City:
SRS: When I was environmentally poisoned in 2000, it created brain differences. I have trouble discriminating sounds - if there is more than one. Background music precludes me understanding much of anything. Movies are a struggle; R has to explain any finer points after we get home. If a person speaks to me directly, I can usually understand. If they put their hand on their chin, it changes the sounds. So do mustaches.

I hear too well and am hypersensitive to loud sounds, hence I no longer go to the cafe on Friday nights; since the beer and wine license, people speak loudly and so they turn up the music to compensate. It literally made my body physically hurt the last time I was there. I once had a brain damaged client (from hypoxia) who would come home complaining, "Those people on the school bus make my whole body hurt." I know how she felt.

My #1 son was bugging me about my hearing and told him if he spoke clearly and softly I would understand. He did; I did and he stopped bugging me. I can turn the TV up to no avail; the only way is closed captions, though I sometimes understand the CanadianBC news people. Temple Grandin explains the problem of auditory processing and discrimination in Thinking in Pictures. I believe it is a major cause of children with autism being non-verbal. If verbal sounds have no meaning because they cannot discriminate or process them, then how can they learn to use them? I have a book, Like Sound Under Water, which I bought in a grocery store bin; the name jumped out at me because that is how it often feels. A young mother explains how her, apparently non-autistic, toddler had to be trained to learn to discriminate sounds. She was fortunate to find this assistance.

Lots of people have trouble with auditory processing disorder (APD). I always had it to a degree but before the poisoning, I was a newspaper reporter for 6 years and understood easily. I was noted for the correctness of my reporting. I could not do that now.

The back yard looks better and I must have worked more than I thought because I am feeling it! R came home at midnight; I was in bed but awake. He came in and asked, jokingly, what's for dinner? I told him it was on the counter so he made himself a plate and sat on the bed to eat, telling me how good it was! When I phoned him just after 9, he had said he would be home "soon"!

I had almost an hour on the phone last night with my dear friend (1968) who is a rabbi in MD. This is the busiest month of his year - 3 weeks to Rosh Hashanah. It is uncanny how I think of him most at the time he is busiest. I had left him a rather plaintive, "I miss you" message a few days ago. We caught up.

Time to trim a few pots and and go to the mill. A two day craft show this weekend. The Roxham Woolgathering, at a marvellous old farm in the middle of nowhere Quebec. Hundreds of people travel 50 miles or more to come to the event!