Bad Housekeeping

Jennie Bovard:
This is Low Vision Moments, the podcast all about those sometimes frustrating, potentially embarrassing, but yep, usually pretty comical things that happen when you're just going about your day with a visual impairment, blindness or albinism. I am Jennie, I host this hot mess, I mean this podcast, I host this thing and a little bit about myself. I usually like to consider myself a glass-half full kind of person, don't we all love a good cliche? But I'm generally optimistic, I guess, I like to try to think that way and I can be independent to a fault. But when you're blind or have some kind of visual impairment, it's been my thought recently because this happened to me recently that if you drop said half-full glass and it breaks and the glass frigging flies everywhere, when you're blind or visually impaired, do you not feel kind of screwed in that moment?
Yes, there are techniques and things that you can do to clean it up safely, but I had this happen recently and I was like, "Well, I'm fucked until someone with good eyes can come along and do a second spot check." So my guest and I are going to discuss this, I can't wait to get their take on what I just said and many other household chores because this episode, I'm going to call this one Bad Housekeeping. My guest today has been what I would call a fixture, they have been with Blind Sports Nova Scotia since I joined the organization like a decade ago. We've played goal ball together and they bake a mean batch of brownies, so we've got that baking thing in common as well. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Courtney:
Thanks. My headset slipping. There we go.

Jennie Bovard:
What frigging timing?

John Courtney:
Perfect. You were talking, I just felt it starting to slip a little bit [inaudible 00:02:09] I better fix it before I talk, otherwise it's going to fall off because that's happened to me in meetings before, you just hear boom and in my head it's like, "I have to fix my headset."

Jennie Bovard:
I'm really good at whacking the mouthpiece of my headset with my hand because I talk with my hands when I have my Zoom headset on for work, but John, I want to welcome you to the podcast. What do you want the people to know about you?

John Courtney:
I guess my name is John, I work as a software developer, I love music and like you said, goal ball, you and I have goal ball in common and the other things I like. It's funny being a blind guy, I'm a big car racing fan, which seems kind of funny to some people, but I've been watching that for 30 years and then once you get into that it's like either you love it or you hate it and I'm on the love it side, for sure. So into lots of different things, so yeah, that's just a little bit about me.

Jennie Bovard:
Yeah, I can't wait to get back on the goal ball court, but I'm curious to know what do you think about my opening remark about if you drop a glass, what do you do? How do you feel about it? Are you like, "Well, I'll do what I can."? And then I always need to get a second pair of eyes, working eyeballs in there.

John Courtney:
That's what happened to me. I remember this same sort of thing happened to me once, but it was like with bowls, I was doing something, I forget I was either putting bowls away and I dropped one. And I remember the race was over and my mom had come over actually and I was trying to put one bowl away and then I dropped a second bowl. So there was two bowls broken on the floor, so I had to go find a broom and start cleaning up and my mom's just like, "Don't move, I'll get the broom."

Jennie Bovard:
Because it can fly so freaking far, I'll find pieces of glass months later if I don't have someone. And you know what? There's no perfect system, even if you're fully sighted, there's a good chance you're going to miss something that flew off in the corner.

John Courtney:
It just literally goes into a little corner somewhere and then you find it, but if it ever happens to me, say if I'm working from home one day and I break a glass or something, it's just like, "Well I'll just slip on shoes for the rest of the day."

Jennie Bovard:
So you don't have pets, see if you got pets, it's like,-

John Courtney:
I got to get it.

Jennie Bovard:
"I've got to try to get this up."

John Courtney:
You don't want your dog or cat getting into it, right?

Jennie Bovard:
Exactly. I have another question, and you can tell me to frig off if you don't want to answer this, but I love to learn how other people live, how other people do things. You and your lovely wife, how do you guys divvy up the housework?

John Courtney:
It's like a lot, Robin and I are both pretty equal on things. There's things like just doing the dishes, I like to dry them more than wash so usually she'll wash and I'll dry and I'm pretty good with laundry. We could talk about that a bit, I mean we have these things in our dryer, they're like these little dryer balls, they're made of yarn.

Jennie Bovard:
Yeah, I've heard of these.

