Quilt Show

I recently attended the American Quilter's Guild's national quilt show. I love quilt shows. I can get ideas and be inspired to continue working on my current project. I have be working on a rose pattern quilt for a while now. It is nothing fancy, just nine-patch interchanged with plain blocks. The cool part is that it goes from light in the center to dark on the outside. I feel like a big cheater though, I machine pieced it. The long and the short of the story is this; I am a purest when it comes to quilting. I know there are some absolutely beautiful quilts out there that are machine pieced and quilted, but I have always preferred and admired the quilts that are hand pieced and quilted. (Just in case you are wondering, this one though machine pieced is being hand quilted.) I did one other machine quilt, it was the first quilt I ever did and I feel that I short changed the people I gave it to.

So, my reasoning for attending the quilt show was to get inspiration to finish my quilt. It didn't work. Instead, I picked up a new craft. Well new to me. I am sure that my husband is flabbergasted that I can go to a show dedicated to one of my favorite crafts and come home with a new one, or maybe he just knows with me a new craft is inevitable. I love crafts and working with my hands. In the list of currents would be cross-stitch, quilting, crochet, stained glass, and now, needle punch. The list of "tried but didn't quite catch my fancy" is much longer.

I am very easily distracted. I usually have two or three projects going on at one time. One needs a workshop (stained glass). One is for in front of the TV (quilting, cross-stitch, crochet, needle punch). One is for travel (cross-stitch, crochet, and needle punch). My current projects is of course needle punch, my quilt, and a stained glass piece that I designed. Maybe I'm ADHD?????

Something to be Re-Learned

Did your mother (or father) ever tell you "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"? Well mine did. As a matter of fact for a couple of years I think it was her favorite thing to say. Being my Girl Scout leader, she had to keep us sometimes catty girls in line. She would also say it to me and my brother all the time. I think it was her way of telling us to Shut Up without actually saying Shut Up.

As I have gotten older, I have realized, either this is something that adults really don't mean or they have thrown this lesson completely out the window. How much better would the world be if this was our model for all we said. If you can't say anything nice, then shut it. I got this epiphany in the shower, so follow me for a minute, my logic in the shower is not always sound. IF this statement was true, then really where would the world be. Think of the news on TV. They would have nothing to say as most of what they have to report and of course, comment on is the horrible state of the world or the failure of the latest politician. Newspapers too would be in a quandary. Take it off the world and bring it down to your family (oh no, getting personal aren't I). My husband and I had an intense negotiation last night, as married people sometimes do. I confess (but don't tell anyone) I have a tendency to focus on the negative, but what if my vocabulary was only limited to the positive. Wouldn't our "negotiation" have been much smoother. I know I am getting a little bit crazy. I am proposing an entire paradigm shift in thinking. Never going to happen you say. Ha! IF this statement were true, you couldn't say to me "never going to happen" because that's not nice.

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. Wise words to live by, starting with me.

Glad to be Married

Can I just say, I am glad to be married. And this is not one of those thing I say because my husband is sooooo wonderful (although he is). I am saying this because I am glad not to be dating. I have a friend, not single by choice, rather single by lack of choice. And she was set up with friend of a friend's boyfriend. (I used "friend" entirely too much in the last two sentences). Now, she got the call back (great!), they made tentative plans and he was supposed to call back "beginning of next week" to solidify. What does that mean? "Beginning of next week." Is that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday? Surely it would not mean after Tuesday, because after all Wednesday is hump day, it is the middle of the week. I have to tell you, I have no idea what these dating phrases mean.

Here's another example. Another friend is doing the single thing from lack of choice. A co-worker wants to set her up. She asked my opinion. I have no clue at all. I have been married for the last 10 years. So here I am left shrugging my shoulders unable to give any opinion at all. I sympathize with all my single friends and must say I'm glad not to be in your situation.

Marriage is one of those amazing things. It is dynamic and alive and takes you by surprise all the time. If a marriage is good it can be such a self-esteem booster. Here is this man that knows (I mean KNOWS) all of my faults. He has seen me at my worst (and my best). And yet, everyday, he chooses me. I don't have to worry about "beginning of the week" or any other obscure dating phrase. I know his nuances. I know that when he says "beginning of the week" he means Monday, maybe by afternoon on Tuesday.

I am glad to be married.

Friends

I did not keep touch with many friends from High School. As a matter of fact there is only one friend from High School that I now still consider a friend. Before you think that this is all sad, it's not. We just went our separate ways, simple as that. But this one friend, we always managed to stay in touch. We grew up together, I have no memory earlier than knowing her.

We were reminisencing the other day about some of these childhood memories. Every year we seemed to be bunk mates at Church Camp. Me on top and AB on the bottom bunk. When we would wake up, I thought I was so clever to hang my head down and holler "Speak to me, Amy. Speak to me!!" It is good to just sit back and remember every so often.

