Wednesday, July 6, 2022

 Wednesday, July 6, 2022

 

   At 9 am, I drove Scott to the Jiffy Lube to pick up a car. It was a good opportunity to go to the bank when I wasn't drained from a visit to the PT. The parking lot had a lot of cars, but it wasn't packed. When I got to the entrance, people were standing outside. The line for the tellers inside the bank was right up to the door. A man explained the computers were down and the bank was short on tellers. He said they had problems because they updated their computer system, which didn't work. I had some confirmation of that theory the other day. I received a bank statement from First Hawaiian explaining their new format. I waited for a while. When a man exited, I asked whether he was served or just had given up. He just gave up. There was no movement on the line. This is an absurd situation. If the full parking lot was any indication, this had been going on for several weeks. Whada mess!!

  When I spoke to Judy later in the day, she told me she deposited her checks online and withdrew money at ATMs. She would show me how to do it. I had mixed feelings. Going to the bank is an occasion to get out of the house. I suffered from a lack of stimulation. I was finding it hard. I wondered if my reduced fear state was making it worse. Fear kept my energy level up. I was at a loss for how to deal with this mental state.  

  The incident with the bank reminded me of a funny moment with the scammers trying to get me to access my bank account online. I was directed to get to the account and put in my pin. I didn't have a pin. Well, that blew his mind. How did I do my banking if I didn't do it online? I went to the bank. "When was the last time you went to the bank?" he asked in a challenging tone. "Yesterday! He was so frustrated with me. How unaccommodating of me.

  While I had Judy on the phone, I shared my frustration with the day's Wordle puzzle. After putting in all three trial words, ready, stomp, and quick, I only had one yellow letter, U; that wasn't much to go on. I tried another word and got a green L in the second slot and a green U in the third. The first two letters had to be a consonant blend. I tried to find a consonant blend or digraph for the last two. Nothing I put in worked. Judy got it. When I gave her flu she saw the word fluff. I had forgotten the FLOSS rule. 

   My low mental state due to lack of stimulation was made worse by two other factors. I was reading Merzenich's book Soft-Wired details how the brain loses its edge with aging. I'd already noticed problems. It made me think of how Mike must have felt as his health degenerated with his kidney failure and then how he felt confined to bed, wired, and drugged. 

  Scott will be moving downstairs for two weeks while Yvette and Josh are visiting on the mainland. I very much appreciate having someone else, a human I didn't have an outright bad relationship with, in the house. He spent most of his time out of the house or in his room. It was not like he spent a lot of time with me, but that little bit of presence made a difference. Scott was sufficiently outgoing to say a few words as he passed through the living room where I sat. That's all I need. Scott is a perfect person for my situation. I can ask him to find another place to stay if I need the room for visiting family or friends. While the situation was good for me, it wasn't ideal for him. He needed to find a place of his own for his sake. I knew he was investigating a situation south of here where he could park his van and work off rent by doing some labor on the property.

   I had a session with Adolescent D this afternoon. I asked him two questions about his tendency to absent himself mentally. Did he experience it when playing video games? He said he didn't think so. Did he experience it when watching movies? Yes, if they were very long. Then I reviewed want and went. He read want as won't. The boy has no ory. I knew he had made progress in reading. He reported he read more and understood more of what he read. Yet, he can't remember the word want from one minute to the next. I didn't know how he made progress. When he read the list of twenty-five words we already covered, he missed five or six of them. OMG!  

     We also worked on identifying the difference between the five words in column one with short vowels and the five words in column two with long vowels in a VCe pattern. He remembered the VCe pattern made the vowel say its own name. But then he couldn't remember the name of the vowels. He mispronounced the name of the letter O. How do I help this boy?  

       My frustration with him and the Twins was another factor wearing on me. Three of the six students I was working with had severe memory problems. It made me wonder if something was causing this problem in the environment. I had another student with issues like that, another D. He couldn't remember math facts from one minute to the next. 

  I met with Twin E on Facetime in the early evening to work on her memory. I wrote the words there and was on my computer screen and turned the phone camera on those words. I instructed her to 'just remember' the words. She did. Holly cow! Will that continue? After all my work developing BrainManagementSkills, all this kid needs is instructions to remember. Whatever works!

   I watched a sweet movie, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. It was about teenagers, but it dealt with larger issues. It wasn't a great movie, but it was good enough.