John Courtney:
And they're fairly brightly coloured, so we looked them at the store one time, we thought these will probably work because our dryer, especially you're washing goal ball stuff on Sunday, there's something with plastic in it that's usually pretty loud that you're washing. So these actually work out pretty well, they make stuff quieter, they kind of dampen your dryer, they bounce around. But because they're meant to be quiet, these little balls, if they ever fall out somewhere on the floor, it's like they're silent and they just roll somewhere. So at the end, I'm putting laundry away and I'm like, "There's normally tree balls, why is there's only one?" And I'm like well, I go back and I check the dryer. I was like, "Well maybe there's one inside of there." If I'm lucky, there is and if I'm not lucky, it's somewhere on our floor. And we have a great place here, we're really lucky because we actually have two sets of washers and dryers. It's really weird because-

Jennie Bovard:
Oh my God, stop bragging. That's not a good way to make friends John, people listening are going to be like, "What tax bracket is this guy in?" Sorry, go ahead.

John Courtney:
This place before, I guess they kind of had an illegal rental at the time. So they had a just a fridge and a washer and dryer and a bathroom downstairs, and then upstairs here where we mostly live up here in our second floor, we have a washer and dryer in our kitchen on the other side. So it's kind of nice.

Jennie Bovard:
Do you use them both?

John Courtney:
Sometimes we use the one downstairs because it used to be an apartment downstairs, if say, Robin, my wife's parents, they come over, they spend a few days here. Usually, they come down maybe two, three times a year. They'll spend a few days and they can stay downstairs. So when they're down here, usually they'll wash their sheets, they'll use our dishwasher downstairs and stuff that we don't normally run. I should have sort said there's a dishwasher downstairs too, there's two of them. It's like crazy.

Jennie Bovard:
Oh my God.

John Courtney:
So they'll run our washer, so our washer gets run downstairs maybe two or three times a year but we mainly use the one upstairs.

Jennie Bovard:
That's actually a really nice option to have for guests, right, if you can, I would say that's pretty rare. But the dryer ball thing, I tried those too, they're supposed to be a fabric softener, right? Isn't it? Or keep static away, that kind of thing.

John Courtney:
It's the static and I think it's the noise too, and I don't think ours do the fabric thing, but ours are just like-

Jennie Bovard:
Okay.

John Courtney:
When I looked at them it's like I thought, "Hey these are bright, I'll be able to find them if they ever fall out." And that's never the case because I have one last week where one was on the floor and I kicked it at one point and actually it hit my office door here. And it's a really unfair game of pool because you can hear it hit stuff and then you don't know where it goes after that.

Jennie Bovard:
It's not like goal ball where there's a bell in the ball that will help you tracker down. I'm not as smart as you, my dryer balls, I only have two of them, interestingly enough, it only came with two, and they're gray so they're not super easy to find. They blend in with the inside of the dryer, they blend in if they get mixed into the laundry and then if they fall, mine are like plasticy, they're the recycled plastic type material. They will roll for a frigging days and it's just gone, I lost one of those balls for so long that I was like, "Screw it, I'm not using these anymore." And then eventually I found it, it had rolled off into a corner in the basement but sometimes I'm just so stubborn. Obviously, I could have asked for help tracking it down, but I don't know, sometimes I'm just like, "This is too time-consuming, it's too much. I'm just not using these balls anymore." And then I kind of forgot about it and then lo and behold, you stumble upon it later on.

John Courtney:
So stuff like that always shows up to you after you're like, "I've given up totally and I just went and bought a new thing." And then you have an extra one.

Jennie Bovard:
And I have to say, full disclosure here, I didn't realize how bad I was at housekeeping and keeping my house clean until some years after I bought a house. And I sort of gained this new mindset, I've always been good at keeping my laundry done and that kind of thing, but I want to make sure things are dusted and I want to make sure the floors are relatively clean and these kinds of things. And when you own a home, they're always chores and projects and things that need to get done, but I'm more talking about the everyday stuff and I've come up with some tactics that kind of work. I try to clean things on a schedule, right? So I'll do all the dusting and the mirrors and the floors at least once a week on a weekend kind of thing and so that helps me keep on top of these things.
But there are some things that I don't do weekly, I don't necessarily do on a super regular basis and one of my aha moments where I realized I really need to figure out how to get my act together with keeping my house cleaner. Because this aha moment was one day, I don't know why I was, I think I was in the washroom getting something out of the shower area, I think it was a face wash or something, I was getting out of the shower area. And so I'm leaning in there and I've got my glasses on and I was like, "Holy Moses, the shower, when did this get so scummy and dirty and disgusting?" And I had this moment where I was like well no wonder I'm not normally wearing my glasses, number one, when I'm in the tub or in the shower to see that this area is getting dirty. And then even if I do have my glasses on, I've got to be an inch away from the tile or whatever just to see if something has built up.
So that's something, I had this aha moment, it was like, "Oh my god." And the other thing is why didn't anyone tell me? Why didn't my husband tell me that it was getting this gross? And it's just like keep the shower curtain closed or if you have a door type deal, just keep it closed and if you have guests over, there'll be none the wiser. But I don't know. Is Robin, your wife, ever like, "Hey John, the trash is starting to overflow, it's time to take it out." Do you help each other out like that or would that be annoying to you?

