Today was my first day back on campus. Sex & Gender class went fine in the morning, I am caught up with everything (I think). Tomorrow we’ll find out how much I fell behind in my other classes, and whether I can catch up quickly or what. I know I fell behind in my linguistics reading…I don’t think I even cracked that book while we were gone! I have to do some history reading tonight for sure.

Also today I had my brain scan at the audiology center. They found out that the hearing loss does not lie between the cochlea and the brain, so it’s somewhere between the eardrum and the cochlea. They don’t know why, though, and won’t speculate - they said I’d need to see an ENT doc for that. They explained why my mild hearing loss is a problem - apparently a high frequency loss takes away sounds like s, sh, and f. As we all know from Wheel of Fortune, s is a very common letter (RSTLNE anyone?) and so by missing certain sounds, I’m not able to fully understand. It’s not that I can’t hear when someone is speaking, I know they are speaking, but missing out on certain sounds means I don’t get the full information.

For home situations, I have to train my family to get my attention before they start talking to me, not call to me from another room, etc. This will allow me to use lipreading just a little bit so I can fill in the gaps, and also it makes sure my attention is focused on my ears. The reason I have trouble is because I often miss the first half of a sentence and then I miss some information from the rest of it and I end up clueless. So attention-getting is going to be important at home. For work, the audiology department is going to order a special in-line amplifier so I can try it for 30 days and see if that helps me. If it does, then I get to buy it for myself - they’ll tell me how much it costs. If it doesn’t help, uh…I dunno!

The audiologist is going to send my audiogram and the certification letter to the admissions department so I can get converted over to regular student status.

Just a quickie post. We made it back fine, got home last night around 9pm. All the flights were on time and everything. We spent several hours hanging around the airport in San Juan, and then had barely enough time to grab dinner in Atlanta before our next flight. Fortunately, that flight was only about one-third full, so we got to spread out a little bit. I did my reading for Sex & Gender class on the plane, and I discovered that in addition to being very feminist, the book is also a little transphobic. Oh well. We took Metro home from National Airport and a cab from the Vienna station. Today I did some Deaf Studies homework and some grocery shopping. Tomorrow I have class in the morning and then my audiology appointment for the brain scan. I have a list of stuff I have to catch up on, and I’ll fit it in somehow. We are back to dieting, because I’ve gained 5 pounds and 12 pounds on past cruises, so I know I gained this time. I refuse to check how much, though. I just cheated and had a big snack for dinner because I am having trouble sleeping and I know that having a full tummy will make it easier to go to sleep. Tomorrow I will double up on my sleep meds so I don’t cheat with food again. Back to the grind! (Oh, and we’re looking at Curaçao rather than Aruba, because it’s more gay-friendly and they have a school for the deaf there, so I might be able to find a job.)

After A went to bed about 11pm, I came downstairs and watched the last episode of Eleventh Hour, and this week’s L Word. I switched to regular TV and watched half an episode of Intervention, then X-Files and Outer Limits. I think the alarm upstairs will be going off in about 20 minutes; our flight leaves at 7:30am from National Airport so our cab is coming at 5:30. (We could take metro but I’m not confident we’d get there fast enough, and parking is expensive, so cab it is.)

I caught up on my LiveJournal and DeadJournal reading though not my blog reading yet. Unfortunately I found out that one of my best friends in the world got her heart completely ripped apart, so I’m aching for her. I wish I could call her up on VP but I doubt the free wifi at the hotel in Puerto Rico will be good enough for that. I did get my Palm Pilot and GPS synced up so that’s good, I can do geocaching on this trip.

I think I’m ready to go…I better be, right? The weather in San Juan is in the 70s and 80s. As of the minute I am writing this, it is currently 23°F in DC and 73°F in San Juan! Fifty degrees, damn. I can’t wait to get there, but I am going to miss my friends. I think I am going to be able to keep up with schoolwork, at least I hope so!

Oh, and I have a temporary seasonal theme up on my site, for those of you who read it elsewhere. When the season expires I will probably be making some changes to my design structure, whee!

Q: What did I do today?
A: Not much.

I had a bunch of long island iced tea with lunch and slept for several hours as a result. I woke up, ate the pizza that had been delivered while I was out, and went back to sleep! Then I woke up quite sober. I had fun in the afternoon though, it was fun to just do nothing and be drunk. I didn’t even get silly, I just felt really buzzed and enjoyed myself. I have no idea why I was allowed to have pizza though! I haven’t been sticking to my diet at ALL well since we got back from California, but my meals have been pretty responsible…I’ve just been having extra snacks in there too. A is worried that I’m developing a taste for drinking too often, and she’s probably right. It’s a fun high, you know? But not a healthy or responsible one, so I will probably try to cut back.

While today may have been sit-around-on-my-ass day, tomorrow I have to do homework and some cleaning. I’m pretty sure the homework is mostly reading. I really hope my Sex and Gender textbook arrived over at our house, because I have to do reading for Monday and the school bookstore is apparently out of the book! The class is at 10am and there will be a quiz on it Monday. I have a bunch of friends in the class, but I will have to get to school really early to borrow somebody’s book, if mine didn’t arrive today. Plus I have stuff for Linguistics and History…I don’t think I ended up with any Deaf Studies homework, but I have to check!

Today I went to Disneyland by myself. I was going to take today off and go tomorrow, but I read that MLK Day is coming up and it will be getting busy, so I figured I’d go sooner rather than later. It was fun, and I will write more about it tomorrow. Right now I am just writing to share a funny thing that just happened to me.

