2010 Mike & Gigi Firth Notes

Gigi's Job - Gigi has been very busy with tasks related to proofreading Braille, having gotten her NLS certificate last year. She has a contract with Region 20 of the Texas Education Service Center system to do textbooks and classroom materials and she is almost done with the 16 exercises involved in the Nemeth Code certification.  For the Region 20 work, the Braille file is sent to her electronically and she reads through it aloud while someone, Mike or one of several lady volunteers follows the print text for variations and mistakes.  While Romeo & Juliet in Grade 2 or Contracted Braille (a kind of short hand) was a pleasure with Gigi's good reading voice, the long hours spent on Texas! a junior high Texas history book are much less fun because it has been done in Grade 1 or ordinary Braille where every print character is matched to cell of up to six dots - like the listings of Braille you see in a dictionary.  And to help the inexperienced student follow the lines, it is all double spaced, which means a single print paragraph takes a whole Braille page of 11x11 inch paper.  And Gigi has to look at every cell for errors which means the reading sounds a lot like a second grader struggling through the words, which are much longer than they would be in contracted Braille where "ed", "ing" and "th" are single cell symbols and whole common words like "the" contract to one cell.  And the "attractive" layout for preteen students involves some choices to untangle the reading path when side columns and bottom figures enhance the text.
Nemeth Code is the special version of Braille used for mathematics and science work. If you recall either the look of textbooks as far as you went in math or the stuff that made you give up on going further a collection of symbols and specific physical arrangements will come to mind that are not on typewriter keyboards.  Nemeth uses a complicated set of rules and complex character combinations to convert super- and subscripts, integrals and square roots, and reaction arrows to a single line of "text" that can be read in a linear fashion by the fingers although the last two exercises involve laying out the cells so they line up and down, like when you do division and write the partial answer under the first part of the dividend.  A single error usually requires doing the page over again, like manual typing class. 2010-03-02
 

Gigi's 60th - Gigi's 60th birthday was a nice success - lots of gifts all with a count of 60 involved and a "surprise party" of 7-8 people near the end of a designated 60 hour event.  From midnight Thursday, Feb.25, her actual birthday to noon Saturday was the 60 hours, but the day started late because she was up working on her Nemeth code (above) and began with 60 M&M's for sustenance and 60's pennies for a cash reserve and "Happy Birthday Gigi!" in Braille, which takes exactly 60 dots (with capital signs), and ended with a quiet dinner as requested at Outback Steakhouse with a small round one-layer white cake with two large red roses on it.  By this point, Gigi knew something was going on on Saturday because, I didn't want the quiet dinner to become a point of anxiety over a lot of people showing up in the tradition of a get together at a nice restaurant as at previous birthdays for others or at dog parties. That stimulated the 60 hours connection.
 Friday began late also as Gigi worked in the very early a.m. with a bag of 60 dimes "since 60 pennies seems insufficient" and 60 Brach's Starlight Mints, her favorite candy "for sustenance and recovery." and ended with 60 Valentines heart shaped mints with a verbal claim of affection.  In the last mail before the party, an important letter arrived.
  Saturday was a very nice day, typical, supposedly, of a Dallas-almost-spring - at least the temperature was a normal 65 or so.  When everyone had finally assembled, from the first arrival of Suzanne Whalen to Bud and Annie Melton walking over,  I took on the role of Master of Ceremonies and pointed out what had happened so far and the half sheet cake I had sitting on the end of the table with 60 red and yellow rose buds on a marked out grid, again her favorite white cake, white frosting. Everyone agreed after tasting that Albertson's produced a very good cake.  Susanne hand carried Liz's gift of 60 nickels as she had to attend a retreat.  We reviewed the early arriving bag of 60 1950's style candies (Tootsie Rolls, bubble gum, etc.) from Dawn Bedard, the transcriber friend in Tennessee that came with a Louis Braille bi-centennial pin and a nice poem in Braille which was read. Lea Lohstreter brought in 60 containers of diet caffeine free Coca Cola, G's drink of choice. Going in the frig after display on arrival was a great pair of salmon fillets that came to 60 ounces and 6 large bulbs of garlic from Bud and Annie.  More M&M's, plus 60 small marshmallows and a booklet of DART coupons from Kiem Densmore and a Brailled card and coupon booklet from Jim Dawkins followed. Long time friend, Rhanda Hasley came with a unique cardboard gift box that looked like an old arch top lunchbox or mailbox that had 60 quarters rattling in it. I offered a Chinese checkers game which has 60 marbles and allowed us to play with "lose one marble a year until you have lost all your marbles" or "give a marble to a friend so they will never lose all their marbles." Glenda Goodwin, a co-worker of Gigi's during the almost two decades she worked at the IRS, gave her age in $1 bills plus $1 more "to grow on" as we used to say.  Suzanne Whalen, Gigi's very long time friend, finalized the gifts with a generous $60 gift in her name to The Seeing Eye, the letter finally arriving late on Friday before the party, as well as 60 $1 bills and a Brailled note of exactly 60 words saying she could never express her feelings in only 60 words.
And I was so busy being Master of Ceremonies with a room full of blind people, that I did not pick up the camera I made ready the night before.   2010-03-02