Hey There! It's 7:32 AM EDT, 59°F, Humidity 74%, Wind 5 mph SE, clear I'm not sure that temperature reading is accurate, because my thermometer reads 62°, but it it a chilly morning. I had to choose between going out on the porch or sitting in the study to write this morning. I chose the study, with the window open. A compromise. Yesterday after morning routine and a walk, I spent the day experimenting with my new hearing aids. I'm having difficulty adjusting to them for two reasons. The first is that I can hear so much more that it's distracting, so I am trying to find a volume setting that makes the world sound normally amplified without sounding artificial. The second is the price. I am uncomfortable with the cost of these things. I think they are overpriced, and I think it's another instance of something designed to help people with a disability become an economic profit center for a captive market. After some research with AI, I finally discovered how to connect these to my computer. I have an Android phone and a MacBook Air, so they don't play all that well. There is a sequence of actions I have to go through to make them play well together, and the aids are also designed with energy efficiency in mind, so without warning they will go into "low power" mode, drop a connection, and then you have to go through the sequence all over again. I am not sure this is all that much better than simply swapping the aids for earbuds. I may go looking for a set of earbuds that can connect to more than two devices at a time. Once I managed to connect my hearing aids, I realized that this might mean I would not need earbuds, despite my statement above. I can take and make phone calls through the aids, and I can listen to podcasts and videos through them as well on both the phone and the computer. In fact, these things bring me close to filtering my entire sonic world through them, as they never stop amplifying the sound environment around me as well. I decided to contact Son2 and see if the MacBook I bought him for his business was in use. He said he wasn't using it at all, and that in fact he hated it, so I am making arrangements to obtain it from him as a traveling computer and backup to my main MacBook Air M2. It might also end up being my couch computer. This means I will have another Linux laptop hanging around, which I will either give away as a Linux book, or more likely return to a MacOS device once I decide to give it away. All of this actually more time than you might think, as I spent time looking into more details about the aids, how to connect them, optimizing my situation, and trying to decipher why they cost so much. In the meantime I shopped for other alternative solutions, all of which were on the expensive side. But apart from that, other things that ate up the day were writing a letter to a friend, some videos, a post for my public blog as well as some tweaks to the design, looking at my rotisserie baseball team for changes I need to make, and doing a little bit of research on housing for an upcoming visit to Son1. Small activities that take up the day. Chicken scampi, which is one of my favorite meals, was on tap for dinner. Always a hit. Then I tuned into the ball game, using my hearing aids and my Roku app to feed the audio to my aids. Should I receive a call, the Roku pauses the video stream while I take the call, and then continues where it left off when the call is complete. I tested that with DW, but it's a feature I don't think I'll use often. I mean, I am amazed at the technology, but like so many things that relate to tech, I really don't know that, in the long term, it's truly that useful. I'm going to continue using them this coming week and see how much more useful they can be. I think I am going to need a lot of convincing. After the ballgame I did some cursory research on costs for a trip to Ireland. I'd like to go before I lose the ability to do so. I was thinking of using a scooter, but could not get enough information before cleaning the kitchen and bedtime at 11:12 PM. To be continued. Notable deaths: Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. magazine and prolific feminist author and activist, 85. That's all for now. 'Til We Meet Again!