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June 23, 2004

Game shows and the English Language

During last couple of months, I have been working on my writing skills. As those of you who have known me for a while can confirm, my writing skill are sometime rough. The reason for this is I am dyslexic. My brain does not store words with a normal connection to their meaning. In my head the words, ‘sever’ and ‘server’ are the same. It takes a long time to track down in my brain what word I am looking at. To compensate I do a lot of guessing when I read. I use the context to guess at the word.

Now this has caused a problem. That problem is in editing the stuff I write. My brain knows what it says, so there for guessing is easy. My brain says ‘you meant this’ and it sounds correct. This has been a challenge to over come. To over come this, I have needed to if a way to remove the words from there meaning.

Enter 70’s game show theory. Do you remember the Match Game? In the show, a contestant read a sentence such as “large Marge was so fat, she had a blank for a house.” The contestant then gave a word to fill in the blank. This use of the word ‘blank’ to mask the meaning of a sentence is very useful to me. The replacing nouns and verbs with the word ‘blank’ I found that I could read the words of the sentence with out guessing.

Between this and the spell-check, I can now read what I write. I still have a long way to go, but by the wonder of 70’s game shows, I can edit the things I write. Now if I could find a way to stop spelling in homonyms.

June 21, 2004

Update

Well, I am home from a great trip. I am sorry for the lack of posting (yes Tina) over the last couple of weeks. So here is kind of a run down of what has been going on.

Dean’s trip here was very nice. I had much fun dragging him around with me. To the question of ‘did he have fun?’ I think he did. He saw a good deal of what I do. We spent time together and with friends. As you may have seen, he got to shoot a cannon and ran around in a kilt for two days. Dean was a very good sport.

++

The Faire is over for another year. I feel like I did many good things this year. I feel like I was a positive influence. I have not always felt this to be true. Sometimes I can be a real force of chaos. However, this year this went differently.

As an inprov teacher, I really saw some amazing things. From the people who helped with the training the teacher workshop in January to the person who thanked me for all the help after dreading my class all year this was a good year for me as a teacher. As a person, I am proud of how I acted this year. It sounds small but sometime being a good person is hard. This year I abandoned more grudges then I started, I listened more then I talked, and I gave more then I asked for. At the end of the season, I normally want nothing more then to get as far away from faire as I can. This year I was thinking of what I could do next year. That was a big thing.

++

Last week K and I took a trip to California. This trip was the spring break trip that I messed up the dates for in March. We flew in to San Francisco on Friday night. Dean picked us up from the air port and not only gave us a place to use as a home base for our travels but also gave up the use of his truck. We also got addicted to a game Dean has called ‘Puyo Puyo.’

On Saturday, we went up and saw Beth and Brian. We meet Kate their daughter. She is an adorable child. Then we were off on the road.

Sunday and Monday Napa Valley, we rode the wire train and toured the Grgich Hills Winery. Monday night and

Tuesday Monterey, we stay at the best place, the Best Western on the beach just north of Monterey. If you go top Monterey, and I suggested you do, stay there. Mort, the guy working the desk was great. He pointed us to the best place to watch the sunset and about a dozen things we could do the next day. The sunset was everything Mort had said it would be. I have to say it was one of the most romantic moments of my life. The next day we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Very cool.

Tuesday night dinner with K’s brother, He is a very neat person. He is in to wine, food, and making fun of his sister. I like him.

Wednesday and Thursday visiting Dad, it was about a 3-4 hour trip up to see Dad. I had not been up to the place in a while. Dad and Zara are doing great. He is working on more old hot rod trucks then I can count in my head right now. Zara is retired and both of them are looking great. Dad look better then he did in 10 years. It was good to see them.

Thursday and Friday winding up. On the way back from Dad’s we stop and visited more people and collected stuff then ended up back at Dean’s for tacos. After a night of K and I laying in bed till late laughing and joking like kids, it was off to the air port for a delayed flight. Good trip.