I decided I wanted to have a drink, so I went over to the 7-11 two doors down and bought a bottle of wine. I checked to make sure it had the twist-off top. I paid for it and brought it back to the room. After peeling back the outer wrapping, I discovered…it was not a twist-off top after all, but a regular cork, buried in the bottle! Remember, I’m on vacation…of course I have corkscrews at home but nothing here. I tried feebly poking at it a little bit but of course the cork didn’t budge. My wife suggested I take it down to the restaurant in the lobby, which has a poorly-stocked bar but was sure to at least have a corkscrew. So I took off my pajamas, got dressed again, and brought down the bottle; there was a corkscrew right there on the bar but I didn’t want to use it without permission. The host asked from halfway across the room if he could help me, and I beckoned him over. “I bought this at the store, and I thought it had a twist-off top, but it doesn’t! Can I borrow your corkscrew?” He handed it to me, and I proceeded to fumble with it…because I don’t actually know how to use one! He saw the trouble I was having and kindly did it for me, even removing the cork from the screw and giving it back to me.

So I now have 1.5L of 18 proof wine from some local winery…hey, I said I bought it at 7-11, right? It was only $7.50! Now I can actually enjoy it, because it’s OPEN. Thank goodness.

Wow. I managed not to drunk blog last night, but I did drunk text. Or is that drunk Twitter? Here’s the updates I sent last night:

Totally drunk at my in laws house before they come over. Whee! I’m soooo drunk. about 9 hours ago from txt

I have off tomorrow, so pretty much anything is good for me! about 9 hours ago from txt - this was actually meant for neuro42, but I sent it to Twitter

I am SO drunk. Like seriously. I love you all.nj okay noiw I am dru nk on the pbatheoprom. Wow. about 9 hours ago from txt

As near as I can figure out, that last one meant “bathroom.” See, kawaiibishounen, it’s entirely possible to know your limits and still drink too much. I don’t think I’ve ever actually blacked out before, but I woke up about an hour ago in my own bed, with virtually no memory of having left my in-laws’ house. The only memory I might have is maybe being bundled into the car to come home, but then vomiting outside it. This is backed up by the fact that there was a trash can next to the bed when I woke up, raised up on an empty box so it would be at bed height rather than on the floor. Now I see why “…had sex with someone whose name you did not know?” is a common question on purity tests…you really can forget an entire night and everything you did, and wake up next to a stranger. Fortunately I woke up next to my wife, but damn…that could be scary.

Added: Oh dear, it’s worse than I thought. I went to let the cat out and I saw my coat was outside, covered with a towel, and there was a washcloth there too. And the side of my wife’s car is not pretty. What’s funny is that I can usually hold my liquor much better than that - I didn’t have much more than I normally do. Maybe it was on an empty stomach because of the diet? Good grief, how embarrassing.

Mischa keeps having bad dreams. He woke up hissing a little while ago, and just now he was growling in his sleep.

Today we went to the outlets at Leesburg; it was more crowded than I would have liked, but less crowded than I expected. I needed to go to Lane Bryant to exchange some jeans I’d gotten in Rehoboth Beach - you can only return them to another outlet store, and I hadn’t felt like hauling ass to Leesburg before today. But I got the jeans in my size, and bought two sweaters and a long-sleeve fitted t-shirt. I almost bought a cute semi-formal minidress, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I also got a bunch of underwear - I tend to wear mine until they literally fall apart, and A had deemed that I only had about-to-fall-apart underwear, so she made me buy lots more.

Also, she put me on a strict diet. She introduced it in a kind of toppish way - or maybe that’s just how I read it, being a sub type - and so I’m following orders. It is like having my own personal diet coach who goes out to eat with me and everything, which is pretty cool. Right now I’m appalled by how little I get to eat, but I know it’ll get easier with time. It’s just frustrating right now. I think we started on Thursday morning? It feels like forever!

Oh, and my lolrus shirt arrived today. Woo!

This is just another gripe about my in-laws being so noisy at night. My brother-in-law is really noisy by default, he grew up in a loud household and he doesn’t know how to close cabinets quietly, close doors quietly, etc. He also thinks it’s okay to talk to himself and sing to himself all the time, so he’ll blurt out all kinds of stuff to himself just walking around the house at night. He apparently never learned that doing the dishes makes noise, because he does them at 11pm sometimes. Bang clatter crash! And him and my sister-in-law have a habit of singing to each other…really loud…as if nobody else lived here. It just drives me crazy. They’re good kids, I like them fine, I think they’re great…but why do they hafta be so loud?!

I am working on my research project about accreditation. I think my thesis is going to be along the lines of “Despite the need for improvement in K-12 deaf education and despite the cultural differences between Gallaudet and other universities, we can retain our accreditation with MSCHE” etc. Something like that.

This morning we went to dim sum. It was my idea, but there’s not a lot I can eat there - I mostly got vegetarian noodles and the greens. I’ve had the Notorious MSG song “Dim Sum Girl” in my head for days so I decided I wanted dim sum myself. A really likes it but never asks to go because there’s nothing I can eat there, so she was happy to go. We also did some shopping - I got new black sneakers because my old ones were dead. I’ve played a lot of Sims 2 today, and I finally got my first character engaged to somebody. She had really bad luck with men for many days; advancing in her career in medicine but not ever starting a family. So hopefully that’s good now; my Sims blog is here but so far it mostly covers the families I had while I was playing Life Stories. I revised my history paper and sent that in, and I played some Guitar Hero. That’s about it for the day!

I was so tired last night from my mom’s 60th birthday party, that I slept most of the way home (had to switch drivers in Silver Spring to make this possible) and then once we got home around 6:00, I slept all through the night. As a result I am hungry and kind of grumpy this morning, but I have to leave for work in an hour and 15 minutes or so.