Month: February 2025

Caveat: Well f*k me sixteen ways to Sunday, Arthur lost another goddam f*king hearing aid

Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia

I got home from work, he had the couch turned over on its back, I guess he was trying to find it. I spent another solid hour searching high and low. I’m actually skeptical that the hearing aid was lost in the way he claims – that he was trying to put it in his ear and dropped it. Not that I think he’s confabulating – I just think his memory and grip on reality are such that he could have been doing who knows what and the hearing aid ended up missing. I can’t figure out where it went. For all I know it got flushed down the toilet.

That makes the third one lost. This one cost a lot more than the previous two lost – not just in money but in the time and effort it took to make a special trip to Portland to get the new pair. I’m pretty sure we can sweet-talk the VA into another pair, but given the delays, and given the fact they won’t “fit” them unless we show up in person, that means no new hearing aids until at least November (when we’re next scheduled to travel there).

I feel like that at some weird subconscious level Arthur prefers being deaf. Maybe this is uncharitable, but the resistance he’s put up to using and having hearing aids, at every turn, starts feeling quite willful.

I should just drop it. My problem isn’t that I harbor any concern for him or his comfort at all – for all I care, let him be deaf. My problem is that I very much dislike yelling at the top of my lungs and repeating myself 4-5 times for every single utterance when trying to communicate with him. It’s exhausting. I told him tonight (yelling, and repeating), that I might just give up talking. I swear he was pleased at the idea.

It’s not as if it’s been smooth sailing since getting back home after Portland, 3 weeks ago. Other issues have arisen.

Arthur has developed a new, difficult-to-cope-with habit: when his arthritis pain is acting up, he throws a tantrum. A perfect 4-year-old “I hurt myself and it’s definitely not my fault” tantrum. He pounds on the table, kicks at the table-legs or the floor, and flounces around like a miserable toddler.

I much preferred the stoic Arthur. And I have no way of coping with this either, except to leave the room. Which emotionally feels like abandoning him in a moment of pain. But what can I do? He has some pain meds, but my impression is that they don’t work very well, if at all. The doctors aren’t going to prescribe him hardcore pain meds for arthritis, I don’t think. My uncharitable theory is that his pain hasn’t actually gotten worse, it’s only that his coping mechanisms are continuing to devolve.

I was quite naive in signing up for this.

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Caveat: A thought about the supposed “AI alignment” problem

Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Science & SciFi

Lately, I’ve stopped caring about AI alignment – but not because I don’t believe it’s a problem. Instead, I’ve come to realize we have a much bigger problem: we still haven’t actually solved a much more fundamental thing – the HUMAN alignment problem.

I used to worry about AI alignment, a bit. It struck me as something plausibly dangerous, and technologically imminent. But as long as megalomaniacs, narcissists and assholes are building and training our AI’s, I really don’t expect the result to be a good one, no matter how successful they are at it. Or alternately, given the type of people running our civilization, we might actually HOPE that they fail to “solve” alignment, so that there’s an off chance that the AI can turn out to be more compassionate and humane than its creators (much to the techbros’ regret!).

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Caveat: Tree #1927 “A pathetic fallacy: a storm approaches”

A Daily Tree / Banalities & Journaling / My Photos

I’m really not doing well these days, at all. I mean, psychologically.

I thought once Arthur and I got back from Portland, I’d get to settle into a routine and relax a little bit, not have to be “always on.”

But in fact the store, which I neglected all through January, is demanding more of my attention than I’m able to give to it, and so it remains neglected, and the un-done tasks pile up and stress me out. Further, specific very annoying bureaucratic/financial crises have popped up (I’d prefer not to go into detail right now, but it may even involve a financial loss for the store, and it’ll have been my fault, there’s no way to blame anyone else), and I’m out of my depth, and no idea what to even do. The waiting and more waiting is the hardest, when dealing with bureaucrats of all flavors.

I just want to collapse, or run away and join a monastery.

This tree was blowing in strong wind. Along with other trees. The air warmed up. A storm is coming – likely to rain on our snowy/icy road and make it worse, not better, for driving on.

