Monday, July 15, 2024

 Monday, July 15, 2024 

   My dad's 121st birthday.  He died in 1956.  I've been without him for a very long time. My mom died in 2001.  It's been a while since she died, but she's no competition for my dad.

   In my morning contemplations, I thought I had to call the vet and get Elsa on an antibiotic. Then, I thought I should try the infrared lamp. When I got up, I looked up using infrared on dogs.  I watched several videos on it. One said you can leave it on for only three minutes. The other said the animal would know when to move. When I sit in my old-lady-chair, Elsa usually lies on the floor at the side of the chair. That's a perfect spot for trying the lamp. 

    She responded well. She stretched out and relaxed. I was concerned about the light getting into her eyes. It's not good for us either. She turned her head away from the lamp.  Perfect. Let's see how this goes. It's supposed to help with almost everything that ails her and me.

   Elsa's Royal Canin Ultamino dog food arrived on Friday, the 12th. I just opened it tonight.  I ordered royal Canin hydrolyzed protein dog food by accident. When I noticed it, I compared it to the Ultamino and saw it was less expensive. I thought, why not try it.  Her skin started erupting again.  I checked with the vet; they said the hydrolyzed protein should be okay. Her skin condition didn't improve. I took her off the new food and fed her only the Dr. Marty's food, which I had been feeding her in combination with the Ultamino before with no negative results. That didn't do much. Then, I eliminated the hydrolyzed protein food and fed her only Dr. Martys. Tonight, I finally served her the Ultamino. What a difference in her response!!! 

  She begged for something else when I fed her the hydrolyzed protein with Dr. Marty's combination and Dr. Marty's alone. I gave her a greenie pill pocket as a treat, and then she ate the food. Tonight, I gave her the Ultamino. She scarfed it down without even considering another treat. This pup knows what's good for her. 

  I started watching Call the Midwife on Netflix. I caught an episode once before and found it too grim. Jean, my Hanai sister, has been touting its merits. I finally made another effort. It's wonderful. It's warm and loving above everything else. It gives a glance into poverty in London in the 1950s and 60s. It shows some domestically rough situations, but it shows these loving relationships in the midst of all that poverty. I had to wonder if any of that really happened.

  I've been listening to various books and podcasts on psychological states: Attention Deficit Disorder, adult immaturity, and narcissistic personality disorder all have the same symptoms but are labeled as different psychological disabilities. The perspectives are interesting because they look at the impact of these problems from various perspectives. 

One of the books I'm listening to is Ellen Langer's book on mindful learning. She differentiates between drill learning, resulting in automatic processing, versus mindful learning. She considers automatic processing the enemy of mindful learning. Once we learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide automatically, we are no longer mindful learners of math.  I think mindful learning is excellent, but I disagree with her view on mindfulness versus automatic processing. 

   Langer argues we lose contact with the basic elements of a process; we perceive things in larger chunks. For instance, when we learn to tie our shoelaces, we learn a set of steps. Once we can do it automatically, we unthinkingly tie our shoelaces while doing six other things simultaneously. For her, this means we should never learn to do anything automatically. Ridiculous on so many counts. First, we couldn't function if we had to perform every act mindfully instead of unthinkingly.  Second, we can always retrieve, relearn, and revisit the basic elements of an act.  Pablo Casals was asked in his 80s why he still practiced the scales daily. He said to get better. Going back to the basics makes us better, whether we do it mindfully or mindlessly.  Casals could never have been the cellist he was if he couldn't play his instrument automatically. I agree that if you want to deepen your knowledge of anything, you must mindfully go back to the basics.

   Moving from automaticity to mindfulness is riding an elevator up and down the options, from the most atomized to the largest chunk. The smallest element in language, the phone is only worth focusing on if you're a linguist. The one after that is the phoneme, selected phones used to create a language. The next larger unit is the vowel in its context, which determines the syllable. Then, additional consonants are added to make the syllable a large unit. Those units are combined with other syllables. In the case of single-syllable words, to create a phrase. In the case of multisyllabic words, to build a word.  etc., to larger and larger units. 

   The twins can now identify the phonemes in a word. They sometimes have trouble holding on to the sound when they blend it with another phoneme. I discovered yesterday how much trouble they both have comprehending unfamiliar phrases. That is the unit size we have to work on now.