A mid-finals update on life (AKA, The Monster that Ate My Weekend)

Okay, I haven't updated this thing in forever! Time to return to our previously scheduled programming after a month-long interlude of commercials featuring "third draft", "let's discuss", "think about ___", "check file", and "now WHY haven't you all started that aphasia project yet?!!?" Yes - the end of clinic turned into the end of life as we Clinic 2's knew it for a month or so there. Treatment outcomes, SOAP notes, graphs, and end-of-semester self-evals were just about killin' us.

And then, of course, there was the ever-present Aphasia project and oral presentation. Oh, but you all are just doing Clinic 2 and a few classes...of course you have time to put together a 25+ page project!!! Sure, we all just have free time out the wazoo....

Well, several crazy-mad weeks later and after a weekend of constant work on what turned out to be a 50+ page Aphasia MONSTER that ate my weekend (preventing me from seeing Michael AT ALL but I'M. NOT. BITTER!!!!) I am finally feeling like things are calmer!

(Side note: the weekend was actually really fun in the times I wasn't working; got to hang out with Apryl a lot and go to the bar with her and hang out with Liz at the bar and go to Erin's really fun Christmas party....but I DESERVED all that after working so hard each day from morning to night! I suppose you could say the weekend was a mental health weekend...not that I needed to restore any, just that I WOULDN'T HAVE HAD ANY if I hadn't taken the mornings, afternoons and evenings to work and then gone out afterwards!!! hahaha)

Anyway, yeah, things are calmer. Never mind that I have a family conference and a final meeting with one supervisor both today, a final meeting with a supervisor and an exam both tomorrow, and an exam on Tuesday still left to go....it all feels like cake compared to what I just went through to finish up the Clinic paperwork and the Aphasia project. (And that's when you know you've been busy - when THAT schedule feels like nothing! lol)

And I am super, super, super-excited because I get to see Michael tomorrow!!! It will have been eleven days, which completely feels like eons. I am meeting him in Toledo at Franklin Park so that I can get some final Christmas shopping done if I have any time before he gets there (NO looking in my shopping bags if I have any when you get to me, hon! lol lol lol) and then we can go to the Beirut, which is possibly Michael's favorite restaurant on the face of the earth and is a place we have not been in eons! We'll decorate his tree over the weekend (yayyyyy Christmas trees!!!) and go out Saturday night to a new restaurant in Sandusky for 18 months wow...it so does not feel like we've been together that long!!!! we both keep mistakenly calling it six months, hahaha....

/end gush-fest

----brief interlude to give everyone reading this who's not Michael time to go throw up----

I am really excited about being done for good, though. That'll happen Tuesday after the Aphasia exam, and then all of us will go out somewhere to celebrate (I am SO taping the Biggest Loser finale and watching it the next day, hahaha) and I will feel like I actually have free time!!!

To do what, you ask?!

Let's see:

-figure out when to take the Praxis exam - I think the next available time is March??
-start studying for the Praxis
-figure out what jobs are out there that I could apply for starting in May so I have a job when I'm out in August
-work on research stuff
-get stuff settled for my public school internship (wherever that happens to be - I still don't know yet!!!)
-try to see if I can come up with a cool PhD area of interest so that I sound more together when talking to Karla and anyone else I might try to email as a backup plan
-talk to a few of these people who have clinical/research jobs to see if the PhD is even something that benefitted them/that I would want
-plan New Year's Eve party at my place and see who would want to come (any interest? email me!)

etc. etc. Some break, huh?! But at least I'll have TIME to do all this crap!!! lol

Gotta run off to EMU, but I will talk to you all later :) Have a great end of the semester!

Where has this semester gone?!!?!?

Sitting here at ERC-State Street, drinking cinnamon cider and hoping all the work I have to do will somehow complete itself!?!? I'm slightly tired and don't feel like working. But if I want to get anything done this weekend, it has to happen this morning or afternoon, or it won't happen. So I thought maybe making a blog entry - goofing off but still - sort of? - being productive? (forgive me if I delude myself) would get enough unwillingness to work out of my system that I'll be able to dive right into everything after I do this. That is the hope at least....

