Last Tuesday I took the day off. Laina and I went to St Louis to pick up Ted from the airport. Before we got him we stopped at MicroCenter and picked up some black and orange filament for the printer. It was on sale for Black Friday. I’m still maybe only halfway done with the printer assembly. It’s taking longer than I thought but I’m learning all the intricacies of the thing while building it. So if I have trouble later at least I’ll have more in depth knowledge of how to fix it.

We picked up Ted then went to do the usual “Get Chik Fil A and charge at the Brentwood charger” routine. This time though the Brentwood location was totally filled. When we got there I saw that all the parking spaces (both Tesla and non-) were full of “Resla” vehicles, advertised as rental Tesla vehicles according to the outside livery on one of the cars. Luckily we didn’t have to wait for a spot to open.

We got home and I continued tidying up the basement. We took Elsa’s dollhouse over to the music teacher’s house for her daughter to have.

I took Wednesday off as well and we all ran over to Jacksonville to get final groceries for the Thanksgiving meal. Ted and I started watching “Andor” (really one of the best Star Wars shows out there), and I was off my diet the whole break, so life was good. Even being off the diet, I didn’t have any soda or candy nor did I eat to excess. I was still conscious of everything I was eating even though I wasn’t tracking it in the WW app.

Thanksgiving was great. The wife did all the cooking, as usual. Some guys, maybe most guys, don’t do any cooking except for grilling steaks outdoors and cooking the Thanksgiving turkey, and then they do it with great gusto. I’ve never had the urge to do any of that. I try to carry my weight in other ways, by picking up the house or doing dishes.

Friday was a vacation day for work and the wife was out shopping for Black Friday, so Ted, the kids and myself just had a lazy day for the most part. We did play some pickleball since the weather was super nice.

Saturday we all got up early to take Ted back to the airport. Along the way we stopped at a great little pancake house in Alton. Again, I wasn’t like ravishingly hungry, but I could have ate who knows how many pancakes if I hadn’t given some to Jack. He has officially started wrestling practice and can quite literally eat as many calories as possible without ill affects. Like, a thirteen year-old boy playing sports, he has a crazy high metabolism.

We dropped off Ted went to charge at Brentwood again. None of the rental Teslas were there this time, which was odd. Jack and I went into MicroCenter. His hopes of having a super high-end gaming computer have waned now that he can play Farming Simulator on my plain ol’ PC laptop. He was looking around for the steering wheel and controls that they make just for this game but to no avail.

It was great to have Ted around for a holiday. I wish he could be around for every Christmas.

Sunday was another lazy day and Monday I was back to work. I weighed myself that morning, hoping to be around 178 lbs. I was shocked to see I was 174.8 lbs. So even though I had went off my diet I still didn’t go crazy and eat everything in sight. Heck even yesterday I weighed in at 172.8 pounds. I’m only three pounds away from my goal weight and then after that I’m not sure what to do. Maybe WW will give me more daily points to use? I don’t want to keep losing weight but I don’t want to fall back into bad habits either.

Tuesday I went to the hearing center in Jacksonville to pick up my hearing aids. I wore them all day with a smile on my face, like I was getting ready to re-experience the world anew. I imagined being able to hear the wife’s and Elsa’s true voices. I played around with the settings all day since there’s a phone app that controls them. We went to see Emma in the Pep Band and dance team at that night’s basketball game and I could hear other people a little better.

It was a little difficult working while wearing the aids because my glasses rested on them, which tilts the glasses down a little. But I gave them the ol’ college try at work on Wednesday. I wore them to Jack’s eye doctor visit (where we discovered one of his contacts was ripped). I wore them to St Louis Thursday when I chaperoned Elsa’s trip to the City Museum and Cirque du Soleil show. And after putting them through the paces, in these different situations and playing around with the settings, I don’t feel $2000 worth of joy while using them. I constantly toggle the aids on and off, to compare my normal hearing to my assisted hearing, and while it’s kinda nice to hear the high end frequencies, it’s not enough that I’m like utterly amazed or anything. The wife and Elsa still sound the same only with a hint of more high end.

The most defining aspect I discovered is that, while the hearing aids amplify sounds and help me hear, they don’t help me comprehend any better. I still find myself saying “huh” and “what’s that” just as much while wearing the aids as I did without. It’s like my mind still needs the extra second to process what I’ve heard and turn it into meaning. So that’s where my bottleneck is; it’s not in the hearing of conversations, it’s in the mental processing of sounds and forming them into words. But I think this is an issue (or battle) I’ve fought since my early teens. Growing up around my friends we were all very astute at hearing sounds for what they actually sounded like (and always pointing this out) instead of what a “normal” person would do, which is just hear a word and move on. And then being in bands and being very aware of what pitches we were playing on instruments, it’s kind of made me hyper-sensitive about sounds. Add to that all the foreign languages I’ve studied and the French, German and Spanish I took in college, and I feel like when people are talking to me I don’t hear the normal flow of English words coming out of their mouths. I hear the phonemes and sounds they make but it takes a split second for me to translate that into language in my brain. So at this point I think I’ll be returning the hearing aids before my trial period is up. I know that I can always repurchase them in the future if/when my hearing gets notably worse but for now I feel like they’re not for me.