can display any degree of his or her actual soul is in one's personal profile. Just like on Lavalife, I can see myself fiddling with mine until kingdom come given its sheer importance. If you flunk out there, you never even get the stimulation of multiple guess quizettes. Due to how the site is constructed, I can't even look at the possible answers to the questions I choose. I presume it's possible for sighted people to do this but my speech software doesn't read the information out other than the actual question. I presume I'll be able to actually read the answers to the questions I administer but won't even know that for certain until I'm found interesting enough by some woman out there to actually bother with answering them. One thing I'm a bit worried about is the potential for sending the same question more than once to a potential partner. Presumably, given the care they've taken to automate damned near everything, they've covered that possibility. I can't imagine a more thunderously insulting blunder to make than that. Nor, at the same time, do I think I should have to keep careful note on which questions I've sent to which matches. I'm searching for a shot at true love, not hoping to pass a bloody university exam. I've done a life's worth of those damned things already while getting my BA.

Thankfully, there is a facility for exchanging standard but anonymous emails with each other if both parties agree to this. I just hope I manage to start up such a dialogue with one or more of these ladies before the three months I've paid for expires. Even if, by some act of God, it were made financially worth-while for me to keep at it for a longer time, I just don't think I'd have the sanity to spare. As always, I'll give this my best shot and represent myself as honestly as their pre-scripted "guided" communication lets me presuming that I actually get sent any questions to answer. As crazy as it seems, I'll also keep initiating this process with people who I find of interest. I did find one lady who preferred "fast-track" communication, otherwise known as saying what you actually want to say via anonymous email. Dare I hope that there are any more who will even come within my per view? I'd love to be dead wrong about eHarmony. Right now, that's pretty much all the hope I have of getting anything other than frustration and perhaps mild amusement for a little over a hundred bucks. Isn't that pathetic? My only sense of hope comes from my having been completely wrong about other things before and having lived to enjoy that. I had been saving up my money in hopes of starting a new life with Janene. Now, I've spent most of that saved money either on places which offer the only faint hope I have of finding someone new to love, or on things to make the single life I see stretching ahead of me more bare able. I still have a good safety margin as I utterly refuse to go into debt. While I certainly don't regret the decisions I made on items, my investments in escaping single life are somewhat more suspect. With nothing else happening over the Summer, there's no better time than now to explore these avenues. It just seems so unlikely to work though. If there were a place I could get to where people came with the expectation of meeting new friends, I would far more cheerfully put my money in getting there. However, there just isn't a place like that. You bring your own crew to bars and restaurants these days.

On that front, I had another mobility lesson earlier this week. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that the grand idea of attempting to master even three routes was simply biting off more than I could chew. We're just shy of July and I'm still a long way from feeling very confident that I could make it all the way to Symposia's and back on my own. The route has yet to form a truly cohesive chain in my mind. I've already zoned out a couple of times today so don't feel at all safe heading out there now. I need a really good night's sleep. Presuming I achieve one of those, I feel quite confident in starting to practice roughly the first half of the route on my own. I'm going to try to do that at least four or five times between now and my next lesson the Wednesday after next. I ought to have enough source material to put some sort of audio documentary about this Summer's mobility experience by the time September rolls around. By that point, I should have getting to Symposia's and back mastered. The trouble with the bus routes is the sheer amount of time it would take to learn them. I'd go through all that trouble and then have it all blown out the window when I finally get a subsidized apartment in Hamilton or, dare I hope, find someone special to move in with.

As comfortable as living here is for me, I hate being in this Limbo in life. There's just no affordable alternative. When I ultimately get into a place I can afford, there's the question of whether it would then be considered at all responsible of me to leave it in order to be with someone I loved. Given that I've waited my entire adult life to have the opportunity to live in my own apartment, could I ever trust someone enough to let it go again? Especially after how much all of us, my friends, and my family, trusted her to actually marry me. That still hurts a lot. It's going to be a much slower process building that kind of trust presuming I'm ever given the chance to try with another woman. I can just hear a chorus of voices saying: "well then why not go for quantity and the short-term fling rather than this seemingly unattainable permanent marriage?" Because, readers, I just can't be at all comfortable with that. I'm not built that way. Just like I can't see my way to intentionally getting drunk, high on drugs, or wracking up a mountain of debt for instant gratification. That kind of human intimacy simply demands a deep love and level of commitment to be fully enjoyed. Shortcuts only diminish the experience.

