Thursday, February 07, 2008

Mit, 1st senior, day 3

Woohoo! K (the activities coordinator) at RSM has turned this ship around! It's clear that the residents trust her, and she's also good about using different words to try to direct them.

We met with my 1st senior again today. I had no expectations that anything was going to happen, and in fact, arrived under-prepared — I forgot to bring my recorder. But my senior seemed not as tired today as Monday, even though she just found out her son was moving away (not sure about that) and was in "a bad mood" (she said so herself, although not detectable by me).

Anyhow, since she expressed the feeling that I was pushing her into doing something she didn't want to do, I was determined to not be pushy today, and I was only going to bring up the subject once. If she said no, that would be it.

Well, I brought it up, and she said no. But K went on to ask about her favorite books, and although her reply was that all her books were favorites, she asked me to bring her her prayer book from the cabinet (now we were getting somewhere!) that was given to her when she was confirmed. There was a beautiful insert, with her name and names of the rabbis printed and signed.

But when I asked if we could make a print of it, she said she had plenty of prints already and didn't want/need any more. Immediately, K said, "oh, we're just going to make some copies of it."

Well, in that case, that was just fine!

It was obvious that she didn't want to do the actual gocco printing itself, so K and I went off and just did it. Returned the original and gave her 4 of the gocco prints. She seemed to like them and sounded happy that I would come back again next week.

Yippee! I was pretty happy after that. But of course, next week, she'd probably not like "copies" any better than "prints." See this entry for the disappointing visit last time. Today was just 100% better.

(Fun Factoid of the day: turns out, K, I, and my 1st senior are all Rats! K is half my age and my first senior is twice my age. Pretty cool, huh? Which reminds me, this being Chinese New Year (Happy New Year of the Rat), it was a pretty auspicious beginning!)

Since I was printing in their arts and crafts room, I attracted the attention of someone who came in to ask about some other project, and now she wants to be next to participate. Double Yippee!

On other fronts, made good progress cleaning up the spare bedroom. Found a recycler very close to us and the broken TV (broken for 15 years, I'm just now dealing with it) is loaded in the car, ready to go. That alone, cleared up a lot of space.

Haven't made any more progress on the LO Chronicles piece, but found out we actually have until April 15 to submit the image, so I want to let it sit for a bit before I continue.

(I just ran the spellchecker, and it wants to change 'woohoo' to 'boohoo'!)

4 comments:

Michael5000 said...

So now we know how old you are! But what is a twelve year old doing in a professional position like Activities Coordinator?

fingerstothebone said...

M5000 -- flattery won't get you anywhere, young man!

gl. said...

ooooo, that's slick, m5000! fingers, if flattery won't get us anywhere, i guess i have to stop telling everyone what an awesome gocco artist & teacher you are, not to mention strikingly beautiful and youthful....

fingerstothebone said...

Well, you can certainly keep trying! It might eventually work someday.