Japan

So I'm hanging out here in Japan, having a blast. The food is great, and when I get back to the states, I'm going to post some photos of the WAY BETTER SUSHI THAN WE HAVE IN PORTLAND. If you get my drift. They don't have spicy tuna, but all that is is a matter of mayonnaise, so we'll be peachy.

Anypoo, I'm having some deep thoughts about stuff, which I feel not yet at liberty to divulge. But expect some pictures of bacon sushi and also my new favorite, which I think is called salad roll. I'm not sure, but it's not really salad. What it IS is delicious.

Even in Japan though, I do need my morning coffee. So, off I go.

my lemon tree

I've been putting this off. But I got a new camera, and now you can see my lemon tree in all its glory.


And this one too:


It's easy to kill a citrus. I really hope I didn't kill the lime. We'll find out.

Meyer Lemon

My tree has some little tiny baby blossoms on it. They haven't actually opened yet, but the thought of it thrills me.

However, I think my lime tree is angry at me. It is dropping leaves. I transplanted both trees today though, and hopefully it will all be ok. I hope the lemon isn't angry at me for transplanting it with buds on it. There were worms in the lemon pot. That thrilled me.

bad blogger

I've been very lenient with myself over updating this thing. I know I should be better about it, but I need people to acknowledge they're reading it, you know?

In CI news, the thing works fabulously. I'm always listening to my iPod with it, and though I haven't yet mastered the art of talking on the phone, it is about a million times better than before, i.e. when I couldn't hear at all in my left ear.

In food/horticulture news, I ordered a meyer lemon tree and a kaffir lime tree. They should be on their way as of tomorrow, and I look forward to seeing just how they do in my sometimes chilly Oregon clime. They'll be like the puppies I'm in no position to buy. Nobody ever tells you that you can't have plants in your apartment.

La Vie en Rose

I wouldn't say life is pink. It's really not, but it's OK.

I have my third mapping appointment tomorrow morning at 9; I'll finally get the music map, which is good, because I have to play around with the various programs I have already to find the right map for music. Music sounds weird on my processor.

I got into a mood ("mood" is the word I use to say I'm in a funk about something) tonight, so I took myself to the gym for the first time since right before my surgery, and I worked out super duper. It was great. I should do it again, because it totally improved my mood, and now I'm here, typing.

I started understanding speech about two weeks ago, and it's pretty cool. Mo sounded kind of like Judy Garland and Liza Minelli for awhile, but she is sounding more like herself. Men kind of sound like Sean Connery (depending on the voice), and if I am listening through the wrong program, male singers all sound gothy and death metally, which is bad when you're listening to Jack Johnson.

Next post will hopefully be about food!

Telephones

I hate being able to hear things when I'm talking on the phone! It is very easy to talk on the phone if you have one deaf ear. It is a lot harder when suddenly, you can hear out of that ear.

I now understand why "hearing" people plug their ears when they're on the phone.

Aphrodisiac meal coming up. The meat is proving to be the biggest problem for planning. Maybe if I can find some rabbit.

I can tell by the way you walk

I just had two moments of hearing that I've missed in the past several months. While I'm not yet used to the way my cochlear implant sounds, I'm starting to recognize some things.

I had it turned on this morning, my appointment set for 9:30. Dana, my audiologist, called me into her office and sat me down, where she promptly hooked my head up to the speech processor. First things first: getting my map set up. MAP doesn't stand for anything, they just call it a map for some reason. Thus the lower case. She tested out the electrodes and told me to count the amount of beeps I was hearing (i.e. one, three, two, four, etc) at different pitches starting with low. At first, I was afraid my implant wasn't working because I wasn't hearing anything, but then I started hearing beeps, only, how to describe, they weren't exactly beeps but feelings.

By "feelings" I mean physical sensations. Like the bass of a drum, but only in my brain.

After that, which was pretty tame, since I was hooked up to a computer and hearing silence except for quiet beeps, Dana turned the processor on so that I could hear real sounds like speech, and my mom started talking to me. I should be honest, it's not easy for me to understand speech through my processor yet, but I will eventually come to recognize exactly what the sounds are, because it sounded at first like a timpani. Yes, a timpani. A kettle drum. Or a whole bunch of them, and it still kind of does.

The first sound I was truly able to recognize was the clicking of my cell phone keys as I typed a message for my roommate. Then, the sound of feet walking on pavement. Right now, I can hear the keys on my computer as I'm typing. They click. A minute ago, I heard the kitchen alarm go off as I'm baking some cookies.

Hmm, being able to hear. Weird.