Friday, March 12, 2021

 Friday, March 12, 2021

             The man who usually mowed our lawn hadn't been available for several months. Yvette was supposed to use his lawnmower to do the job. She had the same reaction I did; that machine was too much trouble to deal with. I thought of buying a lawnmower, a motorized one, but I really don't like them. I saw our next-door neighbor mowing her lawn with a manual one. Ah! That sounds much better. We have an acre, but not much of it is lawn needing to be mowed. The more serious issue is all the ground that has to be weed-whacked.

            I told Dorothy about the lawnmower dilemma. She said Milt had a manual mower; it was a pleasure to use. She thought it was an American Lawn Mower. When she checked with him, it wound up being a German-made mower, a Brill. I saw that I could order a lawnmower on Amazon Prime. While it is not a Brill, the Fiskars had a high rating. Wow! I was on it like a shot. I don't have to pay shipping costs with Prime. I'm sure some assembly will be required. Both Yvette and I hate the machine mowers, noise, and smell. Also, Mike taught me the machine mower had to be serviced every spring. That's a lot of money. The reel one just needs to have its blades sharpened. In the meantime, Yvette's friend Steve brought over his motorized lawnmower and did the job. 

            I asked Yvette if she could help me clean up the shed to fit a lawnmower in. She took over the job. She cleaned out all the unnecessary junk, some for the dump and some to Habitat for Humanity for donation. Besides getting rid of stuff and organizing what was left, she dusted the shelves and vacuumed the floor. It looked spectacular. 

            I had a 9am appointment with Shelly. I saw my sessions with her as a self-indulgence because I love exploring the human psyche; mine is just the most available one. Years ago, I thought of myself as running an experiment with me as the key guinea pig. But nowadays, I have issues to work on. I'm more brittle and reactive. I realize that this has been building up over the last two years. Mike could help me release stress. He was my go-to-guy. I hadn't confronted this fact yet.  

            I find myself getting involved in 'fights' with people in my mind. I haven't done that in years. Between my meditation training and Mike's support, I was free. As I worked with Shelly, l concluded that fighting with people was a way to interact. That's missing from my life now. Why chose that form? It's Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. This is how I related to my mother, non-stop. It wasn't great, but I wasn't alone. I existed in a relationship with another person. I was connected. I did the best I could to learn a different way of relating to people. I managed that with Mike. I did a dynamite job. I was happy in a peaceful relationship. I worked on releasing all that was negative about this other way of relating.

            At some point, Shelly asked me if this was really me or an intrusion of another person, in this case, my mother. I don't know if there is a situation where that question makes sense. I was trained to interact that way in response to her. Calling that an intrusion is like calling my knowledge of English an intrusion rather than my own. If I learned it, it's mine.

            I had a session with D. at 11:30. He read the words with reasonable accuracy, having good comprehension even with some errors. However, I have him working on beginning third-grade inferencing exercises, and he's struggling on that level. We get through one to three passages in a half hour. This is where I started with M.  She struggled with the first exercises. But she is now zooming through 10 to 15 in a session. I had to jump a whole grade level with her.

            I had J at 2:30. We worked out our schedule for next week. California went on daylight savings time; Hawaii doesn't do time switching. If there were no other reason for moving to Hawaii, this would be it. I hate, hate, hate the time changes.

            When we worked together on his comprehension exercise last time, he had all the correct answers except for one out of a good twenty. When I saw the final score, I was surprised at how low it was. He had done some of the work on his own. I asked him if he doubts his first answer. Yes. I pushed him to always go with the first answer. I reminded him how little I contributed to his work yesterday.

            Today we worked on a writing project. It's amazing how computer programs are set up to guide the process. I was impressed with J's understanding of the assignment. I didn't understand why his grades weren't better. I sat and read a book on my own as he did his work. I read ahead to determine where he could find an answer in the Wiki entry.  

            Some say Wiki shouldn't be allowed. In my day, it was the Encyclopedias, Britannia and World. Wiki is basically the same thing. Why shouldn't they use it? 

            After I returned from another brief walk, I went through the PowerPoint Presentation. Again, I made some changes. I was alarmed to find that the title slide was blank. I have no idea why the computer program did that. I couldn't see how to reconstruct it. PowerPoint offered me one design with the same shape but a much darker blue. I like it when the image looks like a cloud. This has to do with the great pleasure I take looking at the clouds during yoga while lying on my back. It also has to do with The Cloud of Unknowing. The book is unreadable, but I love my understanding of the concept of accepting unknowing.

            I had I at 4 pm. She said she followed up on the exercise I gave her to do Phase I, analyzing one sentence's sound-symbol relationship each day. I think her reading sounds better. She thinks her reading sounds better. However, the teacher hasn't heard her read, and she won't read to her mother. We worked on Phase II today, decoding longer words. I pulled some beauties out of the Very Short Introduction to Spinoza. She knew what the vowels were but didn't know the consonants. I went over that briefly. Of more significance, the vowel letters didn't jump off the page and bite her on the nose. I gave her mother an exercise; she had to underline all the vowels in any given text. She didn't have to read the words. The objective is to heighten awareness of the vowel letters. That's it. While she didn't have to read it, I suspect the exercise would be good in any language that used the Roman alphabet. I would still want the student to be working with English spelling and be exposed to the patterns unique to this language.

            Judy and Paulette dropped off two huge bottles of vinegar. Costco said they didn't have vinegar, but here were two bottles from Costco. 

            Tommy, my hero techy, said he was just about to launch my Facebook Page. We'll launch the audio file with it. I'll have to write an article to explain how to use it in more detail. 

            I watched more of Pippin before bedtime. It didn't ring my chimes.