Category Archives: Home & Family

March 15, 2010 · 9:49 am

Transitions for Young Adults with Neurocognitive Deficits

This coming Saturday, I will give my second talk at an Orion Academy‘s “Annual Seminar on Post-Secondary Transition Planning for Young Adults with Aspergers, NLD and other Neurocognitive Deficits”. The 4th Orion annual seminar will be held:

March 20, 2010
8:30 AM – 4 PM
Lafayette Park Hotel
Lafayette, CA

Here my presentation for this year: What Happens After College? – Kids with Neurocognitive Disability Working in Engineering and Computing”.

My talk of the same title from last year is linked to my 7 April 2009 blog entry. As the Mom of a 17-year-old son with social-cognitive disabilities, this seminar is of particular interest. I enjoyed speaking to Orion parents but I also learn a great deal from the other parents and presenters. My son Paul just registered for the Spring Semester at Foothill College so that he can take his first college class (“Introduction to College and Accomodations”) during his last semester as a High School Senior. I am looking forward to hearing advice on the High School – College transition at Saturday’s seminar.

It was fun to refine and extend my slides from last year. The Benefits/Disadvantages of Neurocognitive Disability table gives me a new perspective every time I update it. (This was first published in my Living in a Cat World blog entry dated 15 May 2008.) I added a new picture of a geek at work (with his permission, of course), plus new geek-wear images from Think Geek and the XKCD Store. I was very pleased to find an excellent new quote by the famously-autistic and famously-successful Temple Grandin:

“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 trouble following the normal paths. We don’t do very well in interviews, which is a big problem for us, and a lot of autistic people also have extremely ‘uneven’ academic skills… I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing if there weren’t any back doors.”

(From Animals Make Us Human, 2009, by Temple Grandin)

29 Dec 2016: Links Updated

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Tagged as Disabilities, Geeks, Paul, teaching

March 3, 2010 · 6:12 pm

Paul’s Sculptures

My 17-year-old son Paul loves creating sculptures. Starting last year, he built a ceramic and copper boat as an engagement present for his sister Jessica and her fiance Matt. The boat took much longer than planned because someone accidentally set something heavy on top of it when it was half-dry in the Paly art room. Before the boat, Paul created a Rauschenberg Combine interpretation box with copper wire (my Christmas present!). The blue box is supposed to be filled with small green glass bottles but someone recycled the original set, so we are looking for more.

Expensive Valentine’s Day

Since I no longer work for Sun Microsystems, I am using my own home office equipment more. This week, everything overloaded and died. My old Motorola Razr cell phone had been limping along but then the battery started disconnecting randomly. My husband John’s Razr gave up after it got washed. So, we started discussing new phones. Luckily, we mentioned this at our monthly Spirals dinner. Several of the couples passed around their cell phones and gave tutorials. The two I liked best were the Motorola Droid and the Apple iPhone, with the iPhone feeling easier for me to use.

John and I went to the very crowded Oakridge Mall Apple Store on Valentine’s Day to buy a black and a white iPhone 3GS. Then, we went out to a lovely dinner at the Sienna Bistro in downtown Willow Glen. John had a spectacular red bouquet by Mimi at Flower Flour on the table when we arrived. (I gave John a turned and inlaid wooden bowl by William Broderson as his Valentine’s Day present.)

I consulted with my 17-year-old son Paul as to which two iPhone games he recommended. I know he will be borrowing my phone to play games when we are driving, so he might as well help me pick. We chose Crayon Physics Deluxe and Tetris for $5/each.

After I turned in my Sun Ray at Home system on my last day of work, I started using John’s 4-year-old MacBook Pro laptop to drive the big monitor that is cantilevered over my desk. John started using his iMac for his primary computer because the laptop kept crashing. After the laptop crashed for the sixth time in one day for me, we went to the Apple web site and bought a new 13″ MacBook Pro. The Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard arrived today, so the laptop itself should get here soon. It already shipped from Singapore. It is fun to have new electronics but I very much hope we are done for a while. This stuff is expensive!

Images 2010 Copyright Katy Dickinson

Family Finance Review

One of the results of my being laid off by Sun Microsystems last month is that we are now reviewing and deciding what to change in a wide array of family finances. This is not just about our household budget. We are analyzing our insurance coverage (property, life, and health), wills, investments, etc. For my last 26 years, many of these were tied into Sun’s benefits, retirement, stock and other offerings. This review process is very time consuming but enlightening. Because my lay off was at the time that Sun became Sun-Oracle, the company itself changed when my circumstances changed. This means more than the JAVA stock symbol going away.

