Mathru School for the Differently-Abled
Saturday 1/18/14
Everyone is bustling about getting ready for this afternoon, and I'm helping by staying out of the way. It's hard work, but somebody's gottta do it.
Had a nice Skype visit this morning with Andy, Linda and Bill, who'd just gotten in from dinner at Pooja, our fave Indian restaurant in West Sacramento. Here in Bangalore I'm thirteen and a half hours ahead of California time, and it's weird talking to Andy at his dinner time on Friday night when it's my breakfast time on Saturday morning.
Linda leaves in just eleven more days for Singapore, and then she's here in Bangalore two weeks from tomorrow. And Mayu will be here in thirteen days.
Not much teaching time left here, but we'll be able to finish up all the projects. I hope to finish my bees mosaic tomorrow, and I think I can get one and maybe two more major mosaics done for the school before the end of the month. Andy will send some more mosaic tools and supplies with Linda so both Mathru schools will have tools to work with after I leave.
I also asked Linda to bring me one of my audiobooks. I'm on my second listening since I've been here of Stephen King's 11-22-63, a nice 30-CD monster of an audiobook, and I'm not interested in doing a third listening anytime soon. I told Andy to look in my bookcase for George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones -- that one is about 30 CDs long, too, and should be long enough to get me through the last two weeks of this big adventure. At home I usually listen to three to five hours of audiobooks every day. I'm not doing that here of course, but I always listen to at least one CD at night before I drop off to sleep, and I'll go through several CDs on the long flights home.
If there is one thing I miss more than anything, apart from being able to see faces and colors, it's reading, Visually, that is. It was a long hard grieving when I got rid of all my print books. But audiobooks are great, and just as I had my own library of hard print novels, I now have my own library of audiobooks.
It is a different experience to listen to a book, rather than to read it visually, but it's still an excellent experience. I especially love the way I can plug into an audiobook and do my mosaics at the same time -- or the dishes or the laundry for that matter.
Mom's friend Ann Chandler asked me to write about how I read my computer. I can still visually access some things on my computer, by changing the colors and fonts. I use a black background and enlarged and bolded sans serif fonts in white or yellow for the text. My Apple MacBook also has a screen reader built into it, called VoiceOver, which reads the screen to me. (I use VoiceOver on my Apple iPhone, too; I would not be able to use the iPhone at all without it.) Finally, I have a hand-held CCTV (closed circuit television) that I use not only for magnification but for changing the colors so I can see better. I use a combination of all of these techniques and technologies, but am relying more and more on VoiceOver because I'm losing more vision all the time.
And there are lots of websites I just can't access, because they are so low-vision and no-vision unfriendly. Websites are based on -- and designed on -- visual access, and it's a totally different process navigating the internet aurally instead of visually. I am competent with VoiceOver for reading my email and documents, but I'm still learning how to use it effectively for internet surfing and website access.
So, I'm still reading. Just differently. And a lot slower.
Late Saturday night:
Wow, what a show. The students and teachers obviously spent months preparing for this. and I can see why they needed my classroom for all the costumes. They were many, and many were elaborate with sparkly trim and lots of sequins. They had music, singing and dancing, a few acting skits and poetry readings, and even special effects lighting that made some of the dancing numbers in sequined costumes look like fireworks.
Other than giving my little speech, handing out awards to some of the students, and lighting a ritual candle (I didn't know about that until it was time to do it, and it's a good thing Muktha guided my hand because otherwise I would have set the place on fire). my job was to sit there and look nice and happy to be there.
I did look nice, and I was happy to be there for the first two hours. But four hours is a very long time to watch a show in a language you don't know. The announcements and speeches were in heavily accented English (except for mine), but all the singing, skits and readings were in Hindu. People were laughing during the skits, but I was clueless.
I liked most of the music -- it was loud but it had a good beat -- and I was impressed by what I could see of the dancing. The kids were adorable and some of the teachers were good enough to go pro.
But, like I said, four hours is a long time, and I was glad when it was over.
Now that I have had experience wearing a sari, I am sorry I bought two of them. A sari is one of the loveliest garments a woman can wear, but I am not sure I'll ever get the hang of folding and draping ten yards of material around myself so it looks right. And getting the thing off was almost a claustrophobic experience. I struggled for several minutes puzzling out where the pins were in all the folds of material, and the hooks and snaps in my fitted top were not cooperative. When I finally got out of the thing, folding it back up neatly to put away was harder than folding a king-size bed sheet.
Well, if I decide the saris are a bust, I have some great material for salwar kameez outfits.
