A good day

I enjoy my work with Thanh so much.  We spend a lot of our time together laughing.  Today I discovered that he keeps two word lists - one for words he might use for writing and the other for speaking.  Once again, some of the words came from a film he had seen.  Then we read an article about how a county sewage district commissioner had siphoned more than $700,00 into his family's bank accounts without getting caught.  That led us to talk about words relating to audits, record-keeping, and oversight.

We were short of tutors today, so I split my time between Thanh and Hashem, an older Iranian gentleman who is preparing for the citizenship exam and wanted to work on understanding the questions and how to answer them.  He's at the section now where questions are being asked about whether he's a terrorist, has been in prison or done anything that he might have been imprisoned for, has committed, supported, had any relation to a crime, has ever deliberately hurt someone else..  What struck me is that no one in his right mind would answer "yes" to these questions for which there is no evidence to contradict him.  Who would admit to being a terrorist?  Who would admit to having had a record of teen lawbreaking expunged?  It seems clear to me that villains would easily pass this test, but honest non-English speaking immigrants would have a great deal of difficulty in answering the questions accurately. And the questions are so badly written!

My main blip is one I would have posted yesterday had I not misplaced my phone.  This will give you some idea of why I love Sky Nursery.  I had thought to blip a photo of one of the parrots at PetSmart (see Extra) but was really distressed by seeing how this bird never stopped pacing in his cage.  Back and forth, back and forth - he is in a prison from which he can't escape.