Saturday, February 26, 2022

 Saturday, February 26, 2022

    My left foot bothered me after my morning walk with Elsa. My calf felt tight. When I sat with my foot on the floor, I could feel the tension running up my leg. I iced it. The problem was all the muscles in the leg. Question: Is the pain coming from the foot and affecting my calf muscles and all the other muscles in my leg? Or is the problem coming from my hip and spreading down? Or is the problem coming from my ankle? Maddening.

   I got Wordle on the fifth try today. I made a mistake on the fourth try. I used two letters I had already eliminated.  

    The M& W sisters’ mom texted me to ask if I could meet after four today instead of 9 am.  

With first grade M, I started working on automatic processing. Her decoding skills are much better. While she had plenty of decoding training from the Orton Gillingham tutor on Oahu and me, she didn’t apply that knowledge until her teachers showed her ‘decoding.’ Then she started using it regularly. I didn’t have to do BrainManagementSkills with her. I just had to remind her to give her mind the letters before she asked her mind to tell her the word. First, we went through the paragraph practicing automaticity and then decoding, using a variation on Phase I.

    With fifth grade W, I continued working on editing her latest story. This is the first one she’d dictated that didn’t hang together. It had irrelevant additional and missing information. Today was the second day I did EFT on her discomfort with reading and writing. It seemed to help.

    It was another low-key day. It wound up being fix-it day. I glued my mother’s broken trivet and the arm on my wonky butler, which is really a wine bottle holder. 

     Part of the garden watering system got fixed too. When I spoke to Mei and Peter over the fence, I commented on my watering problems. We’ve had a bad drought for about a month. The plants were suffering. I told Peter I couldn’t even get the garden hose to work, no less the sprinkler system. He came over promptly to check. Oh, boy. He figured out nothing was wrong with the pipe; there was a toggle switch on the hose I hadn’t turned on. This allowed me to water much of the strip along the driveway, but not as much as I wanted to. 

   It was a new hose I bought on Judy’s glowing recommendation. It doesn’t have to be coiled. It doesn’t get any kinks, and it is elastic. The hose wasn’t long enough for my needs. Peter said it was a 100-foot hose when I had it all stretched out. When I finished watering the area and put the whole hose back, I could see it was only a 50-foot hose. It had stretched out that far, and I still couldn’t reach the entire area. I promptly ordered another hose.

    I also showed Peter one of the places where the pipes in the sprinkler system were broken. He said, “Oh, that’s easy. Go to Home Depot, buy a 45-degree half-inch elbow PCV pipe and some cement, and I’ll fix it. I was in my car and on my way before you could say Jiminy Cricket.

I hadn’t been able to find anyone to fix it. Scott and B were too busy, as I were the two professionals in this field I had contacted. I contacted Peter when I got back from Home Depot. He was over with his tool kit after his lunch. He had it fixed in no time. Later that night, we ran the sprinkler for 10 minutes. It will take several days before the plants recover from their deprivation.

   I did no work on the updates and blog except jotting down some notes. I did watch at least one video on Brainspotting. It’s an interesting idea.

    I found a feel-good movie on Netflix, Then Came You. Lovely.