Sunday, January 29, 2023

 Sunday, January 29, 2023

    I ran into Rosemary today on my morning walk. I hadn't seen her for a long time. She explained she had been doing other things; pickleball was one. She said my hair looked cute. She was the second person who used the word cute to describe my hair. I have never heard anyone describe it that way before, and now two in a matter of days. I asked her what about my hair was cute. She said the color. People have told me I have a great shade of gray, but it's been this way for a long time. There is no radical difference in my hair color. The difference is in my face. My left brow is more relaxed because of meditation.

   In my meditation, I focused on the sensations in the brow and let what happens happen. The first time I did it, I felt a shooting pain in my eyeball. It went away as quickly as it came and didn't return. My mental focus shifted to just above the eyebrow. After the stabbing sensation passed, I observed my brain's electrical activity; that's the best description. I remembered someone else describing meditation as an exercise in herding oxen. I didn't herd; I just watched in the style of Vipassana. Whatever was nagging at me calmed. The Vipassana meditation is a lifesaver.

  I told Rosemary I bought a box of rubber fingertips because I had misplaced the one she had left behind when she came to my house to notarize a document. As it turned out, she couldn't notarize it; it was a Xerox copy of my driver's license. Come to learn, Xeroxed copies of official documents can't be notarized.

   The church was crowded again this week as it had been last week. Sandor was the deacon of the mass. He hasn't been doing the nine am because he was needed for the Spanish mass. He's the only one who speaks Spanish fluently. I called him the other day to ask for the extra glasses he had made during Covid. He said something about glasses being in a tray at work. Everything was confused during Covid because of the messed-up supply chain; anything is possible.

   I wasn't exhausted after church as I usually am. I stopped at Safeway to pick up cream cheese, lox, celery, and an onion. I didn't buy more Hersey's milk chocolate nuggets or kisses with whole almonds because I am overeating them. It's showing on my scale and my measuring tape.

  I had second-grade M in the late afternoon. She did an addition and subtraction problem with regrouping on her own correctly. It was slow going, but she got it. I tried to get the word problems her teacher sent me on the shared screen but got another document instead. I highlighted the correct one, but it kept bringing up the story from QRI. Fortunately, it was the one I wanted to work on.   She read the story reasonably well. She made mistakes and stumbled but self-corrected. This passage is low first-grade, although I can't imagine a first-grader reading it. More significantly, she needed help with basic understanding.

  I read another chapter in Shivani's book. It is wonderful. It could be a best seller. I could have screamed when she described her mother-in-law's behavior toward her as her husband was dying. I was so upset I had to stop reading. Her mother-in-law didn't like her and believed she should be the beneficiary of Shivani's husband's life insurance and death benefits. Are you kidding?