Today was the day that Chet, Randy and I met with Mary Bauer of the Minnesota DHHS, Deaf and Hard of Hearing Division.  It was time well spent!  Mary was very knowledgable and patient and easy to talk to!  She explained much of the technology that is available to help people who are deaf and hard of hearing and had the items there for us to try out.  I had already done some research online on my own, which gave me a good base for asking questions and she was able to answer them all.  The thing that I am most interested in right now is a neck loop.  It is something that you can wear around your neck (sort of reminds me of a lanyard only a little bigger) and you can plug it into anything that you can plug headphones or earbuds into (church assistive listening device, ipod, computers, etc.).  If you have a T coil in your hearing aid (most do now – they are used with telephones) then you can put your hearing aid on the T coil program and it will pick up electromagnetic waves from the neck loop and sound goes directly into your hearing aid!  I tried one out and it was awesome!  Since I already have behind-the-ear hearing aids now, plus wear reading glasses it ends up being a lot of stuff on my ear to add some sort of headphones to that, so this would be great!  We also discussed emergency alerts and things like alarm clocks, etc.  There are a lot of products out there and she gave some recommendations for some she thinks are good.  It was very helpful for me.  Mary also gave us information with additional resources.  It was really fun for me to talk to someone else who is hard of hearing.  She understands the challenges and problems that come up first hand and there were several times she mentioned things in the conversation that I could totally identify with!  We were there for 2 hours and I was pumped when we left!  It was a very good day!