Thank God for good friends. Mark and Wendy have rescued me from yet another empty Saturday. We're going to have dinner tomorrow evening. Thanks to my camping trip as well as the trip to Chicago, I'll have quite a lot to tell them about. Those two have really stuck by me over the years. It certainly takes the edge off the glumness of lethargy. It's just getting on five o'clock now. I zoned out at my desk for a chunk of afternoon but didn't type anything in my sleep. That phrase I entered among all the garbage I typed during one night's doze at my desk still sticks in my mind: "They're here because" I've never been able to pull the foggiest notion what I meant by that. Hundreds upon hundreds of random characters with that odd phrase stuck smack in the middle. I got a brief second wind and made another stab at the shorter article I'm writing for the church about my conference experience in Chicago. I'm inching closer to something good but it doesn't yet snap crackle pop like it deserves to. Damned earlier this morning, I did manage to help around ten people with their computer questions. Neither of my two short story ideas aren't going well at all. They seemed so promising when they first occurred to me and they're all I have at the moment. Guess I'll take this weekend off and try again on Monday. I'll feel a heaping bunch better once I've finished *something* and my money's on the church article. That conference was a terrific experience. If I can write something which conveys enough of that to motivate someone else to go on one of these things, I'll have done another bit of good and scored an important victory for my own peace of mind.

Walk of Discovery

Hello everyone. I have at last concluded my mobility activities for the day. We headed out to walk the complete route to Symposia's at around quarter to twelve this morning. Going there or back is certainly well within my physical capability. Walking there and then fairly rapidly back right away was somewhat taxing to put it mildly. I got back at a little before two o'clock. It's now just after three and my legs at last feel somewhat close to normal again.

I don't know whether we'll do the whole route again next week or just start focussing on parts of it. Usually, the method of attack is to start small and build up a route step by step. I wondered whether it might help me absorb a route more quickly if I had first experienced walking it in its entirety. Guess I'll find out over the next while. I just hope the route actually recorded correctly. As far as I can tell without walking it again, it seems to have done so. It took another while to edit the landmarks I created while we went along. I had to delete a couple created by accident and re-record the names of others which weren't picked up properly by the microphone. I definitely prefer wearing the Trekker Breeze on my belt despite this minor extra chore.The next few lessons will be on Wednesdays starting at eleven thirty give or take a bit.

It feels good to have truly started this next project in life. There's not nearly the sense of purpose to it that I would have had if I still had Janene willing to marry me in a matter of months. Nonetheless, some of that aweful feeling of being cast completely adrift in life has left me. I can picture myself sitting there eating alone later this Summer. Going out is so much more enjoyable with one or more companions around your own age. I'll certainly enjoy the food. They've never let me down there in that department. I can go for brunches and leisurely dinners. The netbook ought to serve me well there. A new environment to observe the flow of life and write will also do me some good I think. Still, I've always keenly felt the pain of being in a crowded place but profoundly isolated and unknown to everyone there. I suppose I might occasionally hear a conversation I feel I can safely and politely join. That seemed to happen from time to time when Janene and I went there. The staff are also good about conversing with patrons so you don't feel like just another number to them. I guess they'll get to know me more when I start going fairly regularly. It'll also be good to have a place where I can go to should someone new actually find me worth serious consideration. It wouldn't be nearly as intimidating as having to meet my parents right on day one.

Profound Revelation

You never know what an online conversation will lead to. Last night, I was in a chatroom with a few other blind people discussing life. I explained to them about the documentary and personal mobility quest I'm embarking on and my hopes for a breakthrough with my mobility difficulties. One of the guests in the room was an old acquaintance. Geoff Eden used to work in the technical aids department of the CNIB. I've been using technical aids of one sort or another since a very early age so he's known my parents and I off and on over most of my life. He therefore knew what caused my blindness. He grew up with the generation of blind people where the practice of giving premature infants too much oxygen was most prevalent. I had always believed that the only things possibly effected by this well-intensionned attempt to preserve my life were my eyes. In particular, the oxygen destroyed my retinas. Apparently though, it also changes how blood vessels grow in the brain. They don't grow as much when you have tons of oxygen and they don't need to. Then, when you're taken out of the incubater and deprived of that extra oxygen, they have to grow quickly to compensate.

