Day 15: My ears are ringing

"My ears are ringing" is the prompt for "Day 15" over at "We Work for Cheese" -- please click on the link and check out the other bloggers who are diligently trying to master a blog a day for the month of February.

 

For the life of me...I don't know why my temperature is always 97.something.  Sometimes it's even 96.something which causes me to think I'm probably dead...because only dead people have temperatures below 97.0.

 

But, that's not why I posted a picture of that thing.  It's a digital thermometer by ReliOn...and runs for about ten bucks.  The LED numbers, as you can see, are clearly shown and in a mere nine seconds...or until it beeps...you'll have your readout. 

 

Pretty nifty, huh?

 

Yeah...until you get old like me and the frequency range of things like stealth-like high frequency cell phones and mosquitoes start to go out.  And, apparently, the exact frequency that this thermometer emits.

 

It's very quiet...like 3 decibels at the most...and that's a good thing...because heaven knows you don't want to wake your kid up by the thing beeping as loudly as a garbage truck going backwards...when you shove this thing in their bottom.

 

The bad part is...no one my age can hear it.  Plus, let's pretend I could hear it...I can't hear it because I have tinnitus.  Tinnitus, for those who don't know, is an aggravating thing.  My ears are ringing.  Constantly.  It never stops.  Along with the high-pitched tea kettle sounds...are a lower frequency drone.  Sure, it's nice sometimes, as it drowns out the neighbourhood dogs barking at nite...but, it gets awfully annoying the rest of the time.

 

After a while you get used to it...but sometimes it changes pitch in my head and I pay attention to it again...and I have to constantly ask people to repeat themselves and I sometimes have to put the closed captioning thingy on the television.  I hate that because I end up watching the words and not the picture...plus they have to put it right smack on the screen...not low-like...and most times that channel logo will partially cover the words.  Plus the font is THE ugliest font in human history...and if two people are talking at once you'll get garbled nonsense with numbers in it.  I have to admit, I do find it fun when it says "EMOTIONAL MUSIC PLAYING" or it tells me who is singing the song, like "ROLLING STONES' SINGING SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL" - and I sit here and think...if I'm deaf...how the hell am I going to know what that song sounds like?

 

Anyway...it's time I get back to watching the Olympics -- altho I took a break from cross country skiing to watch Mae West in "She Done Him Wrong".  I'm just about to Google Cary Grant's teeth...because they must have been replaced early on in his career as they didn't look like this later on.

 

Ugh...I seriously need to get a life as I haven't yet gone to bed.  And, if that wasn't bad enough, the birds are now chirping outside...and in a range I can actually hear.



(Speaking of birds...for what it's worth, I blame my hearing loss/tinnitus on my attending a concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia where "A Flock of Seagulls" played.  There were a ton of bands...so don't mock me just yet.  But they came out and played a super loud noise for what seemed like ten minutes straight...whereupon everyone started holding their hands over their ears and yelling for them to stop.  I have actually Google'd this -- and some people online actually have implicated them as well...same concert.  I really think they screwed up a lot of peoples' hearing that day...and I will always believe that.)