Mike's death; Betty's life...

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Sunday, January 15, 2023

The pain in my right foot shifted to the top of the foot between the metatarsals, far away from the toes. It also was lessening.

I pulled out of my driveway, heading for church just as Paulette and Judy passed. I was behind them as we drove to church. Would the route I take once we get to town be faster than theirs? I turned off at Kawai while they continued to Henry before turning. When I saw them next, they were several cars ahead of me. They must have made all the lights, two on Queen K and three on Henry Street, the two additional stop lights since Safeway moved down there.

I turned into the library parking lot, which has a lower chance of a car accident than the church parking lot. I was delayed as I struggled to get a Costco-sized box of diapers out of my car. As I entered the church grounds, I saw their car looking for a parking spot.

I had planned to drop off the two boxes of diapers at the church today. I carried one into the church today since I knew I would forget or be too tired after church. TJ usually wandered around on the south lanai. I could ask her what to do with them.

Going up the stairs of the church was a challenge. I placed the box a few steps ahead and then walked up, holding the rail. I repeated that several times before one of the greeters noticed me and came to help. She grabbed the box. When she reached the top of the stairs, another greeter said, “Give it to me. I’ll put it in the donation box.” There was no question about why I was carrying a large box of diapers. I’ll do the same thing with the second box next Sunday.

I was supposed to be in Honolulu next Sunday visiting relatives, but the guest of honor got sick. Apparently, she gets sick a lot. I know she has had two bouts of cancer. I wonder if her immune system has been compromised by the treatments.

While at church today, I stayed away from Claire. Someone else came up and checked on her. She slept through most of the service.

I felt tired while at church. That’s not unusual. I often come home and take a lovely nap. However, today, I was exhausted. , I skipped planned stops and lay down for a nap. I slept for three hours. Getting up was a struggle. I was so relaxed.

Driving home, I couldn’t see the horizon. We were plagued by vog. This is the worst we’ve ever had. When I moved here, there was vog. The island dealt with vog from the 1983 eruption of Kilauea, which lasted till 2018. My first visit here was in 2004. Mike and I moved here in 2015. We had never known the island without vog. What a difference! I wept when I could see the cloud formations clearly. Some find the vog sunsets more beautiful. Huh? The clouds are obscured. The sun looks like a big round orange ball. There is little variation between the daily sunsets. Nothing there to applaud as far as I’m concerned. And yes, Mike and I would applaud sunsets. The shows were often spectacular and surprisingly different each night.

Darby called while I was on my walk. When Patrick called yesterday, asking if I could help him with a car pickup. Darby got sick while on a piano tuning job. She couldn’t drive; Patrick had to go get her. Their car had been parked at the client’s house for several days.

I told Patrick I had plans to go to Honolulu the following weekend and didn’t want to be exposed to Darby’s stomach virus through him. I said I couldn’t do it. Darby called to thank me for considering helping pick up the car. She also wondered why I was going to Honolulu. Was it a follow-up for my hip? I told her it was to visit relatives. We talked about how we learn to love Hawaii more each year we live here.

When Mike and I first moved here, it wasn’t as awed as I am now. It was unfamiliar. I didn’t know one plant from another. I don’t mean I couldn’t name them. I couldn’t see a difference. Darby told me how people would give directions: turn at the Blue Palm or the Ulu tree. Huh? I become more familiar and sensitive to more minor foliage variations each year.

I hadn’t received the final check from ninth-grade K’s mom. I figured she was going to stiff me. Then I checked my email. While I had written the session in my notebook, I never sent her the information. Okay. I was two weeks late. She paid me immediately.

I had a session with second-grade M. We reviewed double-digit addition. I started with problems with regrouping. She couldn’t remember anything. I switched to addition without regrouping and used expanded notation to help her. She had no trouble remembering how to do the expanded notation. At some point, I asked her what was going on. I had never seen her so disconnected. She said something about everyone packing to go to Oahu. I told her that wasn’t possible because she had school tomorrow. She backed off, saying, “Oh, I don’t know.” I had no way to get through to her. I was very concerned. I planned to call her father and find out if he had any information on her state of mind. We were back to square one when it came to addition and subtraction. She subtracted in an addition problem and added in a subtraction one.

I finally watched Leap Year tonight. I thought I would love to watch Amy Adams in anything. This movie was pushing its luck. It was ridiculous. She walked over half of Ireland in a pair of high heels. OHSA should have been called in. The final scene was ridiculous. Would she really have done that in front of everyone? I don’t think so. It was so unlikely it didn’t even make good drama.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

I woke up very early this morning, around three am. I started my in-bed exercises and did some meditation. I must have dozed because I finally got up at 7.

While my right foot was swollen yesterday, today, it felt great. Whatever the problem had been, it is resolving itself.

I met with Mama K’s crew, but only the girls. Fourth-grade K was with his dad. Mom said she had to take her older daughter to a volleyball game at ten. After that, she would meet up with Dad and K. She would have him for the rest of the day. They would be at the beach, and he could do a session with me via phone. I was in touch with K’s teacher. She asked me to work with him on verbal expression. She said he had the ideas but couldn’t put them into words. Mama K never got in touch with me. Very frustrating. I do their sessions for free. It does seem I am more concerned than their mom is. Or has she just given up on her kids?

The Special ed teacher says she sees a difference in the girls. Twin A was moving ahead quickly. I decided to work with a lower-grade material so she could identify more words.

I got a call from Patrick, Darby’s husband. She had a stomach bug. She had been at someone’s house when it hit. She wasn’t up to driving home. Patrick went to pick her up. They left her car there. Would I drive him there to help pick up the car? I was hesitant. I was scheduled to visit relatives in Honolulu the weekend of the 20th. I didn’t want to get sick; I didn’t want to pass it on to them. We agreed we would wear masks and keep the windows open. I said, “That was a given.” Nonetheless, Patrick might be carrying the bug and pass it to me.

I called Jean. She was working on taxes with a friend of John’s daughter.

For the second time today, I couldn’t find Elsa. The first was in the early afternoon. I frantically looked around the house. I finally remembered I had taken her to Petco to be groomed. I’ve never been good about coordinating events in my mind. However bad my temporal disorientation was when I was younger, it is considerably worse now.

The second search for Elsa occurred as I prepared to get in the car to pick her up from Petco. When I got the call to pick her up, I started searching for her to take her with me when I drove to town to pick her up. I’m having as much trouble thinking of her as gone as I did/ do with Mike.

I did some shrub trimming, some work on the updates/blog, continued cleaning Elsa’s poop spots on the lanai rug and posted my videos on Facebook again. I’m into doing that once a week. I get one or two new viewers each time I post them.

Other than that, it was a nothing day. I couldn’t even nap.

I have been listening to more YouTube videos by Stephen Batchelor and Robert Wright on the non-metaphysical aspects of Buddhism. Buddha pointed out that we suffer needlessly because of dukkha, having unpleasant things happen. Those things are usually listed as old age and death. S.N. Goenka taught a more inclusive definition of dukkha, not getting what we want and getting what we don’t want. It is now being defined as disappointment. They talk about some forms of Buddhist meditation, particularly Vipassana, as antidotes to that form of suffering. I believe another antidote is gratitude, focusing on what we like versus what we don’t like.