So it's November 2, surprisingly and scarily enough. The semester's almost over, and there's only about two more weeks till Thanksgiving break!!!! :) (wow - I so cannot wait!!!!!) Clinic is making me feel overworked and underpaid, despite the fact that, A) all the horrific paperwork-crunch-ness is over, and B) I'm not SUPPOSED to get paid! Except I sort of just was - in the middle of all that crazy applying-for-grad-assistantship-ness, I threw in my app for free money from EMU, and just got notified that I got a $500 scholarship! yay :)

Anyway. Clinic is going well. I'm not as attached to my clients this semester as I was to the little guy I had last semester, but the clients are interesting and since one of them is canceling sessions for two weeks soon to go on vacation, I'm gonna have time to go and observe my little guy from last sem! I am super-excited. :)))))

Super-curious to meet a certain miss A.'s new main man this weekend. ;-) Michael and I will have dinner with them at some point either Saturday or Sunday, then I'll get together with Jessica Saturday evening, and Michael and I will probably cook together tonight. Michael wasn't supposed to be here till Saturday night and I wasn't supposed to NEED to get work done right now, but he decided to skip going to the OSU game to come hang out with me, which I think is one of the sweetest things ever :))))) so of course I am re-arranging things a bit and making myself do more work sooner.

On November 16 I head off to Chicago!!!!!!! Two weeks!!!!!!!! I am so unbelievably excited to see Cassandra. :)

I need to do a lot of work on the PhD thing (what am I interested in now that autism's out?!!?) In some parallel universe could I ever see myself going the motor speech PhD route and doing Moebius???!! But then I wouldn't get to go to Iowa - which I kind of have my heart set on at this point if I do the PhD, although I'll apply elsewhere too - and I wouldn't get to work with Karla, who's awesome, and I wouldn't have a PhD topic that's terribly fundable and generalizable to a lot of other disorders. I think?

and where-the-cwap-am-I-gonna-get-my-C's? I wanna be in Chicago, but what kind of jobs are out there? Would I be better off somewhere else where there's a job more suited to what I want? I have less than a year now to decide this. Perhaps I will work on that all next weekend, after the Scrabble tournament in South Lyon.

Well, speaking of work, I'd better get back to mine. Hope everyone's as excited about the weekend as I am!!!!

Life's Insanity, and Other Musings

Turns out there is very little time that goes by without things going on. Not that this is bad - I really enjoy having a busy and eventful life!! - but it's just interesting to see the different times where I start thinking "Well, this week should be really calm!" and then find out that things still hop along and there are still not enough hours in the day during even those times.

Recently saw Chaim and Sunali when they came into town - coincidentally on the same day, but they didn't end up seeing each other, although I saw both of them. That was lots of fun! Went to Ashley's with Sunali and Michael, and met Chaim at the South U Starbucks.

Am headed to Chicago during the November 16 weekend, and have been invited by Nate to go to DC on the November 10 weekend when he and his fellow novices at the IVEs get their habits - I doubt I'll be able to go, but am going to run it by the Parental Forces That Be and just see if there's a shot I could make it.

Seven to eight more Tuesdays left in the semester - that is unbelievably exciting. I am NOT a huge fan of Tuesdays - and that's not a reflection of any one particular thing I do on Tuesdays, it's just a reflection of the fact that it seems that EVERYTHING I DO IS ON TUESDAYS. Literally, I'm at EMU from 8:30am-8:30pm. I am so ready to not have a 12-hr day anymore! One client's session may change from 9:30-10:30am to 10:30-11:30am, though, so that could give me - well, just an 11-hr day, lol - but I think it would be better. We will see what happens with that - client's family must talk to supervisor and arrange and then I will get the word as to if that will officially be changed.

Other than that - Michael and I went to our second ever Scrabble tournament this past weekend in Elyria, OH. It was two full days of Scrabble - fifteen games total - and was a total blast! I won five of the fifteen against a pretty darn good field (there were only four players, including Michael and me, whose ratings were under 900 - my rating was 740), so since my rating only put me in line to win 3 of the 15, my rating will go up by about 43 points. Yay! Michael saw one of the competitors I lost to some days later (who finished, like, third in the competition) and the guy said I'd really scared him; he thought I was going to win! I didn't, but I kept it really close, so I was proud. Another game that I lost was only by 4 points, and I kept it really really close against the guy who eventually won the tournament, too. Very proud of my performance - but I know I still have a ton of work to do on my game! I can do all the two-letter words in my sleep, but I need to be slightly more solid on the threes, and my fours and bingos need a bunch of solidifying, too. It'll be a fun process learning all these new words, though.

And we went to Cheesecake Factory after the tournament was over! I had Kahlua Cocoa Coffee cheesecake - it was reeeeeeeeeally good. :-D I loooooove Cheesecake Factory.

