Paper done! That's this week's down, now I have one for next week and one for the week after and school will be over for the quarter. W00T! This was my Rorschach paper, and I chose to do it on forensic applications. The topic was something I was particularly interested in, since my supervisor has talked about using it twice now, when he was otherwise stuck on a diagnosis. I way overdid on this paper, as I often do, because I wanted to learn the subject matter and there is nothing that irks me more than paying massive amounts of money and being asked to do superficial work. Sometimes that's ok, like just one class per term because I don't like to be overloaded, and heaven knows I whine when I get a whopper assigned, but in reality, the purpose of grad school is to learn the material to a depth that most people don't go. This is the antithesis of the quarter system, which by design sees to it that you will never have time to do more than glance at anything before a class is over. Hell, were it not for being able to do interlibrary loans chapter by chapter, so the PDFs come the next day, I wouldn't even be able to get all my resources in time to write anything! I stayed within her page length limit of 7 pages (not including cover, abstract and refs) but I did three PAGES of references rather than three references. LOL! I really don't see how much can be had from three articles on any topic. I will also stay within the 20 minute presentation time she asked, but I'm going to pack one hell of alot of info in there and provide handouts that people might actually learn from and refer to in the future if they need to reference this topic.
So over all I am quite pleased with my product; I think I did well considering how much I covered in such a small space, but I am now behind in everything else. Akk! Next week's paper will be a bitch because I have done almost nothing on it yet and I have a report for my practicum due Tuesday plus I have to work on Sunday. Oh, and some supervision Friday afternoon, so that cuts into my study time too. Once again, as soon as my schoolwork gets heavy my practicum requirements up the ante too. Sigh...
All the match buzz has me agitated about internships so I am having to sit on my hands to keep myself from spending all my study time searching for good sites. I'll download the APPIC application when school is done and spend my break working on my CV and essays.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Scary Go To Nite Nite
Raging storm here with all kinds of wind and rain. AR put Gus to bed and covered him earlier, but I was scoring Rorschachs in the kitchen and he could hear me muttering to myself, so in short order he was asking, "step up?" and demanding I "C'mere!" I took him out, as even when we leave the room he'll start crying once he's decided he's not ready for bed. I set him on his basket perch by the window so he could watch the storm while I worked.
First there was the matter of fact voice, "It's raining outside."
Then there was the very small, high pitched, wavery voice, "Scary." LOL! He says this sometimes and obviously knows what it means, so I put him on my lap under the table. In short order there came a stream of nite nites, so I tried to put him back in his cage. Nope, now I got, "Scary go to nite nite. Scary!" Apparently it was just too creepy to go in the dark cage with the rain hammering down, wind howling, and the windowpains rattling. He's now in back with AR, alternately nodding off and telling him, "nite nite."
First there was the matter of fact voice, "It's raining outside."
Then there was the very small, high pitched, wavery voice, "Scary." LOL! He says this sometimes and obviously knows what it means, so I put him on my lap under the table. In short order there came a stream of nite nites, so I tried to put him back in his cage. Nope, now I got, "Scary go to nite nite. Scary!" Apparently it was just too creepy to go in the dark cage with the rain hammering down, wind howling, and the windowpains rattling. He's now in back with AR, alternately nodding off and telling him, "nite nite."
Friday, February 22, 2008
Match Day!
Well for the cohort ahead of me it was a bittersweet day. Of those who interviewed only two matched, BUT, both got APA internships, which is an enormous boon for those of us still coming down the pike. It means that it's possible... not necessarily easy since our school is not yet APA acredited, but not out of the question. Plus many of those students only applied in California, and CA is the most competitive state in the country! Much as I appreciate the status quo, I intend to look a little further afield.
I'm making contingency plans in the event I don't match next year. There is, of course, clearninghouse and CAPPIC, but the big thing is, what if we don't get accredited the first time around? Even if I got an APPIC, APA match I'd be in trouble. Most likely they would simply get it the second time around (I have great confidence in the people running the program) and everyone would be grandfathered, but there are no guarentees.
