Category Archives: Home & Family

November 21, 2013 · 6:30 pm

Paul Applying to San Jose State University

I am delighted to write that my son Paul is finishing up his last year at Foothill College and applying to transfer to San Jose State University (SJSU) in 2014. In addition to studying Studio Art, Paul is interested in becoming a credentialed art teacher for children with disabilities. Samples of his art are below – with more in his online portfolio: Paul’s Element.

Raising a kid with disabilities is a challenge and I am proud of Paul and of our whole family for his successful progress. Paul has been blessed with some remarkable and excellent teachers – to whom I am forever grateful:

Carol Zepecki, Linda Herreshoff and her remarkable and dedicated C-9 (Social Cognitive Class) team at Jordan Middle School
Justin Cronin and the patient support team at Palo Alto High School
The outstanding Foothill College professors and Disability Resource Center staff, especially: Andy Ruble (Ceramics), Joe Ragey (Painting), Simon Pennington (Art History), and Dr. Andrew Fraknoi (Astronomy)

Paul also had more than his share of poor teachers but we survived them. I only ask that they and…

…the teachers who did not want disabled kids like Paul in their class:
…the administrators who told us that Paul would be lucky to get to college:
…the head of school who kicked Paul out because his disabilities were bringing down her scores:
…the career counsellors who took Paul and the other disabled kids on a tour of the sewer plant:

Please consider this…

Jane Goodall went in the back door to become an ethologist. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, because people with autism usually have to go in the back door. We have a lot of trouble following the normal paths. We don’t do very well in interviews, which are a big problem for us, and a lot of autistic people also have extremely “uneven” academic skills. An autistic person can test at the bottom of the IQ range on one subscale and at the very top on another. For example, I had great difficulty with algebra because there’s no way to visualize it. I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if there weren’t any back doors.

– Dr. Temple Grandin, 2009
In 2010, Dr. Temple Grandin was listed in the Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world in the “Heroes” category.

Wish Paul luck in being accepted! We will hear back from SJSU by March 2014.

Images Copyright Katy Dickinson and Paul D. Goodman 2011-2013

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Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Disabilities, Foothill College, Paul, San Jose, San Jose State University, teaching

November 20, 2013 · 12:15 pm

Blimp Copter Flying High in SOMA

The 100,000+ Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference attendees are creating traffic gridlock in the South of Market (SOMA) area of San Francisco this week. I was there on Monday, visiting the Everwise mentoring company at Impact HUB (in the old Chronicle Building at 5th and Mission). Everwise was busy that day converting a shipment of Mentos candies into MENTORS freebies for distribution to the Smurf-blue hordes of conference goers.

I also visited eVault (at 3rd and Howard) where my husband John Plocher is the Principle Architect for Open Storage. Over the Dreamforce installation, the large Engajer blimp copter flew freely, sometimes coming very close to the eVault windows overlooking the Moscone Center. Blimp copters are a fun development since I last wrote about quadricopters in 2010.

Unemployment Reporting, EfM

Last summer, as soon as I was laid off from MentorCloud (great vision and staff, being paid would have been better…), I filed my unemployment claim with the California Employment Development Department (EDD).

Things have changed with EDD since I last wrote about it in 2009. The every-two-weeks reporting forms are the same but instead of a check in the mail, now they send a VISA credit card from Bank of America. This has lead to some problems.

Unfortunately, BofA is not my bank and the name on the BofA card is not precisely the same version of my name that is on my regular bank account, so they will not set up an auto-transfer. I get no notice when EDD puts funds into the VISA account, so every week, I have to: go to the BofA ATM to ask for the balance (the teller inside BofA cannot do this for an EDD card), if there is any money in the account, I go to my regular bank and tell them the precise balance, then my bank can transfer the funds into my checking account. I could just use the EDD VISA card to pay for stuff but not knowing how much is in it and telling EDD exactly what I spend money on do not work for me.

The EDD reporting form asks questions like:

Was there any reason (other than sickness or injury) that you could not have accepted full-time work each workday?
Did you look for work?
Did you work or earn any money, WHETHER YOU WERE PAID OR NOT?

That last one is difficult for me to answer, because of my work as an accredited Education for Ministry (EfM) mentor for the University of the South – School of Theology. The EfM program pays me a $126/month stipend during nine months of the year. I tried reporting that amount to EDD once a month during the week in which it was deposited but that did not work. EDD stopped deposits and after two fussy letters, scheduled a phone call for me to explain about EfM. The call time was set for sometime during 3 pm to 5 pm Wednesday. When the EDD representative finally called at 5:15 pm, I explained that EfM is a weekly adult formation class for the laity – a four-year program of Bible study, church history, and theology I joined in 2010. The small payment is not per-hour or per-session but per-month and only for nine months – even though I work on the EfM program year-round. Nonetheless, the EDD representative asked me to report as if it were paid $28/weekly. Now that is sorted out, I hope that they will resume payments to the BofA VISA card.

