Browse Month: June 2006

There’s nothing like a good beat down…

on a Friday morning. As if my week wasn’t hard enough but this morning at 8 am I had a meeting that topped it all off. I walked in thinking it was going to be rather easy-going but it quickly turned sour. The first inkling of a beat-down was when the mom said something like, “When he starts his new school we’re going to get a real OT…a really good one.” Awesome. This can’t be good.

When it was my turn to speak, before I could get into my report, the mom said, “You don’t need to go through this I already disagree with your recommendation.” She had flipped to the end of the report to see that I was recommending that we discontinue services. Double-awesome.
THEN!! She says to me, “I know you don’t like me and I’ve never liked you so I guess it’s mutual. But it’s not fair to take it out on a child.” WHAM! Beat down! I was pretty speechless. When I finally caught my breath, I calmly replied with, “Wow. (pause) I’ve never had any negative feelings about you.” She then quickly replied with, “Well, then me too!” Huh?

Anyway, I didn’t finish my report and said to the administrator, “I don’t have anything else to say. It’s all in my report.” After the meeting, the teacher, who was sitting next to the mom, said to me, “I had to do everything in my power not to reach over and sock her in the face. That wouldn’t have been very professional of me.” Aw, *sniff* how sweet. So that was how I spent my Friday morning. I hope all of you had a better Friday.

Avert your eyes!

This has been such a busy week at work. We call it “Kindergarten Transition Week”. In other words, no kids come to school because all the grown-ups are too busy gathering around a tiny knee-high table talking about where they should go next year for Kindergarten and how much therapy they will need. Well, as the only therapist at the preschool, my poor intern and I have been driving from school to school, sitting through meeting after meeting, and looking at documents with tiny print until we’re cross-eyed. I can barely remember whose meeting I went to just this morning! Anyway, it’s Wednesday and I have two more days to endure. I didn’t think sitting around all day could be more tiring than chasing kids around but I think it might be.
Things I’ve thought about during my meetings:

  • “I wonder if I could hang our summer jellyfish projects from the clinic ceilings the same way this teacher has: paperclip+string+clothespin…clever.”
  • “99 Ranch, tofu, kimchee, soybean juice, mochi ice cream…mmm…mochi ice cream”
  • “Did I close the garage door this morning?”
  • “This dad looks like the dad in ‘American Pie’.”
  • “I wish I could trade places with Koa right now. I could use a long nap.”
  • “That lady seated across from me is too large to be wearing a denim skirt that tight and short. I wish the table was higher…eew.”

I’m so mac-dumb.

On Sunday night, I was fiddling around with some new software that I just installed on the macbook. I thought I’d update some of beakatude and upload the pages using a new ftp software that I had to learn. Well, learning how to skillfully navigate on this new OS and doing what I usually do on the Thinkpad has been quite an adventure. Something so simple as to delete something from your desktop requires two-finger tapping the mousepad and clicking “move to trash”. Whatever happened to the delete button?
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Speaking of deleting…in my mac-dumbness, I accidentally deleted the index to my website. Haha. No problem, I’ve done THAT before. Previously, all I had to do was upload the backup index that’s on my computer and voila, solved. Not so fast…apparently it’s not that simple with my new site. Fortunately, my wonderful Admin managed to fix it by the end of the night but it involved a whole lot of reinstalling and reconfiguring stuff. *sigh* I’ll learn to love my macbook soon.

Fish, Friends, and Cocktails

On Friday night we drove up to Hollywood to celebrate Patty’s 31st birthday at Geisha House. It was the usual Hollywood-ish crowd with some weird-looking geishas milling around the restaurant as if they were part of the decor. The dj was basically a girl controlling an iPod upstairs. We tried the Maguro Spicy Taru-Taru Crispy Rice, which was spicy tuna on top of crispy rice rectangles and garnished with a fried slice of jalapeno – pretty creative. Patty had a pretty good cocktail called a Miniari that was made with pomegranate juice, sake, lychee, and mint. It tasted somewhat like a sweeter mojito. I don’t really like mint but if I did, it would have been really tasty to me. Anyway, it was nice to see everyone together and the brother even stopped by. Happy Birthday, Patty!

Check!

I went to the first part of a 3-day workshop today and discovered that my instructor was deaf. I didn’t actually realize it until she started signing while she spoke. Huh? She’s speaking perfectly with just a bit of a Virginian accent. (I only knew it was Virginian because she told us.) It just sounded a little Canadian to me. (Pronounces “mouth” more like “mooth”). Anyway, it was amazing. I guess she was born hearing (which she loved), then became hard-of-hearing (which she hated), and then completely deaf (which she’s fine with). I suppose it’s better to be one or the other. She also had an interpreter seated in the audience to act as her ears whenever we asked questions. It seemed so natural. She was an effective speaker, an entertaining teacher, and as we saw in the video clips she presented, a great therapist.
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On a side note…much of today’s lecture was going over normal development of an infant from birth to 18 months. She had an awesome handout that laid out gross motor, fine motor, oral motor, language, and cognitive development for each age group (clusters of three months). It was a very good review and now I have something to easily refer to when I have my own rugrat. I can just imagine having a crumpled version of the handout tucked in my back pocket to constantly keep track. Oh…I’m sure the therapist in me will be feeding my baby and saying, “Tongue lateralization? Check. No rotary chew yet?! Oh no! You’re behind!” How annoying is that?!