Friday, January 13, 2023

I only realized today was Friday the thirteenth when I typed in the date. Well, so far, it's been okay. I got up shortly before eight. My alarm went off at 5:30, as usual. I had no reason to get out of bed except for Elsa. Eventually, I was going to have to feed her.

Regarding her other needs, she had no objection to using my lanai carpet to do her business. I did my in-bed exercises and dozed for the next two to three hours. Sleeping in is exhausting. I woke up tired.

I ran into some people I usually see at an earlier time. I thought Michelle had been out since before seven. She walks for a long time. Then, I ran into a couple with their dog who lived on the street below me. I remembered their dog's name was Kai and the woman's, Pam. Oops! The dog's name was Mia, and the woman's was Annie. Getting the dog's name wrong was forgivable. I cued myself, remembering she had the same name as someone's child. Wrong child. Wrong sex, for that matter. Kai is a boy; Mia is a girl. Getting the names Kai and Mia confused was one thing, but renaming this poor woman was another. I know names start slipping at this age. As I lay in bed this morning, I tried to remember the name of a philosopher my dad had told me about. I couldn't remember it for the life of me. As I typed now, it came back to me, Kierkegaard.

I ran into a neighbor who lives kitty-corner from me across my backyard, John. He was on his second dog walk for the morning with Bobo, their seventeen-year-old miniature poodle. John's first walk is with his two yellow labs. They tear around the block.

I got my entry for the public blog edited and posted before nine am. At nine-thirty, I signed in for a Zoom meeting with Jana, a woman who asked me to mentor her as a reading teacher. We talk about our lives as well. It is nice to have someone who consistently expresses an interest in my ideas. She had double booked for today. It is usually me who does that. It was just as well. I was exhausted. I tried to nap before my eleven am appointment with Shelly.

In my session with Shelly, I worked on the relationship between hate and anger. I saw it on a continuum for the first time today. Shelly said she thought they came from different parts of the brain. That's certainly possible. Hate probably resides in a deeper part of the brain. Brain scans show that we never use discreet parts of the brain. There are many parts involved in all activities. I imagine hatred is our response when we don't get what we want. We only recognize it as anger. But we often hear people say, 'I could have killed him," not meaning it. I'm sure we don't, but why do we say that? I believe those expressions carry some hidden meaning, not about our intentions but what happens in our unconscious minds. We can deal with being angry. We can't deal with wanting to kill people because they don't do it our way.

I also dealt with cravings. I have ignored its role in my life except for chocolate and FreeCell. But there are many things I crave. I crave better relationships with certain people in my life. I crave the warmth and affection I shared with Mike. I crave recognition for my work. Moreover, I crave to see people use it more. I also crave recognition as the creator of the method I developed, but only at a polite distance.

D's mom missed my text from Wednesday. D said he wanted to work on reading the book three days a week. I had yet to hear from her about adding Friday to our schedule. I texted her again this morning. She said yes.

We continued reading Investing for Young Adults. He had done no reading on his own. He doesn't. I couldn't convince him to make an effort. I can only push so hard. I repeat over and over that the more he does, the better he'll get. But nothing penetrates. He forgets. That I can believe. He has no memory. Really! It's stunning. Even things he wants to remember, he can't.

D still makes up words with little or no relationship to the letters on the page. His guesses are often good, but he makes enough errors to throw off the meaning.

I have a lot of cases with kids with faulty memories. This is the first time I've seen it like this. Or is it just that I've never noticed it before? I hope it's the former, and I just got lucky. The other option means something's going wrong with us physically that's altering our brains. Is it genetic, epigenetic, or chemical, coming from our food, air, or water?

I read about Wittgenstein's three-day nonstop bout with Bertrand Russell, trying to get him to see what he was trying to say when he spoke about the difference between saying and seeing. I would love to run this past Mike. He studied philosophy for both PhDs. On the other hand, if I had asked him to tell me what he knew, I might have driven him mad with how I approached the topic. It was always a problem between us. He studied what people had to say. I struggled to understand things on my own terms.

On seeing versus saying, the idea Wittgenstein desperately tried to get Russell to understand: It sounds like the difference between the concrete and the abstract. Seeing is concrete; saying is abstract. In my first class in linguistics, the teacher said, "All words are abstractions." That's taken for granted now. Was it also understood in Wittgenstein's day, or did he introduce the idea?

Then again, seeing is limited, too. I can only see an object from one perspective at a time. What I see with my eyes is limited. I can't see the back of something simultaneously; I see the front of it. I imagine what the other side looks like. Yes, I have that information from seeing the back of the chair some other time, but at that moment, my perception of the chair was top-down. I imagine a whole chair. I can never 'see' a whole object at one glance. Isn't that image an abstraction since it only exists in my mind? It certainly doesn't involve seeing. Mike might know the answer to that question. I can feel him pushing against the confines of his current existence. He would love to lecture me on the subject, maybe in my dreams.

Thursday, January 12, 2023

My good spirits from last night were with me in the morning. I had to get up earlier than usual. We had morning yoga. I had to get up by six to get in my walk, and Elsa fed before yoga. On yoga mornings, I skip my in-bed exercises; I’d be doing many of them in the yoga class anyway.

I did some more clipping of the overgrown hedge. I do a little bit most days. I don’t pay the gardeners enough to do that work. I also did some cleanup on the lanai. The furniture was still moved away from the screened wall after Scott moved it away when a bad rainstorm blew in the water. Elsa took advantage of the exposed carpeting and used it for her own purposes.

I had sessions with the J & Iz siblings. I usually start with third-grade J. I don’t tutor him. Lord knows he is far ahead of his grade level; he needs no academic help. He has a problem with anger management. Today, I had Iz first.

Iz objected to working with me. This was strange. She has been enthusiastic up to now. She is J’s younger sister. I think she felt she had to dislike it if her brother did.

Iz made terrific progress in a few sessions. I’ve seen improvement like this before. When the student has no perceptual problems, only confusion about the reading process, The Phonics Discovery System resolves problems in a flash. Unfortunately, the Share Screen option on Zoom wasn’t working. I had to stop early with Iz. I fixed the problem by restarting the tablet.

J continued complaining about working with me. He didn’t want to talk about his anger. I’m sure it is very upsetting to talk about something you hate in yourself as much as he hated his uncontrolled rage. I tried several tacks and then returned to the one I had used before with some success.

I asked him to remember a time this week when he lost his temper. He fell silent. I thought the screen froze. He had a puzzled look on his face. Then he said, “I didn’t lose my temper this week. How did that happen?” Here we have an eight-year-old boy with a good concept of the human psyche to have his mind blown by an unexpected turn of events.

I asked his permission to tell his mom that he hadn’t lost his temper in a week. Afterward, I was concerned that he would think the problem was solved and that he would never have to think about it again. Would he have an incident during the week, and we’d be back to square one? Does he believe I performed some miracle cure? I teach the principles of psychology taught in Vipassana Buddhism. You learn a skill. The skill requires regular practice. And there are still times when you’re out of control. I started on this process when I was forty-nine. I hope someone who starts younger can do a better job with it than me. We’ll see, won’t we?

