After knowing that my hearing was crap for years, I finally got a hearing test and now I have hearing aids. I realized it felt like everyone was mumbling, and that rather than them, it was just my ears getting worse.
I had a heck of a lot of inner ear infections as a kid with both eardrums blowing out which causes scarring and with age, well something had to give. So here is a picture of my nifty new Oticon aids (there needs to be a better name for them than that).
There’s standard stick ballpoint pen to show the size. What I found is that there is a whole subculture of decorating hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc. I’ll have to make some bling for mine.
So everyone, consider getting a hearing test since hearing loss is pernicious. If *everyone* is mumbling, you are likely losing your hearing, at least in the higher frequencies. I find my brain is much quieter since I don’t have to strain so hard to hear and understand people. I don’t have a low-level irritation constantly.
A good friend of mine sent me this great substack essay on cats and Ukraine. In an older post, I put that I found that at least one set of my great grandparent came from the western tip of Ukraine, an area that has often been part of different countries thanks to war, etc.
Here’s a bit of the essay:
“A CAT NEVER ASKS YOU TO LOVE IT. And yet, it loves you anyway.
It doesn’t demand. It doesn’t beg. It doesn’t seek approval or recognition.
Cats love because love is in their nature. They don’t need anything from you except the warmth of your presence. Maybe that’s why their love feels so pure, because it asks for nothing in return.
And maybe that’s why I love them so much.
Because they remind me of Ukraine.
Ukraine never asks the world to love it. It doesn’t beg for attention or scream for recognition. It just exists, with courage stitched into every shattered street and burned village. It fights because fighting is all it can do. It stands because standing is all it has left.
It loves, even when there’s nothing left to give.
Even when the world feels like it’s forgotten how to care.
It’s the same with cats.”
Heroiam Slava! And if I were pagan, I’d ask the winter goddess to pay special attention to the orange rapist, his illegal alien and the poor fellow suffering little man syndrome in moscow.
Club Schadenfreude 
Welcome to the club.
I got mine years ago. I need a blue tooth thingy for TV. I’ve had mine for almost 10 years. The problem is that now I now hear everything equally and my brain lost its ability to filter out unwanted sounds. Audiologist says I need to retrain my brain. She couldn’t tell me how long that might take. Apparently it’s more than 8 years. LOL.
Some environments are worse than others. I can hear everyone around me talking, I hear the HVAC everywhere, and don’t get me started on restaurants and all the hard surfaces. I often remove the hearing aids and hear better in those environments, and I ask people to talk loudly (okay to yell at me). I didn’t realize that was partially lip reading until COVID and the masks took it away. It is not just the hearing, the sound discrimination is a challenge, as well, if not more so.
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mine have a couple functions that allow for speech to be enhanced, and they can somehow tell how I have my head tilted to enhance one or the other. I can understand how removing them in restaurants could help. And yep, I was partially lip reading too and didn’t know it.
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Does this mean you have to listen to people now?
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that’s what the off button is for 🙂
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Wonderful⭐
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