This weekend should be a lot of fun, too. I'm meeting Apryl for coffee tomorrow night, then on Friday Michael's coming and we're going grocery shopping and cooking together. We're hopefully meeting David for lunch on Saturday. For dinner Saturday night Michael and I are going to Gratzi because that's where we go every 10 weeks - and it has been 70 weeks since we met :-D Wow, how time flies! Saturday's also Sweetest Day - so it'll be cute and I'm excited. I wonder if there's anyone good at the comedy club below Seva on Saturday? We went to the comedy club and Gratzi on our first date, and we keep talking about re-creating that sometime..... Then on Sunday Michael and I are going to Wiard's Orchard to do the pumpkin picking, cider mill, hayride, corn maze, other-cool-stuff-to-do-right-before-Halloween thing. I'm excited about that too because I haven't been to Wiard's in eons!!!

I have a new background on my computer: an adorable picture of Lucy, the auction puppy most of you have heard me rave about, as a little teeny puppy! The family that won her sent Mom the picture, and Mom forwarded it on to me. Lucy is toooooo cuuuuute....makes me want a Golden Retriever puppy when I get older and into an apartment complex or something that will let me have a pet. But of course, who knows what life will hold for me - I can't start planning for a dog yet. :-P

Lord knows I can't even plan past the next year....who knows where I'll get a CF job?! The hope is Chicago, but life will plant me where it wants me to be. It's kinda scary knowing that I don't know where I'll be - that a little over two years from now I might be far far away in IOWA of all places - lol but Iowa City's awesome - but that's what life is; you can't always plan for it and you don't know what the future's going to hold when transition times like graduations and going into the work force are ahead. We shall see - but I'm going to try to make my life post-master's-program as conducive to making me happy as possible, in whatever form that ends up taking. How on earth did I get to be 23 and on the cusp of making major life decisions?! Time she flies.

In any case, I'm so totally putting off serious work that it's not even funny. I gotta get going - there's so much I have on my to-do list for today, and I haven't even crossed off one thing on it even though I've been doing stuff since 9:30am! lol

/end procrastination

Bye, everybody - have a great week!

And it begins....

Well, the craziness of a new semester has begun. Fun times have been had - I started Clinic 2, in which I get two clients, and have two other classes besides. The two classes' times and days were messed around with to no end when the new professors took over classes for the former prof after he seems to have disappeared. But luckily I was able to keep both classes because my schedule was open - others weren't so fortunate. There's not been much to do for either class thus far, but of course that's made up for by the mountains of paperwork that are Clinic. It doesn't quite feel like Clinic One times two because I'm way faster at everything now that Clinic 1 taught me more or less how to structure my paperwork...but it's a hoppin' party of wild and craziness nonetheless. :-P

I was correct in my suspicion of who one of my new clients would be, which makes me happy. Both my new clients are really interesting cases and it will be so much fun doing therapy with them this semester! I'm still figuring them both out, but hopefully I'll be up and running with solid therapy sessions soon, and for sure sooner than the about-a-month it took me last semester to get everything solidified with my then-client.

Got to see my little former client in the hall of the Clinic today. That seriously made my day! I had hoped to get that client back for this semester, but if I can't, at least I know now that I can go observe whenever I want because the session time is extraordinarily convenient. :))))))) And we're encouraged to observe other clinicians, anyway!

I'm kind of excited because I just structured some stuff with a professor of mine so that I can meet with her on a regular basis and really get going on some research stuff when the approval comes back from the necessary committee. There's apparently also another girl at EMU, who I haven't met yet, who my prof knows wants to do some research. If I could get in on that, I'd be thrilled! The more research projects I've got, the better - and since a few I thought I was going to be involved in haven't happened due to other people's time constraints, I'm excited to do stuff on my own - where only I am holding myself back in terms of time - and with people who also have the same idea of wanting to do a lot of research. Possible coolness there! I'm also doing a presentation in my professor's class (which I took a year ago and which spawned the paper from which my current research emerged) in mid-October. I'm excited about that too - my research topic is very close to my heart and I welcome a chance to share what I know with other people. I could talk forever on this topic, but I have a feeling I'll be kept to a half hour or so - boo! lol but I shall deal.

Today I get to see Apryl! I am very very excited. I have not seen her in forever!!!! Much to tell her, and I can't wait to hear her stories. I also need to go to the gym, do a lot of Clinic work, study my 3-letter-words if miracles happen and I have time (yeah, right - I have two hours or less as it is, probably :-P), and then Michael comes tonight. Fun times! But it's amusing how no day turns into an entirely-work day where I can just crank Clinic stuff out. I'm having way too much fun now to back out on any social thing, but I can't say I won't relish an entire day to work, if I ever get one, hahaha. A few days in November look like the most likely and soonest candidates for that. By that time, maybe I won't need a work day! lol But there's always stuff to do.

On that note - better get going so I can get some of that "stuff to do" done! But hope everyone is having a wonderful week. Saturday is Michael's and my first competitive Scrabble tournament in Battle Creek - wish us luck!!!