Saturday 1/18/14
Everyone is bustling about getting ready for this afternoon, and I'm helping by staying out of the way. It's hard work, but somebody's gottta do it.
Had a nice Skype visit this morning with Andy, Linda and Bill, who'd just gotten in from dinner at Pooja, our fave Indian restaurant in West Sacramento. Here in Bangalore I'm thirteen and a half hours ahead of California time, and it's weird talking to Andy at his dinner time on Friday night when it's my breakfast time on Saturday morning.
Linda leaves in just eleven more days for Singapore, and then she's here in Bangalore two weeks from tomorrow. And Mayu will be here in thirteen days.
Not much teaching time left here, but we'll be able to finish up all the projects. I hope to finish my bees mosaic tomorrow, and I think I can get one and maybe two more major mosaics done for the school before the end of the month. Andy will send some more mosaic tools and supplies with Linda so both Mathru schools will have tools to work with after I leave.
I also asked Linda to bring me one of my audiobooks. I'm on my second listening since I've been here of Stephen King's 11-22-63, a nice 30-CD monster of an audiobook, and I'm not interested in doing a third listening anytime soon. I told Andy to look in my bookcase for George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones -- that one is about 30 CDs long, too, and should be long enough to get me through the last two weeks of this big adventure. At home I usually listen to three to five hours of audiobooks every day. I'm not doing that here of course, but I always listen to at least one CD at night before I drop off to sleep, and I'll go through several CDs on the long flights home.
If there is one thing I miss more than anything, apart from being able to see faces and colors, it's reading, Visually, that is. It was a long hard grieving when I got rid of all my print books. But audiobooks are great, and just as I had my own library of hard print novels, I now have my own library of audiobooks.
It is a different experience to listen to a book, rather than to read it visually, but it's still an excellent experience. I especially love the way I can plug into an audiobook and do my mosaics at the same time -- or the dishes or the laundry for that matter.
Mom's friend Ann Chandler asked me to write about how I read my computer. I can still visually access some things on my computer, by changing the colors and fonts. I use a black background and enlarged and bolded sans serif fonts in white or yellow for the text. My Apple MacBook also has a screen reader built into it, called VoiceOver, which reads the screen to me. (I use VoiceOver on my Apple iPhone, too; I would not be able to use the iPhone at all without it.) Finally, I have a hand-held CCTV (closed circuit television) that I use not only for magnification but for changing the colors so I can see better. I use a combination of all of these techniques and technologies, but am relying more and more on VoiceOver because I'm losing more vision all the time.
And there are lots of websites I just can't access, because they are so low-vision and no-vision unfriendly. Websites are based on -- and designed on -- visual access, and it's a totally different process navigating the internet aurally instead of visually. I am competent with VoiceOver for reading my email and documents, but I'm still learning how to use it effectively for internet surfing and website access.
So, I'm still reading. Just differently. And a lot slower.
Late Saturday night:
Wow, what a show. The students and teachers obviously spent months preparing for this. and I can see why they needed my classroom for all the costumes. They were many, and many were elaborate with sparkly trim and lots of sequins. They had music, singing and dancing, a few acting skits and poetry readings, and even special effects lighting that made some of the dancing numbers in sequined costumes look like fireworks.
Other than giving my little speech, handing out awards to some of the students, and lighting a ritual candle (I didn't know about that until it was time to do it, and it's a good thing Muktha guided my hand because otherwise I would have set the place on fire). my job was to sit there and look nice and happy to be there.
I did look nice, and I was happy to be there for the first two hours. But four hours is a very long time to watch a show in a language you don't know. The announcements and speeches were in heavily accented English (except for mine), but all the singing, skits and readings were in Hindu. People were laughing during the skits, but I was clueless.
I liked most of the music -- it was loud but it had a good beat -- and I was impressed by what I could see of the dancing. The kids were adorable and some of the teachers were good enough to go pro.
But, like I said, four hours is a long time, and I was glad when it was over.
Now that I have had experience wearing a sari, I am sorry I bought two of them. A sari is one of the loveliest garments a woman can wear, but I am not sure I'll ever get the hang of folding and draping ten yards of material around myself so it looks right. And getting the thing off was almost a claustrophobic experience. I struggled for several minutes puzzling out where the pins were in all the folds of material, and the hooks and snaps in my fitted top were not cooperative. When I finally got out of the thing, folding it back up neatly to put away was harder than folding a king-size bed sheet.
Well, if I decide the saris are a bust, I have some great material for salwar kameez outfits.
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