My Blind Experience

The smallest bedroom in our house is our Star Wars room. The walls and ceiling are painted black. White, yellow, and blue Christmas lights cover the ceiling and the upper half of the walls to simulate far away stars. The main light in the room was a 30" diameter Death Star. The bed was a TIE Fighter - here's a picture of my wife holding the foot board: Miniature TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers hung from the ceiling. We designed it to be Brian's room. He's as much of a Star Wars fan as I am, but Brian moved into a larger bedroom when it became available a few years ago. Julie moved into the Star Wars room when she moved back in with us but she and her boyfriend have been in their own apartment for a year. The Star Wars room has been empty since then. It's become the place the kids store their stuff after they move out. My wife and I have been repainting it this week. Yes, a blind man with a paint brush is every bit as goofy as you imagine. Some of the paint even en...

Between packing boxes to take to the thrift store, calling to get internet and utilities at the new address, trying to work through two punch lists (one to sell this home, the other to buy the home in Virginia), and trying to hire guys to do some home repairs for us I haven't had time to write. * * * There's a girl named Dottie who works at the local Dollar General. She's a life long smoker by the sound of her voice. Whenever a customer walks into the store she says something like "Hi, welcome to Dollar General!" Whenever I hear her I say "Hi Miss Dottie!" She gets the biggest kick out of a blind man recognizing her voice. I'm not sure why but it just makes her day. Lucky for me she was the one working the register when we showed up and asked to take some empty cardboard boxes. I'm giving away all my books. That sounds like a no-brainer but it's actually a bit traumatic for me. I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember....

San Antonio's local Jack FM station used to be cool when they were an eighties station. The small Arizona town we lived in before we moved to San Antonio didn't have an eighties station. We heard music on Jack FM I hadn't heard since it was newly released in the eighties. On weekend nights the station sometimes broadcast their show live from Brass Monkey, a dance club on North Saint Mary's Street. My wife swims laps with me. She rides our tandem bike with me. She hikes with me. She does the river walk with me. When the weather is nice she exercises outdoors with me. But when the weather's too cold to swim or bike I jog for cardio. And my wife refuses to jog with me. She just won't do it. If I beg and plead I can get her to go maybe six steps, then she says "This sucks" and walks. Jogging just isn't her thing. She'll walk the river walk in the cold but that doesn't really get our hearts pumping hard enough to count as a  cardio workout. One...

This post is for a Redditor, u/EffectiveYak. He's a student at UTEP taking a course on discrete mathematics this semester. If you aren't Yak and stumbled in here looking for today's blog, it's the next one down. But if you're still here, take a seat - class is now in session. *** Three vocabulary words - a set is a collection of elements . Mapping is how we match up elements in one set to elements in another. Your textbook might use other words. Imagine you want to know if there are more Marvel superheroes than DC superheroes. This doesn't sound too hard to figure out, Just count all the superheroes in the set of Marvel superheroes, then count all the superheroes in the set of DC superheroes, and see which set has the most elements in it. A six year old could explain this to me. It's very easy and intuitive. There's another way to compare the size of sets, though. Imagine you take each Marvel superhero and draw a line from him or her to exactly one uni...

Some poisons cause dizziness. That's why our ancestors evolved the vomit response to feeling dizzy or off balance - it's better to lose a few hundred calories than to die of poisoning. Get too dizzy and your body thinks it's been poisoned. If you stay dizzy long enough you'll throw up your lunch. Last week my eyesight reached the point that everything seems tilted and off kilter. It's not just the picture of my wife on the wall anymore, it's everything. If you're in a place with floor tiles or some sort of repeating pattern on the ground, look down. You'll see the parallel lines. If you look to the side you'll notice how the parallel lines slant because of your perspective, but the lines directly under you don't slant at all. I look down and see parallel lines slanting, but that's all I can see. I can't see the rest of the floor or the walls, I just see slanting lines. It looks like the floor is slanted. My sense of balance tells me one t...