Tuesday, October 18, 2022

 Tuesday, October 18, 2022   

As I lay in bed doing my in-bed exercises and dozing on and off during savasana breaks, I reviewed the math problem I did yesterday, adding 999 twelve times. I came out with the same answer as my calculator. What had I done wrong? When I got up, I found the piece of paper I had written the problem. Ah, I added one and zero and got nine. That would throw off anyone’s calculations.

        I was up by 7 am. I joined Tammy on her walk today. We ran into each other, going in the opposite direction, and stopped to talk. I proposed we walk with each other. Tammy doesn’t live in our neighborhood. Like many other walkers from other neighborhoods, she prefers to walk on our street. Tammy said it is her favorite. It’s well-shaded, and it has good neighbor vibes. Elsa made a consistent stride impossible with her constant need to check out the peemail. Tammy took off on her own. Her pace is much faster than mine.

   I was exhausted after editing the public blog posting for the day. My eyes gave me trouble. That’s always exhausting. I needed a nap before I left for my appointment with a new esthetician. She had an impressive suite, two closed rooms, one for facials and one for massages, and a beautifully decorated L-shaped reception area. She offered me a choice of exfoliation methods. We settled on the scalpel scraping. As I thought, men look better than women because they shave every day, at least if they use a manual razor. I don’t know how well the electric shavers exfoliate. She would be shaving as well as exfoliating. It felt good, relaxing, and not scratchy. When she asked me to lift my chin so she could do my neck, visions of Sweeny Todd danced through my head.      

   I got home just in time to shower before the acupuncturist arrived. I see her once every two weeks. Each time she is surprised by how much straighter my left leg is. She asked if I was seeing the physical therapists. No, I still haven’t gotten a prescription from Kaiser. My primary care physician has been on leave for quite a while now. She was supposed to be back on the job by October 4, but there still was no prescription. I suspect my morning exercises are making a difference.

   The acupuncturist asked me to point to where the pain in my left ankle was. She put a needle in on the inside of the ankle. I howled. It took a good thirty seconds for the acute pain to subside and over a minute for it to disappear. I thought my body had adjusted to the needle, but no. She said she pulled it out the moment I yelled.

   I spoke to ninth-grade K’s mom. She needed to cancel for Wednesday and proposed skipping a makeup on Friday. I saw it as a sign she was happy he was doing better. She said no, he still needed more tutoring. Did she feel less concerned because she had seen his progress and knew he could learn? She said yes to that. 

  I continued doing the WbyW comprehension exercise with K on the passage I got from adolescent D, also in ninth grade. K reports he is continuing to see improvement. I tried the process I started with Adolescent D, where I pronounced the individual phonemes, and the student had to figure out the word. I wanted to see how K did for two reasons. One was to check his auditory processing. The other was to check on the method. Adolescent D was having terrible problems with it. Was D having issues because of his perceptual problems, or was I asking too much of someone to understand the sounds over Zoom? K did much better. Where D couldn’t blend three sounds, K could discern the word sixteenth after I said it a second time. How’s that for a difference? Maybe K doesn’t need this activity at all.

   I recommended the Ted Lasso show on Apple TV to everyone I met, only to discover they knew about it long ago. Thankfully, Damon told me. It is a wonderful show. It’s upbeat without being sappy. The writing is fantastic.