Friday, January 10, 2025

 Friday, January 10, 2025

     I went to bed late, around 10:00. I must have been asleep by 10:30.  I slept straight through to 4 a.m. when I had to pee. I went back to bed and was stirring when I heard Joseph leave for work. When I checked the time, it was 6:17.  I went back to bed again, dozed, and finally got up close to 7 a.m.

   Damon and Cylin have been posting information on their state of affairs amid the disasters in Southern California. I only heard about the windstorm and fires through Jean on Wednesday. I texted  Damon and Cylin and got pictures of electric poles and lines down on the main street from the high winds. That meant they were without electricity and water.

   Because their house is one block from Griffith Park, they might be in particular danger from the fire. As it winds up, it’s probably the exact opposite. While Griffith Park is a tinderbox, the city has surrounded it with water tankers to protect it.   Damon’s house is perhaps safer for its location.

   Once they started posting, they posted regular updates. They got a hotel room so they could shower and went home each night to be with the cat, which the hotel refused to accommodate. 

   I had an appointment with seventh-grade RC after a long break over the Christmas vacation. She went to Oahu to be with her aunt while on vacation because he mother worked. We continued working with the dictation and spelling. She misspelled ride as rive.  When I asked if mistakes like that happened often, she reluctantly said, “Yes.”  She opened up more when I told her there was a good chance we could fix the problem. I told her about neuroplasticity, telling her stories of success. She relaxed and felt less driven to hide the problem. At the end of the session, I left her with the understanding that it could be changed.  I always feel the need to progress slowly with this girl.  She’s very self-conscious, very ashamed.  When students are overwhelmed with shame, I have to move slowly. I often merely show them the problem in a new light and leave it at that.  Often, the students make the changes on their own. Just learning change is possible is often enough.

   Yvette came up for dinner. We engaged in lively conversation.  She told me she was planning to get trained and licensed as an aesthetician to expand her earning options and create an income path as she gets old and loses strength in her hands, making massage difficult to impossible. In the middle of the dinner, the muscle on the right side at the level of my armpit started aching.  The pain spread across my upper back. I was in agony by the end of the evening.

   The pain was frightening. I hadn’t been in pain like that since my hip replacement. My PT warned my efforts to straighten out my spine and my posture could backfire. The bones had worn down to accommodate my lousy posture. If I realigned them, they wouldn’t fit together smoothly, and I could be in trouble.