I just learned that the Juvenile Hall in my county (I don't work at that one, I work in a county south of where I live) is hiring therapists and pays a little more than the one where I work. There is one part time and one full time position open right now, and one of the students the year ahead of me just took a part time job there. He will be moving on in a year, so if I am not in an internship, or my school has to try a second time at accredidation, I might apply for that. They want bilingual people, but what they want and what they can get may be two different things.
The whole match process is just bizarre. I cannot think of a more stressful system.My heart goes out to all of you out there who didn't match today. Everything crossed for you if you're moving into Clearinghouse on Monday!
I'm making contingency plans in the event I don't match next year. There is, of course, clearninghouse and CAPPIC, but the big thing is, what if we don't get accredited the first time around? Even if I got an APPIC, APA match I'd be in trouble. Most likely they would simply get it the second time around (I have great confidence in the people running the program) and everyone would be grandfathered, but there are no guarentees.
I just learned that the Juvenile Hall in my county (I don't work at that one, I work in a county south of where I live) is hiring therapists and pays a little more than the one where I work. There is one part time and one full time position open right now, and one of the students the year ahead of me just took a part time job there. He will be moving on in a year, so if I am not in an internship, or my school has to try a second time at accredidation, I might apply for that. They want bilingual people, but what they want and what they can get may be two different things.
The whole match process is just bizarre. I cannot think of a more stressful system.My heart goes out to all of you out there who didn't match today. Everything crossed for you if you're moving into Clearinghouse on Monday!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Compulsive Communication
My puter went down for the count this past week and I am just today getting back online. Wow... I'm embarassed to say I don't have much of a life without my computer! I adore reading and Heaven knows I have massive amounts to do, but somehow I just didn't want to. I love going for walks, but same thing. It wasn't just that without my computer I didn't have anything to do, it was that I lost interest in everything non-computer related. Anhedonia set it. How pathetic is that???
We went shopping for a retail one, but it's not possible to get a PC without Vista, so we ended up ordering direct from Dell. That means a week to 10 day wait, so today AR plugged my hard drive into the MacMini he was supposed to have sold when he bought a new Mac. Glad he didn't! I am NOT a Mac user and am going nuts over all the changed menues and buttons etc. Must say it's a whole lot nicer than nothing though!
So I had two ball busting weeks, one slacker/sick week and now I'm just trudging through work and assignments. Really I didn't have to have my computer every moment because I have all the articles I need to do my Rorschach forensic focus paper and if I just get that hammered out then I'll probably have a computer again before I need to go back to my same sex couples marital therapy paper. I think maybe part of my stress and anxiety comes from too much multitasking. It IS possible to complete one task at a time, after all, but I never do. I always have to be doing everything at once. Hmm... shall try to remedy that this week.
We went shopping for a retail one, but it's not possible to get a PC without Vista, so we ended up ordering direct from Dell. That means a week to 10 day wait, so today AR plugged my hard drive into the MacMini he was supposed to have sold when he bought a new Mac. Glad he didn't! I am NOT a Mac user and am going nuts over all the changed menues and buttons etc. Must say it's a whole lot nicer than nothing though!
So I had two ball busting weeks, one slacker/sick week and now I'm just trudging through work and assignments. Really I didn't have to have my computer every moment because I have all the articles I need to do my Rorschach forensic focus paper and if I just get that hammered out then I'll probably have a computer again before I need to go back to my same sex couples marital therapy paper. I think maybe part of my stress and anxiety comes from too much multitasking. It IS possible to complete one task at a time, after all, but I never do. I always have to be doing everything at once. Hmm... shall try to remedy that this week.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Sleep, perchance.
Slept all damned day on Saturday and didn't feel one whit of guilt, either! I was on the verge of getting sick and my brain was utterly useless, so other than reading some on Emotionally Focused Couples therapy over some soup at lunch, I didn't do anything school related. Then Sunday was insane at the Hall, so no schoolwork there either. So it went to right now, when I am here at 8:40 pm and STILL not doing schoolwork!