Being smart enough to have attained a university degree, I never would have thought that my brain may have been effected in any way. Apparently though, it's quite common for people with retinopathy of prematurity to have the kind of profound difficulty with navigation and spacial concepts that I have over the years. All that struggle with geometry in Finite Math; That simple puzzle of only a few pieces which I couldn't solve for the life of me during my IQ testing which turned out to be a damned horse; And most profoundly, the endless trouble I have with learning routes and forming mental maps of large areas. There's an actual biological reason for that.

I've had a sense my whole life that I've always had far more difficulty with orientation than most of my fellow blind people. However, since most of them attributed it strictly to my lack of motivation and easy circumstances as they saw it, I've frankly taken a lot of undeserved crap from people over the years. That damned well stops today. I can't very well hold people's eronious judgements of me against them. They had even less reason to conceive why I might have so much difficulty and be as disinclined to try to learn routes to places. It's funny. I've read Braille all my life and would never have connected the dots between my condition and mobility difficulty in a million years. At least I can stop beeting myself up about that.

So what does knowing this ultimately change? Quite a lot on a psychological level. It helps tremendously to finally understand the source of so much frustration over the years. It really isn't all my fault and I can at last explain this to people. I can give them a reason. That could make a whole lot of difference going forward. At least I won't let peoples' misjudgements hurt as much as they have previously. Also, I won't go into this next while with the fool's hope I had dared to entertain that with enough sustained effort, I would have some sort of orientational epiphony. I'll do my best to learn the routes to Symposia's, Adam's house, and Ron's apartment over the next five or six months and see where I am with this at that point. It'll be enough to give me a solid idea of how much the Trekkor Breeze and digital recorder can improve things for me in general. That in turn will give me a proper perspective going ahead when it comes to deciding what is reasonable to invest so much time and effort into learning how to get to on my own.

Yesterday, I signed up to a dating site for people with disabilities. It takes quite a different approach than Plenty of Fish. Sadly, its chat client is absolutely inaccessible. Go figure. The email and searching work well though and it lets you post some audio files for people to listen to. We'll see how that goes over the next few months or so. Frankly, I have far more faith in Plenty of Fish. Between those two sites plus this new church, I've opened things up to finding a new special somebody as wide as I can. My digital recorder certainly makes it more comfortable to produce audio but I still have that nervous sense of talking to the inanimate. Perhaps, doing this documentary will eventually lessen that awkwardness. So damned frustrating starting over at square one again. The worst part of it is that there really isn't much I can fairly apply from my time in love with Janene to whoever comes along next persuming that anyone actually does. It doesn't seem right at all to rule out anybody who's going through particularly stressful times in life. I'm certainly not about to stop being open and honest about things from the word go. Also, I don't think it's right to go into a relationship with the assumption that it's just too good to be true and she'll suddenly decide she wants to be single somewhere down the road. You really have to be willing to risk the pain of love gone wrong in order to get anywhere. There were absolutely no deal-breakers on my end with Janene at all. Nothing I don't think I could have coped with over the long term. For the most part, I think my approach was correct overall. There were moments when I should have been more alert, thought farther ahead, been more patient, etc. However, I don't believe I did anything to deserve getting tossed aside. I know she didn't do it in order to punish me in any way but honestly, that's what it feels like. So much meaning is taken out of life. I've been pushed onto a long and lonely path. I'll certainly manage well enough with friends and family but things are just so much better when you have a companion who loves you who you've commited to share your life with.

