Why I'll be away

[This was posted by proxy for Heather, she will not be able to respond to replies, but I will forward them on to her, or you may write to her directly. Her mother reads her correspondence aloud to her. Bach] I grew up in a Seventh-Day Adventist community, and one of the delights of being raised as an Adventist child is that the Victorian morality tale is alive and well among the Adventists. You probably know the sort of thing: boys go skating where they were warned not to skate, and of course they drown. One of my favorite records as a child was "Silver and the Snake," in which a native girl is warned by her mother not to go into the jungle at night, and of course does, and is promptly bitten by a snake, with the result that the natives (who seem surprisingly incompetent at dealing with snake bites) go through a hideous series of first-aid measures to save her: first they burn her finger, then they boil her finger, then they cut her finger, until (as I recall) the missionary comes along to save the day. Well, my own mother warned me long ago, "Don't look at the screen for too long, or you'll hurt your eyes." And I blithely ignored her, staying on the Web for six to eighteen hours a day. The result? Loss of the ability to read or to look at a computer, television, or movie screen. Just goes to show what comes of following instructions from one's elders. At this point, I'm something of a medical mystery, because while I've been diagnosed with dry eye (which I always thought was a disease as serious as a hangnail), nobody can explain the headaches I've been having or the fact that I haven't been able to read since the beginning of the year. So I'm doing the rounds of doctors; in the meantime, my opthamologist is utterly unable to offer a prognosis for me. Fortunately, one of my closest friends is legally blind, and she's been making cheery remarks to me such as, "They've made new devices that let you read UPC codes in the grocery store!" So I know that, one way or another, I'll find my way back to the boards, but it will be a while before I either get my reading ability back or I get the assistive technology to bypass the whole eye thing. Needless to say, I don't think I'll be spending eighteen hours a day on the boards in the future. :) I thought I'd mention this all, not because I want to bore you with medical updates (especially as I've no idea what my situation will be like even two weeks from now), but because of my e-mail situation. If you wrote to me last year and I haven't responded yet, it's not because I'm ignoring you; it's because I can't go back and read your e-mail. Plus, of course, half the people I know seem to have gotten new e-mail addresses, thanks to the demise of Goplay. So if you're drumming your fingers waiting for me to reply, please do drop me a line - provided, that is, that you don't mind my mother reading your letter aloud to me, as she's my secretary at the moment. Incidentally, here's the three most useful things I've learned during the past three months: 1) You get a heck of a lot more writing done (albeit you're unable to read back what you write) if the only other activity available to you is listening to books on tape. 2) Losing part of your eyesight is like going on a retreat or fasting - it's one heck of a powerful way to undergo psychological growth. 3) The Golden Age of Radio never died in Britain. Check out BBC's Radio 4, linked below. Heather Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page] Radio 4 (needs RealPlayer)