WHAT DID YOU SAY ?
I got my first appointment lined up for the summer: a hearing exam in late July to see which hearing aid I need. An audiologist appointment is one of the few appointments that you can get without a referral from your doctor. And it didn't take a doctor to tell me I couldn't hear; my family tells me that fairly regularly.
Hearing loss is also one of the medical problems that you don't have to prove to the VA that you have. The VA assumes that if you worked in certain jobs, you will have suffered some hearing loss, and working on the flightline around running aircraft every day is one of those jobs, and that's exactly what I did.
We were given hearing protection, consisting of large bulbous headphones that covered our ears, which we called mouse ears. This hearing protection worked better than nothing, but now that I know what real hearing protection looks like, what we were given was the bare minimum, and it's amazing I can hear at all.
Unlike being around loud noises like gunfire, which usually doesn't last for long, when you're working on the flightline with half a dozen C-141s running their jet engines, the screaming engines never stop. The planes change, but you're just trading one screaming jet engine for another, and that goes on for 8 or 10 hours a day, five or six days a week. And in my case, for almost 4 years..... It's little wonder I can barely hear anything my elementary school-age grandkids are saying.
Theboondork
This statue in a Holbrook, Arizona, City Park represents the first Amazon delivery on Route 66, and celebrates getting free three-year delivery times if you're a Prime member. Few people realize that the Pony Express delivered Amazon packages long before UPS showed up on its big brown horses.
As a former business owner, I am very familiar with the path businesses take from start to finish.
One.... A business opens up and starts making some money; everyone is happy.
Two.... The town gets bypassed by a new interstate, and business drops off drastically.
Three.... People in town grow poorer as their jobs disappear.
Four.... Crime rises, and the businesses that are left put bars on the windows and doors to make it harder to steal what few possessions the business owners have.
Five.... The business is put up for sale, but after 15 or 20 years, there have been no offers, so the business owner takes a tax write-off and joins the Foreign Legion.
Yes, that's right, you're actually looking at the world-famous Brad's Desert Inn. I can't believe I was actually allowed to get this close to the world-famous Brad's Desert Inn, considering how many movie stars are coming and going every hour of the day and night. I can't count the movies that were made on these very grounds of Brad's Desert Inn, but trust me, there were plenty! In fact, Brad's Desert Inn is what put Holbrook on the map. So consider yourself fortunate to have actually seen a picture of this hallowed ground.