One thing I heard this week while waiting for class was a few girls talking about things such as their vision (due to one of them not having their contacts). Though I didn’t listen to their conversation fully one thing that struck me was that one of them was saying that they wouldn’t mind being visually impaired because then they could get a guide dog. I didn’t mention to them that it takes more than being visually impaired to get a guide dog, but I wasn’t going to. I mentioned before about how sometimes things that other people have because of disability are somehow “cool”. I suppose people don’t think of the downside to it. My girlfriend has a similar probably with her diabetes when she was in high school. Normally food wasn’t allowed in classrooms, but given her situation she was allowed and everyone wasn’t too happy about it because they wanted to be able to eat. I suppose that’s similar with people who see people who are visually impaired or blind walking around with a guide dog and being able to take it everywhere. There are some benefits to not being able to see well I suppose, but personally I’d much rather b able to see normally, be able to get around and drive where I wish. Be able to not have to worry about all the downsides than whatever “perks” I may gain from having this disability, but that’s just me.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Discovering the Area
Over the past few weeks I’ve been meeting with my mobility specialist at the CNIB once i a while in order to find new places that I may want to go. Places like the super market and mall, but also interesting places that are along the way or around. I had her help first year to learn my way around campus and also to learn where the bank was and other such things, but after that I kind of fell out of doing it. Now I’m learning about all sorts of fun places. It started with me needing to find my way to the CNIB building for something, and just went from there It’s always good to have someone help you find places and find the place you’re thinking about. Sometimes the hardest thing about Google Maps is that if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for or what it might be called it’s harder to find, and if you don’t know it’s there (like she told me about a really neat cafe that I would never have known about had I not been told) there is no reason to find out. It’s pretty fun and I have to do it more especially since I plan on living here.
Thanksgiving dinner by Candlelight
So for those of you who don’t know Canadian Thanksgiving was the Monday that’s just passed. Of course our school made a turkey dinner for the event. The thing is that Monday was also the day we were hit by the hurricane. At one point the internet went down then the power flickered. At about five minutes before dinner started the power went out completely. Of course the school has backup generator just in case this happens, but for some reason that wasn’t turning on like it was supposed to so we had to get facilities to fix it. Meanwhile lot of us were ready to go to dinner (though we had to take the back way in because the doors were locked since we had no power). We have cards that we always use to get itno meal hall so it’s taken off our meal plan and they had to take the numbers by hand since the system wan’t working. Good thing was that the power only went out a few minutes before supper so it wasn’t ruined. Still for at least half an hour we were eating in the dark by candlelight. It was certainly an experience.
Pasta or Fries
One thing I love about being on campus is the cafeteria staff know me very well. I got into the habit during my first year of always asking them what they had (because the online menu could change and it was hard to read the printed out ones because the text was small). So now they’ve gotten used to just telling me without me asking, and it’s a good thing too because apparently my eyes confuse pasta and fries. Now the pasta was with meat sauce mixed in so it was around the same colour as fries in general, but it certainly would have tasted different had I thought it was fries.
I used to feel silly at fast food places asking what they had because the menus are up on the walls, but it’s a very useful habit to get into and usually the people are very nice about telling you what’s there.
Why I don’t trust elevators
This is a more silly thing that happened to me once. Well it happened to a good friend of mine, but I was actually the only other person there ate the time. So we were at a conference for visually impaired and blind people of New Jersey with a program we were in. We were at the hotel we all were staying at going to go to supper. We’d gotten to the elevator earlier than the others (I can’t remember why we were so early actually). So we went into the elevator, but were going to hold the door open. Still his cane got stuck in the gap between where the door closes. He tried to pull it back out, but it slipped out of his hand. Perhaps it was because his tip was worn down, but somehow the cane managed to slide through the hole and fall down the elevator. We stood there in stunned silence for a while listening as the cane clattered down the shaft. Needless to say that cne wasn’t recovered. We laughed about it afterwards. I would have lent him my cane, but I was rushing and forgot it at home. Still it’s an interesting moment and I always think of it when I go into an elevator.