Monday, February 27, 2023

 Monday, February 27, 2023

  I woke up before my 5:30 alarm went off. I never get up then, but it reminds me to finish my in-bed exercises. I was done with them and ready to get up, but I didn't. I didn't have anything unpleasant to face. Getting up was better than lying there. I was torturing myself by staying in bed. Why do I do that to myself? Why do any of us do things like that?

   After being plugged in the whole night, my iPhone was only 45% charged. I need to find out what the problem is. If it's a dying battery, I won't be happy. I still need to finish paying off the phone. I hope there's another explanation.    

     I called the dentist's office on my walk. There was a swelling on an upper right tooth. It should be taken care of before I get fitted for my dental implants and bridge. Susan said to come in, and the doctor would fit me in as he could. I started preparing for my trip to the dentist's office when I got home from my walk.  

    I packed my computer to work on my updates and had enough food and water for most of the day. I had to figure I would be sitting there until I had to leave for my rehab appointment at 10:15. If the dentist didn't get to me before 9:45, I would come back after I was done with the PT appointment and sit there until I had to leave for my two pm appointment with Adolescent D.

   I packed the collected cardboard into my car for drop off at the transfer station, my two bags with food and my computer, and headed out. I arrived before nine am. I took out my laptop and got to work. Dr. Kris came to get me within fifteen minutes. He poked around in my mouth. When he hit one spot, I yelped. He was surprised; I was surprised. I hadn't expected it to hurt that much. He told me I had an ulcer. The treatment for it was salt rinses. Done. I knew what to do and left.

   I made a pit stop before I left. Many offices here do not have their own bathrooms. There will be a single set of bathrooms for a whole strip mall. In this case, the whole second floor of a good-sized building. The employees use these bathrooms as well as the visitors. We don't have a sewage system on the Big Island. We have septic tanks and cesspools. Everything has to be dug into hard rock.

   There was no point in going home after I visited the dentist. The drive home would be fifteen minutes. I would have had to turn around shortly and drive half an hour back into town to make my rehab appointment. I thought of a place I could sit and type- the church lanai, a shaded area where I sit for Sunday mass. Even if the church was locked up, the benches would always be there, and I would have access to a bathroom.

    I was surprised to see all the doors of the church were open. The side walls of the church are glass sliding doors. When fully open, fourteen feet of three twenty-foot stretches on both sides of the church are open-air. It's very Hawaiian. It is hot and humid here. Some churches here can't be closed off at all. It's how the native Hawaiians built their homes.

      I settled into a bench on the south lanai, pulled out my computer, and got to work typing up the morning's events. I was concerned that someone I didn't know would come along and tell me to scram. No one did. 

  Fr Lio walked by. He waved to me while he spoke on the phone. Rather than walking away, he came back to talk to me. I told him the wedges were ready to attach the gravestones, but there was no rush. Lord knows I haven't been rushing. I had to wait until everything felt right. After looking at the wedges for the third time yesterday, I'm satisfied they don't look like dirty cement. They're darker and have a sheen to them. I will be okay with them.

    Fr. Lio said he wouldn't be doing them. Ben would do them. I had no idea who Ben is. Is he an employee or a volunteer? Not that it makes any difference.

    It was time to leave for my rehab appointment. I demonstrated my new, improved walk for Katie. She was duly impressed. She said I walked so fast, it was almost a run. I told her about the pain I had under my left ribs. I discovered a tender spot there in my twenties. It usually only bothers me if I press on it. I knew the cause of the tenderness.

   When I was ten, I tripped on a rock and lunged forward. I saw an old-fashioned tent stake, a fat piece of wood driven into the ground, coming up toward my chest. I was afraid if I fell on it, it would strike my heart, and I would be killed. I took enough steps so my upper chest was no longer in danger. However, I didn't avoid it; it hit my left rib cage. I thought, "You're dead." And then I thought, "Thank God it's over." That's not a great thought for a ten-year-old to have. If I'm right about the source of this physical pain, it's been a problem for seventy-two years.