Re-Ed

Because of where I work I belong to the American Re-Education Association. Re-Ed is this philosophy of practice more than a prescribed method of practice. It is based on 12 principles that seem basic and very common sense until you consider that these kids don't have these principles in daily life.
"1. Life is to be lived now, not in the past, and lived in the future only as a present challenge.
2. Trust between a child and adults is essential, the foundation on which all other principles rest, the gule that holds teaching and learning together, the beginning point for Re-Education.
3. Competence makes a difference; children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something and especially at schoolwork.
4. Time is an ally, working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust.
5. Self-control can be taught and children and adolescents help to manage their behavior without the development of psychodynamic insight; and symptoms can an should be controlled by direct address, not necessarily by an uncovering therapy.
6. The cognitive competence of children and adolescents can be considerably enhanced; they can be taught generic skills in the management of their lives as well as strategies for coping with the complex array of demands placed upon them by family, school, community, or job; in other words, intelligence can be taught.
7. Feelings should be nurtured, shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed, and expolored with trusted others.
8. The constant challenge in a Re-Ed program is to help groups build cultures that sustain children and adolescents in their efforts to manage their lives in ways satisfying to themselves and satisfactory to others.
9. Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and confidence to trouble children and adolescnets, whose lives are often in considerable disarray.
10. The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.
11. Communities are important for children and youth, but the uses and benefits of cummunity must be experienced to be learned.
12. In growing up, a child should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for the morrow."

(I did not wish this would take so much time to type when I started)

So, I just returned from their conference. 4 days of being around adults, who like myself, are stuck in school. I had some good experiences at this conference and some not so good. The workshops I attended, Top-notch. I got some great ideas for working with the kids I work with. My personal favorite is "Let's Play". We did all these group building activities. I am not sure yet how to apply them to individual therapy, but have no fear, I am very creative. First was a simple variation on the name game, you catch the ball, thank the person by name who threw it to you, say your name then toss the ball. Then we figure who we threw the ball to and who threw it us and then we timed how quickly we went threw the sequence. Then We took suggestions on how the speed it up and impliment it. There were 50 or so of us and our first run was 2 minutes. Our last run through (6 times later) was 5.8 sec. So, there was a sense of accomplishment, communication, problem solving. Good stuff.

The not so good experience, you may ask? I will start off by saying I am not a drinker. I may have an occasional adult beverage, Margaritas are a weakness of mine, but one has always been my limit. With that being said, each evening was a opportunity to cut lose and many people took the opportunity. I had a strange man banging on my door in the middle of the night, and kept trying his key in the door. With the safety bar firmly in place, I asked if I could help him. Apparently, he thought that it was his room. So, he then began trying all the doors along the hallway. I did not realize that there were so many people in my profession that felt the need to cut loose. Makes me wonder... Were they awake for the 8:00 am session the next morning or is this the reason that those sessions were sparse????

Blood Donation

I gave blood today. If you are squemish, I have a horror story so don't read this post. This is not about today, but rather the last time I gave blood. This would have been about 5 years ago and was not with the Red Cross (just to clarify). I was a seasoned donor by this time and had no worries. I went through the question process, no problem. I got the prick in the finger, not a big deal. Then I get out into the heart of the big bus to give blood. The lady chooses my right arm to use, seemed okay to me. And then instead of sticking the needle in horizontal to my vein, she sticks the needle in sideways. I don't know her reasoning behind this, she may have had a good one, but the problem came when the needle kept slipping out of the vein. It was still in my arm, just not in the vein. She would notice the bag was not filling with blood as it should and she would twist the needle back and forth until she found the vein again. I am not the fainting type, but this put me to the test. All in all she did this about 5 times before the blood finally clotted in the needle and she had to give up. My arm was purple from 1/2 way up my forearm to 1/2 way up my bicep.

So, because of this ordeal, it took me awhile to work up the nerve to return to the blood donation world. But they were having a blood drive a work. Seemed like a perfect opportunity. I couldn't let them down. I volunteered. After all I was going to be in Nashville for Defensive Driving (work related, not personal) anyway that day, so why not. Needless to say, I was a little bit nervous. And I will start by saying it finished well, without much pain, and they got a full pint off of me. With that being said, I think the person working on me was new. She was good, but unsure. The site doesn't even have a bruise. But she just didn't have her routine down just yet. Little things that I noticed because I have given blood a few times before. She lost the tape that she had put out to hold the needle in place. She picked the bag off the hanger before getting the sample vials for testing. She didn't take the squeezey thing out of my hand until I handed it to her when leaving. She left the tape on my arm and tried to pull out the needle. After getting the needle clear, she left uncovered. And worst of all, in my opinion, she did not instruct me to the cokes and cookies. As I said before, non are serious infractions in the blood donation world, just things that I noticed.

High Faluting Language

I had a conversation with a friend and she commented on the difference in my choice of words between what I say and what I write. Apparently I like to use a few 5 dollar words when I post and I keep it simple when I talk.

I have a few theories about that:
1. I must have some sort of speech impediment. I don't stutter, but I do have a tendency to stumble over my words when speaking. I have a tendency to self correct in my head and only say out loud words that I know I can speak with eloquence.

2. I blame therapy training. I went through 4 years of college and 3 years of graduate school. During this time I wrote gobs and gobs of papers on majorly impressive stuff. I went through diagnosing classes to learn the multiaxial assessment of the DSM. In Research Design I learned about significance and generalizing, correlation, blah, blah, blah. Then in group dynamics, well you get the idea. I learned a new language of jargon. And learning this language was tough, but I worked hard and I learned it. Then it came time for my first session with people. It was in my practicum. I was nervous. Not only was it my first session with a group of people, but we were being video taped so that my supervisor could watch it later and critique the session. It went well. I thought that I was on top of things. Then my practicum group brings their video tapes to supervision and I put mine in and push play. The first critique was, "I'm not sure your clients are going to understand these words, you must adapt yourself to them, not ask them to learn your language." Something like that. I had spent 7 years learning a language that I wasn't supposed to use. So I went through my practicum time learning to translate. I knew the book term, but to communicate, I have to simplify.

3. I like to pass myself off in my blog as smarter than I really am. No explaination necessary I think.