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

I've been good about my in-bed exercises before my morning walk. I've included the toe stretches the chiropractor recommended. I see improvement in the discomfort level of my right foot.

I called the company that sells concrete acid stains, asking if they could send me a color chart. The one on their Internet site needs to be bigger. I can't hold it against the base and the gravestones to compare the color choices. They said yes, no problem.

I downloaded the book I planned to read with Adolescent D, Investing for Young Adults. This is the book his mother gave him for Christmas. It was the first book he ever received as a gift; he was fifteen years old. He only now reads well enough that giving a book as a gift is reasonable. D was excited to receive it. He wasn't put off by it being a book. He was thrilled with the topic. It is something he was interested in.

I saw I could order the digital version of the book for $.99. Then I noticed I had a Kindle subscription that was costing me $10 a month. Huh? How did this happen? I decided to maintain the subscription while I worked on this book. Then I thought- cut my losses. I canceled the subscription and bought the Kindle version to share the book with D while we read it together.

I put my Kindle version on Zoom's shared screen. I was disappointed that I couldn't write on the book's pages. I needed to write on the screen to continue to guide him in his reading procedures. I had to think of another way to do it.

I cleaned Elsa's ears. My friend Carol modeled how to do it. Elsa builds up wax quickly. I have learned that people build up wax at different rates, some too much and some too little. Whatever the problems are with building up too much, too little is worse. The wax protects our ears.

I got a call from a Colorado number yesterday. I didn't pick it up because it had to be a scam. Then I saw I had a voicemail. It was the Kaiser billing department. This was my answer to my phone call yesterday. When I called and was put on hold, I was given the choice of holding or getting a callback. I chose the latter. They said I would hear in half an hour. It was quite a bit longer than that.

I asked if I could get a single-sheet summary paper of all my medical expenses for the year. No, they didn't do that. They would print out every receipt, and I would have to add it myself. Are you telling me this huge company can't get the software installed that allows for an annual summary sheet?

I got around to straightening out the linen closet. After my guests left, I washed a bunch of towels. I neatly folded them and asked Scott to put them in the closet because I couldn't reach that high. I forgot to tell him that I wanted the whole stack put in as is. He stuffed each towel in individually. Well, I could have done that. And that is what I did do today. I removed all the towels from the closet, refolded them, and put them in one at a time.

I did it while Scott was out. I didn't want him to feel bad.

I was pretty depressed today. I had a great time yesterday. My spirits were good. I thoroughly enjoyed lunch with my friend Jean. Today, I found myself obsessing about relationships that were not as I would like them to be. I struggled against it.

I was reading Time of the Magicians. OMG! I recognize the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. They're the ones my father taught me. Along with Rousseau, with some Socratic debate thrown in for good measure. Wittgenstein combined logical thought with metaphorical expression. That sounded familiar, too. I see myself reflected in these philosophers. Not so original.

I trimmed some of the overgrown shrubs along the edge of the driveway. I took down a major branch along the edge of the fence with my much-loved mini chainsaw. Mike would have freaked out at the thought of me using it. Good thing he's not here to worry about it. If I cut an artery, I'll join him sooner than expected.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

My morning routine was the same. I got ready for my 11:30 luncheon appointment with my friend Jean, who was visiting from Arizona. We met at the Kona Inn restaurant. The seating area is separate from the oceanfront by an expanse of lawn. It reminded me of Bermuda. Our waters are rougher than they are there. When I eat at Huggo’s or where Daylight Mind used to be, I see the water crashing into the shoreline.

I ordered a hamburger with fries and a lemonade. I ate there once with my friend Zola. I ordered a hamburger then, too. I remembered it as good. Eh! On today’s burger. I think it was a Costco preformed one. It was tasteless. Jean had crab cakes with shrimp and a wedge salad. The waiter warned that the shrimp weren’t separate but mixed into the crab cake. Jean said her meal was okay. Neither of us gave a rave review. We shared a mud pie with a huge wedge of ice cream and whipped cream for dessert. It was fun to eat. More importantly, I had a great time with Jean; it was very renewing.

When we left, I asked her to come to Mike’s gravesite. Jean is an artist; I wanted her opinion on what color to select for the wedges the gravestones will rest on. I didn’t have a color chart, just small bits of color on the Internet. It didn’t make any difference. I couldn’t get to the site. Jean still wanted to see where Mike was buried. The man was so loved by one and all – and me. Jean loved the cemetery; she found it peaceful. It’s very small. I’m surprised it wasn’t filled up years ago. It doesn’t have a lawn; it’s naked lava rubble. Most of the gravesites have bare cement, grimy after years of exposure. But there was no question in my mind that this was where Mike wanted to be buried. He was loved by the priest and the parish members, and he loved them. He was so happy. His happiness was a great source of joy for me, too.

After Jean and I said our goodbyes, she headed to her daughter’s house to be home when her grandkids arrived. I headed to Office Max to print out two copies of a will. When I tried to print it out, it was a huge deal. It took the woman manning the print desk fifteen minutes. I had the document printed double-sided. That reduced the bulk substantially. My printer gave up on double-sided printouts years ago.

I noticed a for sale table. There was an electronic paint kit suitable for children three and up. I was looking for a present for a three-year-old I was about to visit. Next weekend, I was to travel to Honolulu to stay with relatives.

After Office Max, I headed to Dr. Hiranaka’s office for my three-month checkup on my five pulled teeth and the implanted posts. I had to wait all this time without teeth until the swelling reduced. Getting a good fit for the implant caps and the bridge would have been difficult otherwise.

While I was waiting to be seen, my phone rang. It was Kaiser. I was expecting a call from the billing department. I wanted to order an end-year statement for tax purposes. It wasn’t them. I emailed my doctor asking for a baseline memory test. I have several friends suffering from noticeable memory loss. I see it in myself. So far, so good, only age-related errors. However, I was disoriented by this phone call. I usually get an email telling me that someone will call. I was expecting one call, and I got an unexpected one. The irony of my disorientation when requesting a memory check didn’t escape me. I made an appointment.

I was full of energy at the end of the day and was up for stopping at Costco. I did a large shopping including two Costco-sized boxes of diapers to donate. I hoped I would run into some I knew. When they saw the diapers, I would say, “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m pregnant.” Ha! That’s been impossible for years. I’m sure there will be no surprises in my future.

Monday, January 9, 2023

I woke up feeling sad. I finally figured out what I could do about that. I use Vipassana to help myself, and I teach it to others. It is surprisingly effective. I often sit with my hatred of some feeling I don't like, dealing with aversion. But Buddhism teaches that craving is as much of a problem. Through S.N. Goenka, I learned that aversion was as much an issue as craving. They both indicate a feeling of dissatisfaction. Things happen that we don't want, and something we do want doesn't happen. I turned my attention to craving.

I released anything negative about a craving for recognition for my work. It's easy to learn and teach, and often not just effective, but surprisingly so. It is painful that something so simple and cheap doesn't get into the schools. If a few teachers tried it and found it effective, they'd pass it on to other teachers. My work would be done. But this is not in the cards. And I am incapable of energetically pursuing that end. Why would I expect the work to be known if I'm unwilling to put myself out there in full force? I released anything negative about this craving and kept anything positive or anything I still needed. Nice!

