In an attempt to blog more...

In efforts to attempt to blog a little more often, I'm going to try to make this "Wordless Wednesday" thing happen each week....no promises though! Because I have a career in which it is important to lead a more private life, I've had to keep this blog unsearchable, which limits readers mostly to friends who know about it.

Since I can't expand it in any large sort of way, it has made it difficult to keep up with regular posting. Especially since I'm a very open person in general and like to share what is going on with me. Thank you Marni for the Wordless Wednesday idea and continual encouragement with my blog :)

Rough Patch II

Quite a bit has changed since losing my job in October. Not long after it all happened, I sunk into a bit of a depression, and had a difficult time coming to terms with all of it. I stopped doing a lot of things I enjoyed doing (keeping up with friends, crafting,shopping etc.) and mostly just wallowed at home most of my days. My husband, seeing I was in a funk, bought me the new Sims 3 game, and for a couple weeks, I spent SEVERAL hours a day sitting at home living someone else's life.

I knew I was depressed, I knew laying around at home wasn't fixing anything, but part of me knew it was what I needed to do. I needed to sit and wallow in it a while and just be sad about the whole situation.

A couple weeks after I was let go, my former boss FINALLY answered my calls and agreed to meet up with me to sign off paperwork that is necessary to validate all the hours I accumulated while working with her. During our meeting, I pretty much gathered that she had thrown me under the bus to cover her own butt, which is why the county decided to let me go. Of course, she didn't say that, but it was pretty obvious.

Fortunately, while I was wallowing at home, I'd been taking some time here and there to look for jobs and shoot out some emails/resumes. Within 3 weeks of being let go, I had landed myself another internship. One week after that, I started my first day.

This place is just amazing. I really cannot stress this enough. My new supervisor is a REAL supervisor who actually takes time out of her day to provide real supervision and guidance instead of expecting me to do things for her and then lying about providing supervision to me. Group supervision is small (2-4 people on any given week) but it is REAL supervision with other really great interns.

As for my site, I'm contracted out to serve as school counselor for an alternative high school. This means I'm working with kids who have been kicked out of traditional high school for various reasons. Many of these kids are on probation, and have drug/alcohol/trauma/abuse histories. I'm the only counselor on site for a school of 115 kids, so I definitely have plenty of people to work with.

What I love the most is the trust and flexibility of my job. My requirement is to be there when the kids are in school M-F and do the work I think is needed. There are no requirements to see a certain number of kids, work with them in a specific kind of way, take a specific style of notes, run specific kinds of groups,or keep files in a specific kind of way. My company trusts me and my education, and trusts the work that I do, and my reasonings behind it. They back me 100%, which is something I've never ever had before. I'm able to keep files in a way that makes most sense to me, use treatment strategies that make the most sense for the situation, and see kids on whatever schedule feels most comfortable. They back me 100%.

The only downside is that I'm making roughly 1/3 the hourly wages I was making before. However, this is quickly trumped by the fact that I'm working for an amazing company and with great supervision and amazing kids. The stress of making less money is SO MUCH LESS than the stress from the joke of an internship I had before.

All in all, I'm in a much better place now. I'm really looking forward to our honeymoon coming up in a couple weeks, and am so glad I can go enjoy myself without the job stresses I had before.

Belated Halloween Blog

So, I've been meaning to share some super fun Halloween treat ideas I tried out this year. After losing my job, starting a new one, and trying to get settled into some sense of normal, I've finally got some free time on my hands to post this :)

So the first was an idea I saw used here. (To see a really nice how to on her blog, check out the link)This one didn't cook up to show all the layers all that well but in any case, the black and orange swirly made for some fun cupcakes.

I originally went with black frosting and quickly realized that this would dye the mouths of everyone who ate them....which isn't exactly what I was going for. I then decided orange was probably a safer option.

I did the icing by scooping it all into a sandwich bag and snipping one of the corners. After doing it I realized the icing looked a bit like a giant swirly turd. Lesson learned: make a smaller cut in the bag next time.

The next recipe I tried were string cheese witch fingers.



This one is super easy, and I think came out super cute. Start by taking your string cheese and cutting it in half to make two fingers. Use a pairing knife to hollow out a spot towards the top where you will later place the nail, so that it will lay fairly flat. Then take your pairing knife and make teeny notches to look like the knuckles. (This looks a lot harder than it actually is.)

You can then slice up a green bell pepper to make little fingernail pieces. You will want to cut the "meat" of the pepper fingernail so it is about 1/2 as thick so that it will lay a little flatter on the cheese.

Adhere with a little dab of cream cheese and voila!

On a side note, I'd recommend making sure your hands are very clean (which you should be doing anyway) and maybe even wearing gloves, as string cheese picks up little particles quite easily. I made the mistake of quickly wiping some of the cream cheese off of my fingers onto a black kitchen towels, and then noticed some of the little black fibers stuck to the next finger I worked on....oops!

The final treat I tried was an idea my mom gave to me based off something she had seen someone bring to an office Halloween party. To create these spider eggs, just prepare your favorite deviled egg recipe, and then use black olives to create spiders for each egg. I used about 1/2 an olive for each body, and then sliced up the olives to make little legs.

This one is super easy, but quite time consuming. In any case, I'm glad I did it. It was my first time ever making deviled eggs and I think they came out really cute!

I ended up dressing as Sally from the Nightmare Before Christmas and the husband was a mad scientist(literally and angry scientist). Unfortunately we managed to make it through the entire party without taking any pictures of ourselves. Bummer!

In any case, I'm looking forward to finding some new fun Halloween recipes to try out in the future!

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.