    | .. |
 9/1/2006 Bryce starts school later today at the Jean Weingarten Peninsula Oral School for the Deaf. I have been fighting with the school district in the past few weeks to try to get them to pay for it since they do not have a program of similar caliber to the one there. The positive side of this school is that it is the best one in Northern California and posssibly beyond. The bad side, other than our fight with the school district, is that I now have a 45-minute commute twice per week. Of course, I have been going down that way occasionally to go hiking anyway, but now I will be obligated to do so. Bryce continues to react well to his implant, we had a doctor's appointment yesterday to fine tune the setttings again. He is still not hearing high frequency sounds at low volume, but he has improved accross the spectrum and will continue to do so as we see the audiologist again in the next few months. We did an assesment a few days ago and found that he knows about 30 words. I don't have a frame of reference, but I feel like this is pretty good for someone who was born deaf.Dory, Bryce and I went to a picnic this past weekend put on by the implant team from UCSF. It was interesting to meet so many people who had cochlear implants, but most of them were adults. I talked with one guy who had been nearly deaf since he was in his twenties. He volunteered to go to war in Korea and was sent there for two months before the army realized that he was deaf. His friend in the service had always given him the elbow to the side when he wasn't paying attention so that he could read lips of people who were talking. He said that the sound coming through the implant "sounds like it's coming through a tunnel" which was an interesting comparision. Dory and I, despite a few problems with babysitting, have started an ASL class at City College of SF. The teacher is deaf and a great instructor. We covered a lot of signs that I already knew in the first class, but I imagine that I will be learning a lot of new stuff in the coming weeks. It takes place at the SFLGBT center which is quite a nice facility; they provide free childcare, but since they lost a grant, they only do it on request; this means that we have to be careful to coordinate ahead of time for Bryce, something that I tend to bad at remembering to do. I've been keeping myself busy with bonsai activities and pottery in the last few weeks. It's been good, but sometimes I lose track of time and things that I should be doing instead of bonsai. I got three new work projects which just in the last week have made it harder for me to just go do anything I want. In fact, I should be working on them instead of writing this entry. I mixed up some fertilizer balls the other day, which seem to attract flies...I guess I shouldn't really be surprised about that since they have fish parts in them. And as a caveat to the increased number of flies in the back yard there seems to have been an increase in the number of spiders. There is one type in particular which has started showing up in larger numbers, it is quite colorful and interesting to look at. The webs can be five feet across, and sometimes I walk right into them, which isn't terribly pleasant, but I don't mind given the number of flies that they eat. I bought a couple new pine trees in the last couple months. One from either of my main teachers. The first is a Jefferey Pine, native to the Sierra Nevada and Oregon. I have been working on sketches to decide on the future design of the tree. The second tree is a very old corkbark pine; it is a variety of the Japanese Black pine, one with very rugged bark; but they tend to be weaker in growth habit and harder to train both because of the corking and because they don't respond as well to the regular training techniques used on other pines. Between these two trees and all the other pines I already had I am really starting to have a pine collection. Compared to any other species I have ten times more pines. I have a lot of oaks, but all of them are either seedlings or have many years to go before they will be a bonsai. 5/30/2006 5/20/2006 4/25/2006 3/22/2006 2/22/2006 1/25/2006 12/20/2005 11/17/2005 10/27/2005 10/8/2005 9/11/2005 8/26/2005 8/9/2005 8/1/2005 7/20/2005 7/5/2005 6/17/2005 5/27/2005 5/1/2005 4/15/2005 4/5/2005 3/24/2005 3/13/2005 2/5/2005 12/28/2004 11/29/2004 11/3/2004 10/2/2004 9/10/2004 8/23/2004 8/8/2004 7/21/2004 7/2/2004 6/8/2004 5/4/2004 4/20/2004 3/28/2004 3/10/2004 2/10/2004 1/15/2004 To reach entries prior to January 2004 click on one of the older entries on this list and scroll down to the bottom of that entry. e-mail Eric |