Most of the Oracle benefits providers are different. For our family’s medical needs, in some cases the new offerings are better. For example, Blue Cross this month radically lowered the amount they would reimburse for services by More Physical Therapy, where my son has been going several times a week to help his chronic headaches. We got a remarkably frank letter from More PT dated 30 December 2009 that said:

…we were deeply concerned when Blue Cross notified us earlier this month that it is canceling its long-standing contract with all Preferred physical therapy providers in California effective January 31, 2010. In place of the existing contract, Blue Cross is offering a new contractual arrangement that dramatically changes reimbursement methods… The new contract that Blue Cross is offering includes, among other things, a nearly 50% reduction in the allowable fee for each of the services we provide… In its letter regarding the proposed changes to our contract, Blue Cross stated that it hoped ‘these changes will be viewed by our therapy providers as exciting and positive.’ We hope you understand how offensive and ridiculous this statement is. In addition, the Blue Cross website states, ‘Our mission is to improve the health of the people we serve.’ We would argue that what they are attempting to do to physical therapy providers and patients across the state will, without a doubt, achieve the opposite effect.

Changing back to United Healthcare (which was our family’s health insurance company before Blue Cross) will mean that more of our providers are in-network, so some of our medical costs may go down. In the last week, have spent hours talking with Beck Grabau (Financial Advisor, Park Avenue Securities, 408-392-7818) about life insurance and investments. This afternoon, we spent an hour with Bill Halper (Halper Insurance Services, 408-866-4470) discussing health insurance offerings and costs. I will be happy to get all of this sorted out so I can get to work full-time on my new job of finding a new job.

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Tagged as Sun Microsystems

February 11, 2010 · 11:52 pm

Spring Dogs, Birds, Plants

It is still raining here in Northern California but Spring has definitely arrived. My daffodils and almond trees are in full bloom. The finches are eating through a full tube of thistle seed a day on their feeder. Our energetic new 9-month-old puppy Redda and her patient 14-year old pack mate Juliet are having a wonderful time getting to know each other. Redda is still learning who is a friend and who she can bark at. She has decided that the garden light shades make great chew toys.

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Tagged as birds, Dogs, garden

February 4, 2010 · 11:30 pm

Skype from Qatar

A friend of ours dropped by yesterday with a good bottle of wine to cheer us up after my being laid off by Sun-Oracle last week. During lunch, I was very surprised to receive a phone call on my cell phone from my daughter Jessica who is at school at CMU-Q in Qatar until May 2010. I ran out of the restaurant trying to find a quiet place to hear why Jessica had called. I was only slightly hyperventilating, really.

Jessica is having fun in Doha, Qatar. (Qatar is east of Saudi Arabia and south of Iran.) Our busy girl is in a musical, a choir, and on the basketball team as well as taking classes at CMU-Q and Georgetown University in Doha’s Education City. We have been talking with her by way of Skype on a regular schedule. Doha is 11 hours off Pacific Time, so we need to be organized to stay in contact. Yesterday’s call was the first unexpected communication.

It turned out that all is well. Jessica called to say she had found a cheap ticket and would be visiting her fiance Matt in Washington DC over Spring Break instead of traveling around the Middle East as she had planned. It was good to hear her voice. It always amazes me that I can be standing on the street in Willow Glen, California talking with my daughter who is sitting in her dorm room in Qatar talking to her laptop. I love technology.

Model Train Layouts, Berlin Wall, Koi

Last night, my husband John and our son Paul and I visited three HO-scale model train layouts which are part of this weekend’s National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) Pacific Coast Region (PCR) Layout Tours. One of the layouts was in an office in the Bayshore Business Park, very close to the original Sun Microsystems campus in Mountain View. Before Sun was big enough to have a cafeteria, we used to walk into the Bayshore Business Park to buy sandwiches. In addition to a good Deli, the Bayshore Business Park has a delightful koi pond, and two big pieces of the Berlin Wall in a tiny monument to freedom next to a parking area. The signs say:

A Tribute to American Resolve
Sections of the Berlin Wall

The period after the second World War divided Western Democratic and Eastern Communist ideologies by what was known as the Iron Curtain, which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Seas. Within East Germany, part of the communist sphere of influence, West Berlin was an island of freedom surrounded by a sea of oppression. In August, 1961, the East German government, to prevent the flight of its citizens from West Berlin, built a wall dividing the City. For 28 years the Berlin was the Rubicon for East and West until “Glasnost” became the new thinking in the Communist World. Between November 9 and 12, 1989 the Wall was breached; not from without with bombs or bullets, but from within by the sound of freedom and the vision of a better life that had drifted over the Wall.

The World must not forget that it was America’s resolve and its political and economic ideals that made this bloodless revolution and most significant historical event possible.

I enjoyed showing 17-year-old, 6-foot-tall Paul the Berlin Wall monument and nearby fish pond and telling him how he and I used to feed the koi bread from our sandwiches when he was tiny. We chased the fish around with our flashlight. My fish pictures turned out surprisingly clear, considering how very dark it was.