Friday, March 29, 2024

 Friday, March 29, 2024  

     Hmmm! March 27th and 28th are missing, too.

 

     I called Certainteed this morning at 4:30 a.m. Hawaii time, which was 10:30 a.m. EST. Certainteed is the warranty company covering the solar panels I bought from Hawaiian Solar in 2017. The batch of 35 panels was defective and failing one after another. 

It took time for the company to replace them. The company decided to honor the warranty. The company would offer up to 90% of the original cost. I was worn out with the continuing breakdown of the existing panels and the slow replacement. It had been a while since I heard from them.

   I called Beth at Hawaiian Solar. She contacted Certainteed. Certainteed emailed me to say I had to return a signed document to them. I had sent that document back to them. The other day, I sent it again by certified mail. I  spoke with a colleague who was responsible for my case. He gave me his email address. It was my fourth attempt.     

   I ironed this morning. The ironing board has been sitting on the lanai since I ironed the linens for the church silent auction three weeks ago. The ones I ironed this morning had rust stains I thought would never come out. They did; all they needed was a washing and a time in the Hawaiian sun. They came out free of all stains.

   Microsoft did it; it deleted 47 (forty-seven) days of file updates. Yep. Forty-seven days. I Googled missing Microsoft files and found a slew of people with a similar problem. Forty files were lost, and no previous files were available. On the version history, each one was the current one. Ow!

   The good news was I used the time to do other chores. I washed the floors.

   I only had a few students today. I had Mama K's twins at 8 a.m. 

Twin A worked on reading Reading Roots story 23. We worked on reading speed, which her Sped teacher said she needed to work on. When she read to me earlier in the week, I intuited she was reading slowly because she was consciously decoding every word. I pushed her to use automatic processing: 'What does your mind say the word is?' After several readings, we could both see her rating rate increase, and she sounded so much better. She was reading with 'meaning.'

   Twin E worked on reading the word lists. I hadn't seen either girl since the last weekend. Twin E sounded better. She said she had been working on this list in class. She almost mastered the first 1-100 words of the Fry Sight Word Lists, which puts her on the first-grade level. She is in fourth grade.

   It was a Darby night. She brought over an Easter basket.

   Gail joined us as we passed her house. She is so cute. She brings a joyful playfulness. She speaks about her days in a boarding school every time we walk. Her parents sent her there when she was twelve years old. She said she didn't ever get to know her parents. She made it sound like her parents sent her there because she started hanging out with the 'wrong kids.' But she recently told us she sent her younger brother off to military school at the same time.

   When we got to our drive, Darby gave me a goodbye hug. She's as good a hugger as Paulette is, someone who hugs for the pleasure of it instead of as a cursory social gesture. Seeing us hug, Gail dove in for a hug of her own. I now have three good huggers in my life—oh, really, four. Let's not forget Elsa, who loves to wrap herself around my neck.  

   I've been chasing the smell of Elsa's pee. Where was it coming from? I vacuumed the spots on the lanai carpet where I could find them. I got on my hands and knees to check them; they didn't smell. I had put the four by six foot Chinese carpet left here by the previous owners out in the yard, hosed it down, and left it in the sun to dry. When I put my nose down there, I found the source of the smell. I was beginning to despair of getting rid of it short of ripping up the carpeting, underflooring, and starting from scratch. Then, I had to deal with the possibility of Elsa using the lanai again after I had done all that work.  

  I exposed the underside of the Chinese carpet to let the sun do its magic, cleansing everything it touches. I also sprayed the affected area with Febreze. Wow! What an improvement. I no longer smelled it every time I sat on the lanai. The smell was starting to depress me. Stale pee is not the best scent.

   I had an appointment with Adolescent D at 3 p.m. He sounded like he was drowning. He was sick. No, he didn't think it was Covid. I asked him if he wanted to do the lesson. He said yes. He really wasn't up for it. He was running a fever.

  He had canceled for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday because he went off the island to visit friends. I asked him where he went. He didn't know. He said it was the island after Maui. That's Oahu. But he didn't know where he had been on Oahu. I found that a remarkable lack of awareness of his surroundings for a sixteen-and-a-half-year-old boy. I guess he wasn't visiting friends alone but with his whole family. Still, it struck me as odd. Do I have unusual expectations of teenagers?