In Honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Rough Patch

Last week was, by far, one of the most frustrating weeks of my life, and I'm finally ready to talk more openly about what is going on with me right now.

As many of you know, I recently graduated with my M.S. in clinical psychology. I am working towards becoming a marriage and family therapist which unfortunately means that a masters degree alone does not grant me the ability to start my professional career. The BBS requires me to gather 3000 supervised hours over the course of 2 years (post-grad) before I am eligible to sit for the licensing exam.

While I was finishing my degree, I was working as a marriage and family therapist trainee at a local county facility. This was allowing me to gather some pre-degree hours that I was able to apply to the overall 3k total. After my trainee-ship was up, I was asked to stay, even though it meant I would be working for free. I was told that if I stayed, when a paid position came up, it would be mine. The benefit for me was that I could continue to collect supervised hours towards my license, and the benefit for them was free labor.

I worked for free from the end of May until the end of September, and as promised, a paid position was given to me. The best part was that not only was it a paid position, but it was paid very well. At this point, I'd been working for the site for over a year, and felt pretty comfortable in my ability to do the job. Things were really looking up for me professionally, and finally having a well-paying job meant that Brian and I could consider looking for our first home. I was really excited to open that chapter of our lives.

Three weeks later I was fired without notice. When asked why, I was told that they could not discuss it, and that was that. I was left confused, embarrassed, angry, sad, and without a job. That was almost a week ago, and I still don't know why it happened. I've attempted to get more information, but still have nothing.

On Friday, I had to file for unemployment for the first time in my life which was....well, a more than humbling experience. I never thought that it was something I would have to do, as I thought that working all those years to obtain a masters degree would help keep something like this from happening.

Financially, Brian and I are fine, and we will continue to be fine. I know this. We are incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to have our 1 bedroom apartment rent-free in exchange for managing the complex. Mostly it is just frustrating, as our dreams of moving away from this situation finally became a reality, and then disappeared in the blink of an eye.

I've spent the past few days feeling defeated, a bit depressed, and questioning my ability as a therapist. I have never in my life been fired from a job. In fact, I have never even received a negative review from a job. I take pride in my work ethic, and if I was doing something wrong, I would have liked to have been given the opportunity to correct it. Unfortunately, the situation has left me not knowing whether it was something I did or not, and without the opportunity for professional growth.

I will continue on, I will move forward, and things will work out for the better. This is another thing I know. I will spend my free time looking for another internship that will allow me to get my remaining hours, and eventually, I will find one. However, it doesn't change the fact that I'm still confused and upset about the entire situation.

Booming Business

Okay, well I don't know if I can quite say "booming" just yet, but it certainly has exceeded all of my expectations thus far!

Once the craziness of my wedding died down, I decided to take one of the ideas that my lovely cousin Holly gave me after reading a blog about tissue packs, put some of my own spins on them, and offer to make them for other brides to be. I really enjoy little crafty projects, and thought I'd give it a shot. Etsy only charges .20 cents per listing, so I figured that even if it never took off, I wouldn't really have lost anything.

Little did I know that it would take off! I've had 5 orders to date, and have about 3 more pending currently. It doesn't sound like much but I haven't been doing it for long either. Here are some photos of a few of the orders I've done:

There has definitely been a learning curve when it comes to the perfect type of paper, number of tissues, paper size, seals, and placement of adhesive. I feel like I've really learned a lot though, and have created the perfect "tissue packet formula" hehe.

I'm actually hoping orders stay where they are for now, because I wouldn't want to get so many that it just wasn't fun anymore. I have a feeling orders will slow down now that wedding season is coming to a close. Guess we'll just have to wait and see!

A Twist of Life

I've never been one to believe in fate, destiny, karma (not in the traditional sense anyway), or any other inevitable phenomena of that nature. However, I had an interesting thing happen today that I felt like reflecting upon.

I had the absolute WORST day at work today. Probably the worst day I've ever had at any job in my entire life. Now, due to the nature of my profession and the professional confidentiality that goes along with it, I really can't get into detail about why my day was so terrible. And that's that. All I can really say is that I work with severely mentally ill individuals, and it seemed like a few of them were particularly ill today. So ill that I spent the ENTIRE day running to urgent care, writing a zillion emails, writing up behavior contracts, consulting with other staff members, and making phone calls since my boss/supervisor was out sick today. All while worrying about the physical and mental health/safety of these particular clients.

