Tuesday, February 13, 2024

 Tuesday, February 13, 2024

     I got around to vacuuming one of the spots where Elsa peed and did a general vacuuming of the lanai rug. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you give someone an assignment with little to do, it tends not to get done. The vacuum cleaner has been sitting on the ready for over a week.

    Elsa and I had our appointment with the vet this morning. The clinic has maintained a system to deal with waiting clients they adopted during Covid. Instead of entering the waiting room with our pets, we park in numbered parking spaces, call the office to let them know we arrived, and wait for a tech to come out and get the pet. Nowadays, we can go in with them, which we couldn’t do when Covid was still an active threat.

   I was there to check on her ears. I suspected something was wrong because of the sweet, sickly smell. 

The receptionist asked if she scratched or shook her head; the answer to both questions was no. I suspected I made the appointment for nothing, but at least I could talk to the vet about Elsa’s food. Surprise! She had a yeast infection in both ears. The vet told me again she’s prone to yeast infections because she has hairy ears. I should ask the groomer to pluck those hairs. The vet said she doesn’t like to do the job. It hurts the animal. It’s either one round of plucking per grooming or months of ear infections and a much-hated treatment plan.

    As for the food, I finally got an explanation that made sense. I thought she told me to order the Royal Canin doctor’s prescribed brand because they were out of the Science Diet. But that wasn’t the case. She said the Science Diet hadn’t had the desired effect. The Royal Canin Ultamino diet was a different formula. The Purina, which they use now instead of the Science Diet, used the same formula. It’s true. Elsa’s skin has been better since she started on the Royal Canin. I should call the other vets in town to see if anyone carries it. It is expensive to post to Hawaii. Without Amazon, we would all be lost. Amazon doesn’t carry the 8.8 lbs. dog food package, only the 19. 8 lbs.

    The last topic was her teeth. She is missing several. When the vet checked her teeth, she saw a lot of plaque on one of her back teeth. She needed a dental treatment. It will be a lot of money to clean her teeth and a lot more if she needs to have one extracted. That all be a pretty penny.

   I got in a few minutes with Mama K’s Twin E. I heard Mama K order her to get online with me. I gather she’s not overly excited about the work. I worked strictly on memory improvement for several weeks. Twin A had changed how she worked a while ago and made great strides. Twin E was afraid to rely on automatic recall, remembering all the painful moments of failure. Neither of the girls could identify all the letters in the alphabet by the end of first grade. It’s been a struggle. Twin A made the leap about a year ago. She followed my instructions on what parts of the brain to use. Twin E clung to the faulty system she had been using, trusting the devil she knew.

    Twin E had problems with letter instability; the letters shifted inside her head. Many of my students have this problem. I have a protocol to deal with this. It often takes one ten-minute session, and it never comes back. I always tell the student that it may return. If it does, they must close their eyes and repeat the procedure.

    In most cases, that takes care of the problem. Twin A told me she had that problem perhaps as much as a year ago, and the protocol resolved it. Twin E only told me about it roughly six months ago.

   While Twin E had done pretty well on Fry Sight Word list 51-100, I had her working on list 1-50 for the last several weeks to build up confidence and speed. She had done well with those words;  I wanted her to do better.   I had her read the words in the 51-100 list a few days ago. Today, she read that list at a good speed. I pulled up the 101-150 list for the first time. She zoomed through it. For the first time, Mama K was in the same room and heard her read. It knocked her socks off.   I didn’t get to work with Twin A. Mama K had to run her son to the dentist and couldn’t leave the girls alone.

  I met with first-grade B for the second time this week. Today, she read something she hadn’t read before. Oh, boy! This is an entirely different picture. She has something interfering with her reading words accurately.