Today was the second Death Thing, this time being the generic memorial service at the vets home.

To be honest, I wasn't all THAT thrilled with the thing, though Mom and Aunt Susie were very delighted and the adults in general couldn't stop saying "Wasn't that a good service?" It just didn't feel all that special knowing it was for twelve people who died in March that don't know each other and probably nobody participating in the service knew them either. Plus it was very military, which I have never been into either. There was, however, one brilliant moment when the commander dude giving the generic speech was telling a story about how he (he was Catholic clergy) and a Baptist minister were arguing during Desert Storm about what would happen if Christ walked up to them- would he be on the Baptist side, or the Catholic. Then out of the blue, a woman whose last name coincidentally turned out to be Christ walked up to them. The punchline was, "The world has changed- Christ is a woman with hand grenades." Awesome.

After doing lunch, Mom suggested doing the birthday shopping that hadn't gotten done last weekend because they were late in picking me up, so we hit the Napa outlets. As it turned out, after she found out Granddaddy had died, Mom had headed over to the outlets to buy herself shoes. And today after the memorial, she wanted to go shoe shopping again. Yes, my family is odd.

I managed to find three different kinds of sandals that don't kill my feet. (Alas, the last time I went shoe shopping...once again, I can't walk in the damn things without agony. Grr.) I ended up getting five pairs in five different colors, because who knows when I'll find this many that fit again? Plus, big sale prices. I also found a new purse for Mom and got it for her for birthday/Mother's Day bonanza. As for clothes, I needed more pairs of capris to wear to work (especially on Craft Center nights, since we're not supposed to wear regular shorts to work and I think pants might be better than skirts on those nights), so I found three pairs and also found four buttondown shirts that fit over the Hooters of Doom. Yay summerwear!

Though in one of those moments of irony, now that I have new sandals and new summer wear...the weather has turned frigid and is going to rain for the next few days. Whee.

We had ASL again tonight (the first, last and only week we're having two sessions in a week), and I realized what the heck is annoying me about this teacher.

I think she's very much a beginner at teaching a class- her bio said she tutors and interprets. Maybe she's not good in group situations, I'm not sure, but there were a lot of things that were bugging me. She swapped back and forth between teaching REALLY easy things and REALLY complicated concepts for beginners.

I am sadly not kidding when I say that she wanted to test us on whether or not one would used normal eyebrows versus furrowed eyebrows in a situation. As in, if she said, "I'm hungry, when do we eat?"*, would you use eyebrows like you were asking a question. Uh, gee, what do you think? Unless someone in the class had Asperger's (or whatever that one is where you have issues determining what facial expressions mean), we all learned that as infants. That's a natural thing to already know! With my last teacher, Kevin, the same lecture was "Use expressions the way you would when you're speaking."

God, I miss Kevin. Damn Kenya!

Anyway, she went back and forth from doing stuff like that to doing very elaborate pantomimes about concepts that weren't all that distinct. For example, her trying to act out "explain" made us think she was trying to act out "meet" or "talk." She'd keep asking if we got it, we'd all say no, then she'd act it out... for oh, maybe 12 times or so in a row. I think each word must have taken 10 or 20 minutes to get across. We'd ask her to write it down on the board and she wouldn't until she'd acted it out a billion times and we were still lost. I tried fingerspelling "lecture?" and "test?" at her one time when she was trying to get across something that looked like either a lecture or a list. It turned out she did mean "test", but I got griped at for fingerspelling. "No English! Throw that out! Picture it!" As Heather said afterwards, "I know why she wouldn't want to write it down, but why can't we even ask with fingerspelling what it is?" I know they want you to think a certain way, but if you'd just write it and MOVE ON, it'll help! Kevin didn't mind writing it down when people didn't get it, and things moved a lot faster.

Honestly...I'm kinda wishing I'd taken the other class, even if it was intermediate. Maybe that teacher would be better, I don't know. I have a feeling this one is going to frustrate the bejeesus out of me.

* Note: all of the stuff I'm claiming she said is in ASL. In case you didn't know.

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