My Blind Experience

When I was very young my father taught me to go with my first answer. When a question was asked and an answer popped into my head, that answer was right, and unless I was certain it was wrong I should stick with it. Don't second guess myself. When I was in college my English professor believed the soul of writing was editing. Anybody can scribble words on a page but the process of agonizing over word choices and punctuation decisions was where writing actually happened. That's where the scribbling becomes a masterpiece. Sorry Dr. Brown, but I'm going with my father's advice. When I write the first word that comes to mind is the truth. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Editing is for wimps. I am what I feel and what I feel needs to be committed to the page while I feel it to truly reveal who I am. Going back and rewording what I wrote seems like lying. Someone might say "That's fine for a journal but what about technical writing? Fiction writing? B...

  Here are a few items still on my bucket list - The Smithsonian Monticello Tubing in the snow Ride in a self driving car * * * Imagine you're barefoot and trying to navigate your way through a room with Legos scattered all over the floor. You're halfway to the door when somebody turns off the light. That's what it feels like for me to be in a cluttered place. It takes me forever to find the salsa in a cluttered fridge, or a particular tee shirt in a full closet, or a certain tool in a full toolbox. I need less, not more. Less of everything. My blindness has caused me to want to buy the best of everything once. I don't want six pairs of cheap pliers, I want one pair that will last a lifetime. Searching through dozens of items to find the one I'm looking for doesn't seem like a big deal but when I do it over and over again each day it's draining. I don't consider myself part of the decluttering movement. I have my opinions against consumerism and capitali...

Mom is 76 years old. Dad is 81. They're remodeling machines. Give Dad a paint roller and he'll finish a room before I've got my roller wet. Give Mom a screwdriver and she'll have the outlet plates on or off faster than a cheetah. So far we've painted all of the basement except the small bedroom and the hallway. We've added shelf supports, shelving, and closet rods in the closets in the bedroom and the hallway. We have about 500 square feet of laminate flooring to install. I don't think that's going to be enough to do the entire carpeted area downstairs. We might have to buy more or leave the bedroom carpeted. We won't know until we start laying it all out. Today we're removing the carpet in the big room. We're going to roll it up in four foot rolls and tie each roll off with bailing wire. After that we've got to get the carpet pad and tack strips out. I really hope the pad isn't glued and the tack strips come up easy. If so we can sta...

The sun will come up in a few more hours. Not too long after that happens my parents will start the long drive from Salt Lake City to Virginia. They'll be here 20 days to help me remodel the basement. My mud and tape guy will finish the basement walls about two days before they get here. I've taken off the outlet plates and taped up the plugs and torn the old door casing and baseboard molding off the walls. I even ran Ethernet cables through the walls and false ceiling and into each bedroom for when we get fiber internet in March. After the mud and tape guy sands everything down I'm going to mask everything off and we'll be ready to paint. Mom and Dad are going to help. As soon as the paint is dry we'll get rid of the old carpet and put in the hardwood flooring the seller left for us, then replace the doors, door casing, and baseboards. I don't know how long any of this will take. We might be finished with the work halfway through their visit or we might be fini...

Posted by u/Liquidcatz 2 hours ago I am so sick of my mother acting like I can still see! Discussion My vision is 20/400 I'm functionally blind, but can still see. I do pretty well navigating the world with low vision to the extent most people don't realize I can't see, but I'm still functionally blind. I've been like this for 3 years now and was steadily losing vision before that for years. My awful excuse for a mother can't get it through her head that I can't see anything. She's been with me to eye doctors appointments. She's well aware I'm functionally blind. But MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY this woman still holds things up across the room and expects me to look at the object and respond to it. Asks me to go look for something in another room. Or do tasks that generally require vision that I don't have! Then she has the audacity to get mad at me for not being able to see! I'm so over it. I've mostly come to terms with my very...

I used my only butter knife to make a peanut butter sandwich yesterday afternoon. I remember washing it when I was done. Today it's gone. I can't find it in the silverware drawer. I can't find it in the dishwasher where I put my dishes to dry after I washed them by hand. I reached down the garbage disposal in the sink to feel around for it but it's not there, either. I looked in the fridge and in the cabinet where I keep the bread and peanut butter. I looked in all the other cabinets and drawers, too. I even looked through the kitchen garbage can and on the floor around the cabinets. No knife. One of the benefits of living alone is having my stuff stay where I left it. Nobody moves my things, nobody puts their own stuff in places I don't expect. That's important. A few months before I moved my wife decided to rearrange the kitchen without telling me. The corn chips don't belong here anymore, they belong over there. The rice should go here. The canned soup wi...

This is nice. A beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood in a beautiful city. We got to Roanoke Friday afternoon. Layne and Veronica took my wife home this morning. I'm on my own for a few months. We installed handles on all the kitchen cabinets, hung a few closet rods for clothes, unpacked all my stuff, hung a mirror, rewired some temporary light switches into permanent electrical boxes, replaced a missing shingle, cleaned out the rain gutters, repainted the chain link fence and the chimney flue cap, installed an extension arm on the downstairs shower head, and raked the leaves in the front yard. I even decorated an unfinished basement wall to hide the studs and wiring. We were very productive in a short time. I'm not done. The toggle switch to turn the garbage disposal on is inside the sink cabinet. Unacceptable - I'm way too tall to bend over like that, and who wants to open a cabinet door with wet, soapy hands? The sink cabinet has a false drawer front on it. I've...