Ok, to be fair I did do some reading on same sex couples at lunch yesterday in preparation for a paper on the topic in my couples class. Mostly though I've been working my ass off during the day and so utterly wiped at night I watch a movie with AR and go to bed.
Had a great case this week that challenged me and kept me interested every moment. But oh my HELL never sit with a person who has both attentional problems and OCD. Gak! When she wasn't looking out the window, she was checking, rechecking and REchecking every answer. Took 2 1/2 hours to administer the PAI-A, which should take about 45 mins. I think this case is one where what looked for all the world at first glance to be ADHD is actually straight up anxiety. So fascinating to see it unfold and tease out all the little subtleties that rule out one thing and rule in another. We weren't asked for a neuropsych eval on this one, but recommended it, so we may get another pass. My supervisor did a little bit, but thanks to some internal fumbling in the agency we had only two days to turn this around instead of the customary two weeks... which is a story unto itself. Anyway, it was 'down and dirty' but I was impressed with how much solid work we could do as a team in such a short time. Go us! I'm still high on how much I learned and pleased to punch about how easy it was to write. Just a short while ago I agonized for hours over making definitive statements about data, but now I'm getting positively bold! Of course that's only on the three tests I do gazillions of. I'm starting at ground zero for the neuropsych stuff.
Entree is better, or was this morning, he's being a shit and refusing to come in tonight because he knows mama=meds. Ergo, FUCK mama! His heart rate has climbed back up, but the vet says that doesn't have to spell the end, it may yet go down again, so we just keep on keeping on. We have put a plan in place for the worst and I got confirmation that his pain pills will sedate him if I triple them up, so I feel better about how we can get him through the end as painlessly as possible when it comes. Despite how morbid that sounds, it's surprising what a relief it is to have a plan and know there is something we can do that we're at least semi-comfortable with. It makes it more bearable to face the whole nasty reality. Thankfully Entree knows nothing about our reality and insists on living in his own, which involves much less gnashing of teeth (excepting gopher teeth, of course) and much more sitting on stumps and rolling in the dirt with the sun on one's fur. Mm... that sounds nice, doesn't it?
So tomorrow I will study and study and read and read, but I have nothing to actually turn in this week and I'm feeling pretty confident about my Rorschach scoring, so I'm letting myself slow the pace a little.
My sister, who lives in Yuma and has been rocking and rolling with all the Mexican earthquakes down there, informs me that there is a prediction of a quake for central or SW California for the next 48-76 hours. In my area it may be as much as 6.0. Oh my... so maybe I'll tape my bookshelves. When we got hit hard a few years back our entire book collection that numbers well over 1000 and is mostly paperbacks, ended up in piles on the floor. Being the OCPD person that I am it took me THREE YEARS to get them all reshelved properly, in alphabetical order by author. Damned if I want to do that again...
Ok, to be fair I did do some reading on same sex couples at lunch yesterday in preparation for a paper on the topic in my couples class. Mostly though I've been working my ass off during the day and so utterly wiped at night I watch a movie with AR and go to bed.
Had a great case this week that challenged me and kept me interested every moment. But oh my HELL never sit with a person who has both attentional problems and OCD. Gak! When she wasn't looking out the window, she was checking, rechecking and REchecking every answer. Took 2 1/2 hours to administer the PAI-A, which should take about 45 mins. I think this case is one where what looked for all the world at first glance to be ADHD is actually straight up anxiety. So fascinating to see it unfold and tease out all the little subtleties that rule out one thing and rule in another. We weren't asked for a neuropsych eval on this one, but recommended it, so we may get another pass. My supervisor did a little bit, but thanks to some internal fumbling in the agency we had only two days to turn this around instead of the customary two weeks... which is a story unto itself. Anyway, it was 'down and dirty' but I was impressed with how much solid work we could do as a team in such a short time. Go us! I'm still high on how much I learned and pleased to punch about how easy it was to write. Just a short while ago I agonized for hours over making definitive statements about data, but now I'm getting positively bold! Of course that's only on the three tests I do gazillions of. I'm starting at ground zero for the neuropsych stuff.