   Katie looked at it and said it was fibrotic, a sign of prolonged inflammation. Since I saw her last, she had taken a course in the lymphatic system. She recognized something called 'orange peel skin," which is symptomatic of a problem. She did some manipulation on the spot. She also applied thin strips of KT tape in an asterisk pattern. We made our next appointment two weeks ahead.

    I left and headed for Longs. I had taken most of their available Hersey's kisses on Sunday. I wanted to see if they had restocked the shelf. It was empty, but it was worthwhile asking. I found a clerk in the front of the store. She checked and finally conceded that she didn't know but would ask someone. I heard an announcement for someone to come to aisle ten. I wondered about it since it came right on the heels of my request. I was in aisle sixteen. No one came.

   I finally walked to the front of the store and asked the lady what was happening. She was talking to another woman. The second woman said she went to aisle ten, but I wasn't there. I explained I was in aisle 16. The other woman said she didn't know where someone was. I am going to assume the poor woman was very inexperienced.

   My next stop was at the Goodwill donation center. I only had two items to drop off: the giant Lego blocks for young children and a picture mat. I bought the mat at Christine's suggestion. I love viewing landscapes through a frame, a window, or a picture frame. She suggested I buy a mat and tape it to my lanai screen, creating a framed view. The mat wound up being too small for what I wanted. I realized I could make a frame with masking tape and have it any size I wanted. I didn't need the mat.

  My last stop before home was at the transfer station to drop off the cardboard for recycling. We can only recycle glass, cardboard, and brown paper bags since the Chinese have refused to take our trash. Then, it was home for a nap, a long one.

   When I met with Adolescent D at two pm., we applied Phase I to the text of his book, Investing for Young Adults. I started modeling. Then, I found a way to engage him.

     In Phase I, you start with the spoken word without seeing the letters. First, you identify the number of syllables; then, you identify the sounds (phonemes) within each syllable. I started just asking what a sound might be and leaving a pause. The hope is that his mind rushes in to fill the void left by my silence. Today, I switched it up a bit; I asked him to signal when his mind had given him a sound. He didn't have to tell me what it was or if he was correct, just if his mind produced anything.

   I asked him to tap on something to signal he had heard something. I heard nothing. We tried to have him clap his hands. I still heard nothing. Then I tapped on my end to see if he could hear it. He heard nothing. Mics must be set to filter out miscellaneous sounds. We settled on having him say yes when he heard a sound in his head.

  At the end of the class, D said, "This is more engaging!" Wow! This is the first time he has said something positive about the lessons. I was wondering at the time if it was the exercise or the strategy I used to ensure he was participating.

  The advantage of the approach I use to teach phonics is it involves discovery and problem-solving. The disadvantage is you discover all sorts of anomalies in pronunciation. When analyzing the sounds in the word from, D said the first sound was a /v/.

       My first reaction was to tell him he was wrong. Then I thought about it. He's not entirely wrong. As our mouths change from the unvoiced /f/ to the voiced /r/, there is a nanosecond when that /f/ becomes a /v/. Much of what we learn falls in the "The Emperor's New Clothes" category. We are told what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Many students who are disabled, rather than hearing too little, hear too much. They perceive subtleties that the rest of us have learned to ignore. Why do they do this? Here's a theory: they're not as good at pattern recognition.  

    The weather forecast said it would rain between eleven and one pm. I planned to spray weeds with vinegar after my session with D. It hadn't rained all day. I went out to spray. It started to drizzle. Then it poured. I gave up.

  I had a session with second-grade M at four. She had a ruler. We discussed the difference between inches and centimeters. She was adept at using the ruler to measure things, although she said she had never used one before. The only problem she encountered was lining up the ruler's zero edge with the object's edge. We'll do reading comprehension next time.