John Courtney:
We have a schedule with things, I'm usually the guy that takes out the recycling or the garbage, so I do that every week and I've gotten a little system now at least where stuff mostly stays in the can. Although there's times, I have to be careful because I only have one eye that works, my right eye works a little bit and my left one doesn't so I don't have any depth perception so it's like I try and be clever. It's like, "I'm just going to throw something in the laundry basket or in the garbage." And then oops, well apparently my wife says, "You don't hit on target every time, you miss because no depth perception, there's no way." So literally I have to be extra careful, if I'm putting something in the garbage, I'll try and make sure I have to touch the garbage can and say, "Okay, here, it's actually going in the can." Because otherwise I'm not as sure, she was just telling me that the other day, it's like John, "When you floss sometimes you try to put it in the garbage and it doesn't go in."

Jennie Bovard:
I was just going to use that example, I can't even tell you, that's so funny. I was going to use that exact same example because I've got one of these bins in my washroom and it's got a lid, but it's one of those floppy lids so you can just push stuff in. I don't know how to explain it other than it's one of those, it's a flat lid where you can push stuff in.

John Courtney:
It's like what they used to have at the McDonald's right where you have the thing and it would-

Jennie Bovard:
Yeah.

John Courtney:
Remember you were a kid you'd like press on it, you make it spin and be like [inaudible 00:13:34] that thing.

Jennie Bovard:
Yes, exactly. But so often I'll be cleaning up something else down in that area, I'll be sweeping up the sweepings on the floor and there's just floss hanging out of the trash can. And again, I don't know what it is, maybe I need to tell my husband you need to tell me when this stuff is getting dirty. I'm not going to take it as, "Hey put your apron on and get back to cleaning." I'm not going to take it like that, I'm going to take it as a hey it's maybe time to clean the tub because it's getting gross in there.

John Courtney:
Sometimes I can tell, if you step in the tub and you can tell when it's grimy. You're like, "This probably needs-

Jennie Bovard:
Totally.

John Courtney:
And then you could tell when it's cleaner because then you walk in and you almost slip and fall because [inaudible 00:14:24].

Jennie Bovard:
Yes. Once it's been cleaned you have to be a little bit careful, yeah, when it's freshly cleaned. That's another one of my tactics, I can't really tell when shit's getting dusty and usually I dust on a regular basis on a bit of a schedule. But window sills, I don't dust my window sills every week, I just don't have time for that.

John Courtney:
That's in the Spring and Fall type thing.

Jennie Bovard:
But I'll touch something and like, "That's really dusty." Because I can feel it collecting and that's one of the only ways I can tell if stuff is dusty to be honest. But you mentioned depth perception, that my friend is something I can relate to and when we're recording this, we haven't had snow yet, but it's coming. And something that we share, my husband and I, is the shovelling duties, we don't have a snowblower, we just shovel, well we don't have a car either. So unless we're having company that has a car, we'll just shovel a footpath and that's it, as long as we're getting our mail and we can get in and out, we're good. But for me, I don't do a great shovelling job. I want to know, do you do the shovelling?

John Courtney:
Yep, I do. Because especially in the Winter and especially this Winter [inaudible 00:15:42] because past couple years really now since the pandemic, I've also been working from home. So it's like we can do this, we can work from home, so I've [inaudible 00:15:54] in the Winter, "If it's going to snow at all, I'm going to stay at home." So usually, especially this past Winter where I was home all Winter anyway, my wife where she works, she has to pretty much be on site more than I have to be, just sitting here basically programming all day. So if it snows and I hear the freezing, that's the thing I tell is when it's snowing and I hear the freezing rain, it's like cancel all my meetings. I hear stuff hitting the window. I have to go out and shovel now because it's going to turn to rain.
And then what I do is I find the best way, I do the driveway because here in Nova Scotia, maybe it's a little bit different than say out in the [inaudible 00:16:30] or something, you get snow on top of snow there maybe. But here we'll get snow and then it rains and, especially last Winter, it lasts maybe a day or two and it would be gone.
Because I can pretty easily find the grass, so what I do is I go along each side of the driveway and I kind of just shovel a little bit so I kind of know where the borders are and then I get down to the end and I know where the curve on the street is because it's a bit different than our pavement and our driveway. And then literally after, usually once I get the sides done and then I can just go push the snow one side or the other and then I kind of know I can see where one side and the other side is and then it's just a matter of just getting the middle out.