19 October 2019: Links Updated. For more about MentorCloud business practices, see Collecting a Labor Judgement (15 January 2016).

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Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Education for Ministry, Episcopal church, Mentoring

November 14, 2013 · 1:25 pm

Dunk the Bishop and Other Convention Activities

Last weekend, the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real on California’s central coast held its 2013 convention – and celebrated the start of our seventh year under the inspiring leadership of Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves. I have been honored to be elected to serve as a convention delegate (or alternate) for the last ten years. My home parish of St. Andrew’s hosted the convention this year in Saratoga.

ECR includes 13,000 people in 47 congregations:

The Diocese of El Camino Real stretches from south of San Francisco to north of Santa Barbara. The congregations of El Camino Real are found in the five counties of San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and Monterey. Although the youngest diocese in California, ECR’s Trinity Cathedral, in San Jose, is the oldest cathedral structure in the State of California.

Conventions are for celebration of our ministry, updates, and managing the business of the church. However, this year we also enjoyed dunking Bishop Mary. She gamely “volunteered” to get wet as a fundraiser for our youth mission trip. Tickets were sold: $10 for 3 balls to try to dunk, or $20 not to dunk the Bishop. The youth raised $1,200 from ticket sales in one night! As always, the Rev. Stephenie Cooper and my husband John Plocher were the “Assistant Secretaries for Everything Else” – that is, running the computers and displays for the ECR convention.

Other more-conventional (ahem) activities included:

Celebrating the two month visit of The Rev. Fred Kalibwami to ECR from the Diocese of Western Tanganyika (DWT)
Bishop Mary’s annual address to the diocese, including announcing the purchase of Sargent House for the Bishop’s new offices in Salinas.
Honors to notable volunteers and lifetime contributors:
- Bishop’s Cross Recipients: The Rev. Roger Barney, and The Rev. Canon Linda Taylor
- Simple Servant Awards: Don and Diane Cooley, and Rosemary Tisch
Lunch gathering of the Education for Ministry mentors in ECR (including me!)
Reports on key ministries – outreach to the jails, campus ministry at four universities, and caring for the poor and homeless in our communities.
Election of delegates to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (held every three years). I was elected as first Alternate for the 2015 General Convention.
Displays by diocesan and charity groups, plus sales of crafts and Bishop Mary’s newest book Unearthing My Religion

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Filed under Church, Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Education for Ministry, Episcopal church, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

November 3, 2013 · 8:53 pm

Romeo and Juliet at Folger Shakespeare

Tonight, my daughter Jessica and I saw a delightful production of Romeo and Juliet at the Folger Shakespeare Library here in Washington D.C. I am visiting the nation’s capitol with the TechWomen mentors and 78 emerging leaders from 16 African and Middle Eastern countries. Our formal meetings at the US State Department start tomorrow!

Opened in 1932, the beautiful Folger Shakespeare Library, theater, and garden is located on Capitol Hill. “Home to the world’s largest and finest collection of Shakespeare materials and to major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art, the Folger serves a wide audience of researchers, visitors, teachers, students, families, and theater- and concert-goers.”

WP668 Caboose Clinic – Questions?

I am signed up to give a “Caboose Clinic” to the Coast Division of the National Model Railroad Association on 8 December 2013 in San Leandro, California. More event details are on the Pacific Coast Region Master Calendar. Check out the website of WP668, our San Jose backyard caboose for more about our family project.

Last Friday, I joined my husband John Plocher’s model train lunch group to interview the target market for my clinic. Here are the questions the train lunch guys want answered:

How did you find WP668?
How did you install WP668 in your Willow Glen backyard?
How much did the caboose project cost?
In restoring WP668, what did you discover that was unexpected or odd?
How did you match the paint color? What went into the original paint? How did you get the original paint off?

They also asked me to show many many pictures and to include the following:

Tell the story of getting the city permit submitted and approved.
Talk about restoration materials – how you got wood to fit the 1916 old-growth fir tongue-and-groove original boards.

Please add more to this list of questions and topics – and come to the event if you are available.

Honoring My Parents with Sacred Threads

Two of the twelve newly-embroidered chairs dedicated at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (Saratoga, California) today were donated by my husband and me in honor of my parents: Wade and Eleanor Dickinson. The replacement chair seats were created as part of the Sacred Threads project. The new chair seat designs are inspired by the 1957-era stained glass church windows by Mark Adams. I think my mother was pleased to sit in a chair with her name on it!