Friday, October 14, 2022

 Friday, October 14, 2022

   It was a bad day. I had been feeling on the verge of tears for a while. It was irritating and made me jumpy. Today, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I called Jean, my Hanai sister, to unload. She was fantastic. She was comforting and encouraging, all in the proper proportions. Before I spoke to her, I felt I would have to take radical action. Afterward, I felt so much better. I could live with the situation and make small changes.

  Today was a day to pick up more Kangen water from Paulette. It is always an opportunity to sit with her, visit, and talk about nothing in particular. It’s so relaxing. It is the one thing I don’t share with anyone else. Just hanging is what I loved doing with Mike. It was delicious. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we didn’t even do that. It was just wonderful being in the same space.

   Our house in Hawaii was wonderful because it’s all on the same floor. Our home in Ohio was spread over three floors; it was a two-story house with a finished basement. Mike and I were often on different floors. It made me sad. I identified this problem one summer vacation when renting a house on one floor. No matter where he was, I felt his presence. I don’t know why someone being on a different floor isn’t as good.

      Elsa loves to visit Paulette. When I drive up there, Elsa sits on my lap. As I turn into the driveway, she ducks under my left arm, ready to leap out of the car and run to Paulette’s door. When I open the door, I yell, “Here she comes!” Paulette has a cat and cat toys. She throws a little stuffed mouse to Elsa the whole time we’re there. Today, Paulette worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Her grandnephew, Leon, came up to work on it with her. I choose not to indulge.

  When I got home, I prepared a mix of one gallon of 30% vinegar, one gallon of 5% vinegar, and a dash of dish soap and sprayed the rest of the front yard and the back lanai for weeds. The stuff does an amazing job.

  When I worked with ninth-grade K today, I gave him a choice of continuing with the grade-level material we had been working with or using something at a lower level but not as low as what I had started with. He said he wanted to continue with the grade-level material. It didn’t sound like an ego-defending position. Today, he did much better with the WbyW exercise, where I asked many questions about a single sentence. He also said he was better able to understand what others said. Wow! He had already experienced an improvement in his auditory processing. Problems can occur at different levels, phonemic, syntactical, and semantic, at the microstructural or macrostructural level.

      I watched more of The Good Cop with Tony Danza and Josh Groban. It wears thin quickly. Josh plays a nerdy nerd -that’s nerdier than a regular nerd. I watched a video of him singing in a concert; he looked like a stud. Great acting! My best guess is he comes closer to being the nerd in real life than the stud.

     I took on a twenty-foot haole koa tree today. I sprayed a rusted collapsible bow saw with WD40 at regular intervals. This wasn’t as difficult as it sounds. The trunk of this haole koa was no more than six inches in diameter. I planned to try the boiling water trick on this tree. It had worked on smaller ones, three trees between one and two feet tall. In those cases, I didn’t cut the tree back. I poured the boiling water over the whole growth, leaves, stems, and trunk. After three weeks, I saw no new growth. If this works, it would be amazing. These plants are indestructible. My neighbor told me he tried everything, even the most toxic chemical, but never succeeded. He pulled them out by the roots with a truck. They are challenging to pull out once they get over four inches tall. They put down deep roots. I poured an electric teapot of boiling water over the stump daily. I was excited to see what happened.