Darice de Cuba

Twenty six more hours to welcome year 2008. 2007 has gone by real fast and pretty much uneventful compared to 2006 which is good. I never really liked the end of the year I always get a weird feeling of losing something or missing something. If it was for me I would get some funny DVD’s like “Monk” or “Everybody loves Raymond” some good Dim Sum or Sushi and watch the DVD’s and eat without paying attention to the countdown.

But we are having champagne and watching the live programming on TV and of course just for fun we will buy one end of the year lottery ticket. But I’m getting the food, most likely Dim Sum which can last a few hours unlike sushi.

I never do New Years resolutions I just go with the flow. And also I’m looking forward to July 1, when Holland becomes smoke free, finally. Edit: After posting this I just read that 70% of horeca business will be going smoke free starting January first.

Oh and from now on I’ll be taking all my photos in RAW format, I got a 2GB card specially for that. I have a few photos that are not available online that I took in RAW, and they came out great. People have been asking me for prints but I’m hesitant to start handing out prints. Maybe I’ll just do a limited print, we’ll see.

Well Happy New Year everyone!

It was to happen, I didn’t know when but since today I’m deaf. I’ve had a hearing disability my whole life that kept getting worse. Last year I lost hearing on my left ear and last thursday my right ear started hearing weird. Yesterday I went to the doctor but there isn’t anything he can do. We thought the remaining hearing would hold on for a while. But today it’s almost all gone, my hearing aid doesn’t help anymore. I depend 100% on lip reading when talking to my sister.

Wednesday I’m going back for a hearing test, but that will be just a formality. I’m getting a reference to start learning lip reading because I’m still not super good at it. And off course learn to adjust to this new situation. Thursday was a bad day but I’m doing better today, after all I knew it was going to happen, the moment itself only was scary. Now I’m going to go all sentimental, I knew I was going deaf very soon, so I listened to 3 songs with guitars that I always loved:

“More then Words”, “Hotel California(acoustic)” and “Eres mi religión”. Until I get bionic ears, which I hope I will, I won’t hear those songs again except in my head which by the way is full of songs. My feelings are 50/50 right now, I won’t be able to satisfy the urges I get to listen to a specific song. But I guess I’ll get used with time.

My mom is now looking into a laptop to be able to internet on the go, she lives on Aruba and normally we call every other day. Then I remembered Aruba has Blackberry service so I emailed her to look into that. Now technology really pays off for me. I want a Blackberry too as I will SMS and email only now and I want the comfort of a qwerty keyboard. Only thing is T-Mobile doesn’t has the model I want. I will need to look for SIM lock free Blackberry and save the money for it. I have a MDA but it’s too slow, a Blackberry plain for email and SMS will do better.

And then also I have a second job interview on Monday morning. They know I’m hearing impaired but now I’m deaf. I really want this job, so I think I’ll email them and hope they still want to have the interview. It will be harder but the job is for front-end developer and there is always email and instant messenger. Meanwhile I’ll be working to improve my lip reading skills.

To stay positive and strong I look at people who are deaf like Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, Deanne Bray who plays Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye and a while ago I found the Bionic Ear Blog, I spended hours reading every post. And it helps me just to read about people going through the same and how they deal with it.

I guess a new phase in my life has officially started, time to learn new things, adjust and deal with people reactions.