Entree is better, or was this morning, he's being a shit and refusing to come in tonight because he knows mama=meds. Ergo, FUCK mama! His heart rate has climbed back up, but the vet says that doesn't have to spell the end, it may yet go down again, so we just keep on keeping on. We have put a plan in place for the worst and I got confirmation that his pain pills will sedate him if I triple them up, so I feel better about how we can get him through the end as painlessly as possible when it comes. Despite how morbid that sounds, it's surprising what a relief it is to have a plan and know there is something we can do that we're at least semi-comfortable with. It makes it more bearable to face the whole nasty reality. Thankfully Entree knows nothing about our reality and insists on living in his own, which involves much less gnashing of teeth (excepting gopher teeth, of course) and much more sitting on stumps and rolling in the dirt with the sun on one's fur. Mm... that sounds nice, doesn't it?
So tomorrow I will study and study and read and read, but I have nothing to actually turn in this week and I'm feeling pretty confident about my Rorschach scoring, so I'm letting myself slow the pace a little.
My sister, who lives in Yuma and has been rocking and rolling with all the Mexican earthquakes down there, informs me that there is a prediction of a quake for central or SW California for the next 48-76 hours. In my area it may be as much as 6.0. Oh my... so maybe I'll tape my bookshelves. When we got hit hard a few years back our entire book collection that numbers well over 1000 and is mostly paperbacks, ended up in piles on the floor. Being the OCPD person that I am it took me THREE YEARS to get them all reshelved properly, in alphabetical order by author. Damned if I want to do that again...
Friday, February 08, 2008
Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!
Jimeny... this term is turning out to be a rough one. Finally have a moment to post.
Some how or other I managed to schedule myself for three presentations in a single week. Then the week before (last week) I got called in to work on Saturday b/c the person scheduled had an emergency, and I was already set to work Sunday, so my prep time for my projects went bye bye. I figured I'd see all the referrals on Saturday and do schoolwork Sunday, but instead there was one crisis after another and I got very little down time. Then I spent all day Monday and Tuesday testing three different people for neuropsych evals and a CWS case so ended up pulling one all nighter after another to get everything done. People seemed to follow the presentations and I got good feedback on all of them, so I guess they must have been semi-coherent, but damned if I know why. I can barely even remember doing them now it's over.
And our drama filled cohort has been getting more and more and MORE worked into a froth. I have been 'elected' by my peers and a couple of core faculty to try and make the identified patient understand how she is affecting the rest of us, since she can only seem to see how we affect her. I have personal issues with her that I need to address anyway, and it happens that my stuff is pretty reflective of everyone else's. Being a systems thinker I'm trying to figure out how we all perpetuate the problem and how we could change to get better results, but frankly, after two years of this shit I am losing patience and I just want her get over it or go away. Next term we are going to have a cross cohort class with 2nd and 3rd years together. That should effectively dilute our cohort problems and give us a chance to really get to know about the work our classmates are doing. It will be a dissertation class with us doing our research proposals and them analyzing their completed research. I'm excited to see how it goes!
On the kitty front things are getting rougher, which also played into the harsh couple of weeks. Entree had a really bad spell Sunday night and Monday morning. My supervisor wasn't very understanding when I told him I might have to leave abruptly to have my cat put down if my neighbor found him too badly off when she checked on him for me. KaCHUNK... he just dropped about 5 pegs in my estimation. Fortunately Entree did get better, but I think losing circulation repeatedly in his back legs has caused some tissue damage and his feet are sore even when he's ok. And today he came limping in with a bitten front foot. Like he needed one more thing on top of everything else! I suspect it was bad karma from sticking his paw down a gopher hole (one of his favorite pastimes). Just figures it also happened right after I got a notice saying he's due for his rabies shot. Sigh... I'll probably have to take him in tomorrow for antibiotics.
