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Feb. 5th, 2020 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynWent to the dentist the other day to get some fillings done. Had some time to think of a few things while he and the... hygienist? Nurse? Physician assistant? Medical student? I have no idea what the other person involved in the procedure's title was... anyway, while they worked. Mostly, though, it came down to two things.
1. I really need to either find the rotary tool and drill bits my sister gave me for Christmas two years ago and get started using them for stone drilling and metal polishing, or else buy my own Dremel and a few appropriate heads; and
2. I want to learn at least some basic ASL.
I don't actually know any hearing-impaired folks who communicate via ASL, but having to sit still and know the only means of communication I had available was raising one or both hands kinda left me thinking I ought to pick up a little bit of extra skill. And ASL, like flying a helicopter, is one of those things that an RPG system would say 'mmm... no, sorry, you don't get to make an Extremely Difficult check against one of your attributes for this, you either have SOME kind of skill rating in it or you automatically fail the roll, no exceptions'.
https://www.startasl.com/my-courses/#right-course has some free options for basic, introductory stuff, which is good, because trying to search for 'sign language courses boston' doesn't really work very well- most of the results are for language courses that mention the word 'sign', usually in relation to parking, on their web pages. 'asl courses boston' has a number of options, but most of them are a bit more expensive than I'm prepared to pay to start with. Duolingo doesn't do visual languages, and I haven't looked into other language apps yet. (For the fannishly inclined, Duolingo does include Klingon and High Valyrian.)
... oh, yeah. As long as I'm thinking about learning, I need to see how tricky it is to get to a couple of other places. I've wanted to take the Massachusetts firearms safety class for a while now. I did archery in college when we had to take gym classes, and I loved it, but what I had wanted to do at the time was take the course in riflery instead. I just happened to be broke and riflery had a materials fee, whereas archery was free. (It used crappy, crappy equipment, but it was free.) If I can take the safety class and find a place that allows supervised rental and practice, I'd like to learn to shoot. My original flight instructor told me once that 'there are five thousand people in this country with professional rotorcraft certificates, and they're all into motorcycles, and they're all into guns'. I'm not interested in motorcycles, to be honest, but I would like to learn firearms properly, beyond the handful of sessions I had with a .22 rifle in New York City and that one Groupon class I went on some years back where we all had to get in a van and drive to Nassau County in order to learn what using a shotgun or a... I'm not sure what the other one was, I think it was some kind of submachine gun... was like.
I am pretty sure this is not what my mother had in mind when she said to take advantage of the academic opportunities of the Boston area. If that is the case, she should have been more specific.
1. I really need to either find the rotary tool and drill bits my sister gave me for Christmas two years ago and get started using them for stone drilling and metal polishing, or else buy my own Dremel and a few appropriate heads; and
2. I want to learn at least some basic ASL.
I don't actually know any hearing-impaired folks who communicate via ASL, but having to sit still and know the only means of communication I had available was raising one or both hands kinda left me thinking I ought to pick up a little bit of extra skill. And ASL, like flying a helicopter, is one of those things that an RPG system would say 'mmm... no, sorry, you don't get to make an Extremely Difficult check against one of your attributes for this, you either have SOME kind of skill rating in it or you automatically fail the roll, no exceptions'.
https://www.startasl.com/my-courses/#right-course has some free options for basic, introductory stuff, which is good, because trying to search for 'sign language courses boston' doesn't really work very well- most of the results are for language courses that mention the word 'sign', usually in relation to parking, on their web pages. 'asl courses boston' has a number of options, but most of them are a bit more expensive than I'm prepared to pay to start with. Duolingo doesn't do visual languages, and I haven't looked into other language apps yet. (For the fannishly inclined, Duolingo does include Klingon and High Valyrian.)
... oh, yeah. As long as I'm thinking about learning, I need to see how tricky it is to get to a couple of other places. I've wanted to take the Massachusetts firearms safety class for a while now. I did archery in college when we had to take gym classes, and I loved it, but what I had wanted to do at the time was take the course in riflery instead. I just happened to be broke and riflery had a materials fee, whereas archery was free. (It used crappy, crappy equipment, but it was free.) If I can take the safety class and find a place that allows supervised rental and practice, I'd like to learn to shoot. My original flight instructor told me once that 'there are five thousand people in this country with professional rotorcraft certificates, and they're all into motorcycles, and they're all into guns'. I'm not interested in motorcycles, to be honest, but I would like to learn firearms properly, beyond the handful of sessions I had with a .22 rifle in New York City and that one Groupon class I went on some years back where we all had to get in a van and drive to Nassau County in order to learn what using a shotgun or a... I'm not sure what the other one was, I think it was some kind of submachine gun... was like.
I am pretty sure this is not what my mother had in mind when she said to take advantage of the academic opportunities of the Boston area. If that is the case, she should have been more specific.
