Miscellany
Mar. 31st, 2005 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidWhy I still have my old health insurance card that expired last summer: it has the phone number for my doctor's office. Tufts has useful information on the card, including doctor's name and phone, hospital affiliations, copay rates. BlueCross has the copays (once you figure out what the two-letter codes mean), but otherwise just has my ID number. Not nearly as useful.
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Tuesday night I joined a bunch of PMD volunteers at the NBP, to assemble bags for parents of young blind/seeing-impaired kids. Each bag included a Braille alphabet place mat ("A is for apple" sort of thing; for some reason what I particularly noticed was the pig (for "p", of course) had very well-turned ankles. It made me think of Wilbur, and what adjectives Charlotte might use for him.) wrapped around a thick Braille/print primer and some other print pieces, plus a box of letter magnets and an age-appropriate Braille/print kid book (a Dr. Seuss board book for 0-3, one of a series about a frog for 4-5, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs for ages 6-7). We assembled over 300 bags.
The work was routine, but it was fun talking with people, and finding out more information about Braille literacy. If I'm remembering the statistics correctly, there used to be about 50% Braille literacy among blind adults, but that's now dropped to about 12%. Some of this is due to new voice technologies, of course. Some is because a lot of blind adults become blind late in life and don't bother to learn Braille. And some is because a lot more preemies survive these days, and blindness is one of the many possible side effects. Looking from a different angle, of the 30% of blind adults who are employed, 90% are Braille literate.
It was good to feel useful. It helped me feel a bit better about not making it to an out-of-state funeral.
____
The last play I saw was Hell Meets Henry Halfway, at the Loeb Ex. How could I resist a title like that, after all? The play was created by the Pig Iron Theatre Company, based on Witold Gombrowicz's novel Possessed, a Polish writer; apparently this is the first English-language adaption of any of his novels. (I certainly hadn't heard of him before.)
This was an odd show. Henry is the secretary of an old nobleman. His fiancee is a disaffected tennis addict. The whole think is odd in uncertain ways. Is Henry taking care of a querulous old man, or bilking him? Is the fiancee merely bored, or actively malicious? And so on.
This play won my completely unofficial award for Best Use of Wardrobe, even better than the Narnia one. It was a wardrobe, with clothes hanging in it. It was a sleeper railway car, two-tiered, each person crammed in horizontally. It was the nobleman's bedroom, with different wallpaper and small pieces of furniture. It was a table, turned on its side. And it was a tree, when turned around and with branches extending upwards. It was fascinating to see what they'd do next with this apparently-limitless wardrobe.
Also interesting: the idiosyncratic use of tennis balls, which were used on the tennis court, but also appeared at almost random other moments, warnings from beyond, if not the over-enthusiastic ball boy. He was a lot of fun, and I was impressed with the actors' abilities. I admit, however, that I'm glad most parts aren't written as people with colds; it almost made me wince watching the doctor with the extreme headcold.
Final verdict: interesting, but confusing.
I'm still not sure why this group was performing at the Loeb, either.
____
Last night was the first time our group has gamed on a Wednesday. It's going to change the shape of the week, I think.
____
I just got a new computer at work (the first half of this post was typed on the old one, this on the new one), a G5 iMac. It's exciting to have the flat screen that moves so nicely, and more vertical space (enough to almost see a whole Word page at 125%). Now comes the frustration of figuring out what default settings in Word I have to reset (again), and what other subtle things about fonts, brightness, contrast, the keyboard, and so on, are actually annoying, or me just being resistant to change, any change, in how my interface looks. (I am so not cut out to be cutting edge in computers and other interesting gadgets.)
____
Some upcoming local events that may be of interest.
April 13-17 is the Bernstein festival of the arts at Brandeis.
April 30-May 1 is Somerville Open Studios.
May 1 is a May Day celebration in Harvard Square. (aka: hellish traffic day.)
May 5-8 is Harvard's weekend-long Arts First.
May 6 is a talk by poet Maxine Kumin (12 Quincy St., limited seating).
