Thursday, December 12, 2024

 Thursday, December 12, 2024

   This morning, I weighed 135.5 lbs. A few months ago, I was concerned by my rapid weight loss. I got down to 131 from 139; I didn't want to go any lower. At my age, I need to maintain some body fat in case of a catastrophic event. Lutz told me the vulnerable are the very fat, the very thin, and those who are not in good physical shape.

   Yesterday, the service manager at Kia, Joe, called to say a master Kia mechanic was coming over from Honolulu to diagnose problems that couldn't be diagnosed online. Could I bring in my car on Thursday morning? I got up early to drop it off. Joe didn't have a loaner available. I told him, "No worries. I wouldn't need one until Monday." I got the car there by 8:30.

   My friend Melissa called. Would Friday morning work for me? She would drop in to visit for an hour or so. She was leaving the following day for a month stint volunteering as an OBGyn in the Australian Outback.  Then, Vicki, the dental receptionist, called to tell me the antibiotic I was taking for the UTI was good enough. I didn't need to take another antibiotic prophylactically before dental treatment.  Anyone with metal in their body, like a hip replacement, shoulder replacement, or partial elbow replacement, must take it.  I qualify. For reasons I don't understand, these implants increase the risk of infection. Then, the penny dropped.  I had a nine a.m. dental appointment, I didn't have a car to get there, and I arranged for a friend to visit at the same time.

   I asked Vicki if she could find someone to fill my slot. A missed appointment is a missed payment, and I hate doing that to someone dependent on their clients to cover their expenses. She tried, but the people she called didn't answer their phones. I called my friend  Melissa and told her I couldn't make it. I would see her when she got back in a month. I got the car to Kia by 8:30 a.m., and they drove me home.

  Yvette planned to share dinner with me on the night of my birthday but had to cancel because she became ill. It was a short-lived virus infection, starting with a sore throat. We had dinner tonight. She brought an egg sandwich and a side of avocado. I had a bowl of lentil soup and a salad. Neither of us cooks.  

       I nearly forgot about my appointment with seventh-grade LV. We only meet for half an hour a week and have only had two appointments, and her mother canceled our appointment last week. She's also responding quickly to my teaching methods, so I don't think about her a lot. I started showing her the six-step procedure for decoding multi-syllable words. She applied it immediately. 

   My initial plan was to teach her how to decode multi-syllable words, then work on comprehension and, only afterward, drill the fine points of decoding to increase reading speed. I forgot about my plan to focus on comprehension. I forgot that her mother told me it was a problem. She read fiction at a 5th-grade level and informational text at a third-grade level. Given her obvious intelligence, it was hard to think of her as having problems with comprehension.  

    Using seventh-grade material, the work we did today revealed a gap in her comprehension. She didn't get further than the first clause in the first sentence.: "Gazing across the a/r-i-d, rocky Moroccan plain,"  She hit problems reading arid. She read the i  as a long instead of a short vowel.  She would need extensive phonics training.  However, she did decode Moroccan correctly.  By the end of the phrase, I diagnosed a cause for her comprehension problems. upon checking her understanding of the words in the clause, I discovered she didn't use context to figure out the word's meaning. When I asked her the meaning of 'plain," she said not very pretty or simple.  True, the plains are simple and unadorned, but that is not an adequate understanding of the word in this context.  I asked her if her reading of the word made sense in this context. When I pushed her to use the context: someone's gazing across something that is rocky, even if she doesn't know the word arid.  What is that something? She could tell me it was a piece of land.  I wasn't surprised that she figured it out quickly. The surprise was that she hadn't done it on her own before.