Hello world!

Still here and dogpaddling along. Managed to land an external expert my dept chair approved of at last, then had to go back through IRB thanks to the changes he made. But they were good changes and will make for a better paper, so that's all good. Yesterday the IRB gave me the green light to collect data, so the race is ON!

Pounding out the hours as fast as I can. Wishing now I'd gone straight back to full time after the crash, but I know I needed to do it the way I did. Anyway, I have recouped all the lost hours and if I can stay on track I'll slide in with my 1500 by December. I'm thinking it would probably be a miracle if I had the diss done then too, but goals are good and it's not so unrealistic as to be a bad thing to try for!

At the least in January we are going to start making forays to places we might like to move. CA is just toooo pricey these days. So I'm working with a business consultant on how to launch myself and making contacts so that I might have a few offers by then.

All-in-all life is good. Dad is depressed off and on, but soldiering. Paid him a surprise visit for Father's Day and he was delighted! He even said he's going to ask the neighbor lady who he really likes to go for a ride in his little Smart Car with him. :) Go Dad!

Surfin rough waters

No idea how to start this post... which is the right way to announce you have lost a parent? My mother is gone and my life has changed forever. She was an amazing, talented woman and I will miss her terribly. On the other hand she was a very unhappy, hopeless woman these past few years, who desperately wanted out of this life but didn't know how to let go. I have lost count of the times she said, "I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up." Thursday night she got her wish. She went to sleep excited that I was coming to celebrate Dad's birthday that weekend, and died in her sleep the next morning.

Dad is doing well, under the circumstances. In many ways I think we had all been grieving the loss of my mother by inches... even she had. So this was a passing and not a tragedy, but still it is bittersweet.

Awash in red!!!

Ok, so my blog template went wonkers on me and I can't make any of the ones I want work properly. In the mean time I'll just make due with this one. Needed to mix things up anyway, so here we go!

Spring is Sprung!

And the grass is riz and riz and riz despite how often we cut it! But what a beautiful spring it is here. Shockingly green and the creek running consistently, which it hasn't for several years now. My allergies are insane, but the meds are at least marginally managing them, so it's bearable so far.

Been such a long time since I've updated here! I've been trying to figure out what I want to do with this blog, but haven't really settled on anything new or different.

The internship is going great and I'm back on track with my dissertation so that's all good. We've been getting some amazing cases lately, and I've been working on parental fitness cases more heavily than juvenile cases this time around, so I'm honing a different set of skills.

Just back from a Pediatric Neuropsych conference and have a head full of ideas! Besides the conference being thought provoking (this one always is) I also spent four days rooming with a fellow intern and a trainee, both very sharp women who are passionate about their work. We stayed up until the wee hours every night discussing our fields, testing each other with new instruments, and networking like crazy with others at the conference. It was a heady experience! Whenever I hang around with research focused people I get all worked up and want to go back into research, but then I truly want to be primarily clinical. It's always a little bittersweet reminding myself that I don't want that lifestyle, despite the thrill that comes come with it. Keeping up lots of connections is good though. I wouldn't mind writing a book chapter or two or participating in a clinical study on some level. Sigh... I'm 43 years old and I STILL can't make up my mind what I want to be when I grow up!

My own therapy is interesting, though the connection with my T isn't all it could be so I think now that she's helped me work through the bulk of the trauma I'm going to stop and seek someone else out for longer term support. I just take it for granted that I'll always be dipping in and out of my own therapy to manage family and professional stuff, so I'd really like to find someone I can keep going back to.

The whole Azkaban internship debacle is still sending aftershocks. The training director there has continued harassing me by making calls to my school about one thing and another. This person is so far out of bounds, both professionally and emotionally, that for anyone who had doubts it is now crystal clear where the problem lay. Thanks to this being a small community, and several of my classmates working in the state penal system, I've gotten other feedback about these people. This comes primarily from sources who know nothing about me or my experience, and are voicing negative impressions about their own interactions. If down the line I feel like grieving this, it seems I would have more support than I knew. Still not willing to go there though, or at least not unless I can find some way to do it that doesn't feel negative.

Apologies that I haven't been on the blogsphere at all lately, and haven't checked in to see how everyone else is doing and what they're up to. I'll get around the neighborhood this week though, and get back in the swing. Life is picking back up for me, so my time is once again in short supply on every front. Some day I am not going to be a student... at least not officially. I don't know if I'll like that or not, but I definitely think the idea of a little more down time is appealing!

Drippingly Yours...

Wow. So all this time I've been searching for an external expert who will meet my dept chair's requirement that I have ONLY Psychologists on my committee. Unfortunately I am doing a cross disciplinary study and finding someone who is an expert in the other discipline AND a psychologist is a chore. I've got my entire lit review done and somehow my proposal has been approved WITHOUT an external expert. So what if the person I finally settle on rips the proposal apart? Makes no sense to me.

Anyway, this is a very new area of research and there's virtually nothing out there on it. Among that small crowd, however, one person stands head and shoulders above the rest. I've been grousing that I can't ask him, and can't find anyone else, so I shot him an e-mail asking if he had any suggestions for me (after duly gushing over his work) and wondering if he'd consider being on my committee if I could convince the chair to change her mind. His reply? Well he didn't even touch my question about a referral, rather he said... and I quote,

I am sorry to tell you that, unfortunately I do not sit on committees for the Psy.D., only for the Ph.D.

