A Week in the Life
by The Diarist
Monday 24th September
Found a way of adapting the liquid level indicator to work with a teapot using a long piece of wire. I got the wire, (actually, it's one of those tie things you get wrapped around cables when you buy new electrical equipment), and stuck it onto the liquid level indicator with a strong piece of tape. Of course, I have to keep replacing the tape, cos the steam from the tea makes it all wet, and then it falls apart. This happened while I was testing the new device. The liquid level indicator fell into the hot pot of tea, and It took me hours to stop it squealing. Must find out if the patent office are interested in my new invention. Of course, I'd have to make the long loopy bit flexible so it would work with all sorts of different teapots, and I'd probably have to look at something other than tape to attach it, but I'm sure it would really make a difference to lots of other blind people.
Tuesday 25th September
Called the Patent Office this morning. Got the impression they thought I was one of those crank callers from radio comedy shows. For some bizarre reason they didn't seem to take me seriously. Aren't they concerned with making the lives of blind people better? Or do they just think that they can leave all that to the big charities and ignore small inventors like myself. I don't know what the world's coming to!
Decided to try out every brand of teabag on the market, just so that I can find the one I like best and, therefore, perfect the tea experience. The woman in the shop behaved very oddly though.
Wednesday 26th September
Noticed that Jaws doesn't say 7s properly, so added it to the dictionary manager. Then I thought that maybe I should add other numbers so I started with 1s to 10s. Then, it occurred to me that maybe you were more likely to come across plurals of dates than single numbers, so I started adding the dates 1900s to 2000s. I'd got as far as 1934s when I suddenly realised that you only really see the decades with an s on the end, but I decided it would take too long to delete the ones I'd already put in, so I just carried on from 1940s. Of course, while I was doing this it also occurred to me that, more often than not, you see the dates without the 19, like "the 60s" for example, so I started adding those too, only I couldn't work out what you'd abbreviate 1910s to, so I started with 20s. At some point I'll finish the process by adding them again, only with apostrophes at the beginning. All in all though, it's been a really good day.
Thursday 27th September
I've been trying to train the dog to find my slippers for me. The trouble is he seems to interpret "fetch" as "fetch and destroy". It's getting tricky to reward the fetching behaviour without seeming to encourage the destroying behaviour too. I've already had to purchase a number of new pairs of slippers, and I'm starting to wonder if perhaps it wouldn't be easier simply to make sure I always keep my slippers in the same place. Still, we all have to learn new skills from time to time, and Zebedee is no exception.
Friday 28th September
Decided to rearrange my tins of food today, so that I'd know what was in my cupboard. I worked from the theory that half of the big tins were tomatoes, and the other half were soup, and that the small tins were either beans or spaghetti hoops. I also found I had some middle-sized tins, which I thought must be sweetcorn, and some small, flat tins, which I supposed must be tuna. I arranged the cupboard with tomatoes at the back left, sweetcorn in the middle at the back, and soup on the right. In the front I had beans at the left, then the spaghetti hoops, and then the tuna. I had a great sense of achievement when I'd finished.
Had an absolutely delicious dinner tonight of bacon with peaches. Must make a note to try out other interesting dinner ideas.
Saturday 29th September
Ordered four rolls of special magnetic labelling tape this morning. After a deliciously refreshing water chestnut sandwich for lunch, I made a start on sorting out my big pile of braille mail. I put it into three piles, depending on how urgent I thought it was. The most urgent pile consisted mostly of bills, and I had some trouble in stopping the pile collapsing. In the end, I constructed a kind of pen thing, to keep the pile together. It took rather longer than I'd intended, but at least the bills are all in one place now. At the beginning of the sort out, I tried discriminating between least urgent mail and mail that could be thrown away instantly, but I found this was taking too long, so I just put the whole lot in the least urgent pile, well, the 3 least urgent piles actually, I found I didn't have enough cardboard to construct another pen. Thinking about it, this is probably a better plan anyway. I'd hate to find out in the future that I really did need some of the information in that Christmas magazine from 1986.
Saturday 30th September
Unfortunately, my liquid level indicator device fell apart again today. It's possible that I'm going to have to consider another design.
Spent most of today using my computer to make a note of the articles from "Welcome to a World of..." for the last 5 months. This meant I could throw away the actual braille copies of the magazine and, therefore, make my least urgent pile significantly smaller. I'm not quite sure when I'll need the name and address of a new knitting club in Fulham, but you never know! I'm feeling quite pleased with myself actually. I've had a really productive day.
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