The Joy of Achievement

In October 2007 I wrote about the dystonia that Richard has, and of what can be done about it. He tried the medication, and turfed that because of the negative effects and how it impacted his cognitive thinking and skills. He will try the botox injection, administered into the muscle by a neurologist - but has yet to be contacted about when the clinic will be held. In the meantime he has been looking for ways to deal with the problem and use his left hand more and has made good progress.

• His writing is improving.
• He uses Linux as an operating system on his computer, and has mirrored his keyboard so that he uses only his left hand - q is q, but when he uses the space-bar and presses q it is p - and so on! This you can do with linux but not with windows.
• He has been constructing a one-handed keyboard device. He was sent a blue-print and used it for the physical part, but used a different chip from the one recommended and wrote his own code for it. Today he announced that it was complete and working - and the smile on his face stretched from here to forever. So we celebrated the hard work, time, effort, problem solving and all that had gone into constructing this cunning device.

Here is a picture of the cheese-cake he asked for, and all our smiley faces! The cheese-cake was baked by someone at Spar - whose efforts I really appreciate, having given up baking myself a long time ago!!
Richard is sitting at the top right-hand corner of the table - next to me.