Jennie Bovard:
Colour between the lines or remove the snow between the lines kind of thing.

John Courtney:
But it's like by the time I get out and shovel, it's usually starting to rain or something, the best day, last Winter I remember I was out shovelling and the snowplow guy was coming by. I don't know if he just saw me out shovelling, just this one guy with just a little shovel because we don't have a snowblower either. We kind of like to get one, you can actually get ones with batteries now. If we get a little shed, we'd like to maybe get our lawn done next Spring and if we do that we'd like to get a little shed. But you can get battery-powered once now, it's like you don't have to worry about putting gas in it, it'll probably still break down like snowblowers do, but at least you don't have to worry about those moving parts.
But yeah, sorry what I was saying, on a tangent, I was out doing the driveway, I was doing pretty good I thought. And I was just about to do the end where the snowplow was coming by and it had gone by a little bit earlier because I don't know if your street's like this, but they go by about 10 times during a storm I think just to make sure they get all the snow. So the guy comes along and-

Jennie Bovard:
They don't do my street that often, I think the part of town I live in, they're like, "yeah they can wait."

John Courtney:
But the guy came and he kind of went in and he pushed away a lot of the snow and I was just like, "You're awesome."

Jennie Bovard:
Because normally they pile it, it kind of piles in so like I said, we just shovel enough to walk out unless we're having people over that have a vehicle, then we'll make sure that they can get their vehicle in the driveway or actually just park out front sometimes. But whenever I shovel, because I don't have good depth perception, there are no straight lines in my life there, I can't draw a straight line unless there's a ruler involved. There are no straight lines, I can barely walk in a straight line, sobriety test, that needs to be different for us.
But every time I shovel, and again, I really only realize this once we got our own home and I had to start shovelling because when you rent, the landlord comes and does it usually pretty quickly. It looks like someone who's drunk did it, so until my neighbours got to know me and most of them know that I'm visually impaired now, I assume that they thought some lush lived here and tied if you want, every time they came out to shovel because it's so jagged and there are no straight lines whatsoever.

John Courtney:
That's what I'm like with the lawn, I find if I can see because there's enough contrast between the snow and the driveway that she helps me [inaudible 00:20:07] and then I know, "Okay-

Jennie Bovard:
You mow the lawn?

John Courtney:
Yep.

Jennie Bovard:
Man, I don't know, I'm scared of the lawn mower

John Courtney:
Because like I was telling you with the battery snowblowers they have now, it's the same brand that does our lawn mower. We bought one of those battery-powered mowers when we first got our house here, I think it was 2015. And the nice thing is, well my wife said I got it because there's no cord, there's nothing to mess it up, you can mow the lawn.

Jennie Bovard:
Well, that's a really good point because I think that's mostly what I would be scared of is the cord and all that.

John Courtney:
Because I'd be scared of [inaudible 00:20:45].

Jennie Bovard:
But you know what-

John Courtney:
I would've totally run it over if we had had a cord by now, we would've been on our 20th cord by now if it was.

Jennie Bovard:
I'm scared to run over the neighbourhood cat, but obviously a cat, they're going to run away, they're not going to hang out near a running lawn mower unless it's a quiet battery-powered one.

John Courtney:
Actually, it's not that quiet, I have to wear hearing protection, basically like I'm preparing for to be killed somehow. I'm wearing hearing protection, I've got safety glasses on, if it's sunny out, I'm wearing a hat so I don't get burnt.

Jennie Bovard:
Yeah.

John Courtney:
I'm wearing jeans in case something flicks up from the mower because I can't see anything that's going on, I'm just going and kind of hoping for the best. And my wife says I do about 80/90%, which she says any part of the launch he doesn't have to do is great so we kind of worked out that way.

Jennie Bovard:
I don't know why I just thought of this, but it makes me think of if I tried to cut my own hair, 80/90% is not fucking good enough for a haircut but a lawn, I think that's good. I want to know anybody in the audience, anyone listening or watching, do you mow your own lawn? Are you blind or visually impaired and mow your own lawn? I haven't quizzed it, I haven't surveyed enough people about this and I'm really curious. Do you know other people who mow their own lawn who are blind? And I use the term blind loosely, right?

John Courtney:
Yeah. I like blind, sometimes I try to say visually impaired and it's like, [inaudible 00:22:24]. And blind's just easier and with my case where I have a little bit of vision and I have one eye that really doesn't work at all. It's like you can call me blind, you can call me visually impaired, I'm like I'm visually impaired, just call me blind. It's all right.

