Friday, April 29, 2022

 Friday, April 29, 2022

 

    I woke up early and did slow releases in the vein of MicroMoves. I couldn't sleep. I was anxious about cleaning the house before Damon, Cylin, and August arrived. There was lots to do. I got up before 5 am and worked on the glass shower door to the outside. I used bottled olive oil rather than Pam oil, which is recommended for removing water and soap residue.   The Dawn dish detergent rinse I used didn't remove the oil. I checked the Internet for how to remove grease. They recommended a water mixture and vinegar to get grease off windows. Grease often gets on kitchen windows because of cooking oils. The vinegar helped, but the oil was too heavy to do the job on one pass. It was going to take more work. The glass looked pristine afterward. 

    When I finished with the door, I went into the library to get it ready for August. It has an air-conditioning wall unit. Damon thought August would love to sleep there. I dusted the shelves and washed a section of the floor with my Bissel. I was amazed. The floor wasn't that dirty. My carpets are the worst. The other rooms' floors get filthy because they are more open to the outside.

   At 7 am, I left for my appointment with Katie at Hawaiian Rehab. I started by going over the exercises she gave me. I needed help understanding part of the instructions. What did doing 1-3 sets 1-3 times a day mean? Each set had ten reps. I had trouble communicating what my confusion was. Was I supposed to do ten reps, walk away and come back to do a second? She explained that 10 was an arbitrary number. You're supposed to do as many as you can at a time. If you can only do five, do five. If you can do sixty, do sixty. Do as many as I can at one time. I did a good job on most of the exercises. Just the one with the back brush needed more attention. Trying to incorporate that exercise into my walk wasn't working.

   Katie did more work on my kneecap, loosening all the muscles in the leg. I told her what the doctor told me about the contraption I would be in for them to do the operation. Egad! https://muvehealth.com/hana-tables-101/. I want the doctor to allow me to experience the boots and the movement before I go under. I want my body to be familiar with everything and know it all has my consent. 

   I headed to Target after PT. I had seven items. I estimated $10 an item for a total of $70. It came to $54. I was surprised. I bought six frozen dinners, a container of Clorox 2, and a squeegee.

   I had an appointment with the acupuncturist. I asked her to work on my inner left leg. She often does good work. Today she pushed a little too hard. Not that causing pain is always wrong, but I prefer a subtler approach, easing the body into a new pathway. She also did nothing with that left inner thigh I was concerned about. It was very taut. It would cause problems during the surgery. 

    I developed an approach I call Micromoves, involving very subtle movements. The other day I asked my PT, Terry, if she would use it. This is the first practitioner who has been willing to try it. While I have shown it to others, Terry is the only one who responded, "I might be able to use this with some of my clients." Because of her response, I felt free to ask her. I directed her to move my left foot back and forth from side to side with very slow, very slow movements and stop when she reached resistance and head back the other way. I told her I thought this would impact my tight inner thigh muscles. She said, "You know I will only move your ankle joint?" Yes, indeed. But I also knew it would impact my whole body. Everything is connected. I was surprised by her response. She worked on me in this vein for about 10 minutes. I felt a tremendous difference—the most significant difference after a single short treatment.  

    Elsa and I went up to Paulette to get water. Judy was there too. I told them the story of a new scam going around a friend had fallen for. She got a call out of the blue from the "Amazon Fraud Department." Someone had made a $900 purchase on her account. $900 is not a chump change for my friend. She was anxious to regain her money. While she kept saying, "This sounds like a scam," she followed all their directions and bought gift cards. Why? Something about tricking the scammers to find them. Rule: never give money, any information, or access to your computer.

     Aware of the scam and trying to convince my friend to get off the phone, I tried to reach Customer service at Amazon. They no longer have that handy 'by phone' option. I called a number and got a busy signal. Can you imagine a busy signal, not even, "Your wait time will be two hours?" You can no longer have an Amazon customer service person call you. After getting a busy signal several times, I managed to get through to someone. Yes, someone had ordered a phone on her account. Yes, they had a fraud division. No, Peter Williams was not an employee at Amazon. He was probably the one who ordered the phone on her account. He took control of her phone and brought up her bank account on his instructions. 

   While my friend didn't respond to my cries of alarm, her husband finally put a stop to it. He heard her on the phone, realized what was happening, grabbed the phone from her hand, and told the scammers where to go. In the meantime, my friend had ordered $3,000 in gift cards. She managed to get her money back. There were a few tense days.

   Tommy, my tech, stopped over to download the three videos The Phonics Discovery System videos posted on YouTube onto my computer. I can access them through Google Docs and go onto Movies on my Microsoft program.  

     The tech told me he was getting a dog. A friend of his girlfriend was getting rid of one. This woman had opened a dog training business with her boyfriend, who had recently been sent to jail for something. The dog was his, and she already had four. When the boyfriend was arrested, she ran a check on him. Nothing he told her about himself was true. He wasn't a veteran. He hadn't gone to a friend's funeral; it was the funeral of his eleven-year-old daughter. Oh, and why was this poor woman in a wheelchair? She and her boyfriend were fighting while driving on a freeway. She demanded to be let out of the car. He stopped right then and there. She got out and was hit by another car doing 70 miles an hour. One of those TV shows that tell of horrible things happening to people would be interested.

   I got back into watching The Crown. I put off watching the next series because Margret Thatcher is in it. That woman gives me the creeps.