Going to Court

I am simply over the moon today because I got a note from the professor who has taught all my psychological assessment courses inviting me, and her other students, to come watch her testify in a sentencing hearing for a schizophrenic man tomorrow. It is all public record, and therefore she is willing to share her case notes in order for us to learn. Her reason for doing this is to enlighten people about how the mentally ill are treated in our legal system and what some in the field of psychology are trying to do about it. For me it is also an opportunity to see a Certified Neuropsychologist in action as an expert witness. W00T! This is exactly the sort of work I want to do, and the problem area in our criminal justice and mental health systems that I want to address with my work. It should be just an hour in the morning so I will still be able to see my Juvenile Hall clients in the afternoon. Double W00T!

In other, much less interesting news, I figured out at least the manual part of Endnote and decided I like it enough to go ahead and purchase it when my 30 day trial is up. Hey, I can be earning a whopping 5% interest on that $99 in the meantime, so why rush the thing?

Now I'm off to peruse the BBS site because I am still missing some forms for the MFT intern stuff I need for my practicum. The site and supervisor agreements are done and dated so I should be fine with all the hours I've done so far, but there is still more paperwork... I DESPISE bureaucracies!!!

Ooooooooo!!! I am double clocked!

Lookie! Lookie! My cute, colorful Widgetbox clock finally showed up. I'm not grounded anymore. Hooray!

But now I have to remove my more professional, stylish one up at the top, because two clocks is rather silly I think. Hm... what should I put in its place? I really want to slap PacMan in there, but it's too big. Whee... I know what I'm going to do Wednesday (instead of learning Endnote the way I need to) I'm going shopping for blog bling. LOL! Anybody wanna come?

EDIT: Update... as you can see I moved the little clock up and put in this interesting (I think) bookcrossing thingie down below. I dunno if I'll actually participate properly though... if I weren't such a damned hoarder I'd jump in with both feet, but the only books I'd end up registering are ones I'm willing to pass along never to see again, and those are generally not my faves... It's still cool as hell though, and I'm sure I'll see things to try, so maybe that's how I'll get the wild ones. LOL!

Endnote Endgame...

GAAAAAAHHHHH! Sorry... I wasn't sure how else to articulate that particular emotion. So call me alexithymic. Hmph!

I got a 30 day trial of Endnote yesterday and I tell ya, I am not having fun with it today. Does anyone out there use this and if so, what do you think of it? Been trying to use the help index and have succeeded only in becoming convinced I am an idiot. I want to connect it to my library database, but then I have all these insane layers of passwords to go through, so I'm dubious I can do that. Even just importing a reference from a PDF isn't so simple... for me anyway. I'm usually pretty good with new software, but this one's eluding me.

I found a couple of online tutorials that look decent, but screw it, I'm not wasting any more of my Sunday time on this when I could be playing WoW.

Pooh.

Blanklisted!

Oh 'eck! As you can see I was influenced by a few of my readers to do a little redecorating for the summer. Not sure that this particular look will stick, but it's fun to play. So I was trying to add some bling and went to Widgetbox where I found an adorable little clock to add. It came with two links, and one was a graphic I wanted to remove to the "credits" section of my sidebar to make the clock prettier and still give credit where credit was due. I think that was a no no as it stopped showing, and now, while the code shows normally for everything I download from there, nothing shows but the header. Oops! I left the little clock in (sans header so it's invisible) in hopes they'll notice my code is back to specs or my preset timeout is over or whatever. Hm... I suppose I could get out my old software from when I used to design webpages and make my own bling, but really I think my time could be better spent. So I'm both disgusted and chastised at once. Jeeze!

I did, at least, download Endnotes, toward the lit review, so I am at least angling in that direction. I spent a good part of the morning looking around for the lowest prices on the books my supervisor has recommended thus far during my practicum. Wow, the man has expensive ideas! Everything is textbook prices, and one is out in a new edition that would be much better to get, since it's a forensics text and the law portion has been updated to include this last decade, but needless to say the price is double and there's nothing used at all. Sigh. So nearly everything went on my order 'later' list and I still haven't finalized my actual order either. On the bright side, stuff that had been on hold for a long time has come down in price (possibly just for me since they noticed I wasn't buying? What's that called when they do custom marketing and pricing?) and one book that wasn't out has finally become available. Jeeoy!!!

The Concert

Can you see the heat waves? Maybe if you click on the images to make them bigger you'll see. Trust me, they were there...


The Lynyrd Skynyrd concert - from a distance and from the perspective of a short person who is perpetually having to jump up and down or stand on something to see at concerts. Sigh. She's also sorry she doesn't have a real zoom lens. Some day...



So the gang that didn't want us sitting under their tree is the Moloch gang. Moloch seems to be another name for the god Ba'al, worshiped in the Near East and represented by a man with the head of a bull. He's considered to be a demon in other cultures. Bull headed seems a fitting term for the woman who confronted us.

And speaking of bulls... well maybe this isn't one, but I loved this shot I took out my bedroom window last week!
Apparently those new horns are ITCHY!!! Yeah, my internet connection is slow as fuck and I have no cell phone reception out here, but this is the flip side of rural living.

And then I just had to throw these couple in that I took inside my house!

My friend, S, saw this little thing at a yard sale and seemed to think Gus needed it. Apparently she knows his tastes because he LOVES it! Now if only we knew who the heck Tobey was...

No, this is not Tobey, it's Entrée, and this is what AR refers to as his purple condom. I got it on clearance for the cats' stay in the duck aviary while we were evacuated during the fumigation. Entrée immediately recognized that it was meant for royalty and, hideous as it is, it is now a permanent living room fixture. Anything for His Majesty!