I had an appointment with Adolescent D at 2 p.m. I gave him a menu of activities to work on. He chose to practice the visual perception exercise. I form the letters slowly on the Zoom whiteboard, and he follows my lead, 'writing' the letters with his fingertip on his desktop. The last time we did this, I used cursive and manuscript letters. He said he wanted print because he didn't use cursive. The purpose of the activity is visual perception, deepening the imprint of the letters in his nervous system for improvement in letter perception. We tried both. He felt the print had a more significant impact. That's what we worked with.

Then, we switched to reading passages. He read third-grade material with great accuracy and speed. He started off well. Then he hit a word he had difficulty with. I am trying to remember if he recognized he had misread it or if I told him. Either way, his reading accuracy fell off dramatically after that. It was clearly a psychological response. I worked to help him calm himself. It's clear by now he can read, but he still has to use conscious effort. It doesn't just happen as it does for a good reader. "Just happening" full automaticity is on the horizon now, given all his progress. He went back to reading and made a conscious effort to pay attention to the letters in the words as he read. Wow! He decoded one-word syllable by syllable. He made me a very happy teacher.

His mother told me he bought him a book for Christmas, "Investing for Young Adults." He said he was interested in learning more about it. This is the first time he ever received a book as a gift. The boy is fifteen years old. Before this, it would have been like giving a print book to a blind person. It would have been cruel. His mother was thrilled to see his response. First, he could read the title. Second, he was thrilled to get this book. I proposed we work on it together. He was open to that.

At four, I had the M & W sisters. I still needed something to work on with sixth-grade W. I needed to know from her or her teacher what she needed help with. I worked with second-grade M on math. She still has trouble keeping the regrouping procedures with addition and subtraction apart. I don't understand why she has this problem. I had tried various approaches, including the "Do what I tell you to do;" method used when I was in school. I used expanded notation and laid the problem out with realia. Nothing gets in. Given 72+ 88=, she will add the tens column up first. She will write the 5 in the tens column and the 1 (from 15) above the one's column. It's not that she can't do expanded notation.

When I asked her what her teacher did in math today, it was expanded notation. She didn't remember the word for it and wrote out 536= 500+30+6. Perfect!

I didn't watch any TV tonight. I couldn't find anything as soul-satisfying as the jazz on HPR. I did some work on the updates. That also felt good.

Sunday, January 8, 2023

On my morning walk, I encountered a flock of fifteen turkeys. The flock size increases slowly. I have seen a clutch of nine newborns. A while later, there was only one youngster, the lone survivor. If all survived, we would be inundated with turkeys. They would take over the neighborhood.

Jean’s daughter invited me to accompany them on a boat outing. It was canceled because her friend who offered it had an opportunity to have a paying client for the day.

I went to church instead. Boy, did I make a boo-boo!. Last week, I approached an old woman in a wheelchair delivered by a transportation service if she needed help. I gave her the program and bulletin. Then I asked her if she was comfortable sitting in the hot sun. When she said no, I moved her from the periphery up against the glass doors so she could have the best view of the altar. Today, without asking her, I dumped a program in her lap, released the brakes on her wheelchair, and rolled her up to the glass door. “Where am I going?” she asked. She had no idea who I was, no less remembered what occurred last week. I returned her to her original position and returned to my seat.

The new priest gave the homily. It wasn’t quite to my taste. It emphasized faith versus practice to get into heaven. He said anyone who does mass online versus in person can’t get into heaven. Really. He just announced that the homebound can’t get into heaven. Is he for real? I mentioned my feelings to friends who were at mass. They liked the homily. I don’t think they heard the threat in his words. They get great comfort from embracing Jesus. I can see why it would have meant for them.

After mass, I stopped at Long’s to use a downloaded coupon. I picked up five ten-ounce packages of Hersey’s milk chocolate nuggets with whole almonds. I wanted to buy a hairbrush, too. I was looking for a particular type, one with closely set bristles. They didn’t have it. I saved three dollars from the bill thanks to the downloaded coupon.

I planned to stop at Costco on the way home but was too tired. Church exhausts me. Meditation exhausts me. I feel nice and relaxed. That’s great, but I’m useless for anything else.

Saturday, January 7, 2023

I was supposed to have Mama K's crew at 9 am this morning. Fourth-grade K's teacher and I have been communicating. I saw the results of his iReady Math evaluation before the winter break. I had a session with him every day except for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. I covered all the areas where he had done poorly. Mama K never got back to me this morning. I had no idea what had happened. Coming from a different generation, it is inconceivable that someone wouldn't reach out to explain the absence.

I was in bad grief today. Abandoning ninth-grade K was hard on me. I don't know how he will deal with it. It may make no difference. Given that he refused to work with me on Tuesday after I lectured him about his need to be less passive and dependent, he may be relieved. I assumed the no-show on Thursday was a repeat of his refusal. He needs someone else. I worked with an eleven-year-old autistic who couldn't speak with a recorded IQ of 75. I taught him how to speak. I worked with a seven-year-old whose speech was unintelligible to his older siblings. I got him to speak and learn excellent word recognition skills. Ninth-grade K is something else entirely. I don't know what his problem is. Whatever it is, it made me uncomfortable. That wasn't good for either of us. With my backing out, he may find someone to help him, or they will finally get an accurate assessment of his capabilities and prepare him for an academically less demanding life path.

Quitting on ninth-grade K probably will have a bad impact on my relationship with the academic support teacher who recommended me. He probably won't do that again. That makes me sad, too.

On top of my disappointment with K, I also had an upsetting experience with a friend that hit me badly. The grief was almost unbearable until I turned my Vipassana skills on it. Then, it became bearable. No, it was almost pleasant. A little like being sick. But I got things done. I finished reading the chapters Shivani had sent me and trimmed another of the overgrown shrubs along the driveway's edge.

I ordered flight tickets to Honolulu for the twentieth through the twenty-third. I will visit relatives I don't see very often. These are my closest relatives other than my sister and her kids. My mother was an only child, and my father's one brother had no kids- at least none that have shown up on Twenty-Three and Me yet. The young woman's parents currently living in Hawaii are in my generation. Roy is seven years younger than me. His was the first diaper I ever changed. His daughter married a Hawaiian boy she met in San Francisco. He wants to move back here. They're trying it out. She says they're not in a great house but will be here for six months. They have a three-year-old in daycare. Getting him into a program back in San Francisco would be impossible if they were to return in the middle of the year. It's hard enough to get a kid into a good daycare program at any time. Fortunately, both parents can work online.

Friday, January 6, 2023

I got up shortly before seven today. Not bad when I can stay in bed as long as I like. My right foot had been bothering me. This was a concern since I have a second toe climbing over my first. It threw all my metatarsals out of sync.

I met with Jana at 9:30. I told her about my decision to stop working with ninth-grade K. There were two cancelations this week. One because he refused to attend. I got no explanation for the second one, but I suspected he had refused again. In our last session, I told him he had to give more instead of waiting for others to do all the work for him. When I asked him where he was when he was writing a paper, he said, "In a chair." When I asked him why he was sitting in the car if he was at home, he replied, "I'm drawing." I know he can do more. He's not a deep thinker. He thinks concretely but not abstractly. While he could describe what a character does, he could not identify character traits.

