Last Updated on: 23rd April 2012, 09:28 pm
>Well it’s December 21. I think it’s funny that on the first official day of winter, the weather is being decidedly more gentle than it has been earlier in December. But I’m not gonna complain. I want to get home to my family tomorrow, so Mother Nature can just keep that calm weather up.
Hey Mr. Postman: Can you please, please, pleeeease, deliver that one last Christmas gift I’m waiting for? I need it before I catch the bus tomorrow. I know it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get it before tomorrow, and I will see my buddy again, but I’d like to be able to give it to him. I mean, we ordered it December 2. And I’d also like you to deliver Steve’s birthday card from my mom. She’s wondering what’s taking you so long.
I’m so bad. I have about a million things I have to do today before I head home, but what am I doing? Rambling on here. Yup, way to make good use of my time.
A few things struck me this week that I’m shocked haven’t been invented, and I thought I would write them down. Maybe something exists in this regard and I just don’t know it.
I met up with a friend of mine who uses a manual wheelchair. We were both lamenting about the snow, and she said something that got me thinking. “I hate the snow. It gets all over me.” I figured she would hate the snow because it would make things hard-slogging, but I never thought about how it would slosh up the wheels and just splash all over the person in the chair! Can you imagine arriving to work covered in that salt gick they put everywhere to keep people from slipping? How awful!
She said they have clothing guards, but they’re useless. She hasn’t had a chance to explain why.
So my question is does anyone reading this have a solution? Or even an idea for a solution if only it was invented? This is so mind-blowingly simple that I’m amazed that this problem hasn’t been solved.
Also, I asked her how her chair handles ice, and she says she just slides and has only the ability to steer, but little control of stopping. She says she hasn’t found anything for her wheels that would allow them to have more traction on ice. She tried some kind of all-terrain wheels, but they weren’t good. Again, is there something out there? This isn’t friggin rocket science, so I’d be amazed if nothing existed, but I’ve been surprised before.
Then later, I was reading a post on Holly’s blog, and she expressed the need for a vibrating or tactile thermometer. She can’t hear enough to hear those chirpy voices, and she can’t see either. She has a kid and doesn’t want to rely on others to read the thermometer.
I got to wondering. She has a Deafblind Communicator. It has a cellphone component. Could someone build an app for that phone that would be able to do temperature? Then the results could go to her braille display. I mean, people just touch thermometers to foreheads, and iPhones already are on their way to having some kind of glucometer component. This just might be a possibility. Could it be? Or am I dreaming?
Then later on, I was talking to someone about how my parents live out in the country, and we got talking about 911 numbers, ya know, those numbers they assigned to people who live out in the middle of nowhere, so theoretically, if something happens to them, emergency personnel can find them faster. But my friend said that they’re really hard to see, and you have to keep slowing down, straining to see, slowing down, straining to see, etc. So I got to wondering, how good is that for emergency personnel? What good is a number if they can’t read it?
My first thought is is my friend alone, or is it true that these numbers are really hard to see? And if they are, how come they arent’ made in a good font with high colour contrast, and written on something that would be reflective at night?
This all seems really simple. Am I missing something? Am I oversimplifying things? ?
I hope everybody has a good holiday. It’ll be all over before we know what hit us. I have other things to post, but if I don’t get to them, I want to make sure I tell everybody to be safe and have fun. Have a good time celebrating whatever it is you’re celebrating right now.
