Sunday, March 21, 2010

Story of the Day 3/18/2010

I keep being asked if the interpreter situation has improved.
It has.
Sort of.

If you were going to weigh things, the two interpreters that Sarah has had most often are both “negatives”, and the one that she has had the most often is the more “negative” of the two.
If something is negative, and you have less of it, that is an improvement, right?

So, the fact that Ms. Doubly Negative ( also known as Jenni) leaves early must be a good thing.

Sarah has told me that she is often getting up in the middle of class, during the lectures, and leaving to go to the bathroom or to answer her phone.
Okay, Sarah doesn’t want her to squirm around in her seat in discomfort, but how many times in a day does the phone call take precedence over the fact that she is leaving and the student she is interpreting for is now missing part of the lecture?

And then, starting a few weeks ago, Jenni started asking Sarah if it was okay if she left for a bit. You know, took a break.
The break being half an hour, so that she can leave the HS.

And if Jenni is scheduled from 7:30- 1, and class goes until 1:09, she always gets up and leaves at 1.
Of course, If she is supposed to be the one starting at 1, she does not show up in the class that goes until 1:09, she meets Sarah in her next class, several minutes later.

But, this week, she has added a new twist; she has taken to leaving early, and not even telling Sarah that she is leaving.
Sarah was, in fact, surprised the first time that it happened.
But less surprised the second time.

Well, the school has been rather more patient with these interpreters that I am feeling they should be, but I wonder if the fact that I have now notified them that they are paying a terp to be interpreting and she isn’t even in the school will affect their response time.

Any bets?

In the meanwhile, despite the fact hat it means no interpreter is around for part of the day, I can’t help thinking that less of Ms. Doubly Negative can still be considered an improvement.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Story of the Day 3/ 9/2010

We had just gotten home from Ivy Tech.
Ivy Tech is a community college . Aaron is planning on taking two classes there, this summer.
Classes that are required, but not of particular interest to him.
We were pulling into the driveway and he decides to tell me a joke.

“Mom, what was Mozart’s favorite fruit?”
I think, but no brilliant flash of insight comes my way.

“Ba-na-na-na-na.” says Aaron is a very atonal kind of sing-song- if there is such a thing.

Then he adds, “My friends all think that joke is very funny, but I don’t get it.”

I then repeat what he said- but with the melody of one of Mozart’s works attached to the syllables.

He gives me a blank look . and I wonder why I am trying to “sing” this to my deaf son.
Obviously, I need another cup of coffee.

Story of the Day 3 / 8/ 2010

Aaron is home. He came home with a very large bag of dirty laundry.
And with an announcement.
Friday evening, he announced that he has throat cancer.
My concern lasted about 24 seconds, until it occurred to me that this is my very same son who drinks 4 POTS of green tea a day because he is afraid of developing Alzheimer’s, and eats only high fiber bread, to stave off colon cancer, and….
“How do you know?”
“My throat hurts.”
This information takes a mite longer to absorb. Maybe even 51 seconds.
“Have you been taking any anti-histamines?”
Blank look.
“You know, like Benadryl.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, “ says his highly unsympathetic mother, “ I am going to give you some now, and I want you to take Claritin ( a different anti-histamine), tomorrow morning."
Amazingly, he has now decided that he does not have throat cancer, and if I am lucky, he will allow me to send him back to college with a couple of bottles of drugs…..the same kinds I packed for him in August, when he went off to college.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Story of the Day 3/7/2010

Friday night, Shabbat dinner, was especially nice. Aaron is home on Spring Break.
He keeps reminding us that he preferred to come home and not trek to Florida where he could be drunk and sunburnt. Oddly, we even believe him.

At dinner, Sarah was sharing some of the week’s trials and tribulations with the interpreters she has at high school.

On Thursday, at lunch, she asked one of the kids she sits with a question.
The girl responded, “I guess we use trays because if we didn’t’, then the food would fall onto the floor.”
Sarah was taken aback. She sat there trying to figure out why this was so off topic.
The interpreter said, “What?”
Sarah said, “That doesn’t’ make sense.”
Then the interpreter said, “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Are you waiting for T…. (another student with whom they usually eat)?”

The interpreter put her hand on her head and groaned.
She said, “I asked her why people have trays.”

