Saturday, September 24, 2022

 Saturday, September 24, 2022

   I did a short walk this morning because I had my Saturday office hour at 7 a.m. No one signed up. I sat there because someone might have decided to join. No one did. I worked on updates and the NY Times puzzles.

 On my walk, I conversed with a woman I had seen several times before but had never spoken to. I introduced myself. Sally lives on the property with her son and his family. I met her daughter-in-law, Hannah, when she was parked in the middle of the road trying to get a gecko out of her car. I introduced myself as the neighborhood yenta. I get to know everyone and connect them to the rest of the neighborhood. She told me she had a twelve-year-old and a four-year-old. I guessed she was on her second marriage. I have only caught glimpses of Hannah as she drives by in her black SUV.

  Sally mentioned a duck had recently moved in with them. I told her the duck belonged to the family who lived above them in the corner house. They had a flock of at least six ducks. While we have wild chickens, turkeys, pheasants, goats, and pigs, we don’t have wild ducks in our neighborhood. I’m not sure we have any wild ducks in Hawaii; geese, yes, but not ducks. Sally said she would tell her son that the duck was a pet. I knew Sally’s family had a large swimming pool. This duck must feel like it died and went to heaven. His owner only provided a small plastic child’s wading pool. I was relieved to learn what happened to the duck since I saw him in the middle of the street a block from its home. I was concerned it was flattened by a passing vehicle.

  A friend called. She gave me sad news about her sister’s husband. He retired from the medical profession and experienced a radical change of personality. He started spending money at an alarming rate from someone who had lived reasonably before. He bought three houses and six cars without consulting his wife. His family persuaded him to see a doctor. The MRI showed he was just fine. His whole family noticed the change in his behavior; his wife was in despair. She lost the husband she had known for so many years. This is not the first story I have heard from friends about their spouses showing signs of dementia. So sad. Mike would have been seriously impaired had he lived. Prolonged intubation causes mental degeneration. We both would have been miserable. Had he lived, he wouldn’t have been the man I had known for the last forty-five years. Moreover, he wouldn’t have been the man he wanted to be.

    I improved my Wordle strategy. I started with three trial words: ready, stomp, and quick. That took care of all the vowels and nine consonants. I changed my strategy and only put in those trial words until I had at least two yellow letters. Then, I search for a word with those letters in different places. I was having fun with this method. I usually get the word, eliminating other possibilities.

  I trimmed the toenails on both my feet for the first time in eighteen years. Make note. My surgeon was not optimistic that I would ever be able to do that. While the surgery corrected specific problems, it didn’t repair all the soft tissue damage from years of misalignment and the last eighteen years of compensatory movement. 

      The McCracken method for teaching phonics is closest to my method, The Phonics Discovery System Phase I. It is different because it provides lists of phonetically regular words. My approach works with natural language, even names. It comes closer to duplicating what students have to deal with. For many students, McCracken will do just as well as my method. It requires a purchase, but it is only one spiral-bound small book. Not a bad deal. It does not cover the Phase II of my method, which is free.

     I finished The Westing Game. While it was fun keeping track of who was who and the relationship between the sixteen participants, it was a somewhat sadistic game. One of the characters says something positive toward the end of the book. She says everyone was partnered with the person who could help them the most. There is truth to that.

  My right inner thigh spasmed when I went for a short walk. The muscles in my right leg need to change as much as those in my left, where I had the hip replacement.

     I only worked on the updates; that’s it. Like a true extrovert, I find spending a day alone exhausting. All I had was a wonderful long call from Jean, my Hanai sister, some incidental contact with Scott as he came and went, and B when he brought up a bag of limes from my tree at the bottom of the property. I didn’t want him to come in because I didn’t want to be exposed to his pneumonia.