This afternoon, my mother and I are off to Hamilton to have dinner with Dan, Ava and Amia. A sort of early Mother's Day dinner. Dad's going to be golfing and hopefully not rained on. It'll certainly be a good distraction from all this heavy thinking. Some time this weekend. Adam and I may be going to see the new Star Trek film. He's not as eager and hopeful as I am about how good the movie will be but there's nothing new about that. I haven't lost all my incurable optimism. God willing, I never will. We also have family friends coming over for a visit. Next Wednesday, I'll be going out on the route to Symposia's again with Ray. Hopefully, the Trekkor Breeze will perform a little better this time. If it takes ages to lock on to the satellites, I'll know to reset it rather than turn it on and off. The foam worked pretty well in the light wind conditions last week but I believe I'll turn on the low-cut filter again. That might improve things even more. If the foam ultimately doesn't work in high wind conditions, Geoff suggested an olympic sock as an alternative wind screen. That would be entirely too large for the small microphone I have but as with the foam, the material from one could be used to apparently good effect.

Well, that's pretty much where I'm at this Friday. I hope any readers who've made it this far have good weekends. You've earned them for trudging through all this self-examination.

my Easter weekend

Hello everyone. This Easter weekend sort of snuck up on me. I haven't been attending church for quite some time now and don't really plan to until Janene and I settle down together. She's taking advantage of the holiday to see her parents. I'm seeing a lot of my nieces and younger brother. We went over to Hamilton yesterday. Ava and Amia were very happy and cute for the most part although Ava had to have a timeout at one point. Amia likes to grab and examine all my stuff. I think she's slowly learning to get me to feel what she brings over to me or wants me to help her with. At one point, she brought me over one of the fold-out padded books they have. I presume they have pictures and stories in them. Apparently, mom and dad got a pretty cute picture of me with Amia in my lap enjoying my pretending to read to her. I had the book upside down but she didn't seem to mind. That probably won't last long. Hopefully, she'll be gentle in her remonstrance of me for that kind of thing over the years ahead. Ava's getting pretty good at getting me to feel things. She, however, has the advantage of being able to verbalize a lot more. They both love to examine my netbook bag and the equipment it contains. Amia also took a keen interest in my cane this time around. It was staggeringly too big for her but Dad was there keeping careful watch while she briefly held it fully extended in the living room.

Dan's new Keg is doing pretty well so far. He's looking forward to his hours going back to more normal ones now that the opening has happened and things are running smoothly. He's also very pleased with his Apple computer. While we were there, he installed a printer he had previously won but never used. It's a very compact little thing with a front section which opens up rather like a wide and toothless gaping maw. I think it helped that the kids were kept occupied while he did this.

We all went out to Pizza Hut for Lunch. It was the first time we had all done that as a family on the spur of the moment and it felt very good. We all piled into Dan's new van and off the seven of us went. They have a pretty good crispy chicken salad at Pizza Hut. The chicken reminded me strongly of chicken wings. Dad wasn't all that thrilled with his. However, the kids certainly enjoyed their food and got to try the dessert pizza. I have now found something I can enjoy more at Pizza Hut when Janene wants some pizza. It's one of her favourite places. They were very well behaved in the restaurant. Dad got up and went around the restaurant with Amia showing off his granddaughter and dealing with her growing restlessness rather effectively in one fell swoop.