Jennie Bovard:
Yeah. Anyway, it's neither here nor there, blind is a spectrum, I think we need to start owning that word. I wear glasses and I still say I'm blind, that's for other people to try and understand, maybe I'll educate one day if I feel like it. But anywho, I digress as I often do on this podcast, I can't forget this, I need to tell you this because we were just talking about shovelling and I remembered last Winter when pandemic stress was at an all-time freaking high and it was the middle of a storm and the plows were certainly not on my street yet, they might have been on yours. I don't know, they leave my neighbourhood till the very last. I'm on a cul-de-sac so I think it's easier to forget about us. Anyway, pandemic stress was at its height and I think it was a thing of I don't know what we're going to be able to do for the holidays if my family's going to be able to come here the borders.
I don't remember what was going on, but it was pandemic stress at its height and it was storming. I had already shovelled our driveway, our little walkway out, and don't I continue shovelling, I shovelled the whole block, I shovelled the whole sidewalk. I just kept going because it was such good stress relief, it was such a good distraction and all I could think was, and I wear fit over sunglasses, they're like these big old sunglasses that fit over my regular gl. And the stereotyped is older people would wear them, but that's not true, I've been wearing them for a long time. So as I'm shovelling the whole street, I'm wondering are there neighbours looking out their window and thinking, "That blind neighbour of ours, does she know that she's shovelling in front of our house? Does she know she's shovelling our walkway, the sidewalk in front of our place?" And then I just imagine someone else telling him, "No, don't tell her. Just let her-

John Courtney:
Just let her thing.

Jennie Bovard:
- do it." Yeah, just let her do it then no one else has to do it.

John Courtney:
Because I know now they're supposed to come and do the sidewalks, right, but it depends. Right? Usually that takes a day or two.

Jennie Bovard:
You can't rely on them.

John Courtney:
Yeah. We don't actually have any sidewalks on our street here, but it's pretty wide so I mean pretty good to get around, but we don't have to worry about the sidewalk at least.

Jennie Bovard:
Is there anything else you wanted to chat about before we go John?

John Courtney:
I'm trying to think. I don't know, we were talking yesterday, if you can get post-production, I love sound effects. So get your guy to throw in some random sound effects maybe for some of our low vision moments, the sad trombone.

Jennie Bovard:
Okay.

John Courtney:
We should totally do that because I used to love that, they don't do that in radio anymore. When you're a kid, you'd hear the radio people and they'd be goofy and they'd be like, "It's going to rain a lot today." And they'd have the toilet flush sound effect, it's like why do people not do that anymore?

Jennie Bovard:
I do know exactly what you mean and let me tell you, we are not above funny sound effects.

John Courtney:
I've got some, I've got a box here just a minute.

Jennie Bovard:
Let's do it, let's see what you got.

John Courtney:
This is the one. Yeah, so this is the one here, if I hold it up like this, can you see it's like a

Jennie Bovard:
I can, it's a little red box.

John Courtney:
- little red box and this is $10 at Mastermind Toys and it was a few months ago, actually, it was probably in the Spring because we were getting a present for our four-year-old niece and we were at the store and my wife walked by this and she's like, "John, it's for three and up, do you want this?" And I was like yes.

Jennie Bovard:
That's an open age range.

John Courtney:
Yes, I do. So it was Easter and we had these out, this is the one they liked the most. There we go, can you hear that? Someone screaming, [inaudible 00:26:53] to be closer.

Jennie Bovard:
- scream. No, I think that sounds good, I could hear that.

John Courtney:
But for the size of this thing, it's like it's very loud.

Jennie Bovard:
Thank you so much, John, for chatting and making me laugh.

John Courtney:
It's a banter day for this podcast.

Jennie Bovard:
Thank you so, so much for tuning in, for listening and watching. I had no idea we could have so much fun talking about housekeeping and chores, but here we are and that was a lot of fun. Have you got any feedback or suggestions for the podcast? I would love to hear from you, send an email to podcasts@ami.ca or leave a voicemail at +1 866-509-4545. One more time, that phone number is +1 866-509-4545. Just make sure to mention Low Vision Moments in the message please and thanks. Come and follow me on Instagram, I'm there under Uberblonde4, that is U-B-E-R-B-L-O-N-D-E and the number four. Mark Aflalo is our technical producer who does a great job at cleaning up after me, thank you so much. And thanks to manager at AMI Audio, Andy Frank, he seems like a pretty tidy dude if I do say so myself. Until next time, remember, it's only human to have toothpaste stains on your mirror. Hear me out, you're not human unless you have some toothpaste stains on your mirror every once in a while.