Jana repeated a story I told her about Mike when he gave a similar response to K's. Mike was brilliant. However, after being bedridden for a week, riddled with infection, and on high doses of painkillers, he gave a response comparable to K's. A nurse asked him, "Where are you?" Mike struggled to come up with an answer. Then he said, "Here!" That's what K does. Is his problem cognitive or emotional? I don't know. He should be tested. There may be a mental disability or a low IQ. I suspect his mom has been concerned about him for years and has ignored her concerns. It's like the "wife is the last to know" syndrome. In this case, the mother is the last to know.

I had an appointment with Shelly. I talked about feeling shame and a lack of entitlement because of tutoring relationships that didn't work out well. I got in touch with my own feelings of hatred. Most unpleasant, both the feeling and the awareness of my capacity for such feelings. From the evolutionary psychology perspective, I argue that hate must have a positive function. It would have been extinguished from the human psyche if it didn't. It would have had no survival benefits. I imagine hatred to be like that thick black underline I drew in my coloring books. It dramatically highlighted the figure. With a boundary founded in hatred, I felt I had authority. I never thought I had a right or wanted to be in authority. I hated being a classroom teacher. I want to influence, not command. Shelly actually said something about associating authority with the Nazis. I'm sure that's true. I'm both the victim Jew and the victimizer, German. Not all Germans were Nazis or even antisemites, but that association exists.

I had an appointment with a doctor to get a full body check for signs of skin cancer. I haven't had one ever. Christine, one of my visitors, recommended that I get one yearly. My skin looked good. I didn't spend my youth running around in the sun. I was lucky; I didn't develop a nice-looking tan. I turned yellow. I'd come home from two months at camp, and people would comment I didn't have a tan. I had to remove a watch or show my sock line for people to see anything. Mike had also avoided sun exposure. He had fair skin and had to protect himself from the sun. We sat on the beach, looking like Arabs traversing the desert.

A tutoring student from forty years ago once said she hated it when people went to the beach and then wrapped themselves in towels. I told her she could pass me by without saying hello if she saw me on the beach.

The doctor I saw today was not my primary, Dr. Reed. She's been out for six months. I've tried to make an appointment and have been told she was extending her vacation for another month. She finally permitted the staff to tell her patients that she was having a difficult pregnancy and had been in bed the whole time. She's expecting it in April. I finally made an appointment with another doctor.

I was there for more than the skin cancer check. I asked the doctor to give me a prescription for physical therapy at Hawaiian Rehab so I could continue my work with Katie. She agreed.

While there, I told her about my chest incident the other day. I felt pressure in my chest. It wasn't an elephant sitting on my chest- more like my thirteen-pound Elsa. I was pretty sure it wasn't a heart attack. I had no other symptoms. I figured my whole nervous system would respond if my heart was under attack. There was nothing. I mentioned it because I am eight-two, and it was weird. The doctor had the same reaction- better safe than sorry. She ordered a cardiogram and a chest X-ray. She also spoke about my taking a stress test.

I picked up a medication at the Kaiser pharmacy on the same campus. They sent me texts saying something about January 9. I hadn't read it correctly. I thought the medication would be in on the 9th. No, it was there now; it would be canceled on the ninth if I didn't pick it up by then.

Then I headed to Home Depot. I called them yesterday to find out if they carried the acid stain for the cement I was looking for. I learned they did. Wow! There was no one in the paint department to consult. I found an associate in another aisle and convinced him to page someone. He did. No one came. I wandered the aisles and found the cement paints. I saw large cans of cement stain. From what I saw in the pictures on the internet, the acid stains came in large plastic containers, not cans. I wasn't sure what I was looking at. I planned to call Glidden and ask.

I came home and napped. I needed a lot of sleep today. Terminating with eighth-grade K was traumatic. Hopefully, it puts a fire under his mom to get a more formal evaluation.

Thursday, January 5, 2023

As I lay in bed this morning, I felt pressure in my chest. I didn’t think it was a heart attack, but it was weird. I sure didn’t have an elephant on my chest, more like my thirteen-pound dog. However, Elsa was nowhere near me at the time. I also felt the pressure on the back of my chest. I had a medical appointment scheduled to have a complete body dermatological check. I planned to mention this experience to the doctor.

Jean, my friend who is visiting from Arizona, came to visit. I had an actual person in my house for conversation. How lovely! I have plenty of in-person conversations on my walks. But this is the first sit-down conversation since Christmas dinner when Scott cooked for Yvette, me, and Josh. It was lovely.

Other than that, it was a day of cancelations. The mom of third-grade J and first-grade Iz texted at the last minute that she had a work emergency and had to take her kids with her. I signed in for eighth-grade K. No show. No one answered their phone. I suspected I was being ghosted. K refused to participate in the last session. I suspect his mom indulges him. However, there could be a serious reason for their silence. Whatever the cause, it finally made me realize I could not continue working with this boy. I have to bully him to get anything out of him. This can’t be good for him, and I’m sure it’s not good for me.

I am willing and happy to put up with a lot if I can do some good. I don’t feel this way in this case. I have no idea what this boy’s problem is. He is limited in his verbal expression. It’s not that he can’t speak; he is unwilling to. Why is he this way? I have no idea. Does he have a cognitive problem, an emotional one, or a perceptual one? I feel lost. I could put up with the boy, but I don’t have his mother on my side. I think she is committed to protecting him. That’s a natural parental response. She needs him to work with someone she trusts to be on his side. I think she sees all criticisms of him as an attack rather than a diagnosis. However, I have no real idea what’s happening in her head more than I do with his.

I was supposed to meet with adolescent D for ten minutes. I got lost with all the cancelations and forgot about him.

Paulette dropped off a supply of Kangen water. We had trouble coordinating our schedules so I could pick it up from her for two days, and I was just too lazy today. She gave me a big hug. She is a great hugger.

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

I got up after eight am this morning. Holy cow! I woke up around 4 am, did some in-bed exercises, and then dozed until eight. I added the toe stretching exercise that the chiropractor recommended. I move each toe in a figure-eight pattern, five times one way and five times the other. I fed Elsa before we went out on our morning walk. It was too late to expect her to wait until after we got back. We went out after she finished eating.

I called my friend Jean, who is in town from Arizona, visiting her daughter and her grandkids. She has two wonderful grandkids. They Facetime her regularly. She is one lucky grandma. We may be able to get together tomorrow.

I was tired most of the day. I have no idea why I get tired so easily. When I was young, I thought of myself as someone who never got tired. Looking back on it, I was always tired. I was just good at powering through. I lived on adrenaline.

I started reading the chapters Shivani sent me. I had trouble downloading it and didn’t have time to read it with all the sessions I had over the vacation. I did some work on the updates and blog, finally got around to treating the stains from Elsa’s pooping on the lanai rug, and then napped for at least an hour. I fall into a deep sleep.

