Memorial Day, 2017 and it has been raining off and on for all three days of the holiday weekend. Right now it is ‘on’ and raining hard.
I have been taking the opportunity to do some other things. For example, I pulled out all of the furniture in the sunroom and ‘really’ cleaned. All the while I was doing that I was listening to the latest Jeffery Deaver book, The Burial Hour. Good ‘read’. Love my BARD.
I also wrote the questions for the review game for DBT class. Wednesday is the last day of distress tolerance and we go right into mindfulness. Get ready for more ‘thoughtful insights’! Ha!?
And in other news, I have done some very basic cooking. Gasp!
If you have been following along you know some basic and not always flattering things about me. For example, I am a slob. Also, if God wanted me to cook, He would not have invented restaurants! Domestic goddess? Not me!
While I am not planning on retiring (and as of last week, no one was planning on letting me go! Praise be!), I am cognizant the time is coming I will be home with time on my hands. Also, on a budget that may not allow regular restaurant meals. Maybe it is time to practice (how about start to develop?) my culinary skills!
To that end – and also for a page! – I came upon what looks like a nifty little web site. The title of the site is BlindHow. This thing has links to other sites with cute little monikers like Cooking Without Looking and The Blind Chef.
But the site also has other stuff. There are links to just about every practical skill you can think of. Shopping? Laundry? Personal finance? They have links.
Speaking of audiobooks as I did above, I found a link entitled 91 places for free audiobooks online. If you do not quite qualify for BARD, you could probably find an audiobook site that is not as ‘exclusive’. La di da.
The site also has links to information on movies with ‘descriptive audio’. From what I gather, this is a system aiming to keep the blind guy in the back of the theater from asking “what’s happening now?!?!” in all of the suspenseful or sexy parts of the film when everything has gone quiet.
Anyway, following a link, I found a site called MoPix and sponsored by the Media Access Group. They have a list of about a dozen movie theater chains in the US offering headphones and devices that will allow you to access the description apparently embedded on certain flicks. The list of those was pretty long, too. [Lin/Linda here: I found this link that says that MoPix has shut down. Their Facebook page had no recent posts. Sorry.]
I would volunteer to go and check it out for you but our local movie chain is on a short list of chains that do NOT offer the service. (Did you notice the local paper was not available over the phone either? What the…..?)
Oh, but if you don’t have cooperative local providers (dig, dig), the American Council for the Blind sells ALL of the DVD and Blu-ray discs manufactured with descriptive video since 1997. Do you need any special equipment? Not sure. Links for some of the movies take you right back to Amazon. I did not see a special offering of DVD with audio descriptions but I am legally blind; remember? May have looked right over it. [Lin/Linda here: I do not think that you need special equipment for DVDs & Blu-ray disks but check here first to be sure regarding particular devices. ]
Anyhow, BlindHow looks like a winner. Problem is, it probably just took away all my arguments for a housekeeper and a cook! Dang.
Written May 29th, 2017