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Caveat: The chocolate thief

Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia / Life in Alaska

We are settling back into routines in Rockpit, Alaska (Arthur’s name for our “neighborhood” at 8-9 mile Port Saint Nick Rd).

Yesterday Arthur and I had a doctor’s appointment at SEARHC (the main clinic on the island), with his GP. Arthur has been complaining of an occasionally severe jaw/ear ache, since last week down in Oregon. So we got it checked out, plus doing a follow-up on the visit with audiologists down there.

The doctor’s prognosis, based on some looking around and poking and prodding, is that it’s likely just arthritis (of the jaw). Anyway, there’s no evidence of infection or dental problems, so that’s good. Given Arthur suffers severe arthritis in other parts (shoulders, knees, etc.) this makes sense to me. But Arthur clearly isn’t happy about it when it flares up. Arthur is a person who I associate with “stoic disregard” for personal discomfort, so seeing Arthur as someone who increasingly complains of pains and frustrations is very difficult for me – and often there’s very little I can do, anyway, so it’s doubly frustrating.

Since getting the new hearing aids (that actually work pretty well), I’ve noticed a new, difficult pattern: when he’s wearing them, he quickly becomes grumpy, more easily frustrated, even lashing out in anger. After having his hearing aids in during the doctor visit yesterday, he accused me of removing (stealing?) his chocolate (which he keeps stockpiled in his bag that he carries). This is one of those moments of distrust that are very painful for me to experience. “Why would I take your chocolote?” I protested. “You probably ate it or misplaced it.” He became quite angry. “It’s not here.”

When I was able to stop the car, I pulled open his bag and literally pulled out a bar of chocolate almost effortlessly – he often has several stashed in multiple pockets of the bag. He seemed offended, as if I’d pulled some kind of unfair magic trick on him. “Where was that?!”

“Just here, in the bag,” I indicated the pocket I’d pulled it out of. He flounced angrily and was silent for the rest of the time in town.

This is very difficult for me. I keep saying that. Well anyway.

In other news, my mom is apparently doing okay down in the nursing home. We get encouraging messages from her friends, often. I like that. Unfortunately, some bad news on the bureaucratic side, on that front. Seems that my mom’s social security payments – which she gets as a US citizen (she has dual citizenship), deposited directly to her bank account each month – have stopped. I can’t help but wonder at the timing of this, given the current musking about in the US Treasury. Sigh.

The store is quite overwhelming to me. I have to get “caught up” on the framing projects, move forward with bookkeeping transitioning to our new accountant, and continue to stay on top of inventory and other expenses while trying to at least break even during the slowest period of the year. I’m not sure I’m constitutionally cut out to be a business owner.

I’m hoping it DOESN’T warm up this weekend, too much – because that will make our road slippery and unpleasant to drive. Just cold ice and packed snow at -5 C or lower is easy to drive on.

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Caveat: Tune out even more efficiently

Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia / My Photos

One thing that’s always puzzled me about Arthur, with his incipient deafness and his difficulty with interaction: he still listens constantly to his little audiobooks, on his circa mid-2000’s Apple iPod Nano. In the times when I’ve overheard, it’s always the same books – over and over. The mystery is that given his apparent deafness and difficulty understanding, I don’t quite get what he’s getting out of them. I feel like it’s just some kind of reassurance and a way to “tune out” the confusing external reality.

We got his new hearing aids and had a new hearing test on Monday at the VA. It was a long and exhausting (for Arthur) appointment.

The new hearing aids have a feature that is something he’s long wanted: a nice low-tech, intuitive way to listen to his audiobooks through the hearing aids directly. He can just plug the physical audiojack into a little dedicated dongle, and it works “automagically.”

There’s an unanticipated problem, though – for me, not for him. For me, with his old way of listening to audiobooks, with the distinctive white Apple corded earbuds dangling from his ears, I had a nice easy way to tell whether he was “tuned out” or not. This could impact the strategies I needed to use to make myself heard and understood. Now, as he listens through his hearing aids, I have no way of knowing when he’s tuned out. And it makes a BIG difference in terms of being able to get through to him. And bearing in mind, regardless of whether he listens through ear buds or through his hearing aids, he’s often quite reluctant to turn off his audiobooks – he wants to multitask and somehow carry on his conversation and still keep listening. This rarely goes well. Then you have to ask him to turn off his audiobook – and that makes him annoyed and grumpy, which changes the way communication proceeds, too.

