Sunday, April 30, 2023

 Sunday, April 30, 2023

 When I checked the weather this morning before 6 am, it said it would rain for most of the day starting at 7 am.  Elsa and I were home from our walk before six-thirty.  I prepared the vinegar mix for the weeding.  There was a chance half an hour would be enough time to kill those weeds.  I picked up the remaining half a gallon of 30% vinegar from the driveway as Elsa and I walked back in the door; returning from our morning walk, I prepared the mix and sprayed it before I fed Elsa.  I could feed her later.  On the days I got up later, she did just fine.  Seven am arrived, and there was no rain.  When I checked the weather forecast, it had changed.  Rain wasn’t expected until nine am.

After church, I waited to speak to Fr. Lio.  I called on Monday to ask if I could put an ad in the church bulletin.  I was told the ad section was full; Janice, the parish administrator, had to check with Fr. Lio.  I had heard nothing, so I asked him directly.  He fidgeted like a schoolboy caught doing something wrong.  He said Janice would call me.  I suspect she had contacted him, and he had forgotten to respond.

Fr. Lio asked all the lecturers to meet with him after Mass.  I knew Judy would be waiting by the altar at the front of the church.  I wished her happy birthday and proposed singing to her there and then.  That drew a chuckle. 

I stopped off at Mike’s gravesite before I headed out.  Someone had put a lanai on it for Easter, and Judy had bought a plant.  I was sure both were trash-worthy at this point.  While I’m not into decorating Mike’s grave, neither am I into leaving decayed plants of it. 

My first stop was Long’s.  I had a $4 discount on any item.  I picked up a 10oz bag of Hersey’s milk chocolate nuggets with almonds- they were no longer whole.  With the coupon, it cost me $3.65  instead of $7.49.  That doesn’t come to a four-dollar difference.  I don’t know how to account for the discrepancy. 

When I got home, I ate something, wrote a little, and did the Wordle puzzle, Monday’s NY Times Mini puzzle, and one regular puzzle.  Then I went down for a nap.  My alarm was set for three fifty for my session with third-grade KPS.  I woke up shortly before the alarm went off.  I had slept for three hours and could have slept more. 

I had endless problems with the Internet when working with KPS  , and it shut me down at least three times during the session.  I told Grandma to consider it a fifteen-minute session instead of our usual half an hour.  We still got a good deal done.  I checked if she had retained the math we did on Thursday.  She did fine on the long- -division.  She didn’t make the same error she had made in our last two sessions. She said this should be our session where we “talk about life.” Her two significant problems seemed resolved. Her relationship with her mother had improved, her spirits were lifted, and she was doing better in school.  The most striking difference was that she wasn’t defensive when I corrected her.  We had done some work on that.  Had it really made that big a difference in that short a time? 

KPS challenged me to a sketching duel. Okay.  I have zero artistic talent.  She showed me how to draw a tree.  She didn’t show much talent, either.  She drew her tree, and I drew mine, following her directions.  Okay, now what?  I proposed we write.  She asked, “You mean if I have to write something?” “No, I’ll do the writing; you’ll tell me what to write.”

KPS, who was just baptized the Friday before Easter, served as an altar girl today at Mass.  Wow!  She jumped in whole-hog.  That wasn’t quite the story.  She and her grandma were sitting in the first row when someone approached her and asked her if she would serve.  She had no idea what she was doing.  I got some of the details out of her before the Internet shut down again. 

The instability of the Internet is driving me nuts.  I called Brian somewhat hysterically.  Why can’t he fix it?  He told me he sees no problems at his end each time, and there is nothing he can do. He reminded me that when something on the computer seems funky, restart it.  I did that.  I didn’t experience the same problems in my four o’clock session with second-grade M. We worked on reading the passage. It was a third-grade passage.  She was in second grade and had some problems with reading.  I thought she was doing quite well.

   I checked with B later in the day. He’s on a different Internet connection than I am, and he said his was unstable, too. Does it have something to do with our property? This is frustrating.