A year and a half ago I nearly lopped off the tips of the first two fingers of my left hand. They’ve mended, but they’ve never really been the same. A few things have changed around our kitchen since then. I no longer (1) try to slice French bread by holding the loaf in mid-air, (2) I try — I really try — to pay more attention to cooking than to the conversation, and (3) we have a batch of useful new gadgets in case I forget about (1) and (2).
Month: April 2007
My dad now owns a pair of khaki pants from USAJeans.net, makers of pants for people who use wheelchairs. I’ve written about the company previously, and here’s my review of the actual product:
My favorite sets of pliers all have a rubbery surface on the handles, making them easy to hold onto while saying rude things to hardware. Ours came that way, but you can use Plasti Dip to add that same grippy surface to nearly any object you want.
Tools are an obvious choice for coating, since holding firmly on to them is critical no matter you’re doing. But a host of other possibilities come to mind if grasp impairment is an issue. Silverware a little slippery? Dip the handles. Juice glass hard to hold? Dip the lower half. Plates a challenge? Dip the edges (and the bottom, to keep them from sliding). Coffee mug inclined to slide? Dip the bottom. Pencils, Pens? Paint a strip of Plasti Dip where fingers go. Dip the handles of scissors, paint the undersides of rulers, dip the handles on crochet hooks, knitting needles and other craft tools. And so on.
The can says it can be used on virtually any surface: “metal, wood, glass, rubber, concrete, fabic, fiberglass, rope” etc.. The directions call for tying the object to a string, and then dipping it into the can, but the fluid can be brushed on as well. There’s a spray version, too.
Plasti Dip comes in blue, yellow, red, black, white, and (wonderfully) clear. Caswell carries all the colors online. Your local big box probably doesn’t — ours only had the red and black, which I found in the paint department at Home Depot.
Categories
Making Days Meaningful
Kathy Hatfield, who writes a cheerful, anecdotal blog at KnowItAlz, posted an interesting idea. In a post called Giving Back, she writes:
Dad and Katie are volunteering today. When Dad came to live with me, I decided that he should have some activity every day. So, I sent out an email to every non profit in town, offering his volunteer services.
Katie is Kathy’s dad’s companion.
Yes, you get the 78 year old Alzheimer’s patient, but you also get the 22 year old CNA, Katie.
Kathy notes that she chooses the volunteer activities carefully, making sure that they will be fun for her dad, and she’s also ensured success by checking with the organizations first. That last bit is a critical piece, I think, for everyone’s happiness. By matching her dad’s affinities and abilities to the opportunity, and getting the organization’s OK, Kathy’s making sure Dad and Katie will be both welcome and helpful.
The benefits for Kathy’s dad are obvious — he’s out and about, doing things that he’d otherwise not experience, getting mental stimulation that he wouldn’t get at home. I think there are a hidden benefits for Katie, too. Her days are more varied; she’s sharing different experiences with Kathy’s dad, and she gets to “give back”, too.
Image of envelopes (as for stuffing) from Flickr.
MIT is developing a robot named Domo, a humanoid-type machine which is an early version of what one day may be a ‘thinking’ mechanical assistive device. According to Aaron Edsinger, a post-doctoral associate at MIT, the focus is on
. . . making a robot that can function in a real human environment — in someone’s kitchen, for example. Robots that are designed to help people in their homes will have to be able to ignore the clutter found in most environments and focus only on certain stimuli . . .
Julie, at the PSL Fabrication blog, has a great post about a Kansas City burglar who was caught when he left his leg prosthesis at the scene of the crime.
Apparently, there’s more to planning a robbery than just acquiring a weapon. Maybe Julie should write a post on selecting the right prosthesis suspension system . . .
Categories
A Jar Almost Anyone Can Open
My dad’s been craving hard candies lately. He probably shouldn’t eat them (is there anything worse for tooth enamel?), but he doesn’t have medical dietary restrictions, so I picked up a whole slew of candies from the open bins at the local grocery. He wanted the old country store types: root beer barrels, lemon drops, fruit candies — just about everything except licorice and peppermint.
Categories
Easy-to-Use Tab Lifter for Cans
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There are lots of flat, flimsy tab lifters around to use when opening soda pop cans, or cans of soup or tunafish. I find holding on to most of them nearly as difficult as trying to pry the tabs up in the first place. That’s why I like this tab lifter so much. The handle is nice and robust — very easy to hold just by curling your hand around it.
Those of us who have worn eyeglasses forever — say from early elementary school — don’t have to worry much about where we set them down. If your uncorrected sight is as limited as mine is, you learn very quickly to put those babies in the same place every night.
The smallest of my dad’s wheelchairs isn’t especially wide, but it just barely makes it through the kitchen door in our 50 year-old-home. My dad visits us, but if he lived here, the narrow clearance would be a daily inconvenience. Because our walls are lathe-and-plaster, it would be painful, costwise and aesthetically, to widen the doorways by tearing them down.
A less-invasive, easier, and far less expensive alternative is to install offset door hinges. These z-shaped hinges allow the door to swing free of the frame, widening it by approximately 2 inches. They’ll usually replace existing hinges without modification; a little bit of chiseling may be necessary if the plates don’t match perfectly.
You can buy them at Dynamic Living (where you can also read some helpful comments) — local hardware stores may have them in stock as well.