May 19-22 is the Radcliffe (ok, Harvard of some sort, no longer Radcliffe) spring ceramics sale.
____
Tuesday night I joined a bunch of PMD volunteers at the NBP, to assemble bags for parents of young blind/seeing-impaired kids. Each bag included a Braille alphabet place mat ("A is for apple" sort of thing; for some reason what I particularly noticed was the pig (for "p", of course) had very well-turned ankles. It made me think of Wilbur, and what adjectives Charlotte might use for him.) wrapped around a thick Braille/print primer and some other print pieces, plus a box of letter magnets and an age-appropriate Braille/print kid book (a Dr. Seuss board book for 0-3, one of a series about a frog for 4-5, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs for ages 6-7). We assembled over 300 bags.
The work was routine, but it was fun talking with people, and finding out more information about Braille literacy. If I'm remembering the statistics correctly, there used to be about 50% Braille literacy among blind adults, but that's now dropped to about 12%. Some of this is due to new voice technologies, of course. Some is because a lot of blind adults become blind late in life and don't bother to learn Braille. And some is because a lot more preemies survive these days, and blindness is one of the many possible side effects. Looking from a different angle, of the 30% of blind adults who are employed, 90% are Braille literate.
It was good to feel useful. It helped me feel a bit better about not making it to an out-of-state funeral.
____
The last play I saw was Hell Meets Henry Halfway, at the Loeb Ex. How could I resist a title like that, after all? The play was created by the Pig Iron Theatre Company, based on Witold Gombrowicz's novel Possessed, a Polish writer; apparently this is the first English-language adaption of any of his novels. (I certainly hadn't heard of him before.)
This was an odd show. Henry is the secretary of an old nobleman. His fiancee is a disaffected tennis addict. The whole think is odd in uncertain ways. Is Henry taking care of a querulous old man, or bilking him? Is the fiancee merely bored, or actively malicious? And so on.
This play won my completely unofficial award for Best Use of Wardrobe, even better than the Narnia one. It was a wardrobe, with clothes hanging in it. It was a sleeper railway car, two-tiered, each person crammed in horizontally. It was the nobleman's bedroom, with different wallpaper and small pieces of furniture. It was a table, turned on its side. And it was a tree, when turned around and with branches extending upwards. It was fascinating to see what they'd do next with this apparently-limitless wardrobe.
Also interesting: the idiosyncratic use of tennis balls, which were used on the tennis court, but also appeared at almost random other moments, warnings from beyond, if not the over-enthusiastic ball boy. He was a lot of fun, and I was impressed with the actors' abilities. I admit, however, that I'm glad most parts aren't written as people with colds; it almost made me wince watching the doctor with the extreme headcold.
Final verdict: interesting, but confusing.
I'm still not sure why this group was performing at the Loeb, either.
____
Last night was the first time our group has gamed on a Wednesday. It's going to change the shape of the week, I think.
____
I just got a new computer at work (the first half of this post was typed on the old one, this on the new one), a G5 iMac. It's exciting to have the flat screen that moves so nicely, and more vertical space (enough to almost see a whole Word page at 125%). Now comes the frustration of figuring out what default settings in Word I have to reset (again), and what other subtle things about fonts, brightness, contrast, the keyboard, and so on, are actually annoying, or me just being resistant to change, any change, in how my interface looks. (I am so not cut out to be cutting edge in computers and other interesting gadgets.)
____
Some upcoming local events that may be of interest.
April 13-17 is the Bernstein festival of the arts at Brandeis.
April 30-May 1 is Somerville Open Studios.
May 1 is a May Day celebration in Harvard Square. (aka: hellish traffic day.)
May 5-8 is Harvard's weekend-long Arts First.
May 6 is a talk by poet Maxine Kumin (12 Quincy St., limited seating).
May 19-22 is the Radcliffe (ok, Harvard of some sort, no longer Radcliffe) spring ceramics sale.
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Date: 2005-03-31 12:40 pm (UTC)