Day 110: Indulgence and Archery and Progressive Dinner

Today was Saturday.  It's nice to have a little break from getting up early and working hard.  They may be planting strawberries today but I decided that I didn't care, and that I needed a little break.  I was still up at 8am, though, and I made some ginger scones from Anica's tried and true recipe.  They are delicious!  My flatmates appreciated them too. 

Next it was off to the Ellerslie Convention Center where there was a show on called Indulgence.  It was supposed to be for Mother's Day, I think and was billed as "Everything a Woman could want."  I don't know about that, but there were a lot of nice things there.  I went because Alex was there selling salmon for her company and she had an extra ticket.  I wandered around, trying samples of salmon, and wine, and elderberry liqueur (yummy) and cucumber vodka and fancy cheeses and amazing yogurt and chocolate.  I learned that hot smoked salmon has a nicer texture than cold smoked salmon.  Regal Salmon (Alex's company) does a really nice black pepper and herbs hot smoked salmon.  I ate a lot of it.

I left the show at about 1pm and headed into town to catch up with Youthtown again.  Brian and Chris were doing an archery session for a group of kids and adults with cochlear implants, and Brian said if I wanted to volunteer I was welcome to come and help out.  Cochlear implants are an implant that allows a profoundly deaf or hearing impaired person to have a sense of sound.  I was interested to meet the kids and also to help with archery so I went along.  People who have had a cochlear implant still have to wear a hearing aid and have a little clip that attaches to their hair, but otherwise there's no way of telling that their ears don't work normally.  I noticed that a lot of the girls wore their hair down to cover their ears, and some wore hats that made the hearing aids less noticeable.  We had a group of about 15 or so, and we had a fun time, doing archery and playing archery games.  Sometimes I had to speak loudly (because it was noisy where we were) to make sure they could hear and understand me, but for the most part they were like any other group of kids.

I did a little bit of reading on cochlear implants and apparently it depends on how old you are when you get one as for how well it will work.  People who are born deaf and get them when they are very young do the best, because their brains have to learn to interpret the sounds they are being supplied with.  If someone can hear and learns to speak and then becomes deaf, they may also do well with an implant because they already know how to process sound.  But someone born deaf who doesn't receive an implant until they are an adolescent may never learn to speak or be able to understand speech.  This is because their brain may have taken the space normally used to interpret sound and started using it for other processes.  Apparently after a certain age, if you haven't learned to speak, you never will.  And apparently cochlear implants, while allowing people to hear, don't provide the same quality of sound that a hearing person would experience, but they do provide enough meaningful sound to interpret speech and other auditory information.

When I got home from archery I headed out with Antz to a progressive dinner that his church's youth group was doing.  We travelled to four different houses and ate yummy food: appetizers at one house, then soup and bread, then chicken wings, salad and garlic roasted potatoes, and then an amazing dessert spread: lemon merigue squares, eclairs, ice cream and fruit.  Everything was really delicious and no one was lacking in things to eat!  It was fun to hang out with people and visit some new locations in my neighborhood.  Oh yeah, and it was a funny hat and/or wig theme: everyone had to have a funny hat and/or wig.  Antz let me borrow one of his.  I wore a cowboy hat for the evening.