At 2 pm., I had Adolescent D. I always ask him what he wants to work on. His choices these days are 1) getting rid of that knot in his stomach, which unpleasantly expands when he has to think about his reading problems, 3) practicing reading, or 3) spelling. He has been choosing to work on reducing that knot. I use a meditation approach I learned with some adaptations. I find it effective for myself. It’s the best strategy I know to ease physical and psychological pain.

I reminded him of what had happened a year ago. He read the word paint as plant. As we decoded the word paint, I asked him what sound the ai made, reminding him, “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” “Which is the first vowel? He said, “I. I’m not stupid.” Ow! The good news is he recognized the error. The bad news is reminding him of what he did hurt. Maybe too much. I asked him how he would feel if his sister was in pain like that. How would he comfort her? The exercise wasn’t as effective as I had hoped. I was a little worried.

D says he’s afraid of change because he fears losing himself. I argue that it is impossible to lose oneself. No matter what form I take, I am always my version of it. The Buddhists claim this sense of a core self is an illusion. It may be, but it gives me comfort.

When I had Mama K’s crew, I started with Twin A. She made progress over the winter break because we met every day. The work we did on automatic processing paid off.

Today I heard her make an unusual grammatical error when she spoke. Her mother told me both girls have problems and receive speech therapy. She’s agrammatic. These girls need a lot of help. Fortunately, they’re gorgeous and sweet. They will make it through life.

Twin E has also progressed, but not compared to Twin A. The more you have, the more you get. Twin A being ahead of Twin E is an unfair trick of nature.

I met with fourth-grade K. I reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping. He aced it. Then I gave him four-digit problems, with some places requiring regrouping and some not. Once I reminded him he had to pay attention, he aced that, too. I wrote his teacher that I had addressed all the standards he had missed according to his iReady math evaluation and to keep me posted on what else he needed.

I sent a Zoom link to ninth-grade K. His mother reminded me that we were only meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I don’t think I am suitable for this boy. His problems are out of my reach. He is not comfortable with my approach. He may not be able to do the work. I’m not sure. I think he should have a complete evaluation and work with someone with a more structured, less cognitive, and psychological approach than I use.

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Today was a fully booked day. I had eight tutoring sessions scheduled, plus a chiropractic appointment. I woke up around 2 am and dozed on and off for the rest of the night. I was on the road for my morning walk with Elsa by six-forty-five.

My first session was at nine am with Mama K’s crew. I only had the Twins. Fourth-grade K wasn’t home. He had gone somewhere with his father. I did the same thing with the girls I had been doing. I think there has been some improvement since the beginning of the winter break. I am sure there is with Twin A. She recalls words she couldn’t before. However, we still haven’t made it through a primer-level story.

At ten am, I had second-grade M. We have been working on math since I discovered she couldn’t read three-digit numbers correctly. Yesterday, we reviewed many of the concepts in the second-grade core math standards. She demonstrated competency with ease. Then we hit addition with regrouping. On, boy. Everything we had gone over went right out the window.

Today I worked on two-digit addition problems with regrouping. When M saw the four-digit sum, she couldn’t read the number. She had no idea what to do. When I isolated the number 5,642, she had no problem reading it and representing it with expanded notation (5000+600+40+2). Why did she have a problem representing the number 42 with expanded notation? The best I could make out, she became confused when she saw something in an unfamiliar context. Everything had to be presented discreetly.

I figured she was traumatized because she had to repeat first grade. I said something about it. She said she had to repeat it because of Covid. Her mom told me she had to repeat first grade because of her poor memory. Ow! I dropped the topic. Well, not quite. I asked her if other classmates of hers from first grade had to repeat it too. She revealed she had moved to a new school. She didn’t know if the other kids in her class had also repeated first grade. However, she did realize her best friend was in first grade for the first time. Oh, boy. Something is going on that has nothing to do with memory. This is the third child I see as mentally closed off- literally close-minded—someone who has difficulty taking in something new. As I conceived it with fourth-grade K the other day, he was enclosed in a bubble that didn’t allow any intrusion.

I got around to pouring boiling water on the sprouting sucker limbs on the base of the twenty-foot haole koa I reduced to a stump. While the boiling water trick was successful with the smaller tree, would it also work to kill a much larger tree with its much deeper roots? Maybe, if I keep pouring boiling water on it for a year whenever I see more sprouting. We’ll see, won’t we?

I planned to leave early for my noon chiropractic appointment. Just as I was walking out the door, I got a text from Lisa, saying she’d been there at twelve fifteen rather than twelve. That was okay with me—the chore I had planned before the appointment might take longer anyway.

Yesterday, I learned the cement paint I was considering using wouldn’t last more than eight years in Hawaii. The guy at the paint counter was downright rude when I said I needed something that would last at least forty years. He said you’ll have to go to another store for that. While he was rude, he was also correct.

When I got home, I looked up cement stains. There is a product that stains cement, acid cement stains. I called a company in Utah that carries it. The technical advisor wasn’t thrilled to have to deal with me. He usually dealt with professionals, not little old ladies with zero product knowledge. I learned that the cement had to be ‘thirsty’ to take the stain. Thirsty means it had to absorb water, not allow it to pool on the surface. Paint wouldn’t adhere to cement unless the ‘pores’ were open. I had to deal with a distributor of the product. There were three listed on their site. Lowes and Home Depot were two, and possibly Sherwin Williams. I checked Lowes. Never heard of it. I stopped off at Ace Hardware. They’re always worth a try. They had oil-based stains designed for wood, not cement. When I got home, I checked the site distributors. There isn’t one in Hawaii. Now what?

I arrived at my chiropractic appointment at 12:15 on the nose. The office was locked. I went to sit in this open-air atrium with a lovely breeze blowing through to read my Kindle until Lisa arrived. She texted me at twelve forty-five to say she was in. She wanted to show me the new floor her husband had laid over the weekend. She was prepared to go into great detail when I asked if we couldn’t get started. Lisa does good to great work. I see a difference, but she yaks about her private life in more detail than I do in the updates I write. It’s non-stop chatter about life’s little challenges. I usually like to listen to people’s stories. Something about hers doesn’t sit quite right with me.

I had texted Adolescent D and his mom, saying I might be late. When I got home at 2:30, half an hour late, I signed in immediately. I asked him if he wanted to continue working on the knot in his stomach. The other day he asked me if I was a therapist. I told him no, but people have told me I had a gift for it since I was young. We continued working on his hatred of his hatred of his hatred of the knot. I don’t push to the central issue. Too scary, which promotes resistance instead of curiosity.

At 3:30, I had my session with the J & Iz siblings. I started with third grade J. He continued arguing with me about the value of our work. His objection is he doesn’t want to talk about his anger. I asked him if his anger was any better after our sessions. We only had two so far. I couldn’t do the work until the second session. J acknowledged yes; it was a bit better. I asked if anything else had worked. No, but that made no difference. He wasn’t ‘better,’ which means perfect. I compared learning this skill with learning to surf. After the first three lessons, would you argue they didn’t work because you weren’t as good as your dad, who’s a wonderful surfer with years of experience? He seemed to calm. I was yelling- not so much at him as to him to get him to hear me. He said very calmly. Don’t yell at me. There was no anger. Wow! I stopped yelling. He was in the right and had the right. Delightful!