This, That and the Other

This week has been sort of off beat. I say 'this week' when I'm actually just talking about the past three days, but it feels like a whole week.

First was the Skynyrd concert, which rocked! Amazingly I wasn't deaf the next day, though I can't imagine why. There were over 1000 people there and we ended up putting our chairs under a big tent in the back and then standing near the front when the main even began. Before that it was all people watching.

At first one of my friends pointed out a small empty patch of grass at the base of an enormous tree. We wound our way there and started to set up our chairs when a very imposing woman informed us that this spot was reserved for the XYZ family (can't recall the name now). My friend D pointed out that there was no reserved seating and nobody was there, nor had anyone left stuff, so it looked available to her. The woman just kept repeating over and over, "it's reserved for the XYZ family, stressing the name and giving us very meaningful looks. D was all ready to call in the event staff, but I looked around and saw that everyone under the tree was tattooed from head to toe and wearing leather and bandannas. Uh huh... I poked D and suggested we just find another spot, which was a bitch because it was hot as Hades and very few shaded spots were left.

So last night I ran into some old friends at the grocery store and one of them told me he had just bought a 1966 Harley. I was teasing him about which gang he was going to join and he joked back that it was an easy choice since his cousin was with the XYZ motorcycle gang. It was definitely the same name that woman was saying over and over. I'll e-mail him for the correct spelling so I can Google it and learn more, but he did say it was affiliated with the Hell's Angels. Wow! I'm really glad D backed down.

So that was Sunday. Then Monday I was in supervision when along comes the Pediatrician for Juvenile Hall, whom I was introduced to briefly once before. We each thought we recognized the other, but couldn't figure out where we might have met. After a rundown of everywhere I had worked in the past 16 years since we moved to this area we discovered that I worked for her dad! I was a Research Biologist for a large vegetable farm owned by a very affluent Italian family (in one way or another they own the whole damned city I work in!). This woman was one of the few people I didn't know well because she was off in medical school somewhere back east. I knew her name and I'd met her very briefly at holiday parties over the years, but she knew AR, my husband, much better since he did computer work not only for the company but in her parents' home as well. It was so weird to hear her prattling on about clients of mine and finding that I had 'two lives' worth of stuff in common with her and for two months we had no idea about each other. Too weird!

Why?

My niece and her dad just drove 4 hours to look at what is left of her truck. Not much. This is the report she called in to my sister a bit ago:

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The truck has been pretty much stripped out. The tires and rims are gone and replaced with some cheap worn out tires and old rims; both windows are smashed in, there is a major dent in the passenger door and the paint is scratched down the sides. The stereo is gone, along with the speakers, the subwoofer and the custom box, the additional Infinity speakers in a box in the back that were extras she had… The dash board is cut to ribbons for no apparent reason. The gear shift knob is half missing (???) The controllers for the custom suspension are gone. Every scrap of everything is gone from inside the truck including fast food trash, tampons in the glove box, etc, not to mention the approx. $1400 worth of CD’s she had in a nice case. The new stainless tool box is gone with all of its contents which included lots of new tools, tire chains, flashlight, jump/compressor station, jumper cables, a sleeping bag, a nice winter coat, cargo nets, the works.

On the up side, the upholstery is in mint condition and, after all, we do still have the truck…

They left it there in Tucson and will now call the insurance company to start the process of getting the repairs done. It just didn’t seem prudent to try to drive it home on a 116 degree day with no air conditioning no gear shift knob and bald tires.

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So what's the deal with the dashboard and the gear shift? I understand it was found with a bunch of full gas cans and bolt cutters in the back, so whoever took it apparently wasn't quite finished with it. Gas to drive to Mexico and bolt cutters for the gates or fences maybe? Who can say, but whatever the plan, it was certainly a nefarious one. But why the utter trashing? Is that anger going on or what? These kids I work with give me the most cockeyed reasons for doing what they do that I suppose there is probably some "logical" cause for this in some twisted person's head. It feels like a snapshot of a serial killing to me... victim horribly mutilated, forced to do nightmarish things and then the corpse abandoned in a ditch somewhere. Gah! I'm so sorry for my niece, as this was her 'space' you know? And this is the second time, too. Her first truck she bought right when she got her driver's license and ended up totaling it 6 months later in an accident that was not at all her fault. I'm sure this incident will taint her feelings about Tucson, too, which is a shame, since it will likely be her home until she graduates from college.

I gotta question the girl's decision making skills though... she leaves nice cool Oregon for Arizona? Yukko!! :p

Sheer Bliss

Wow. So tonight AR and I are sharing an ice cream bar. I just recently saw this box with a picture of dark chocolate covered pomegranate ice cream (made with POM wonderful and all their amazing antioxidants, of course) and just had to try it. There we are sitting and munching our Sheer Bliss bar and I'm reading the back of the box. It shows four pretty cannisters, each with a flavor written on it: California Pomegranate, Pomegranate with Dark Chocolate Chips, Vanilla with Pomegranate Swirl, and Freedom. WHAT? Yeah, that's right, it just says Freedom.

"What's that?" I ask AR, pointing at the picture.

He gasps and looks up at me in wonder, with an edge of horror in his eyes.
"You don't know the taste of Freedom?" he says; incredulous.

I'm horrified and something in my stomach turns over. I realize it's true... here I am as American as can be with Independence day coming up tomorrow and the works and I have NEVER tasted freedom! I haven't the first idea what it's like. Obviously it's Sheer Bliss, because it says so on the box, but I don't even know what COLOR freedom is! I'm so ashamed...