When our old TV died on Sunday I decided to take the plunge and not just buy another HD TV but to head into the big new world of SMART. It arrived without problem at lunchtime on Tuesday and then I had to wait for Adam to come home to install it, not an easy thing for someone who was a doer, but I managed to put it off and not even open the box. It took minutes to switch the two of them over but twice as long to get it to understand we don’t have an aerial and our programs arrive from Sky, nor was it happy that we didn’t have either Wifi or a LAN ready for it. Another case of manufactures assuming and if they get it wrong, well it all becomes a complicated muddle, but we got there. Yesterday I tried to have a play around to see what is there, but it kept wanting to take me on walk-through’s but without the LAN I didn’t want to do, in case it went into yet another spin. I know that a lot of people won’t understand why we don’t have Wifi, but neither of us trust it and my knowledge of IT learned at work, tells me no one should ever trust it unless they are a 100% sure of what they are doing and then it’s still a risk. I find myself now just a bit frustrated as the LAN won’t be here for another couple of days and I actually do have a Wifi router that I have never used, I am so tempted to set it up just because I want to test my new baby out. I do actually have a fear though that once I can get into it I am going to have to spend hours just learning and learning again to get the new info into my brain so it will stay.
Learning is something I have always loved through out my adult life, I couldn’t see the point as a kid and all I wanted was to grow up and be allowed to do the fun stuff. Even with all the memory issues I was developing over my later years of working, I still managed to teach myself to program in Visual Basic and by clever programming I built systems that did most of my work for me. No one knew but for the last year, I did very little, it was all done by my collection of PC’s without me lifting a finger, I didn’t even need to start the programs, they did that along with double checking all their results. I was well aware in the last year that I was loosing the ability to hold onto totally new information, these days it is getting worse, I know because I haven’t stopped trying to learn, I love history and watch every program I can find about the periods I love best. I know that I am not taking things in as I used to, as I am finding myself more and more getting as far as half way through a program, before my brain tells me I have already seen it, not always, but frequently. Some programs I have deliberately watched for a second time, because I know from their write up I have forgotten, so I try again to restore the facts.
All of us have passions in our lives, the things that make life worth while, I know I have already in this blog written about loosing nearly all my hobbies, being a doer, someone who loved to create, I was drawn to crafts, needle point doesn’t work when you can’t thread the needle or see where the next stitch needs to go. I think the only crafts I never tired that I really wanted to were stained glass making and lace making, I honestly think I would have loved both. Unfortunately though that is what conditions like mine do, they steal the things we love, all those small fiddly pass times have long gone, but they also steal the big and bolder one as I used to love to walk and I used to walk miles without a seconds thought. I remember feeling as though not just my world but my life was being stripped away from me, the things I excelled in and loved were one by one being stolen from me. My PRMS started to take hold of me big style within a year of us buying our flat, I had managed to decorate and style all but one room, our kitchen. We were forced to live with it as it was for over a year as I wasn’t able to climb the ladders or help Adam with the repairs to the plastering. The kitchen had been covered with wood chip wallpaper, a sure sign that the plaster was in a bad way, but we decided to remove the paper, that part I helped with, I tried to teach and help him with the plaster, but it just didn’t happen. Even when the new kitchen was built and fitted, the most I could do was the tiling and I could only do that as I could sit, Adam had to some of that too and paint the whole room and lay the flooring. Step by step as our home was coming together, I was loosing the abilities I needed the most.
I suppose it was always just a matter of time, but to find that yet another love, learning is slowly being taken away from me, well that is a hard one to swallow. I have felt it happening slowly for a while, as I know that much of the info I drank in about world war 2 in my first years of being housebound, was starting to slip. Name of people, places and events that I know where there in my head, aren’t there, not just in what I now see as my normal memory issues, where I forget but possibly can find the information later, this is different, this is knowing where they are to find there is a gap, one that never refills, until I try to learn it again. I have lost more in the last year than I have learned in the past 10, nearly all of my programming langue has vanished, I can’t remember how most of it is done, I have tried. I have even tried reading back programs to trigger something, but most of it looks like gobbledygook.
So now I find myself in this really odd situation, I am excited about learning just what this smart TV can do and how far I can push it, but I am equally scared of it, scared that I just won’t be able to remember how it works and what all those buttons on the over sized controller actually does. It is sitting in the corner of the room glaring at me like a one eyed monster, threatening me with it pre programmed logical system which my now illogical brain will happily disagree with and throw hissy fit all the way through. Lately I have become a person who is not getting wound up by technology, but the brain that should be able to more than handle it, even on occasions my frustration has now become more than vocal when I am alone. Yesterday I had to buy a couple more of the pull through adapters I use in place of a normal e-cig, it has to be attached at all times to my PC but as I sit here all day that isn’t a problem. I bought two of the about 3 months ago, but one broke on Monday so I am now on the spare, I went back to the site I bought them from and browse to see if there was possibly a better one available. For me they lacked a bit of power and I wanted one I could adjust the power levels, my search brought me back to the one I had and as soon as I say the page I remembered that the one I had was adjustable, it was one of the features that made me buy it in the first place. How do you forget one of the main features of something you yourself has bought, in the two days it takes for them to arrive? Now I know, trust me they are so much better than I thought, 3 months of being frustrated by a lack of power and it was there at my finger tips all along.
It doesn’t feel that long ago that the one thing in this world I could rely on, was me, now I have had to shift that over to Adam more and more, but he isn’t here all the time and I have to be able to manage alone. I honestly fear the future more and more, how long will it be before I can manage without someone here to fill in my life gaps, I can’t predict that but I know it is an eventuality that will have to be faced. I already feel as though I need an overseer here to just keep me on the right track and to double check everything I see as complete, like reading this back and finding those missing words, or the mistakes where I some how manage to write the totally wrong word, but just can’t see it. I never thought I would say it, but what I once saw as my greatest ally and the one thing that was going to be my saviour in years to come, is turning into being my greatest fear, technology is only a friend when you can remember how and what it does.
Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 4/12/12 – Side effects
Two Rooms Plus Utilities 
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