I only worked with first-grade Iz for fifteen minutes. I had her read another passage on a high second-grade level. She was a piece of cake. I called her mom afterward to explain I just did fifteen minutes with her daughter. She didn’t need more than that. Mom told me she had her read something to her before the class. This was the first chance she had to listen to her read. She was impressed with the improvement. She could see that she no longer relied on memory exclusively. She could figure things out.

I asked mom to tell the teachers about my method. When we spoke, she said something about saying something to both children’s teachers. I called her back. I advised her against saying anything to fourth-grade J’s teacher. I’m working with him specifically on his anger issue. Mom had taken him to a certified child psychologist to no effect. I advised mom against telling his teacher about me. I am not licensed in anything to do with psychology. I’m just good at what I do. If she told the school she was taking her son to an unlicensed practitioner, we’d have child protective services down our necks. I want her to tell people about my teaching methods, not my healing ones. Those we’ll keep under wrap.

I had a 4:30 with ninth-grade K. His mom texted me; he didn’t want to do it. I’m ready to throw in the towel. He needs more than I can give him or something other than I can give him. I’ve seen evidence that he has the necessary basic intelligence. He is not a deep thinker about anything. He is one of the shallowest people I’ve ever dealt with, and that’s saying a lot. I have worked with the cognitively impaired, the autistic, and one person with schizophrenia. K is in a class by himself. Is he just locked in, or does he lack the basic capacity to do better work? Everything must be pulled out of him. No wonder he hates working with me. Maybe someone who has a structured program he can follow would be better for him.

Monday, January 2, 2023

I slept through most of the night. I woke up before my 5:30 alarm went off, did some in-bed exercises, and got out of bed at 7:30. I assumed I dozed off. Elsa and I did a shorter-than-usual morning walk. I didn’t want her to wait so long to be fed; it was already late for her.

I did the morning work of editing and posting last year’s entry in the public blog. While working on it, M & W’s father called. Yesterday, he asked if we could skip today. Now, he asked if we could do it today. He thought her school started tomorrow. The Hawaii Public School System’s teachers start tomorrow; the students begin on Wednesday. We schedule M for 10 am.

He asked if I was planning to see sixth-grade W. I thought she was doing fine. I was surprised she had a B+ in English on her report card when she had As in every other subject. I asked him about it. He said she had been getting Cs most of the semester. I asked her if she needed help with anything. She never did. I told him to tell me if he sees she needs help so I can get in there and take care of it.

I had a 9 am appointment with Mama K’s crew. I started with third-grade Twin E. She is behind Twin A in her reading development. When I started with them, it was the other way around. I anticipated E would move ahead, leaving A in the dust. No one is moving ahead so rapidly to leave anyone in the dust.

I have been emphasizing automatic recall with E. I started using a passage from my updates. Neither girl could read what I wrote. I was sharing nothing of myself with them. The other day, I couldn’t find something in a timely way and used passages from Barnell Loft’s sixth-grade text to do a sight-word search. I was surprised to discover a wider selection of sight words embedded there. I started with the same passage I had last time. E labored through it even though she was faster than when we started.

Getting Twin E to understand that we use two systems for reading so she would learn to use the one she was weak in was difficult. Both girls are taking surfing lessons. I used that as an analogy. You use one set of skills to paddle out to the wave and another set to ride it in. You don’t use the paddling skills when you are riding the wave, and you don’t use the riding skills when you’re paddling out to the wave. You get the point. Automatic recall and decoding skills have to be separately learned and practiced. The overuse or misuse of one versus the other causes many problems in reading.

My next ‘victim’ was third-grade Twin A. I used the same material with her as I had with E. I just started doing this with her in our last session. She zoomed through using automatic recall. She went through faster than Twin E and recalled more words. I then had her reread the primer passage from the testing materials. She read two paragraphs of that with reasonably good speed. She recalled words she had seen from our last reading. She recalled words she saw in the first sentence when she encountered them later in the passage. Yes, that’s a significant accomplishment for her. She sometimes guessed a word with zero relationship to the letters in the word using context clues. I wondered how much of that adaptation she had made to compensate for her poor reading skills and how much because a teacher, following the Reading Recovery method, taught her to do that. I did some decoding with her.

She drew a blank when I asked her to identify the vowel in the word. When I asked her to name the vowel letters, she started with the letter O. I told her to name them in order. She had no difficulty. Interesting. Why did she choose not to use that skill if she had it? After I wrote the vowel letters she had dictated, she had no trouble identifying the vowel letter in the word. I had to give her the keyword for that vowel sound. Then, she blended the sounds smoothly. When it came to words with consonant blends, she often dropped one as she combined them with a new sound. Those consonant blends. I understand why teachers want to teach them as single sounds. Teaching them that way works for some kids and causes problems for others.

I had fourth-grade K last. I spoke to his older brother the other day. He told me he would argue with you if you said anything to K that contradicted his thoughts. He is not open to learning anything new. I hadn’t thought about him in those terms. I wasn’t sure why he had so much trouble learning something new. I see him as a bright child. From the conversation, I thought it might be a problem with discomfort with confusion.

Every time we hear or see something we have never heard or seen, our brains search for the familiar to help make sense of it. Our heads spin. They continue spinning if we don’t find a familiar association. If we can’t, we can have one of two reactions. We can respond with anticipation, “I’m going to learn something new!!” or with confusion, “Something is wrong with me or the situation!” Anticipation feels good; confusion feels bad. We do whatever we can to avoid the nasty feeling. From what K’s brother told me, K responds with confusion and blocks all incoming information.

My first question to K was, “Does your head spin when you hear something you never heard before?” His answer was clear, “No!” Interesting. I would be surprised if that weren’t his reaction. I considered that he was so defended that he could block that feeling immediately.

I opened up the whiteboard on Zoom. I wrote a K on one side and a B for my name on the other. “ When I teach you something, I have to reach out to you,” and drew an arrow from the B to the K. “When you don’t understand what I taught, I try to figure out why you might be confused and try again,” and drew a longer arrow. I did that two more times. Then I said, “While you will do what I tell you to do, you don’t try to understand what I’m saying.” No arrows are coming from you to me. He agreed with that.

At the end of the session, he agreed that he didn’t mentally reach out and try to understand what the other person was saying. I should say here I do not think K is cognitively challenged. I think he is a bright child. Even very bright people can be closed-minded; he is quite literally closed-minded and makes no effort to understand what someone is saying. He conceded that he didn’t like this in himself. I always ask if someone wants to change. Children often understand that question to include, “If you do, then why don’t you?” But that is not what I am saying. I know he doesn’t have a clue how to change. I’m not sure I have a clue how to help him change. But I know that change is impossible if he isn’t on board.

At 10 am, I had second-grade M. I hadn’t met with her since Friday. She was going back to school on Wednesday. I reviewed the material we covered. She was good with counting by 10s and 100s, identifying the odd and even numbers, and expanded notation. Then, I reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping. She was right back to square one. Given a two-digit problem, she drew a vertical line between the 10s and 1s columns. Then, she started adding the tens column before the ones. That works well when doing math in your head but not when working on paper. She was confused about which way to regroup in the addition problem. She didn’t have the concept.