At last, Janene has completed her two classes. I fervently hope that she'll be able to enjoy having a bit of a break before her final class starts. Things have gotten a little strained over the past while. School and work have kept her extremely busy. We haven't done a whole lot together other than dinners out during the past while. Adding to that, she's decided that she wants to postpone our marriage until she's taken the time to sort out what she wants from life after completing her university degree. That hit me pretty hard. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do but after you've been mentally and financially preparing for such a big life change, it's quite a letdown to have all that swept back for who knows how long. She still wants me to move in with her so that we can get a proper sense of how compatible we are. Again, a very sensible idea. However, it took a bit to adjust to that very different prospect emotionally. I don't know what it'll do to my standing on the subsidized housing list when we move in together and/or marry. I presume I'd get cut off when our incomes had to be considered as a legal couple. As things turn out, I'm still on the subsidized housing in Hamilton. I got confused earlier and thought I was off that list as well. To deal with the inaccessible forms and letters they very occasionally send out in order to verify that a person waiting for housing is in fact still interested, I need sighted assistance. I had earlier decided not to remain on the Oakville list. My good friend Ron not withstanding, I just wouldn't want to end up in Oakville as a single person. I have too many painful memories of another apartment there. An apartment where blank spaces which I could detect the moment I stepped through the door were once occupied by my stuff before my first marriage slowly died. I wouldn't mind if Janene and I ended up living in Oakville together. That would make for a triumphant return and let me start fresh there. Ending up back there as a single person would just be a somewhat perverse twist of fate. It's the first time I've ever had such a strong negative situational thought about a place. Earlier on, I also just gave up entirely on the Mississauga housing list where the wait was something like ten years on average. However, Hamilton had some pretty advantageous stuff for blind people such as accessible door-to-door transportation for starters. If I'm ultimately destined to end up single, it seems that this is where I could make the most of that life. I'd be absolutely stunned if I heard from Hamilton prior to two or three years from now. That ought to give us lots of time to be as certain as we can be that things will work out well for us as a life-long couple. Would I walk away from an opportunity to finally have a place of my own for Janene? Presuming nothing happens to break off our engagement, absolutely. I'd do it in a heartbeat. What we've gone through is merely a bump in the road. Nothing has happened to lessen my faith in her or my love for her.

Another unfortunate habit we damned well have to get out of is getting into sensitive conversations at the end of the day when I have either already begun to go to sleep or am contemplating achieving that state of oblivion in the very near future. Last Wednesday's conversation happened after I had actually just begun to drift off. I was telling her about the discovery my mobility instructor Ray had made when he consulted the schedule and map. He found a bus route which he thinks will prove far easier than the train route I had been working on for what feels like forever now. I thought she'd be pleased at this discovery and we'd then move onto other more pleasant topics. However, she chose that time to start questioning me on my troubles with mobility and try to understand why I found it such a struggle in life. She, of course, was also fully awake and ready to plunge back into working on her last paper right after we said our good-nights. She didn't mean to attack me but I've always been sensitive about my Achilles' heel and that was what it started to feel like. Combined with everything else, it started to feel like all the progress we had made over the past year and a half was crumbling away. A complete over-reaction on my part. I got somewhat frustrated and angry. She then pulled the "this isn't getting my paper done" line on me just when I was starting to get my proper perspective back. Honest, accurate, but damned infuriating. We sort of recovered but I lay back down in bed wondering whether I was too frustrated to sleep or two tired to remain frustrated. Ultimately, neither side exactly won the day. I tossed and turned and thought about the whole damnable issue.

My parents have always been very supportive of me. Having lived either with or near them for most of my life, they have mostly been available to take me where I wanted to go. They could get me to a place by car in fifteen minutes to half an hour. Meanwhile, learning how to travel such a distance by myself with any degree of competence typically takes me ages. We're talking months of lessons from a mobility instructor. Hours and hours of practicing until I'm finally able to do it safely on my own given good conditions. It takes very little for me to become lost. Routes are ribbons of reality comprised of a set of instructions and an experiential sense of the environment I travel through. Once I've learned a route, I have to keep using it frequently or it just fades from my mind. It just doesn't seem to anchor itself to anything. As a result of this, I've been very reluctant to squander my time trying to learn to get places.

While I'm travelling, I can't do anything else with that time at all. If I'm navigating, I need to pay as much attention to everything as I can. It isn't about safety so much as maintaining a sense of where I am as best I can. I'm always tensely alert. Thankfully, I've gotten to the point where I can converse with my fellow travellers should an opportunity arise. However, I doubtless sometimes seem preoccupied due to trying to keep mental track of location at the same time especially with newly learned routes. Other than that, travel time is not only lost to everything else but stressful to boot. I'd never dream of pulling out an Ipod or netbook or cell phone. My ears particularly have to remain unobstructed and ready. I don't even like to wear hoods or carry an umbrella due to how these things detract from my ability to hear things properly.

