Just came from lunch with high school friends. They actually drove 80 miles to visit! Thanks, ladies! Love you!
And that all came about because of a ‘catching up’ email I sent. Moral? Reach out. You never know where one, simple contact will lead. Give people a chance to be kind.
And speaking of reaching out, a reader/member reached out this week. Frustrated by failing vision. Frustrated at how her life has changed. Frustrated by her frustration.
Sound familiar? Thought so. But I don’t want to talk about that?.
The proverbial last straw for our reader was dropping something she needed and not being able to find it. Now this person sounds like a kindred soul. She is inclined to be, shall we say, ‘messy’ and she is also creative. Read some research – like that cited by Clive Thompson in Put Down the Broom…Tidying Up Can Hamper Creativity – and you will see mess and creativity can go together. Our reader/member doesn’t want to give up that part of her personality either. This is even though messiness makes it easier to lose things. But I don’t want to talk about that.
What I want to talk about is finding things you drop. Now that skill is valuable!
VisionAware did a post on Searching for Dropped Objects When You Are Visually Impaired. They suggest you need to remember to protect your upper body. Don’t search stooped over and come up under a lower ceiling, etc. That would be while uttering the memorable phrase “Eureka! Ouch, damn it!” (That is the true quote of Archimedes as he jumped out of the bath and hit his head on a low ceiling. History just cleaned it up a bit?).
VisionAware also suggested listening for the sound of the thing hitting. Soft or hard surface? Things dropped on hard surfaces bounce more. If they are roundish, they roll more.
And may I add, if you drop something and it shatters? Call for back-up, especially if you are like me and ‘shoe’ tends to be a four letter word. A couple of years back I dropped nested, Pyrex baking dishes. My feet were fragged. The entire kitchen was fragged. My husband had to come to my rescue with dustpan and broom. Then off to the walk-in clinic to get glass out of my toe! I tell these somewhat embarrassing stories so you can avoid the same fate.
But again I digress. VisionAware suggests pointing a toe towards where you think the thing dropped and then having a system. Search with your hands in overlapping semicircles. Search with one hand at a time and use the other one to protect and stabilize your body. If searching with hands is not practical (or is dangerous or icky) , use feet, a cane, a broom, etc. The final VisionAware suggestion is to use visual memory of the area to try to decide where the *!#*! thing may have gone. OK, so they did not say “*!#*!”. That was me. You get the point.
And something not mentioned in that post: Be My Eyes. Load it on your phone. Keep the phone on you. After all, you never know when you are going to drop something.
written August 14th, 2017