While fully engaged when tutoring, I had little energy for anything else, including talking to friends. I took a deep two-hour nap after completing a short walk to get my numbers up. I am somewhat concerned about my tiredness and my need for sleep. However, if I am finally processing the grief over my father’s death, that would explain a lot. This is the first time in sixty-seven years that I miss him.

I had a session with Adolescent D in the afternoon. D has serious auditory processing problems. In our last session, I asked him if he could remember something his mother asked him to do without repeating it to himself out loud. No. Could he remember the lyrics to a song? Yes. But when I explored it today, he only remembered the repeated phrases. He didn’t know all the words from any song- back to the drawing board.

I asked him where in his brain he remembered the words. He said right under the fontanel. From my observation, the best spot for recalling words is a little deeper in the brain. I showed him how to locate that spot. I took two pens; I placed the point of one in the area of the fontanel and the other at the temple. The best spot is where these two pens would meet if I pushed them into my head. I asked him if he could picture a candle burning at that spot. He could. I asked him to hear my voice in his head. He could. He said it felt weird. That’s good. It means it is something other than what he usually does. I asked him to recall something I had said. He could do that. When I asked him to recall the same words a bit later, he couldn’t. I asked him how he felt about my pushing to solve the problem of his auditory processing. He said he felt good about it. I believe in the mind’s plasticity, especially in a young person. It’s worth a try.

We switched to another activity. D chose reading. I asked him to say and write each letter in each word before he read the first sentence. He then read the words. I heard a difference.

Then I recalled the other day, he said he didn’t follow the decoding procedures I asked him to follow because it felt terrible. Doing it was a reminder that he had a problem with reading.

I did an EFT tapping series: "Even though I can’t read well, I love and comfort myself. Then, “I love and forgive myself.” None of it had meaning for him or produced greater relaxation. But I felt a difference. I could feel the knot in his stomach. He confirmed my observation. Yes, he hated that feeling in the pit of his stomach. I led him through a release, “I release anything negative about my hatred for this feeling and keep anything positive or anything I still need.” This produced a big change. He felt greater relaxation.

I went for another brief walk to get my step count up to 6,000 and then sat down to work on this update. I have so little time to get things done these days. Sleeping takes up most of my time. I hope this isn’t forever.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

I woke this morning almost doubled over in grief. Everything hurt. I finally did a release. I released everything negative of my hate for this pain and kept everything positive or anything I still needed. This works like a charm almost every time. I have no idea why I don’t use it more. The grief didn’t go away, just the overlay of suffering from hating the feeling. “What we resist persists.”

Something unexpected followed. I grieved the death of my father for the first time. The man died on March 26, 1956, when I was fifteen. I couldn’t afford the luxury of grief at the time. I had to deal with being alone with my mother without his protection and support. I had to deal with my terror. (Note: my mother never abused me physically. She just delivered endless criticisms and put-downs with the sharpness of a cattle prod.) Sitting with this grief calmed my mind, which had been getting a little out of hand, racing ahead with uncomfortable thoughts as I dealt with real or imagined awkward social situations.

I made it to church just in time. I parked in the library parking lot as I always do. I checked the wall to see what happened with the graffiti I saw last week, “Kill all white men!” Since it was the public library’s parking lot, I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t have dealt with this. They had scrubbed all the graffiti, particularly the one declaring war on white men.

I always sit on the south lanai for mass. I prefer the outdoor setting because the church is painfully air-conditioned, and the open air reduces the risks of viral infections. The greeters told me that the chairs were all on the north lanai; we were all to sit there and not on the south lanai. It’s dark and cold there. They set up benches on the south lanai instead of the folding chairs. I have no idea why they chose the arrangement. They weren’t close enough to each other for conversation. I had no idea what they had in mind. I chose a chair facing the altar. The sun bore down on me. A gentleman sitting on the bench in the shade offered me his seat. I think he was an usher. I took it.

After the first reading, an elderly woman was wheeled onto the lanai. She comes to mass every week. She is always late; I’m sure through no fault of her own. Today, I was sitting closer to her than I usually do. She didn’t have a bulletin or handout with the day’s songs and readings. I offered her mine and got another set for myself.

I got hot from the sun beating down on me and moved further under the overhang. I asked the woman exposed to the sun if she preferred the shade. Yes. I pushed her right up to the glass doors lining the sides of the church.

Then I saw her struggling to get something out of a bag hanging over the handles of her wheelchair. I offered to help her with that.

During a part of the mass, I finally released my hatred for the pain I felt from grief. I experienced some peace. I heard someone say, “Excuse me.” There was the little old lady right in front of me. Did I have an envelope for her to put her check-in? No, I didn’t, but I would take care of it after mass.

Right after mass, I headed for the sanctuary. I had put a copy of Mike’s doctoral thesis on Simone Weil in one of the drawers as a gift for Sandor. He hadn’t texted me to say he’d gotten it. I wondered what the mix-up was.

When I checked the drawer, the book was gone. Had someone else taken the book? It was no big deal; I would order another one for Sandor if someone wanted Mike’s thesis that badly.

While there, I asked TJ for an envelope for Claire’s check. TJ looked for one but told me it was unnecessary when handing in checks. They would record the donation. I will tell Claire that next week.

Those chores taken care of, I texted Judy to see where she was. I had asked Judy and Paulette to accompany me to Mike’s gravesite to help me pick a color for the cement wedges the gravestones would rest on. They were very helpful. I had been thinking of a brown color, close to the gravestones. They saw base platforms that the cement wedges and the gravestones would rest on and thought a color closer to that dark gray would be better. I agreed.

Then I went to Long’s to buy more Hersey’s milk chocolate nuggets with whole almonds. I thought they would be on sale. That didn’t work out. I’m not quite sure why. I downloaded the coupon from the email.

Then I went to Lowe’s to pick up paint for the cement pillows supporting our gravestones.. I decided to do all the steps recommended in the Valspar brochure with the color samples. I picked up a prep solution and a semi-transparent paint. When I went to the desk to get the paint mixed, the guy said, “You know this will require two applications.” Yeah, it said so. He said it meant a second application with a different color paint. Then he said the paint job would only last eight years. I said I needed it to last forty. He said, “You need to go to a different store for that,” sarcastically. I figured it was more like a different planet. With a little more exploration, I discovered a stain for cement comparable to a wood stain. It lasts a lifetime.

My last stop was at Office Max to get two copies of a will printed, one for me and one for Damon to put in the safe. I bought him to store all the legal will documents from his mother and me. A sign on the desk announced. “Only open from 8 am -4 pm on Mondays-Fridays due to staffing shortages.” It hadn’t been a very successful day.

On my way home, I called my Hanai sister Jean to wish her a Happy New Year. She had her new hearing aids. Her hearing is worse now than it was before.

When I got home, I napped for a good two hours. I was exhausted. I got up and Googled a few questions. One- how do people who believe in reincarnation explain the enormous increase in the human population? Lo and behold, they do have an explanation. People can have been animals in their last lifetime. There’s plenty to draw from.

I continued watching Rumspringa on Netflix. I found it mildly annoying. I find myself easily irritated these days. Fortunately, that isn’t showing up in my tutoring sessions. If it did, I would have to stop doing them. That would not be good for me or my students.