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Nov. 2nd, 2017 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckWe had friends over last night and played Scott's Firefly RPG for the first time in months. Our next scheduled session is the week of UCon and so may not happen, but who knows? One player was absent due to pain from having had a dental deep cleaning done, but we managed to work around his character.
We started late because Scott ended up working with Cordelia on her geometry homework until about half an hour after our normal starting time. They worked at the dining room table, so the rest of us waited in the living room and talked. One of the other players has a sixth grader, a boy, who's been having the same sort of problems as Cordelia, so that was a topic of discussion.
I tried helping Cordelia with her geometry homework, but it didn't work so well. I had trouble reading the worksheet when she was holding it, and she didn't want me to hold it. She didn't trust what I found on Google (but trusted it when Scott found the same information). I think that she also didn't quite get me working around the problems to figure out all of the different things we knew in order to try to figure out which of those things was applicable. I simply could not get her to accept the idea that, if two thirds of the length of a line was 8x and all of it was 9x+6, the length of one third of it had to be x+6.
The algebra education at her old school was really terrible, so she didn't quite get that having all sorts of different bits of information about x makes it easier to solve for x. I think, too, that me wanting to use algebra for a geometry assignment confused her. Plus, she's got the idea that I'm very, very rusty on this sort of math and doesn't trust that I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about as I try to pull things out from 35 years ago.
I had a discussion, years back, with a friend who maintained that the only necessary math after algebra was statistics. I agreed that statistics is important but argued that some bits of geometry are as necessary because they have real world applications if one's ever going to design or build so much as a community theater set. Doing proofs teaches a little bit about step by step logic, too, and that's a generally useful thing.
I'm not sure where the rest of yesterday went. It certainly happened. I was certainly there. I got very little done. My hands and elbow are both hurting quite a lot. My left ankle is also giving me problems if I move it injudiciously. Standing on it and walking on it aren't problems. The trouble comes when I fidget by pointing my toes. That particular movement provokes a pain spike in a very particular spot. I move my feet pretty constantly while I'm sitting, so this is a thing that happens every five minutes or so. I'd have thought that my brain would have gotten the message not to do it by now.
I'm having better luck with the c-PAP at this point. It's not causing me so much anxiety. I'm usually able to wear it all night. There are two problems. The first is that one of the straps, the one around the back of my head, slides upward and off as the night goes on. I have to rouse enough to pull it back down. The second is that once or twice a week, I will wake just enough to be utterly convinced that I need to remove the headgear and then do it and fall asleep again. I've had similar near wakenings in the past where I became convinced that I had to lie on (or specifically not on) one side or the other or to have my legs bent in some specific way. It's new since the cancer in 2015, and I have no idea why it's now a thing. It leaves enough of a sense of urgency that when I wake fully I wrack my brain, trying to figure out whether or not there actually is a reason for the lying on one side and absolutely not the other. At least, when I start questioning what I did with the headgear, I know that there is no reason at all for me to have been convinced of that.
We started late because Scott ended up working with Cordelia on her geometry homework until about half an hour after our normal starting time. They worked at the dining room table, so the rest of us waited in the living room and talked. One of the other players has a sixth grader, a boy, who's been having the same sort of problems as Cordelia, so that was a topic of discussion.
I tried helping Cordelia with her geometry homework, but it didn't work so well. I had trouble reading the worksheet when she was holding it, and she didn't want me to hold it. She didn't trust what I found on Google (but trusted it when Scott found the same information). I think that she also didn't quite get me working around the problems to figure out all of the different things we knew in order to try to figure out which of those things was applicable. I simply could not get her to accept the idea that, if two thirds of the length of a line was 8x and all of it was 9x+6, the length of one third of it had to be x+6.
The algebra education at her old school was really terrible, so she didn't quite get that having all sorts of different bits of information about x makes it easier to solve for x. I think, too, that me wanting to use algebra for a geometry assignment confused her. Plus, she's got the idea that I'm very, very rusty on this sort of math and doesn't trust that I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about as I try to pull things out from 35 years ago.
I had a discussion, years back, with a friend who maintained that the only necessary math after algebra was statistics. I agreed that statistics is important but argued that some bits of geometry are as necessary because they have real world applications if one's ever going to design or build so much as a community theater set. Doing proofs teaches a little bit about step by step logic, too, and that's a generally useful thing.
I'm not sure where the rest of yesterday went. It certainly happened. I was certainly there. I got very little done. My hands and elbow are both hurting quite a lot. My left ankle is also giving me problems if I move it injudiciously. Standing on it and walking on it aren't problems. The trouble comes when I fidget by pointing my toes. That particular movement provokes a pain spike in a very particular spot. I move my feet pretty constantly while I'm sitting, so this is a thing that happens every five minutes or so. I'd have thought that my brain would have gotten the message not to do it by now.
I'm having better luck with the c-PAP at this point. It's not causing me so much anxiety. I'm usually able to wear it all night. There are two problems. The first is that one of the straps, the one around the back of my head, slides upward and off as the night goes on. I have to rouse enough to pull it back down. The second is that once or twice a week, I will wake just enough to be utterly convinced that I need to remove the headgear and then do it and fall asleep again. I've had similar near wakenings in the past where I became convinced that I had to lie on (or specifically not on) one side or the other or to have my legs bent in some specific way. It's new since the cancer in 2015, and I have no idea why it's now a thing. It leaves enough of a sense of urgency that when I wake fully I wrack my brain, trying to figure out whether or not there actually is a reason for the lying on one side and absolutely not the other. At least, when I start questioning what I did with the headgear, I know that there is no reason at all for me to have been convinced of that.
