Tuesday, March 1, 2022

 Tuesday, March 1, 2022

 

   I slept well last night, except I had to pee one hundred times. I may need a medical checkup.   I got up early in anticipation of Tuesday’s driveway yoga. There was no activity in the driveway by seven, and Yvette hadn’t texted me to say it was canceled. I texted her to ask what was going on. I still had no response by 8 am. I hoped everything was all right. She called later in the day to say she was only doing yoga on Thursdays for the time being. Too bad. I love yoga. I love doing it in the driveway. I hope I can go back to Bikram soon.

   Today I posted March 1, 2021, on the blog site. I read in my blog entry that I only had one or two hits a day on the blog a year ago.   Now, my daily numbers are all over 100 and often close to 200. My total number of visits as of this morning was over 36,000. Damon said he doesn’t get numbers like that. I don’t know what sites he’s on. I thought his wife made sure he got off all social sites because he drove himself and her crazy, comparing himself unfavorably to others.  

   Now, I am facing low numbers with my videos. I often get no visitors; the numbers remain static. After being posted three months ago, Phase I had 157 visits, and Phase II had 52. The 5 Stories video had over a hundred hits after a month. Because it had to be edited, Tommy took it down, losing all those numbers, and reposted it. After one month, it had twenty visits. 

    I felt shaken. I dealt with several issues I had been putting off. I finally took the necessary steps to get the gravestones for Mike and me finished. I called the engraving company on Oahu, Young Bros, the shipping company here on the Big Island, to find out what I had to do, and the trucking company to arrange for the appropriate packing of the granite slabs I picked out close to a year ago. The slabs were patiently waiting in the back of my car. 

     I spoke to the lawyer I called yesterday to find out what I had to do to secure a Life Estate. I made an appointment with the endodontist to get my root canal, which will cost a mere $2000. He doesn’t accept insurance. Thank you, Medicare, for really screwing all of us.

     I also got to speak to Matthew, the fellow who did the monuments for the church graveyard. He does do cement work. He can make the base, a cement slab that covers the gravesite and supports the monument, in my case, the plaque. Susan said Fr Lio wanted to pay for the cement work. He was prepared to pay for the flat slab; I wanted wedges to hold the engraved gravestones at an angle. The cement grave cover will cost about $2000. I called Susan to tell her. She said Fr. Lio didn’t want to put down the gravestones until my death and internment. He had told me he would roll the large cover off the grave to get me in. Susan said Fr. Lio had observed professional monument makers do that and discovered how hard it is. He no longer wants to do it. I could live another twenty years. Mike’s grave would remain unmarked until then. Everyone will have forgotten who he was by then. Matthew, the cement man, said he could make that large slab with ‘a lid.’  I described it to Susan. She said we should meet with Fr. Lio, Matthew, the cement maker, herself, and me. I called Matthew and told him to schedule an appointment with Susan for Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning and let me know when. This was progress, but it didn’t make me happy. Having to think about a dead Mike is not great.

   Miss Kitty, my accountant, told me documentation was missing. She needed more from Raymond James and a 1099 from another account. When I called Raymond James, Laura told me she could email the missing documentation. She did that for lots of people. I thought all tax information was supposed to be out by January 1. Apparently, that is no longer true. Kitty said that big companies feel no need to comply. I called the other company. Their voicemail said, “To get a 1099, check into the company website and download.” It sounded like they didn’t even bother to send it out. I tried to get on to the website. I don’t know how many times I changed my id and password. None of that worked. I finally spoke to an agent; they emailed it to me. After my rehab appointment, I printed it and dropped it off at Kitty’s office.

  It was time to fill up on Kangen water. I drove up to Judy’s house. I call it her house because she’s my primary relationship. Her husband Howard and her sister Paulette live there too. Paulette is the one who bought the Kangen water filtering machine. She filled my bottles while Elsa ran around. 

    I sat on the open lanai for a while with Paulette. Leon, Judy’s seven-year-old grandson, came up with their puppy in tow. Aya is a labradoodle puppy. She has red hair, rust-colored, and is as sweet as can be, warm and affectionate. Even though she was a female, Elsa didn’t bark at her. She sniffed around her and then rolled over on her back. Elsa doesn’t behave that way with any other dog; she doesn’t behave that way with Mack trucks. She takes on everything. But here, with Aya, she rolled over.  

   Jazzy, Leon’s mother and Judy’s daughter-in-law, came up carrying her two-year-old son, Zion. We all sat around and chatted. I asked Judy if she knew how to get an iPhone out of its case. I tried to clean the phone openings using Q-tips. That didn’t work very well. Judy didn’t know. I asked Jazzy. She showed me to push the phone out from the back, where the camera eye is. Easy peasy. Judy came out. She was going to have to leave in ten minutes. I was going to have to move my car. I got the water and Elsa in the car and left. When I got home, I finally cleaned my phone with rubbing alcohol. 

   I had a rehab appointment with Terry. She expressed amazement at how much progress I’d made. My hips are aligned. I was no longer ‘a twisted sister.’ My progress is this good because I make the changes they recommend with every move. Today, Terry worked on my viscera on the right side of my body. She found the tender spots and worked to get a release.

   I drove to Miss Kitty’s to drop off the 1099 I downloaded this morning. On the way, I stopped off at Dr. Ching’s, the endodontist, to pick up the CD for my panoramic X-rays to take to Dr. Munley when I go over to Hilo for the consultation. I want Dr. Munley to check if I have an abscess on that tooth. I know my primary dentist saw something that concerned him. Dr. Ching was certain I had an abscess. However, there is no swelling as well as no pain. I’d like to have it checked. However, it is probably worthwhile doing anyway. I will need a root canal in that tooth eventually. Might as well do it now when I have the money. 

   Dr. Ching’s business was on my way to Kitty’s bookkeeping. I had the 1099 she needed for my annuity. The Raymond James missing documents were emailed to Ms. Kitty and to me. Laura at Raymond James said they routinely email them to clients. Huh? What happened to mailing them? Miss Kitty printed them out but told me she doesn’t usually do that. It would take too much of her time, not to mention ink and paper.

   I met with adolescent D in the late afternoon. I started as always, asking him if he read in school and how well he did. He told me he tried my method for decoding words, and it didn’t work. He did appreciate that it may not have worked because he couldn’t do it. We worked exclusively on decoding two-syllable words, following the six-step procedure. I led him through it. He could only remember the first step, Identify the Vowel Letters. He had trouble starting with step 2: Identify the vowel sounds. He had no idea which vowel letters made sounds. If the first letter in the word is a vowel letter, one can assume it makes a sound. A lone vowel letter between two consonants makes a sound. I had him say, “It makes a sound because it comes between two consonants.” He had a devil of a time remembering the word consonant. He has an auditory processing problem. He didn’t listen to the audiofile regularly. I have to push him to do that. It might help.  

   There are six steps to decoding multi-syllable words. 1) identify the vowel letters, 2) Identify the vowel sounds, 3) Identify the syllables, 4) Identify which consonants make sounds. 5) blend the sounds in each syllable 6) blend the syllables. Since D struggled with the second step, I asked him if he wanted to limit the work we did or go through each step with each word. He chose to limit what we did to the first two steps. I modeled the remaining four. It was an intense session. The difference in his learning style from when we started is substantial. 

   I started watching the movie Once on Amazon. Someone on Quora recommended it.