I went to Ottawa…
6 minute read
May 24, 2023, 2:39 PM
From May 17-20, Elyse and I made a weekend trip to Ottawa. The primary objective was to go and see the Canadian Museum of History in nearby Gatineau, where a Sam and Muffy puppet from Today’s Special were on display as part of a larger exhibit about children’s television in Canada. The exhibit was amazing, with puppets and costumes from all kinds of Canadian-made children’s programming on display. We also explored around Ottawa and Gatineau. The latter was a particularly interesting experience as that was my first time in a place where the predominant language was not English. Ontario is largely English-speaking, and signage is largely bilingual, containing both English and French, but once you cross the border into Quebec, it’s like a whole different world, as everything is in French, and only French, and some people over there do not speak English. It was my first time experiencing a language barrier in a major way, and while I managed, remembering that a large amount of English words are derived from French, it was certainly a challenge nonetheless (but Google Translate helped a lot).
I am planning on doing a larger, more detailed photo set in Life and Times for this trip, so to avoid duplicating efforts, I’m just going to share a few photos here and let that be that for now.
Continue reading…Categories: Canada, Roads, Today's Special, Travel
A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
16 minute read
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Autism, Middle school, Schumin Web meta
My glasses make me feel so fine…
6 minute read
May 4, 2023, 9:38 PM
It’s funny how things work sometimes. For 22 years, I had one pair of glasses and wore that pair every day. The glasses varied over the years, going from nearly round in 2001, and slowly becoming more and more square as I upgraded in 2005, 2008, and 2010. Then in 2016, I switched from wire rims to plastic. But even with that change, I still only had one pair with my current prescription, and kept old pairs as spares. I mean, glasses were expensive, ya know?
Then a couple of things happened. First, I discovered Zenni Optical, after Elyse got an extra pair of glasses from them that were branded by FaZe Clan. This ensured that she would have an extra pair after she had her own glasses emergency when were on a trip back in 2021 (her old glasses came apart in a way that wasn’t fixable while we were outbound), and it also meant that she could now rotate between pairs.
Then, last October, my glasses were destroyed by the airbag when the original HR-V got totaled back in October. The following day, I practically turned the house upside down looking for my old pairs of glasses, and I couldn’t find any of them. I don’t know what happened to them, but they were nowhere to be found. Go figure. The day after that, I went and got new glasses made at LensCrafters, so that I would be back in business on that front, getting an updated prescription for glasses with a slightly updated design. I initially got single vision lenses in order to have glasses in an hour, since I was going on that trip to Tennessee, and needed to be able to see right away.
After we got back from Tennessee, I got the lenses upgraded to progressives, because that’s what you have to do when you’re mature like me. When I was talking to the guy at LensCrafters to get measured for progressives, I made sure to get the pupillary distance from him, so that I could “get a cheap spare pair on Zenni”. He gladly gave it to me and explained how it needed to be entered in. Cool. I ordered the progressive lenses for the glasses that I already had from LensCrafters, and then I ordered a spare pair later from Zenni, in blue. The Zenni glasses showed up first, before the new lenses from LensCrafters did, so I set the Zenni glasses aside, since the idea was that this was a spare pair, and I didn’t want to get used to progressives on a cheap pair, when my LensCrafters glasses cost me several hundred dollars (under the assumption that “more expensive” means “better”).
Categories: Glasses