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This afternoon when I sat down to write this week’s blog, I was thinking about possible titles when I hit on Camels in Virginia.  I wrote it into the subject line and then I thought, Wait a minute.  Did I already write about this?”

So what did I do?  I did what any right-thinking person would do in this day and age—I googled it and sure enough, there it was—Camels In Virginia, December 23, 2023.  Oops.  So for those of you who haven’t followed my blog forever, or who aren’t interested in searching out the original, here’s a quick overview. 

Twenty some years ago, I kept telling Bill he needed to stop mumbling and he should turn up the volume on the TV set.  He said, “You need hearing aids.”  I replied, “I DO NOT!”

That’s how things stood until Bill and I went to dinner with our daughter’s relatively new in-laws.  We were eating at a noisy Mexican restaurant in Tucson, one with very hard surfaces.  During the course of the meal, I heard Jeanne T.’s father-in-law say something about “camels in Virginia.”  I was thunderstruck and said, “Really, they have camels in Virginia?”  He looked at me as though I was from another planet and said, “I LEFT MY CAMERA IN VIRGINIA!” 

Needless to say, I got my first set of hearing aids shortly thereafter, and my ability to hear improved immeasurably, but that restaurant incident has been one of those family stories that lives in infamy and somehow never goes away.  

Over the years I’ve been sent any number of photos featuring Colt riding camels in various places, including a petting zoo in VIRGINIA while he was still a toddler.  The one here is of a much older version of Colt, and it was taken in Indiana while he was there for a bowling tournament.

But recently Bill has started mumbling again, and the only way for me to hear what he’s saying is to hit the MUTE button on the TV set.  As I’ve noted before, in our family room, my chair is on the left and his is on the right.  Eventually I began to wonder, is it possible that the hearing in my right ear has gotten worse?

So finally I made an appointment with the audiologist.  I thought they could simply adjust the receiver on my current hearing aid—turn up the volume as it were.  Turns out I was right about the hearing in my right ear deteriorating but wrong about being able to turn up the volume in the right-hand hearing aid.

The young woman in the audiology office suggested that I might want to purchase a new pair.  That would be a hard NO.  We all know how much hearing aids cost, and my old ones work just fine, thank you very much.  So we agreed that I’d keep the old hearing aids, and they would order in a new receiver. 

They did just that. The process took two weeks but  finally the new receiver arrived. When I went to pick it up on Monday, they were unable to pair the new right hearing aid with the old left hearing aid due to a “software problem.”  Now I’m told it will probably take another two weeks to get the cord in that should fix the problem.

In the meantime, Bill and I will continue to mute the TV set whenever we need to communicate.  

This is one of those times when getting old is for the birds.