I don't mind asking people for help if I do get lost. However, throwing myself out there knowing I would almost certainly be forced to take up the time of one or more strangers just seemed irresponsible. I therefore tried to organize my life around the availability of getting lifts and arranging things so that I minimized the number of requests I'd have to make. Growing up, I had very few places I actually wanted to go. There was nowhere I had any interest in going alone. Shopping has never been something I've particularly enjoyed. There are also no places one can go in order to meet and converse with people which don't revolve around alcohol or loud music. I've never really been the outdoors type either. As a result of this, I've lead a fairly academic life.

Things are changing now. My parents aren't exactly elderly but they won't be able to help me get places forever. They also have grandchildren who are very deserving of their time. They do quite a bit of baby-sitting currently and will doubtless do more things when they get a bit older. Janene will also feel a whole lot better about things if I can get to more places independently. Technology is also much more on my side now. As quirky as it can be, the Trekker Breeze can do a lot to keep me from getting hopelessly lost. My father and I just walked a route out to near the Meadowvale Town Centre. Unfortunately, doing this and then looking closely through the user's guide reveals a limitation I wasn't previously aware of. I can't create landmarks which are only announced during a specific route. I can just indicate things in such a way that they are always announced when I'm in the vicinity. That changes how one should describe such landmarks in the brief four seconds allowed per landmark. I'll have to do two landmarks in some cases to better direct me both ways on a route. Ah well. Live and learn.

Two more devices have also been added to my arsenal. I have a cell phone now. In a worst case situation, I could find out where I was and call a friend or a taxi. That's also an important consideration. With these two devices, trying to become more mobile makes a great deal more sense. I've also taken the step of ordering an Olympus DS 61 digital recorder. I'm going to use it to record routes as I travel them. This way, I'll have the journeys recorded in four-directional high quality sound plus whatever verbal notes the people who help me or I decide to point out recorded in real time along the way. That's something I've never tried before and it's the only idea I have which might let me re-familiarize myself with a route after an extended period of not practicing it. I'll also be able to use it to better fine-tune the names of the landmarks I set in the Trekker Breeze without having to recreate them.

Over the next six months, I'm going to embark on an extensive campaign to learn routes to and from where my friends and Janene live. This is going to entail practicing for a good part of most days. I'm reserving weekends as down time. Also, I'm not about to march out there in heavy rain. My other reservation is for visits with family, friends, or other special events. Failing those things, I'll be out there trying to overcome my travel hang ups by sheer dint of force. Everything else is on the back burner with one exception at least until September. What happens at that point depends largely on how Janene and I feel. We haven't broken off the engagement or anything like that. She just needs some time to find her new life balance and direction. I'm profoundly happy that she wants me to be an important part of that.

But what, you may wonder, is this one exception that isn't put on the back burner? Well one of my major issues with spending all kinds of time learning to get from A to B is that so often, in my experience, nothing concrete ever seems to result from all that work. I could never be happy in a situation where I had to constantly work to maintain my memory of all kinds of routes. My guide could never have been written under those conditions. I put two years of main effort into that project and it truly seems to have made a very big difference for people even if the larger blindness organizations don't seem to give a rat's ass. I've put over a year of effort into learning a route to get to a go station and have gained a little more than prior mobility efforts. I can now comfortably get to a local corner store. I'm also somewhat more comfortable with bus travel. I'm not at all easy with those damned transfer points where multiple buses can be present at the same time. Some things, those transfers included, I don't think I'll ever be alright with and will go to some trouble to avoid. For the most part, I see myself remaining a mostly social exploratory traveller. There are many experiences I would love to have with a person or people who I know and trust but wouldn't find at all worth while going to alone. I'd far rather take the time and effort to cultivate a friendship than try to learn a long route. To make certain that I come out of this with more than routes which time will doubtless eventually render useless as friends move or other circumstances transpire, I am going to attempt to produce an audio documentary of my experience. The exact nature of the end result will depend largely on the source material I collect as I record my travels. One way or another, I hope to have something which goes to the heart of issues surrounding expectations of mobility by the blind and of the blind. Along the way, I hope to become more comfortable speaking into microphones in general, editing and dealing with sound files, and to gain a bit more overall poise. We'll see how all that goes over the next while. Stay tuned, presumed small audience. You'll hear about my experiences first in this blog if you aren't otherwise personally connected to me socially. I hope you all had an enjoyable Easter weekend.