Sarah cringed. OMG, the kids at the table must think she is mentally retarded or that the kids at the Deaf School have never seen a cafeteria tray, or both.

When she told me this, after school on Thursday, I asked, “Did she correct what she had misinterpreted with the other student?”
“No.”

Sarah said that she told the interpreter, “Please tell her what the mistake was.” But the interpreter wouldn’t.
Leaving Sarah mortified about what the other students thought about her.

Aaron listened to this, aghast.
After hearing about it, Aaron said, “I should go and interpret for you. I could do a better job than they do!”

I thought about this, my deaf son interpreting for my Deaf daughter.
I decided he is right.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Story of the Day 2/ 24/ 2010

My son called me.
It was a run of the mill call. He started out by apologizing. “Am I calling you enough? I am really sorry if I have not been calling you enough!”
He is driving me nuts. And not because he isn’t’ calling me often enough. I do not know where this comes from, as far as I seem to remember, I have not spent an excessive amount of time loading him up with guilt, saying things like, “ You must not love me, you never call!”
I am starting to wonder if it is some subtle body language, a look I give him…but since we are talking about phone conversations, I am not quite sure how that would be possible.
At any rate, I have this gnawing feeling that I have been a bad mother and have left him with an incurable guilt complex. And it is only because I have a really bad memory that I have no idea what it is I did to warp him in this way.
Maybe it is my fault because I keep asking him if he is having fun.

But this was not all that was bothering him.

“ I really wasted a lot of time.” He explained to me.
“I was working on this screen playing, and working at it. I spent a lot of time on it, but I decided that it isn’t’ working, so now I am starting another one.”

I had to ask, “What was wrong with the first one.”

“Well, it was a musical. And I kind of realized that I probably should not try to write a musical, since I am deaf.”
And I was worrying that he feels guilty about not calling me…….

Story of the Day 2/ 18/2010




Our mail box looked sad.
This is despite the fact that it must have had a wild time, last night.
It is leaning, rather severely, to one side. It is cracked where the plastic attaches to the wooden post, and I am suspicious that the post is also cracked, and will need to be replaced. This is because the ground is frozen. And not just a little frozen, and it took a heck of a lot of force to shove the mailbox to this angle, which, in frozen ground, probably means a very cracked post.
There are some clues.
The party with the mailbox happened after 11 Pm and before 6:30 AM. And it wasn’t casual. The tracks in the snow show that the car that had the hot date with our mailbox swerved into it from the lane that is on the far side of the road from it. In other words, it came all the way over to the far side of the road just to make this statement.
Sarah was very upset.
She wants to know why the person that did this didn’t have the courtesy to come up to the house and apologize.
Personally, I am glad the most probably inebriated post-lover didn’t’ come and ring our bell at 3 AM.
However, I also hope his car has wearing a souvenir from the party.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Story of the Day 2/ 23/ 2010

I have apparently cornered the market on margarine.
I didn’t’ mean to. And I didn’t’ want to.
It has to do with Passover.

Last year, there was no margarine- none that was kosher for Passover.
I am 50 years old. For 49 of my years there has been Mother’s kosher for Passover margarine.
There has also been Breakstone Kosher for Passover butter, but that is a different story.

Every year, just before Passover, my family and then I would buy some to use during Passover.
But last year, there wasn’t’ any. There wasn’t any at Marsh or at Kroger’s.
With great desperation, I asked my neighbor to pick some up for me when she was in Chicago. Even if it was a different brand.
I know this was sacrilege, but I was feeling desperate.
She came home from Chicago with a van full of grape juice, and cheese, and meat, but no margarine.
She had been told that no kosher for Passover margarine had been made. At All.

So, this year, when the on-line Kosher for Passover co-op order list became available, I put down that I wanted a case of margarine- Mother’s, of course, to split.
What I mean is that I entered it on the “to be split” page, and people were supposed to contact me about splitting it.
This is the order that comes in from Kansas City and is dropped off in the parking lot of one of the synagogues on a prearranged date at a prearranged time, and then all of these Jewish ladies, and a few guys show up and put the cases of contraband surreptitiously into the trunks of our cars and drive away.
This happens about 6 times a year and on at least one of those occasions the stuff actually shows up when it is supposed to.
And once, in the years I have been ordering from them, my entire order has come. Usually I get half of it. Once I got none of it. So it is always interesting.
But if you pretend it has something to do with playing the slot machines, you will feel very lucky when you get what you have ordered, even if the date or time has changed.
So I put the case of margarine on the “to split” page.

