Weblog

My career has focused on understanding the needs of people with disabilities, so I could help develop accessibility accommodations. Focusing on this scope often touched on the question, “What is a disability?”. The word “disability” itself implies that a person has reduced ability in some fashion.

A year ago I began to learn American Sign Language (ASL), in order to be able to engage more effectively with the Deaf community. Language learning has always interested me, and every language broadens one’s potential experience in new ways. Sign language, being visual rather than verbal, brings new challenges to language processing, as well as a new way of understanding the abstraction that is language.

A few years ago, I determined that I have aphantasia. People with aphantasia (some use the term “aphantasics”), have reduced or no ability to form mental images. For most of my life, I didn’t realize that most people do have that ability! Aphantasics assume that references to visual imagery are metaphorical, and I learned to use the same metaphors, much like a blind person who says “See you later!”. One day, I searched online for the term “do people who say they see what they imagine actually see it?”.

Last year’s update expressed cautious optimism about new directions at work. That caution was well founded and in July I left my job of 17 years. The work environment became ever more toxic and it became impossible for me to do any more meaningful work in the organization. I am sad about this loss, and angry at the actions of some former colleagues who made my departure the only acceptable option. But I probably will find a new job that will be more satisfying, so in the end I expect this to be a positive transition.

2022 has been a weird year, for me and for a lot of people. Work has been a big part of that for me. The organization has been going through a long-planned transition that nonetheless was ill-planned and rushed. It’s been a rollercoaster of rising and falling confidence for all of us; fortunately, at the time I write this, things are looking better for the organization.

2020 has been different for all of us because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I've been lucky that the effects of shut-downs have impacted me less directly, since I was already working from home, and I was working in a job that could switch to fully remote work and didn't have to furlough staff. I even avoided the grocery store rushes at the start, because I had plenty of everything on hand (even toilet paper). The only things I was worried about running low on were milk, eggs, and coffee.

October saw a 2-week trip to Europe, one of my longer times away from home. The reason for the trip was the organization's annual meeting, held this year in Lyon, France. In order to avoid extra trans-atlantic travel and exploit a paid-for trip to Europe, I scheduled long-overdue visits to Glasgow to visit Marc and Erin, and London to visit Colin and Anthony.

It's been a quieter year in terms of reportable events. The only work travel was the usual trip to San Diego at the beginning of March, and the annual November meeting that was in San Francisco this year. I didn't take my "usual" trip to the UK because the money that might have gone to that went to home improvements instead. I took a few day trips instead, including to the Wilder Homestead in upstate New York which is where Almanzo Wilder, the husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder who wrote the Little House on the Prairie books, grew up.

About a year ago I did a vanilla extract tasting to test out different types of vanilla beans, as well as compare commercial to homemade. To refine the quality of homemade extracts, I wanted to test out how different alcohols affected the flavour of the final extract. So I prepared four extracts using the same beans and proportions, with the alcohol solvents being bourbon, Calvados (apple brandy), rum, and vodka.

This year was punctuated by more travel, both work and personal trips. It began with another trip to Scotland and England, when I visited Marc and Erin, Colin and Anthony, and whiskey distilleries in Islay and Oban.