Generally speaking, communication with Arthur continues to become increasingly fraught and frustrating, in other words.

Life goes on. I’m pleased that the VA didn’t try to force us into any follow-up appointments. One revelation from the new hearing test: the audiologist is confident that much of Arthur’s hearing loss is the result of damage to the middle ear, instead of the more typical inner ear. In one sense, this is actually good news. Damage to the middle ear is not, generally, progressive, unlike inner ear deafness. It’s a breakdown in the ear’s ability to transmit sound to from the eardrum to the inner ear. With Arthur, we could speculate that it’s due to the 40+ years of pressure changes, up and down in helicopters. I also speculate that it has to do with his infamous “performative, world-destroying sneezes” – where he sneezes in such a way as to maximize loudness and air movement through the passages in his head, and which he’s always insisted are good for him (?!).

Ah well.

Yesterday, we stayed home and I was very lazy. I spent a lot of time talking in circles with Keith, reminiscing about old times in Humboldt – times when I was a child and he and Juli were my sister’s and my babysitters. Keith is hard to understand, because his memory issues are at a level where you can end up having the same conversation 20 or 30 times, over and over. And he seems to have lost most of his verbs and nouns and names and specificity. “The place when we did the thing was good. I really liked that!” Arthur gets mad trying to make sense of him, and staggers off, disgruntled, to lie down upstairs on his guest bed.

Today I kind of want to go shopping for a new phone – to try to prevent some of the frustrations my current phone has provided, related to my failure at international roaming (In Australia last month), related to the lack of wifi-calling functionality (for coping with Juli’s home being “out of cellphone range”), etc. We’ll see – I’m not sure the phone-salespeople are going to be sufficiently reassuring regarding these functionalities to cause me to spring the big bucks to buy a new one.

More later.

A decorated tree.

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Caveat: The Oregon of our discontent

Banalities & Journaling / Caretaking and Dementia / Hiking & Travel / My Photos

Monday morning, Cherry Grove, Oregon, 6:15 AM.

I suppose I should write something. After a week back home in Alaska, where a major snowstorm made life interesting, Arthur and I traveled to Oregon on Saturday, flying Klawock to Ketchikan to Seattle and driving a rental car down from Seattle to the exurbs west of Portland, where we always stay here.

Arthur has an appointment at the VA Hospital in Portland today. He gets all his VA care here, rather than Anchorage (which is where the VA would route us in “default” mode) because it’s easier to come here, having a nice, familiar place to stay and all that. The Portland region became Arthur’s “home” in the lower 48 because that was where the headquarters of the company he worked for was located.

Anyway, traveling with Arthur is quite difficult for me. He is exhaustingly restless when traveling – he never sits still at all, like a 6 year old on sugar: tapping his hands and feet, sighing melodramatically, shrugging and tossing his head. He is constantly anxious about stuff he feels that he’s misplaced. During the trip down: twice he panicked about having lost his walking stick (and one time he DID lose his walking stick but that time he didn’t notice, and a TSA person in Ketchikan had to help us recover it); once on the airplane he lost his ipod; once in the rental car he lost his oreos (the turned up on the floor of the car when we arrived at our destination). Each time he thinks he’s lost something, he fidgets and repeatedly opens every single zip pocket on his backpack repeatedly, for 20 or 30 minutes, before finally getting sufficiently upset to ask me where something is. Sigh. It’s stressful for me to be around, in a kind of derivative, ancilliary way.

Yesterday was a “day of rest” but it wasn’t a bad day. I worked on a jigsaw puzzle with Juli and we had a successful long-distance telephone conversation with my mom in Australia. Ann actually sounds remarkably good, and was producing coherent output – a huge improvement over how she was during her time in the hospital when I first got to Australia several weeks ago. I think the care facility, with its social interactions and reliable feeding and water-drinking schedules are really good for her.

Here is a picture looking out down the upper Tualatin valley here at Cherry Grove, in the eastern foothills of the Oregon coast range.

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