Um... there must be good things to say here; I hate that I'm so negative much of the time lately! Learning lots of interesting things. Oh yeah... we learned some of the NEPSY-II in group supervision last week and I am DYING to learn some more . It was just so damned much fun I want to buy my own kit ($800 I don't THINK so!) and play it like a parlor game. =p
We'll go over the DKEFS in class next week too, and the Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure test. Jeeoy!!! I absolutely adore neuropsych stuff; the tests are so fun! Now the Rorschach, though it generates fascinating information and it's fun to talk about, is a ROYAL pain in the ass. We've finished with scoring now and will have a midterm in class next week, but interpretation is yet to come. I'm not impressed with the fuzziness of the scoring; it just feels way too subjective for me. Not only that, I think it's a nightmare of cultural insensitivity! I'll delve into my forensic stuff about it this week though, and hopefully get an interview with my Masters prof who uses it in court and perhaps I'll get another angle.
Some how or other I managed to schedule myself for three presentations in a single week. Then the week before (last week) I got called in to work on Saturday b/c the person scheduled had an emergency, and I was already set to work Sunday, so my prep time for my projects went bye bye. I figured I'd see all the referrals on Saturday and do schoolwork Sunday, but instead there was one crisis after another and I got very little down time. Then I spent all day Monday and Tuesday testing three different people for neuropsych evals and a CWS case so ended up pulling one all nighter after another to get everything done. People seemed to follow the presentations and I got good feedback on all of them, so I guess they must have been semi-coherent, but damned if I know why. I can barely even remember doing them now it's over.
And our drama filled cohort has been getting more and more and MORE worked into a froth. I have been 'elected' by my peers and a couple of core faculty to try and make the identified patient understand how she is affecting the rest of us, since she can only seem to see how we affect her. I have personal issues with her that I need to address anyway, and it happens that my stuff is pretty reflective of everyone else's. Being a systems thinker I'm trying to figure out how we all perpetuate the problem and how we could change to get better results, but frankly, after two years of this shit I am losing patience and I just want her get over it or go away. Next term we are going to have a cross cohort class with 2nd and 3rd years together. That should effectively dilute our cohort problems and give us a chance to really get to know about the work our classmates are doing. It will be a dissertation class with us doing our research proposals and them analyzing their completed research. I'm excited to see how it goes!
On the kitty front things are getting rougher, which also played into the harsh couple of weeks. Entree had a really bad spell Sunday night and Monday morning. My supervisor wasn't very understanding when I told him I might have to leave abruptly to have my cat put down if my neighbor found him too badly off when she checked on him for me. KaCHUNK... he just dropped about 5 pegs in my estimation. Fortunately Entree did get better, but I think losing circulation repeatedly in his back legs has caused some tissue damage and his feet are sore even when he's ok. And today he came limping in with a bitten front foot. Like he needed one more thing on top of everything else! I suspect it was bad karma from sticking his paw down a gopher hole (one of his favorite pastimes). Just figures it also happened right after I got a notice saying he's due for his rabies shot. Sigh... I'll probably have to take him in tomorrow for antibiotics.
Um... there must be good things to say here; I hate that I'm so negative much of the time lately! Learning lots of interesting things. Oh yeah... we learned some of the NEPSY-II in group supervision last week and I am DYING to learn some more . It was just so damned much fun I want to buy my own kit ($800 I don't THINK so!) and play it like a parlor game. =p
We'll go over the DKEFS in class next week too, and the Rey Osterrieth Complex Figure test. Jeeoy!!! I absolutely adore neuropsych stuff; the tests are so fun! Now the Rorschach, though it generates fascinating information and it's fun to talk about, is a ROYAL pain in the ass. We've finished with scoring now and will have a midterm in class next week, but interpretation is yet to come. I'm not impressed with the fuzziness of the scoring; it just feels way too subjective for me. Not only that, I think it's a nightmare of cultural insensitivity! I'll delve into my forensic stuff about it this week though, and hopefully get an interview with my Masters prof who uses it in court and perhaps I'll get another angle.
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