Wednesday, July 27, 2022

 Wednesday, July 27, 2022  

It was a nothing day. There was stuff I could have done but didn't. I could have done some gardening and needed to change my will. I finally got the information to Howard to get his advice. He emailed me his response, but I needed help understanding some of it. I needed to call him, but who had the time? That was what my life was like in those days. I had almost nothing to do and no time to do it. Somehow this was much worse since I had the operation. I was more confined than I had been. I didn't leave the house for the first two weeks. Then I still couldn't go walking up and down our street. My leg wasn't good enough; I was still on a walker. I slept a lot during the first five or six weeks. Now, I felt less need to sleep during the day. It was a shame. I missed those deep comforting naps.

  Lutz, God bless him, told me that with the old anesthesia, people lost twenty-five points off their IQs. He said that doesn't happen now, but that's what I felt like.

  Yvette came up to visit for a minute before she left with a friend to run some errands. She was expecting to be away until August 1. Those plans got changed because she contracted Covid while in Colorado. All her travel plans were centered on attending her paternal grandfather's 100th birthday. Then she and one of her uncles got sick. Because they had picked up Yvette's brother from the airport, he, along with Yvette and her uncle, couldn't attend the birthday party. Yvette was very knocked out for the first few days but had no serious complications. She was still tired this morning, but that could be the result of recovering from any flu. It didn't mean she had long-term Covid. This morning, she told me eleven of the thirty-five people who attended the party reported having Covid when they got home, including her 100-year-old grandfather. People of a certain age can get a medication that helps alleviate the symptoms. Her grandfather was in good spirits. Most of the revelers flew home while they were coming down with it. They were negative before they got on the plane and positive when they got off. This means they probably infected people who shared their journey.

    Now that I have the engraved gravestones, I needed to figure out how to treat the cement pillows to lean the gravestones on. It looked like a no-brainer. They make a product for this purpose. I must stop at Ace Hardware soon to pick up a color chart. I want to see the choice against the color of the granite. The gravestones were sitting in the back of my car, still in its packing for shipment. I had yet to look at them. I was a little afraid to. What if I was disappointed? I know the answer to that already. The sadness will pass. I was not that heavily invested in the gravesite. I've never been one who visits graves to talk to the dearly departed.

   I had a session with adolescent D. He finished reading all the words in the sight word list his other tutor had compiled of the words he had trouble with. I wrote every word that rhymed with the target word spelled the same. He pretty well zoomed through the rest of the list. He could identify every phoneme in a word. He actually offered some words that rhymed. This means his auditory processing was better. I had reason to believe this may be due to the audio file he'd been listening to. I wish I could get him to listen daily. I hoped he would finally see the value of the strategies I tried to teach him, which he stubbornly refused to use. I went over the six-syllable patterns. We had been focusing on the VC and VCe patterns.

   I opened a new bag of Hersey's Milk Chocolate nuggets with almonds to discover those almonds were no longer whole. The size of the chunk varies from half to none. Yep. Sometimes there isn't a trace of almond in the nugget. This is Hersey's way of cutting back without having to raise prices. I saw this a lot. The cost of a case of almond milk had mostly stayed the same, but you only got four quarts of almond milk instead of six. Some difference

   Scott said he was going out to move his car and trailer. Huh! "Driveway yoga tomorrow." Oh, yes. I had forgotten. I went out to move my car too. Because I had to back my car up in the dark, I asked Scott to do it for me.

   The hammertoe on my right foot was bothering me. It rubbed against the top of the shoe and where it made contact with the first toe. I iced the foot and started stretching exercises. I felt the stretch in my metatarsals. As I lay reading, I used my right foot to push the second toe back into

  In today's Wordle puzzle, my second starter word, stomp, was the target word. That was easy. I did more work on NY Times daily puzzles. I love doing them online with the cheating options: I try all the vowel letters and use the Reveal function when I run into trouble. I'll also do whatever I can and take a break. When I come back later, I get more words without cheating.