Thursday, November 30, 2023

 Thursday, November 30, 2023

    We had weird weather for a few days: constant wind and rain, a Kona low weather front. Winds come in from the west. It was cold and damp all day- unpleasant.

    I had a lunch date with Mindy and Zola. We were to meet at a restaurant in town. Given the weather, I dreaded the event. All the restaurants in Kona are open-air; none are closed to the outside world and airconditioned. I anticipated being comfortable in the cold, damp air. I called Zola to check her thoughts on the weather's impact on our luncheon date. We decided to go ahead. We would meet at Foster's Kitchen, where Judy and Howard celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary.

    The weather was fine. It was warmer by the shore than it had been one thousand feet higher where I live. I had a great time with my two friends. I ordered a hamburger. I miss Annie's Burgers like mad. They were the best. I keep trying other places. Foster's is a high-end restaurant. The hamburger was lousy-tasteless.

      I had sessions with Mama K's crew and Adolescent D when I got home. I only met with Twin E. The other two had fallen asleep. These kids get up very early and are exhausted when they get home from school. She completed the first two Fry Sight Word Lists. This is a milestone. Her mother heard her read the list and was amazed.

    I continued working with cross-body blending with Adolescent D. We do one word a day of his choice. He generally picks one-syllable words. The exercise is still hard for him. He picked the word city today. He struggles to separate words into individual sounds and blend those sounds back together.

    In Amazon's Professor T, the titular character says extroversion is a sign of sociopathology. One of the people he applied the term to was a socially hostile person with an anger management problem. It made me wonder about his definition of extroversion. 

I didn't see a pattern. I do believe introverts do see extroverts as pathological.  

 

Sunday, December 3, 2023

 

 Today, it is four years and nine months since Mike died. God, I miss him. He was a wonderful life partner and companion. I burned a yahrzeit candle. I read a person’s after life is determined by those who remember them. Mike should be more than fine. I will think of him every day for the rest of my life. he was loved by so many in the community. Some from church recommended a book to me of prayers to help the departed escape purgatory and enter heaven. I had a bad reaction to it. It made Mike’s successful afterlife dependent on others. It also meant that if purgatory and heaven are real and we all have to be prayed for to ascend, I’m screwed- as are so many others I know.

  I finally got the hospital bill from the Kona Community Hospital. The fees for the surgeries were itemized. I mean, every action, every screw, was individually noted. Who recorded all this as they worked for five hours on my elbow and three on my shoulder? Without insurance, the total would have been over $249,150. I was charged $2,360 for two surgeries and two weeks in the hospital.  

 

Monday, December 4, 2003

 

   My friend Jean told me about a tapping app. Tapping is a system of tapping on acupuncture points to resolve emotional issues. I learned it as EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique. It is debunked as pseudoscience by Wiki. I’ve known about and used tapping for the last twenty-five years. I often use it with my students but less frequently with myself. 

   My current therapist/life coach uses tapping a lot. She will often use it on herself for me while I work. I had no idea it had become so popular. I signed on. I found an app for sound sleep on the site. I tuned into it; I had been encountering some difficulty with sleep recently. I fell asleep easily but woke up early, around 3 am. I would try to mediate until five, when my alarm went off. During those two hours, negative thinking overtook me. By five am, I was exhausted. 

  When I turned on the sleeping app, someone talked for about 15 minutes, leading to a tapping session. I fell asleep easily before the man stopped talking. The background music behind the speaker continued all night until I switched it off when I got up. I slept soundly till four-thirty. The legato flute music distracted me from my negative thinking. What a blessing!

  I paid my $2,360 hospital bill today. I would have preferred to pay it next year for tax purposes, but I had to pay by December 21. I have plenty of medical expenses to claim for this year already. I dropped over $15,000 on three weeks of in-home health care.

   I had a facial today. I got the express service, and that was $150. Wow! I only get one once or twice a year. She spared me the tip, probably because I told her it was my birthday the next day. It makes me feel terrible to see estheticians and massage therapists get over one hundred an hour when people think fifty an hour is an outrageous fee for a tutor, even a highly trained one.

   I called Kia for information on my car. When I took it in the other day, they saw that the car didn’t take a charge. They told me they sent the digital information to Kia headquarters and would hear from them in twenty-four hours.

