Week Two recap

I am coming to the close of my second week here at the Colorado Center for the Blind. It’s amazing how quickly the newness of it all is wearing off and becoming routine. I had a brief instant of panic one day while standing at the bus stop, thinking I had dropped my sleep shades on the short walk from my apartment. It took a second to realize that I was wearing them. I guess I’m taking to complete blindness a lot more easily than I anticipated.

Most of my classes are going very well. In travel, I have begun exploring the neighborhood, crossing major thoroughfares and getting to know the bus and light rail systems. In Braille class, I’ve learned most of the alphabet and basic punctuation marks, and am now learning to use a stylus and slate to write. In tech class, I’m getting more and more comfortable with JAWS, the screen reading software that allows blind people to use Windows.

I say “most” classes are going well because, predictably, home management has been a struggle. It’s too early to say definitively, but there is a chance I am the black angel of death when it comes to the kitchen. Even when mishaps are not my fault – like when someone gave me the wrong can and I dutifully dumped pumpkin puree into our greenbean casserole instead of cream of mushroom soup – trouble seems to follow me. Still, I am gaining confidence and am laying a solid foundation of basics to build on.

One thing I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is how accessible the Denver metro area is. Between the bus and the rapidly expanding light rail system, much of the city is easy to get to on public transportation. Moreover, the address system is extremely logical and offers a lot of clues if you know how to read it. The hundreds (and thousands, and ten thousands) place in a street address tells you how far you are from the central north-south (Broadway) and east-west (Ellsworth) streets at the heart of Denver. The tens place gives you a general idea of how far down a given block an address might be, since most blocks in the Denver area contain 100 address numbers. And the ones place, when combined with the cardinal direction every street includes, will tell you which side of the street a given address is on.

For example, I can tell from my apartment’s address of 5871 S. Lowell Blvd. that:
(1) I am 58 blocks south of Ellsworth;
(2) My apartment is a little over 2/3 of the way down the block if approaching from the north
(3) Thanks to the mnemonic NOW SEE (North Odd West, South Even East), I can use the odd number in the ones place to determine that I am on the west side of the north-south street I live on.

I’ve already begun exploring the Denver area, and I must say – the ubiquity of the public transportation system and the logic of the address system makes navigating pretty painless. I look forward to getting to know the area better in the months ahead.