I have never liked ending any kind of a relationship.  Even when I was young and didn’t like a boy I was dating anymore, I had a hard time being the one to say so.  I can’t even find it in me to tell a hairdresser I don’t like my hair cut or highlights, so you can imagine how hard it is for me to realize my audiologist isn’t right for me anymore.  Ouch, I said it.  I have to break up with my audiologist and try someone new.

I started to tell you what’s behind this decision, but I realized it’s not that important to take up your time with the details.  Trust me when I tell you she’s let me down too much in the past two years and I don’t feel like I have someone helping me anymore. In our recent communications, she not only wasn’t up on some new things I was interested in, but she hadn’t told me about the ones she did like.  And most importantly, she never acknowledged the part about my hearing aids beeping randomly and not working properly again/still/always.  So now the challenge is to find someone new after thirty something years.

Obviously, I don’t want to go to the same place and use someone else there.  I’d have to face her and I’d be too uncomfortable for that. So we started the search and this Friday, I’m going to someone new.  Starting over after all this time isn’t fun – it’s terrifying.  What if it doesn’t work out? What if it goes badly? What if, what if, what if?  Wish me luck and hope I don’t have to “say the word baseball, say the word ice cream…”

I had no idea I could be such a wimp.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve written and I apologize for that.   Sometimes I get so busy I forget I’m deaf. 🙂  While being deaf is a full time job, I’ve managed to add a few more hobbies into my life, one of which is cooking.  Yes, after all these years of being an avid cooking hater, I suddenly got an urge to cook.  Though most everyone I know is wondering why, I can’t explain it.  I’m wondering too.  Nevertheless, in the past month, I have made (from scratch) French Onion Soup, New York Cheesecake with a strawberry glaze topping, French Baguettes, Glazed London Broil, and I’ve baked several cakes and a Lemon Meringue Pie.  Those though, were not quite from scratch, but I will get there.

Oddly enough, something happened to really confuse me – the odd beeping of my oven timers.  My brand new ovens, I might add.  (Which may be the reason for my new found interest in cooking.  Give a girl new toys and she may start to play!)  Anyway, I noticed the timer beeping at weird times.  I kept checking the food, but it was fine.  Nothing should have been beeping.  And then came the magical moment when I realized that it was not the timers doing the beeping.  I figured this out when I was sitting in another room reading and heard the beep.

You guessed it.  It was my hearing aid.  My recently replaced Starkey Destiny hearing aid.  It seems this hearing aid likes to hear itself beep so at unpredictable times, it does just that.  It’s not for a change in volume, it’s not for low battery, it’s not for change of program.  It just speaks up now and then.    It’s annoying as heck but there is one good thing about it – it’s not my ovens.  They work just fine.

Before my hearing loss, I loved to do what most people do.  I loved to go to the movies, watch television, listen to the radio, go to shows and concerts, explore new neighborhoods whevever I am, shop, you know – the normal stuff.  Let’s call that life before hearing loss BHL since it’s less typing for me.

AHL (after hearing loss) a lot of that changed.  Going to a movie meant sitting in the theater waiting for it to end.  We switched to videos and now DVDs, which are usually captioned.  But, of course we have to wait for them to come out on DVD, which isn’t while it’s still in the theater. So when my friends are talking about a movie they’ve seen I can’t join the conversation until a few months later. Luckily, they have good memories.

I do have captioned television, but the captions are so poorly done and messed up most of the time, it’s annoying to watch.  Most of the time I give up and do something else.  What’s up with HD television anyway?  The captions for Hi Def are worse than most. And oh boy, the people who caption sometimes get creative.  Just the other day I was watching something and the person knocked on a door three times.   The caption read, “knocks thrice.”  Thrice?  Who in North America says thrice?  But I digress.

I’m not going to go into each thing I loved to do – I think you can get the idea.  And, I do still try to do them sometimes.  Just the other night we saw “West Side Story” in New York.  I don’t know if I really heard it or if I just listened in my head, but neuroscience has already proven the effect is almost identical so I had a great time.  But I do want to note that I’ve changed as time has gone by.

Doing more visual things was a given.  I’ve always loved things like puzzles, word games, writing, photography,  drawing, and painting, and I was able to add computers to the list. When PCs started to bore me, I got an Apple.  There are always challenges to keep me entertained.  But something else has happened and I (along with my family) have begun to wonder who I am.

You see, for most of my married life, I’ve hated cooking.  When our house was being built, I didn’t want a kitchen.  I thought a telephone, a microwave oven and a toaster would be sufficient.  (And a fridge, of course.)  My family didn’t come home on time, food sat and dried out, the kids didn’t like something.  It just didn’t seem worth it so I cooked as little as possible.  Plus, and this is a big plus, I always got injured somehow.  Once I even cut myself opening the take out container.  A burn or a cut while preparing a meal was a given. (I’ll tell you about my trips to emergency in another blog.)

I had no interest in how food was prepared, what went with what, what to substitute if you ran out of something, how to get it all ready at the same time, etc.  I could make the things I knew how to make but my repertoire was limited.  When we felt the urge for a home cooked meal, I wondered where we could get one. (My husband pointed out that I could probably cook one for us.)

Well, things were going along very nicely but then we decided it was important to eat healthy.  That lets out most restaurants and take out food, so the idea of cooking came up again.  With morose resignation, I realized I had to cook.  It was not uncommon for us to have the same thing night after night.  I could do it decently so why take chances? Plus it was easy if I just made chicken every night.

Here’s the odd thing – I’ve always wanted a gas stove.  Electric is the most common in Toronto and I’ve hated it since I moved there. Our house, of course, had electric so I really wasn’t enthused.  Well, we finally put in a gas stove and a new me emerged.

Not only am I cooking, I’m enjoying it.   I might even go out on a limb and say I’m loving it.  I’m reading about cooking, I bought cookbooks, we’re even taking a hands-on couples course in surf and turf!  Last night I loved the movie Julie & Julia.  And, wonder of wonder, there have been no injuries since we got the new stove.  I’m still very afraid of my knives, but I’m working on that.  Now I want to try new dishes.  French onion soup no longer has to be a restaurant treat.  I baked Lemon Meringue tarts for company last week.  I’m inviting people to my house to eat and we aren’t ordering in!

And there you have it?  Who am I?