a more silent world

I had an important meeting this week.  The meeting room is huge, and what sound doesn't "disappear" turns into echoes.  To make matters worse, I knew for a fact there would be soft-spoken people present, as well as people with strong foreign accents.  So I decided to bite the bullet and use an interpreter for my first time ever. I have to admit, I was a bit anxious about this whole ordeal.  Probably more of a "fear of the unknown" thing, but nonetheless not an easy thing to come to grips with.  I worried about my ASL proficiency not being quite good enough.  I worried about being able to pay attention both to the faces/emotions of the people speaking as well as the interpreter.  Overall, I must say that my fears in this case were completely unfounded.  It was wonderful to sit through a meeting and not wonder what I missed when "that person" was talking and I couldn't hear and/or understand them. I hope all future interpreter situations are as ...

So, after having this set of hearing aids for three years now, I can say that I am still quite happy with them. The bluetooth streaming has proven to be an absolute life-saver for watching movies at home, and being able to hear at church.  The longevity of the aids seems good, since I haven't had to send them in for repair yet.  I have replaced the receivers a couple times, but the first time or two was covered by the warranty, and they are only about $100 and do not require sending them in for repair, and thus being screwed for a couple weeks.  I managed to break my bluetooth remote once, but that was my fault, and I had to pay like $350 out of pocket to get a new one, ouch. Overall, I would highly recommend these aids, especially to younger or more tech-savvy people.  Once the tuning was tweaked a few times to my liking, they are really nice.

A few ZVRS people came and gave a great presentation at Deaf Family Night several days ago.  Impressive stuff, and it appears overall to be the best choice for me right now. I'm getting the Z-340, and I will use the Z4 software on my Mac and iPhone also.  Now just waiting for my hardware to arrive!  I'm still kind of sad I couldn't get the Z20 for free, since I don't have a competitive VP to trade, but the Z340 looks pretty nice, and I like that I can take it on trips with me.

I was really impressed with the bold choices made last night, exposing some pretty edgy topics in Deaf culture. The new character Travis is first shown as a strong Deaf militant, intolerant of Hearing people, intolerant of Daphne's intermixing with Hearing and Deaf, and just bitter.  Then the writers connected that behavior with another controversial topic:  Deaf kids in Hearing families who don't learn sign. I really like that this episode exposed two controversial topics to the masses, who may otherwise be ignorant of their very existence!  Handwaves!!

So my 3-year-old son is rapidly learning ASL from me.  It's nothing short of amazing how he is accelerating.  One thing I haven't done much around him though is fingerspelling.  As he learns more, it becomes more difficult for me since I don't know signs for everything under the sun. There are only two cases, though.  Some thing have no signs, and must be finger-spelled, and some things have a sign and I don't know the sign.  How do I deal with this?? Let's take an example:  Octopus.  Clearly this is much to complicated for him to finger spell--if I finger spell this to him he relays back to me "garbage" trying to mimic my hand. Can someone please help me here to understand how kids learn fingerspelling?  Thanks in advance!!

I watched the premiere of Switched at Birth last night, and although people on the show are improving on their signing skill, it seems like even the Deaf characters are using some lazy signing (but mostly the Hearing characters).  Unlike most newbie signers, the Hearing characters have a really decent "flow", but still, I see a lot of lazy signing all around. Obviously, if the show were realistic, we would be seeing choppy, malformed signing for years, which doesn't make for good TV.  What do you all think?

I do not currently have a VP.  If I go to ZVRS, it looks like everything is free if I trade in my Sorenson VP, but if I do not have a VP, then I need to pay?? Sorenson VP is free for me.  It seems like if ZVRS wants business of new customers, they should offer the same deal as porting customers from Sorenson.  Otherwise, I might just choose Sorenson for my first VP. Anyone have any advice?  I know it's a hot topic right now.