 

Tuesday, December 5, 2002

 

  Today was my 83rd birthday. Carol Zim called and sang an improvised birthday song in her style. It brought a big smile to my face. Mike and I sang an improvised version of the sound because Mike couldn’t sing. We caterwauled the song. It was fun. While I miss the man, I enjoy singing the song solo.

   Some friends stay on the phone with me longer than is comfortable because they are concerned about my loneliness. If only a long phone call would solve that problem. It doesn’t. A forced call makes it worse, although I appreciate the concern and the effort.  

    I watched videos of the wedding of the daughter of an old colleague. The bride is the oldest of four girls. The mother often posts pictures of the girls on Facebook. They usually look beautiful, but not so at this wedding. The bride had her wedding party all clad in black. Maybe she thought they would have a dress they could wear on other occasions. Most of the women in the wedding party looked pretty good. Her mother looked stunning, but her sisters looked funereal. I hoped their concern was grief over losing one of their sisters. I feared they were concerned about their sister’s taste in men.

 

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

 

    While on my evening walk with Darby, someone ran to catch up to us, calling my name. It was Melissa, who lived in the ohana across the street from Darby. We knew she was facing eviction. Her landlord wanted her out. We wished her well the other day. But tonight, she shared additional bad news. Her husband, Jerry, had died the week before.  

   She came home from work to find him napping. She knew never to wake him from a nap. Concerned, she went to wake him after dinner. It was then she realized something was terribly wrong. She thought it strange that he chose to sleep on her side of the bed earlier, but when she looked carefully, she saw his arm hanging in a peculiar position. Then she saw his face and knew. She touched him to find he was ice cold. She called a friend to come over. It was she who called the police. Despite the bulge at the side of his neck where the blood pooled from a stroke, an autopsy was required because he wasn’t under a doctor’s care. They estimated the time of death at four pm.

   I left earlier than usual for my early morning walk because I had driveway yoga at seven. I ran into Vince, who told me a different version of the story of Jerry’s death. The friend who came to help Melissa was Vince’s sister-in-law. I figured Melissa’s was the more accurate, but I kept my mouth shut.

    Jean’s daughter was told she had to go to the hospital on something like Friday. She wanted to wait till Sunday night when her kids went to their dad’s for the week. When I spoke to Jean on Tuesday, she told me the doctor said her daughter only had a fifty-fifty chance of living. Jean made flight reservations immediately. She called me Wednesday morning while I was in yoga to tell me her daughter’s death was inevitable. Her liver had failed completely. It was a matter of days or weeks before the end. I stayed inside and wept. Kelly was forty-three with a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old. Yvette knew Kelly. The news hit her hard, too; she canceled the rest of the class.

   Today was the first kupuna mahjong meeting. It’s a new ministry through the church, bonding us old folks so we provide mutual support. I showed up a bit late. Everyone had already had a lesson. There were two groups. I caught on quickly. I saw the game as comparable to Rummikub, with some different rituals.

    In my session today with Adolescent D, we started with a new article on Biden’s open discussion of grief. They listed all the presidents who lost children in the White House: Adams, Lincoln, Coolidge, and Kennedy. Pierce lost a child while traveling to attend his inauguration. What a statistic!

   D struggled with a letter sequence. We continue practicing cross-body blending, but he remains reluctant to use it. It continues to be a struggle when he has to use his conscious mind to decode. The best we can hope for is each practice moment teaches the unconscious mind what to do.

   Today was a Ulu Wini day. I worked with five kids. Two had comprehension problems; the rest had issues with memory. Hakana was absent today. The social workers who run the community center ran the program. One was sitting close to me as I worked. As I was leaving, she suggested setting up a formal schedule. I objected. I showed her my list. I worked with over thirty kids since I started. I prefer it when the kids come to me when they wish or are ordered to do so for the day. I like working with them for short sessions that end when they look distracted. If they have been concentrating up to that point, I figure they’ve had as much as they can absorb for the day.

   While several people wished me a happy birthday yesterday, Judy and Paulette forgot. Today, I told Judy she had forgotten because I knew she would be very upset when she realized what she had. I told her I wasn’t concerned. She gave me so much on a daily basis. That was worth so much more to me.