I voted today! My first ballot cast as a resident of the state of Tennessee. I was a little apprehensive, as I had heard that #Tennessee only had paper ballots and no machines. But I was pleasantly surprised by there still being an #A11Y voting machine available. It did feel a little strange to me to be asked what party ballot I wanted. I very proudly said #Democratic which I have a feeling isn’t a very popular answer around here.

I’m kind of at my wit’s end about something, and out of desperation I’m reaching out hoping someone might have a clue about what to do about a strange thing that’s happening with my iPhone. In a moment of insanity, I agreed to get put on the board of our homeowner’s association. I was added to a text group with the other board members. Now here’s where it gets weird. I’m not getting any of the messages in the group. They have my phone number right, and they get messages I send, but I see none of theirs. Unless, I power down and restart my phone, in which case all the messages come flooding in. Then, I stop receiving them again, until I repeat the powering off and rebooting. I’m part of several other threads, and this is the only one where this is happening. I wonder if it has anything to do with some of the group not using iPhones? I don’t know, I’m just trying to find a solution, and I really don’t want to make a trip to the Apple store. I feel like this is such an outlier. Has this ever happened to anyone else? I’d really like to get to the bottom of this. #A11Y #Blind #BlindTech #iPhone #VoiceOver

Tomorrow morning I’m off to the doctor. Ostensibly it’s the usual annual checkup, no big deal. Only I’m going to share something that might be. For the past few years, I’ve been finding myself having more and more of what are euphemistically called senior moments. Things will just randomly fall out of my short-term memory. I’ll forget to do something I just talked about doing literally minutes before. I’ll walk into the kitchen to do something and completely forget to do it if I get the least bit sidetracked. Or sometimes I’ll just completely forget why I’m in there at all. This is terrifying to me on a couple of levels. First of all, I’ve always prided myself on what everyone used to call my steel-trap memory. Not so much anymore. Also, dementia/Alzheimer’s has been present in the past three consecutive generations of my mom’s family before mine. So I’m going to open a conversation about getting cognitive testing. I’m well aware that I might be making a mountain out of a mole hill. After all, apart from these lapses I’m perfectly fine, certainly not quite ready for Shady Acres. But if I am indeed making something out of nothing, at this point, it’s probably better that I know that so I can move on. So the point of all of this is to ask for positive thoughts/prayers/mojo/whatever anyone can send my way. Thanks for reading and also for being there.

Now that #Trump has made it crystal clear that #ableism is part of his overall brand, I’ll just say it the way I’ve been thinking it: people with disabilities still supporting him are no better than quislings. #USPol