Notices by The Witchy Bitches (pawpower@beige.party)

Phoenix says the chicken needs fresh air, too. She's making sure to pick a new animal friend each time for her fun walks, and today Mr. Pink Chicken is the winner.

@chris Woohoo! I love fire! I am the Deafblind neighbor with the charcoal grill who makes candles, too. So... 🔥😳

@chris Please can you do mine next! 🤭

@Fragglemuppet So the other language in which I am fluent is American sign language and the hardest part for me was as a blind person who has always been blind, then learning a visual gestural language in my 30s because I was profoundly deaf and became profoundly Deaf after hurricane Katrina due to mold exposure, so I had to learn a whole new way of interacting with language and I realize that the poll is meant for spoken language so that's why I'm leaving this comment

For anyone who may be interested, the live captions in MS teams meetings are NOT visible to a braille display. Or if they are I couldn't find them and I scrolled over the entire screen. However, if you are Deafblind and use teams you can turn on live captions through braille access, and choose "phone name" audio as the source and it will caption the meeting for you. The default for the onboard iPhone Live Captions is the microphone because it assumes you want to hear spoken words in your environment. However once you are in live captions you can hit backspace and it will take you to a context menu for things like pause, copy and then it will say either microphone or phone audio and choose phone audio. It works well however you need to wrangle the hearing people in these meetings because you do not get a name with the spoken content and if everyone is talking at once-- a thing hearing people love doing in meetings for .... reasons I don't understand-- you are going to have trouble figuring out who is saying what. However, if you can get the hearing people to behave in a civilized way, it works well provided you are a fast enough braille reader to read at the rate of spoken language 150 wpm. And now I think I need to go outside and touch grass because ... see above about hearing people talking over one another... 😣

Good morning, I was woken up twice with low oxygen and needing my inhaler. This is not great. Part of it is I've been off my biologic that helps with the lung disease for a while because of communication barriers and also the holidays. Going to try and make headway on getting it refilled today. Not sure where the communication breakdown is happening, meaning between my insurance, the lung dr. Or the pharmacy. Other than that, I need to check in with my schools to make sure nobody is at work with a contagious disease and if I'm good to go I am seeing 2 students today. Callisto says it's a Callisto day! It's 41 degrees out so I need to not go outside as much as possible so my lungs don't get even worse. So it's indoor exercise today. I hope everyone has a great start to the week!

@adhdeanasl Yay for working from home! I hope it's a good day for you. How has sir Winston been? I haven't seen any pics of him lately.

@adhdeanasl @me @wx1g @RareBird15 @matt @WittiePenguin @Fragglemuppet For some reason I can't see the toot you're referring to but how is the person accessing Mastodon, IE iPhone, PC Android ETC?

Ok I'm reminded why sometimes I procrastinate... Because it goes like this. I dread doing a thing, I start to do the thing, the person on the other end of the thing doesn't want to provide interpreters/insert some other kind of civil rights fuckery. Then I have to educate grown ass adults about why actually no I cannot bring a pal to interpret for a medical or legal appointment, that yes my service dog can be in the room, or that I need documentation in accessible format or whatever and I spend SO! MUCH! TIME! on this shit ... But we haven't even gotten to the fucking thing I was meaning to do. Some days y'all... I am tired of having to educate/explain/advocate for my right to exist. I want to call a place, get an appointment, show up and be able to do the thing without extensive negotiation or arguing about the thing or my access to the thing. Abled people wear me right the fuck out.

@Fragglemuppet I would share my spice drops with you if you were closer there are cinnamon ones and they are delicious

@chris Yikes! That's no good! Im so sorry hopefully you can leave soon.

OK, I don't know how much of this is able to be detected visually because I don't know how it looks but right now I'm looking at a photograph of a Bee which is something that of course I know about bees I have had bees land on me and of course I have been stung by bees, but I've never actually been able to touch a bee. So this is the first time in my life I've ever been able to look at a bee.

It's here!!! I can't decide if I want to look at pictures or read a book! Why this is a big deal is because all of my other braille displays have one line so if you are a person who can see imagine that you only get between 20 and 40 characters before you need to scroll on one line. That is how I read all of the time. This display has a one line display at the bottom, yes, but at the top there is a larger display that is 30 x 10 that lets you read multiple lines at once or… Look at pictures! This is life-changing for me! #DeafBlind

I had just finished a breathing treatment and was sitting on the side of the bed, gathering the fortitude to stand up and attempt to move through the universe under my own power, when Baloo stood up on the bed, and walked behind me to rest her chin on my shoulder and press her cheek against mine. She stood still, leaning into me with all 110 lbs of her brown self while I put my arms around her. I can't remember the first time she ever initiated this but today it hit me that she was doing it. When we met her at the shelter about 15 months ago it was very obvious that human or canine snuggling was not something she'd ever experienced and that getting too close to people for too long usually didn't end up being good for her. She would let you touch her, but you had to be very calm and quiet and slow. And 15 months later she deliberately will come to me to request snuggles. Every night she is snuggled up against me, or phoenix or Callisto while she sleeps. Last night i think she was snuggling with all of us at once making herself the giant brown filling of a great snuggle sandwich. So I'm not even sure why I'm writing this, but it brought me joy, and i know sometimes joy can be thin on the ground so i hope it brings you joy too. And comfort that even if it's just for one big brown dog somewhere in the world life has gotten better and she has found a family who loves her.

Baloo says it's her job to give the hearing dogs something to do!

Just got an email from the HIMS people who are now apparently distributors for the Dot pad. If you buy one any time between now and 26 December, they will give you 500 off, so it is only 5400 instead of 5900.. Oh man temptation.... A dot pad is a multi line braille display which also allows you to look at tactile pictures/graphics and I really really want one but 5400 bucks... gack! So i have about 6 weeks to decide ...

One of the greatest harms we do to our blind children is not allowing them to fail, not allowing them to get lost, not allowing them to get hurt. I'm talking within reason here, but if you run to the rescue every time your blind kid spills grape jelly or trips over a toy, or gets lost while coming back from the bathroom at Aunt Bessie's house you are simply building an adult who has never learned to problem solve, who has never built resilience or grit into their character. And thats how you end up with 35 year old blind people who are afraid to go out without a sighted person, who can't maintain basic levels of cleanliness in their homes, who can't make a cheese toasty. Who are afraid of everything from cross walks to skillets. And as a professional it makes me furious to see this enabling behavior in children because I know whats coming in their adulthood, but when I try and speak up, or when I won't "rescue" the kid in my class suddenly I"m the bad guy. I frequently hear things like "They aren't me." I'm very well aware they aren't me. But I'm also aware of whats waiting for them out in the big bad world. I want them to feel as comfortable as they can in it, and that includes being comfortable getting lost, or failing, or making a mess because they know they have the tools to solve those problems.

It's fun walks time! And Phoenix declared that nothing would do, but she take her new stuffed cow friend on a tour of the neighborhood. I tried to convince her otherwise and she just yelled at the top of her voice so… Rather than risk her waking up the whole neighborhood with her protestations I'm letting her take this cow on her morning stroll. I hope she enjoys herself.

@Fragglemuppet This! Yes! My back door is open too! OMG! Loving this weather so much!

Dear universe, Just a reminder... Audio books are real books. Kindle or other ebooks are real books. Braille books are real books... Basically if someone wrote a book, it's *real* This is for all y'all who Say "real books" when you mean hard copy print book. This is ableist as fuck, please stop doing it. No love, a teacher who is trying to get her students to love books and who has to constantly fight about this stupid fucking topic with ableist jerks.