Monthly Archives: November 2007

new contact lenses

Rant,

It is a dreary day here in the DC Metro area. I had to drive to Springfield (halfway around the beltway) to go to my optometrist this morning. I always put this off – I mean what normal middle aged woman wouldn’t? Dr Adam is nice enough, but who wants to be told they are getting old and need stronger reading glasses?

Another thing about that place that bothers me. 90% of the women that work there are gorgeous. It is a real blow to one’s self-esteem to pay them a visit. For the most part they are nice enough, but there are a few who are so fakey nice that it makes me want to vomit.

I nearly did today, actually, but not because of a fakey nice person. Dr Adam fitted me with a pair of contact lenses that made me nauseous. One is way weaker than the other and this is supposed to solve the reading and distance issues. Not for me. I couldn’t see up close at all, and far away clear but looking out made me sick to my stomach. My husband has this “mono vision” and loves it. I am sick thinking about it.

Got a nice new pair of glasses though – at least I will in a couple of weeks.

Why do I continue to drive the beltway to go somewhere I feel inferior? Easy – they are on our insurance plan and it is familiar.

Yeah – this is nearly a throw away post, but my husband is taking me out to dinner and I must rush!

WordPress = accessible — not yet

Wordpress, ,

I got no work done today. I should have sent some files to our new coder so she could get started, but I slacked off and did some volunteer stuff instead.

My friend Maria called me the other day to see if I was interested in helping her with a project she and a few others were working on. She is trying to get back into the work force after being a stay at home mom for 15 or so years. The job she left had something to do with helping folks get back into the workforce after a disabling injury. I think she wants to go into a field similar to that.

In the decade and a half since she left the workforce, times have changed. Computers are more prevalent now, for one thing and because she’s blind, that presents a bit of a problem. She’s done her best obtain training on using screen readers to navigate computers, and is not adverse to asking for help when she needs it.

Today she wanted my help in setting up a web page for her job seekers group, Unlimited Success. I’d done a little research and found out that WordPress (thank goodness) was the most accessible weblog so suggested she use WordPress.com. After three hours of trial and error she decided to switch gears and let me do the actual content uploads.

Sitting next to Maria today made me realize how very hard it is to navigate the Internet without sight. Pages are set up for the sighted. Looking at my “write post” page, I have no problem figuring out what to do. When you use this page with a screen reader, however, it is not so simple. We could not work out how to move from the Title field to the post field. Tab was the logical keystroke, but it went directly to Save and continue editing. The keystroke(s) that need to be used are the down arrow. This will highlight all of the wysiwyg entities before settling into the post field. That is too much work. There needs to be a way to move easily from Title to Post. I cannot even imagine what the widgets area is like for a screen reader user.

So Matt, if you are listening – there is work to be done to make this an accessible place for all.

Anyway, keep an eye on http://unltdsuccess.wordpress.com It should have some great information for blind and visually impared job seekers, especially in the DC Metro area.

Heart healthy, but dead, ants

Humor, , ,

So last night I walked into the kitchen after the kids were in bed, expecting the dishes to be done and the counters cleaned off.

(Yeah right, I have teenagers)

Anyway, I’d noticed earlier that the counter was wiped down and expected it to still be that way. But no, Clare had a pomegranate snack and left several puddles of sticky-sweet pomegranate juice and some pomegranate skin on the counter. And the ants discovered it. Not a couple big ants, no we had multitudes of microscopic light brown ants slurping up pomegranate juice.  I could almost hear their tiny ant voices extolling the virtues of pomegranate juice for their little insect hearts.

Annoyed, I grabbed a sponge and wiped up the mess, including the ants, rinsed out the sponge and ran the garbage disposal. It took a few swipes, but I was finally satisfied that the majority of ants were off the counter, at least.  Then I ran the dishwasher and walked upstairs.

Clare’s light was still on, so I stopped and told her that she should have wiped the counter off after eating the pomegranate. She told me that the pomegranate had been covered in ants and since she didn’t want to kill the ants, she filled the sink with water, submerged the pomegranate in it until the ants floated away. Then she lovingly scooped up the ants and gently placed them on the counter.  She left the puddles of pomegranate juice there so they would have something to eat after their harrowing adventure.

Oh, I told her, too bad I just wiped them up and threw them down the garbage disposal.

She called me a cold hearted ant-murderer. Oops.

To her credit, she didn’t want to waste the pomegranate, but I suggested that next time, sacrifice the fruit to save the ants by tossing the whole thing out the door. (but then we might have other visitors again)

Speaking of pomegranates, I bought 6 at Costco last week. Dean thinks I was crazy, but the kids (and apparently the ants) like them and they are supposed to be good for you. Granted, they are difficult to eat.

When I was deciding if I wanted to buy 6 pomegranates another woman was looking at them at Costco. She said that she’d eaten pomegranates every day of her life, but still was not sure how to tell if they were ripe. I think she was from a different country. For sure she wasn’t from the Midwest United States where pomegranates didn’t arrive until sometime in the early 1970’s and only then as an exotic fruit – at least in my hometown, and only at one grocery store.

I remember my first pomegranate. I was 21 and working at a “Pancake House”  located just down from Gromers – the grocery store mentioned above. Another waitress and I, and perhaps a couple of busboys went shopping one day after work and thought we’d try some of the exotic fruit. We bought a mango, a pomegranate and a quince and shared them at someone’s house, or perhaps in someone’s car. I don’t remember eating the mango, but I remember the quince was astringent and the pomegranate was juicy, full of glistening sweet red juicy seeds at the center of which was a hard, almost wooden, pit. As interesting as the pomegranate was, it was too unusual for my taste, and probably too expensive. I don’t think I had another until recently when my daughter started wanting to taste one.