To top it all off I wore new heels to work today that were NOT conducive to all the running around, and left me practically limping by lunchtime...which I didn't get until nearly 2pm.

By the time 5pm finally came around, all I wanted was to get the hell out of Dodge, get out of those stupid shoes, and go home to my nice warm bed. In keeping with the general theme of the day, I had a client that is not mine stop me and want to chat me up about his most recent crisis as I was trying desperately to get out of the building. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to just get to my car.

I finally got home around 5:30, kicked off my shoes, changed into more comfortable pants, and flopped down on my bed. I laid there, in a fog, for about 5 minutes before a tenant came and knocked at my door. All I could think of was the fact that I had ZERO energy to get up and help yet another person with their problems today. I'm only one person.

I got up anyway seeing as apartment manager is my job, and opened the door. I was right that it was a tenant knocking, however, I was wrong about the reason. There she was, standing at the door with the biggest piece of chocolate cake I have ever seen. She told me that her granddaughters had a birthday party the day before, and they had so much left over cake that she didn't know what to do with it. I thanked her for bringing it and made a joke about how it made my day.

The thing is I wasn't joking at all. I brought the chocolate cake back into the room, flopped back down on the bed, and proceeded to take a bite. I'm not usually a big cake fan but I swear to you it was EXACTLY what I needed. As I type this, I'm still on the bed, my husband next to me, and we've eaten about 3/4 of the slice of cake together.

I've been giving, giving, giving all day, and all it took was this little gift of chocolate cake to start turning my day around.

Funny how life works sometimes.

Wedding Photo Slideshow

http://tenleyclark.myshowit.com/bkwedding

Best Friends

I am now a married woman, and looking back, I feel incredibly lucky to have had such wonderful ladies who supported me through the wedding process. I don't know what I would have done without them. Michelle and I decided 16 years ago that we would each serve as maid of honor for one another on our wedding days. Here is a photo of us on her wedding day in March of 2008:

And on mine in August of 2010

Who would have thought that so many years later, the promises made by a couple of boy-crazy prepubescent 11 year old girls would be kept? I have found one of the best friends a girl could ever ask for in her, and look forward to many many more years of friendship.

I'm waiting on the professional photos, but you can bet I'll post some once they arrive!

Custom Candy Wrappers

I've been going back and forth a lot on what I want to do for bridal shower favors. I'm not a knick knacky kind of person, and didn't want to present my guests with knick knacks they likely would never use. After much debate, I decided on chocolate. First of all, it's all women, and let's face it, ladies love chocolate. Second, they can eat it and be done with it. No clutter when they get home.

I saw these online, and it got the wheels turning. Unfortunately, to get the number of wrappers I was going to need, it was going to cost at least $70, and that isn't even factoring in the cost of the chocolate. I quickly decided that I needed to find a better alternative, and turned to my trusty Microsoft publisher program to do the trick.

I originally wanted to design a big Hershey bar wrapper, as I thought it would be nice to give everyone a big candy bar as they left. Unfortunately, what I learned is that they no longer make the standard sized Hershey bars with the foil and paper wrappers, and now wrap them all in plastic. As a matter of fact, ALL affordable standard sized chocolate bars available in stores are wrapped in plastic. (Where is the fund raising kid selling chocolate bars when you need him?!?) The only way to get the foil wrapped candy is to buy the GIANT sized Hershey bars, or the minis. The giant ones were too expensive, so I decided that minis were going to have to suffice.

After a bit of fiddling, I came up with a good template for the mini chocolates that I was able to customize into a few different designs. Unfortunately, I only have a black and white laser printer, so I had to stick to monochromatic designs. These are a few photos of my home made attempt to make my own candy wrappers.



I'm really happy with how they came out. I ordered some cute aqua organza pouches off eBay that I'm going to use to package the favors...one of each design per favor. All in all, enough favors for 30-40 guests only ended up costing me about $25. Not too shabby.

I've even considered designing some templates to sell in PDF "print yourself" format through an avenue like Etsy. Since people would be printing themselves, I wouldn't have to stick to the black and white designs. I don't know...just a thought :-)