Gloomy

Today was an off day. It started at the library, when I was working with a 47 year old developmentally disabled man who was trying to learn to write. He'd gotten through the printing pretty well, but wanted to work on his cursive writing. Well, I found myself unable to remember how to write some of the cursive letters. I just got very confused and felt like a fool. Fortunately, we only work together for an hour and I was able to move on to something easier for me. It was a Korean woman who is preparing for the citizenship exam. We went over questions that the interviewer might ask and how she should respond to them. She did very well on the aspects of citizenship that the questions covered, but ran into some difficulty when dealing with the more personal questions. For example, for the question about whether she'd had other names, previous names, she thought she needed to give them her baptismal name. I suggested that since it was not a name she had used in any legal matters and was not used outside of a church setting, it wasn't the sort of thing they were asking about.

Thanh's wife was there, and she told me that he is on a 5-week business trip to Vietnam and Australia, and that's why he has not been in for a tutoring. It's his first business trip of this length, and he should be back with me in November.

Arriving home, I discovered that my cable service was out again. This is the third time in two weeks that it's gone out. I waited to see if it would come on again, but after 6 hours there was still no service. So I had the frustrating experience of once again having to deal with recorded messages repeatedly until I finally was able to speak with an agent. He said he couldn't do anything from where he was to fix it and would have to send a technician - on Monday morning!

I had tea with Endless Weekend, and she assured me that my being a unable to remember the cursive letters didn't mean that my mind was going. I'm not sure I believe her - it sure feels that way to me. A bit frightening.