macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis A Cat Eating a Shoe – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

A Cat Eating a Shoe

Slowly getting my stuff together. The change in phone carriers and the accompanying set-up have been accomplished. Even with ‘plug and play; I am just about hopeless to begin with and then add a visual impairment. Oy vay. The pool that was green because the pump was down is blue again and six days into the two weeks left to live prediction, Beastie Baby is acting like she never got the memo. [Sue wrote this in July.  Beastie Baby has since passed away.]

Not arguing with it. It is often good to be unmindful of coming sadness. If she can enjoy short walkies and cheeseburgers (yes, spoiled dog), why not?

If there is no averting disaster I see nothing wrong with dancing on the deck of the Titanic. Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.

Planning my next ‘adventure’. Since the dog is elderly, etc. we really don’t want to leave her with a sitter when I go to Penn State. That means my husband drives me down and comes right home. I get to get a bus home. Happy, happy, joy, joy. My choices are taking eight hours – including a 3 hour layover – to travel 100 miles and end up at the bus stop in town here or riding the bus two hours to a town 45 minutes away and having my husband come rescue me there. I vote for option #2!

“You can’t get there from here” may not be a totally accurate statement but it seems pretty close. I will let you know how I do. I would like to say America allows freedom of movement for all, but I have a feeling things are not going to be that easy.

Lin asked me to download Seeing AI. Apparently it is all the rage right now and everyone is all atwitter about it. That said, apparently I am not that easily impressed. Seeing AI seems to combine the functions of several different apps into one. It does a better job describing scenes than some other apps, but bottom line once again is, it needs work.

Seeing AI did a nice job on identifying things on the fridge door as “food in a refrigerator” and the Beastie Baby truly was a “brown and white (and black!) dog on a bed”. Beyond that, we had some problems.

Two pairs of my husband’s shoes were “a cat eating a shoe”. Giggle. The app identified the concrete around the pool but failed to note the black inner tube or the pool just beyond. If I were totally blind I could have easily expected clear sailing, tripped over the inner tube and gone for an unexpected swim! Although the examples in the ads were things like “a 20 something girl smiling”, Seeing AI identified my colleague, a 30 something smiling girl, simply as “a person”.

I guess I have to say excellent start, good attempt, but I would not want to depend on this app to interpret my world for me. Too many chances to trip over inner tubes and end up swimming.

The app is absolutely free in the Apple App Store . The price is certainly right! Download it and try it for yourself. [It isn’t yet available for Android.  It was originally only available in the US and Canada but has recently been made available to people in the UK, Ireland and Australia.]

Check out a good review by Sam of The Blind Life on YouTube.

written July 19th, 2017

Next: The Puppy Zone

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