Like I said, wow. Guess that put me in MY place!!!

Getting Better Day by Day

What a delightful week it's been! Two days of internship with fun people doing interesting things. For example, I met one THRILLING client with a nasty case of scabies and an odor that could knock a horse over. Then there was another client who has often been found on top of vending machines, on rooftops, darting past classroom windows and grazing on wild mushrooms on school grounds.

But I mustn't forget to mention the interns and practicum students who make the professional part a pleasure, too. Most are from my school, so I know them already and am feeling like every day is a reunion. Some are new to me though, and so far all are great fun. Besides the camaraderie, I particularly love the mental challenges. Lunch with my fellow interns is all about discussing and debating theories, ideas and sticky cases. We're all plotting out our futures and everyone is enthusiastic. This is what I had hoped to find in grad school and was disappointed that it was pretty rare there. But now that we're all clear of the coursework it's a very different energy! And too, I suppose that the site has selected for people with lots in common, philosophically speaking.

To add to all of that, a fellow classmate, now in her PostDoc year, has just started at the Prison I left. She's only been there a few days, but her experience is so far really good. I'm delighted about that because it confirms for me that it wasn't the prison in general, it was my supervisor and the internship program. It also assuages my guilt about 'tainting' my school's reputation in some way. I know she'll do well there if she chooses to stay long term. Anyway, it's fun sharing experiences about the place.

The more time I spend with my therapist, the better I like her. I'm finding all kinds of things like that making a big thick silver lining over the horrific cloud of my first internship experience.

I suppose after the past few months this post must sound positively MANIC! It's just really nice to feel like a normal human being again. And somewhere in all this I've had a fundamental shift in my priorities. I don't really care how long it takes me to get through this degree now. I'm going to enjoy this as much as I can, learn as much as I can, and let the chips fall where they may with respect to post docs.

VINDICATION!!!

So today I got an e-mail from the Director of Training at my school saying that the faculty met and agreed that the feedback I received from my internship site was specific to that institution. They said they feel very confident about my professional competence and support me in beginning a new internship. My plan to start part time and move to full time in the summer is being reviewed to be sure the State internship program is ok with it, but they don't anticipate it being a problem.

So hopefully that will be that and the TD at the prison (I've taken to calling it Azkaban) will leave well enough alone. I'm still working at Juvenile Hall and with luck will be back in the swing of the internship next week!

I hate coming here and just whining whining whining all the time, but it seemed that mess just consumed my every waking moment! The support I've gotten here has been wonderful though, and I can't tell you how much it has helped!

Still though, I'm looking forward now to having more interesting things to blog about. Like, for example, the fact that I am seriously crippled by overdoing on my new Wii. LOL! But seriously, I have promised myself that I'll add in one non-technical book to my list at all times, to be read in bed and on weekends. And should post pictures of our lovely canyon all wet and wild with the creek raging (while it lasts, poor dry CA is soaking up water like a sponge just now). I'm going to lunches and breakfasts with friends and watching more movies with AR in the evenings. Trying to restore balance in my world...

Nope, I am NOT going back there...

I have proclaimed that 2010 will rock and I am sticking to my guns. So why am I posting this at 1:30 in the morning and why am I getting angrier and angrier by the minute? Apparently there is a problem with me being resilient. Perhaps if my functioning before this internship was excellent and my performance afterward continues to be excellent, it might suggest that what happened was about the internship, and not about me being broken. So now it seems that it is an ethical breach for me to start another internship right away because I am so gravely impaired that I need to sit around bleeding for a few months before I even think about getting back on the horse... even if I am at a site where I've worked before and am completely at home with the work and the supervisors. Even if I start up cautiously, part-time, and even if I am simultaneously in therapy, working through what happened at their site. There are those who feel so strongly about this that they felt the need to call and make decidedly unsubtle threats to my school about writing to the Board of Psychology if I was allowed to start a new internship, and wouldn't that be a terrible thing for the APA accreditation process of a burgeoning young program?

I have thus far chosen not to file any formal complaints against my supervisor or the site, nor to appeal the loss of 700 clinical hours. I'm concerned about the possibility that even if I am successful, it could do harm to my professional reputation, especially in such a small community. I have been told that I have a very strong case, but I would still prefer to move on and be satisfied that the director of the overarching, state-wide consortium promised me that there would be substantive changes to the internship as a result of my feedback. But now come these threats. My school is fielding this for me for the moment and most likely I won't be held back for more than a week or two, so I'm going to consider this slop over from 2009 and not sully this lovely new year with it yet.

My Director of Training at the school was shocked by some of the details of my supervision experience and it is possible that the school may file complaints even if I don't. In that case this may drag on for some time to come. Much as a part of me wants to see these people go down in flames, I really just want to live and let live, and hope my resignation and my feedback is enough to change things for the next intern in line. So I guess I'll do a reframe and say that if they want a showdown, then this time around I am not going to allow myself to be the victim, and that will make the experience positive, and not negative.

Now I'm off to hit the NyQuil so maybe I can at least make some progress on my dissertation tomorrow. Phooey.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I have decided 2010 is going to ROCK! Because I said so, so there. =)

Worked at Juvenile Hall my first day of the new decade. Good, quiet day. So far so good...