A week went by.

Finally, one women emailed me that she wanted a lb or 2.
I was feeling a little stressed. The order deadline was coming up, and I really didn’t’ want 28 or 29 lbs of kosher for Passover margarine.
That is what I would have left from the 30 lb. case, after splitting it.

If you haven’t guessed, this is why I do not order many things from the co-op.
Yes, they have a great selection of things that you can’t get at the grocery store here in greater Indianapolis, and the prices are good, but I usually do not need 20 lbs of one kind of cheese,
Or 24 bags of chocolate chips, or ….30 lbs of margarine.
And when I do order something, I am not even sure I will get it.
So, in a mass emailing and at synagogue on Shabbat, I desperately mentioned that I wanted to split a case.
And…I waited.
And, after numerous emails back and forth and the desperate help of a few devoted friends, I found that I would only need to keep 16 lbs of margarine, if I ordered the case.

And the deadline to place the order is in 19 minutes. At midnight.

So, with some trepidation, I did a very brave thing.

I removed it from my cart.

And, I will hope that , this year, there really is margarine in the stores here in Indiana, or in Chicago- or we will just use Breakstone butter.
I consider this a true act of faith.

Now, there is actually a second part to this story.
You see, if I had ordered that case of margarine., I really would have been cornering the market- at least in terms of Indianapolis….and probably the rest of Indiana.
Just think of the power!

Many years ago, during the summer- this was in the early 1970’s, I was at home and I picked up the telephone. It was for my father. What ensued was along and very confusing phone call for my father.

My father had this friend named Mort .
Mort and he used to do a lot of things together. They used to double date. Well, not in the 1970;s, by then Mort was happily married to his wife of many years, but they had. They had also gone bowling together, and , in the 1970’s, they had started investing together.
Most people buy shares in a mutual fund. I have no idea if there were such things in the 1970’s, but even if there had been, that is not what those two would have done.
Mort and my father liked to think that they were pretty smart. So, they would study up on things and read up on things, and then Mort would tell my dad, who was a bit confused, what they should buy.
This was good. As a general rule, my dad did a lot better when he followed Mort’s lead than when he invested on his own.
Anyhow, there was this investment vehicle called “futures”. You would sell something, but then, you would have to buy it- that is because you sold it before you owned any of it. Please, do not ask me to explain. It has something to do with farmers wanting some insurance that they will get an okay price come harvest time, but it really sounds a lot like what sunk the economy, recently.
Actually, in comparison, I should probably invest in a case f that Passover margarine, but back to the 1970's.

For some reason, Mort had decided that they should invest in futures of orange juice.
I have no idea why he picked orange juice, but week after week the two of them were buying futures- or, put differently, selling more and ,more of something that they didn’t’ yet own.

Now, neither my dad nor Mort was poor- they were both comfortably middle class. The sort of middle class where you can belong to a swimming pool in the summer and have a maid come in and clean once a week, and get a new car every few years. Not a Cadillac, but something respectable.
Well, somehow, the two of them had managed to corner the market on orange juice. You see, the call was from sort of federal agricultural office asking what they were forecasting, since they were now the third largest dealers in orange juice in the country.
Unfortunately, they called my dad, who listened to the guy very carefully, and then told him that he needed to call his “partner”, Mort, for his sage advice. Personally, I think that was a good save.

And for the next few weeks, the two of them went around feeling like they had joined the ranks of the truly rich- since they had cornered a large part of the Orange juice market.

Hopefully, my dad and Mort would not be ashamed to find out that I decided not to order that case of margarine…….and am just going to take my luck on what Marsh may or may not have, this year.

Story of teh Day- ummmmmmmmm from Rosh Hashanah?

Okay- I foudn this at the end of another document I was checking...I apparently did not save it in my Stories folder, and never posted it.

At dinner, on Rosh Hashanah, and I am very sorry that I do not remember what led to this part of the conversation, but Sarah decided to tell us that when Aaron gets engaged, she is going to pull the young lady aside and tell her two very important things:

1. If you ever hurt my brother, I will kill you.

and

2. We did not teach him that it is okay to eat scrambled eggs with his fingers.