Friday, July 5, 2024

 Friday, July 5, 2024

    I had a bad night's sleep. Between the 24hr. urine collection and my preoccupation about a troubling interaction, I slept poorly for most of the night. I got up around 3:30, dressed, sat in my old-lady chair, and meditated. It wasn't one of the best ones, but neither was it the worst. Around 4:30, I did my gentle seated yoga/laughter yoga combination.  I can feel the muscles in my waist tighten.  Laughter yoga is a fantastic process. The more I do it, the more I learn about its profound impact. I recommend it for one and all.

   I ran into Dean and Nina this morning. Usually, Dean does most of the talking,  I ask more questions than tell my own stories, and Nina makes a few quirky comments along the way. Today, I did most of the talking. I don't know why it came up, but we discussed parenting styles. Dean says Nina's parents, who live with them in their own attached apartment, have never said a kind word to her. I've heard that repeatedly about Chinese parents of their generation. I get the feeling the next generation, at least those who immigrated to the US, are trying a different route. 

  Dean said Nina had never seen my lanai.  It is wonderful. It's 500 square feet of screened-in porch, my living area.  Given the arrangement, you would think I do a lot of entertaining. We did set it up for when the family visited. No one comes to visit these days. Damon is coming in late July, but my home is no longer good enough for him. He wants a house with a pool and hot tub. They do live in their pool and hot tub at home.

  I invited Dean and Nina to come in so she could see my lanai.  Dean proposed they come over, and we play Scrabble together. I thought that was a great idea. I would love to have more people in the house. I was a little intimidated by Scrabble; I'm not that good at thinking of words. I said so to Dean. He said Nina didn't like it either. English was her second language. I suggested Rummikub.  Hopefully, this pans out. 

   Yvette had planned to play Sorry with me yesterday, but then she got into enjoying her husband's company so much.  That makes me happy. She suggested Sunday, but I won't be free then. 

   I had an appointment with Shelly this morning.  I'm working on keeping myself calm in behavior and internally under challenging situations. I did that with a walking buddy the other day. It's new for me. It makes me feel a little dead inside. I'm experimenting. Let's see where it goes.

   I have an issue with boundaries. If I ask someone to stop what they're doing, I expect them to stop.  This friend told me he thought he had the right to decide whether or not the topic I reacted to was worthy of that reaction. He also thought it should be his job to be sensitive rather than to respect my definition of boundaries. What I usually see happening with that system is people living side by side in discomfort. I like the goal of looking for what makes everyone the most comfortable. 

  This friend told me I was being childish when I responded negatively to something he said. Rule #1- if you want to stay in a relationship, never disparage a person's character; only talk about behavior. From what I've observed, those who advocate saying nothing and suffer in silence don't do well in intimate, long-term relationships. They die inside,  and the relationship doesn't do that well either. Speaking up for your comfort should not be escalated into a full-scale battle for total control. If everything about a person makes you uncomfortable- get out. If everything about everybody makes you uncomfortable, you've got a problem.

  I planned to work with the Twins after my session with Shelly.  When Mama K didn't respond, I ended the Zoom session and went to work in the yard. I picked up the branches I had trimmed the other day.  

  Mama K called while I was working in the yard. She had been up early and fell back asleep again. I could work with the girls now.   Twin E came on first. We're working on her memory. The wrong word keeps coming up, although she also sees the right word further back in her head. It occurred to me that she has the habit of looking in the wrong place. Nothing else is wrong with her brain. 

  Twin A's reading fluency, the speed, and the musical quality of her oral reading have greatly improved. I always ask her to tell me what she understood from the passage. She blows my mind with her articulate, 

on-the-nose answers. While I work on the same passage daily with Twin E, Twin A reads at least three passages daily. She faded on the final passage. It's still a drain on her brain.

   After the session, I continued with the yard work. I picked up some green waste and stuffed it into Home Depot 5-quart buckets. I stacked two filed buckets into a large, wheeled trash barrel. I wheeled it down the driveway to the Schefflera to pick up some stumps Dan had just left. I wanted to clear the area at the foot of the 'tree.' I put the word in air quotes; the tree isn't called the octopus tree for nothing. There must be 6 to 10 tree trunks, all pushing out new leaves. I have to drill more holes in the remaining stumps and fill them with diesel fuel or Round-Up.  

I also picked up some of the logs from when Dan cut down the Sheffelerra. I must clear them out to get close to the trunks without having to fear falling. Yes, multiple trunks. 

    That's how the Sheffelera grows. They call the tree the octopus tree. I used to think they called it that because its flower has all these branches, making it look like an octopus. But no, that's not the case. It's an octopus tree because it sends out roots that put up other trees. I've never seen anything like it on the East Coast. Every tree has one trunk and only one trunk. Another tree may sprout from a seed nearby. These trees grow new trunks from spreading roots. And these trees grow into giant trees. The weirdest thing about these trees is they are all benign potted plants in New York, the Sheffilera, the Ficus, and the rubber plant. These plants are monsters that will take over your world and break up your driveway and foundation. They have to be killed off. It is a fight to the death.  So I poison them. 

   My next chore took me to town. I dropped off my 24-hour urine sample at Kaiser and was told I needed to give a blood sample. My quick stop-off turned into a longer affair.  

   I drove to town to pick up a bag of Baking Soda. I use it as toothpaste, a cleaning agent, and to kill coqui frogs. I used it successfully on a coqui a few years ago, but nothing works on the one outside my bedroom door. While at Target, I picked up a few more items. Then I drove over to UPS to drop off Styrofoam. That way, it gets recycled.

   Shauntel texted me to say it was a small group at Ulu Wini today. Maybe I didn't want to come. Then she texted that ML and CL were there. While neither one wanted to work with me, another girl said she did. I had never seen her before. She introduced herself as going-into-third-grade AN. She wanted to work on subtraction with regrouping. She was so stuck on the idea that you couldn't subtract a bigger number from a smaller one that the concept of subtraction with regrouping couldn't penetrate. Then she showed me something I'd never seen before. When regrouping in subtraction, we write a two-digit number in the one's place. We've been told over and over that we can't do that. But here, in subtraction with regrouping, that's precisely what we do. I told AN it's a cheat. 

  AN had just moved to the Big Island from Oahu. Shauntel told me her mother died two years ago. Her dad couldn't care for her and shipped her here to live with her grandparents. I hope the kids living here accept her. She isn't either Marshallese or Chuuk; she's Samoan.

   I finished watching Never Have I Ever last night. I watch Darling Companion. I loved it. It got terrible reviews despite a sterling cast, Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Diane Wiest, and some other performers whose names or faces I recognized but can't remember.  From what I read in the reviews, the critics missed the point of the story.  It's about resolving difficulties in interpersonal relationships. The dog's disappearance creates a situation that forces people to deal with each other and resolve issues. I thought it had a true-to-life feeling. I think the script was good that attracted all those great actors