Life
The more time I spend on Facebook, the less time I spend writing LiveJournal entries. And so here it is, three weeks after I last posted on here, and I'm finally finding time for an entry. I guess I've just been feeling like I have so many things I want to do that I don't have enough time for all of them. Now that I have two tortoises who have to be kept in separate enclosures, I have twice the work to do for them. I enjoy it a lot, and every day I see Adagio looking a little happier and a little healthier, but it takes time that I otherwise might spend on LJ. Yesterday I took him back to the vet, and they were finally able to get him to open his mouth so that they could finish trimming down his beak and give him his deworming medication. Today I noticed that with his beak at the right length, he can get a piece of salad into his mouth on the first try, generally, rather than on the third or fourth try. Life is getting better for my little guy. I took him and Andante outside last weekend, and when he saw her eating phlox flowers, he decided to try some too. He ate a couple, and then she tried to steal one right out of his mouth. I'm going to have to teach them to play nicely together, but overall I think that they will do well together.
I've also been increasing my running mileage lately, hoping that I will be ready for the half marathon in La Crosse at the end of September. This means that most days I run about six miles. I can only run that many miles at once, though, if I run them slowly, which means that it takes over an hour to do my daily runs now. That's another thing that has been taking up a lot of my time. It feels good, though, and I am feeling at least a little bit optimistic about the half marathon.
And I've been going to ski instructor trainings, too. The ski school director decided that a crucial component of instructor training that has been missing is teaching us how to teach. We have a lot of training on movement analysis, working on our own skiing, and learning drills that we can use for specific skiing skills, but we haven't had much in terms of lesson-planning and evaluating our students' abilities and needs. So this summer the ski school director offered three sessions of training on this for any instructors who wanted to participate. This training overlaps a lot with the work I do at my regular job, which involves a lot of psychoeducation, but I thought it could be helpful to think about these things from another perspective. Mostly I was just excited about the opportunity to go out to the ski hill and hang out with my ski instructor friends. Either way, though, I ended up going, and the end result is that I feel a lot more confident in my ability to write lesson plans for my women's college groups this season. Lesson planning has not really been an issue in the other programs I have worked in because they tend to involve working with a particular student only once. Last winter I was an "apprentice" in the women's college, co-teaching with a more experienced instructor, but this year I will be on my own with a group. So this training was very well-timed from my point of view.
And the other big news in my life is that my work schedule will be changing again. Apparently every fall the owner of our agency renews our contract with the county, and she takes that opportunity to review staffing patterns. She asked for staff's input this year, and pretty unanimously we all said that working 12-hour shifts on the weekends is very hard on us and does not provide adequate support for our residents. So we're switching back to working four 10-hour shifts each week, with two people working each day of the weekend instead of just one. Unfortunately, that meant that one of us would have to work Wednesday-Saturday 1 p.m. until 11 p.m., which would pretty much destroy her social life. So I volunteered to work on Saturday mornings so she can work Sunday evenings instead of Saturday evenings, and a third person with less seniority than either of us can work Saturday evenings (but still have Friday evenings off). I thought if we were to spread out the crap that has to be in the schedule so that no one person has to have it all, we'd all be happier overall. My proposal was accepted, so I will now have Sundays off, which means that I can teach skiing lessons in both the Thursday and Sunday sessions of the women's college.
The other thing that this means is that I will go back to working 1-11 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays instead of working from noon to 9 p.m. And that means that I will now be facilitating our evening process group (which is about group members talking about things that are important to them and giving each other support, rather than me teaching them about mental illness and emotional skills) on all of those days instead of just Wednesdays. So far this group has not been run as a process group and has instead just been a quick group in which each group member recites what they did during the day to the staff facilitator while the others sit there bored while they wait for their turn. I think that it has been this way because it has mostly been facilitated by overnight staff who haven't had education about what a process group is or how to facilitate one and because not all of the staff (including the person who does the schedule) even realized that it's supposed to be a process group. But now that I'm going to be facilitating this group three nights each week, I have talked with my supervisor about it, and he agrees that we need to make it into the process group that it's supposed to be. So he made sure that one of the day staff will be there to facilitate the group each day, and the overnight staff will be co-facilitators so that they can learn how to facilitate a process group. I talked with the group this week about what the group is supposed to be and how we can make it into that, and I was very happy to get the feedback from them that they would like it to be a true process group and that they see themselves as having some responsibility for making it that way by talking on a deeper, more meaningful level about the goals they're working on. And even just having that discussion already brought up some of the interpersonal dynamics that a true process group will help them address. So for the first time in a long time, I left that group feeling energized and excited because I think that it will become a very helpful and interesting group. Of course, I don't think that it will be easy to get everyone thinking differently about it, and it's been a long time since I've facilitated a true process group. But I think it will be an interesting and rewarding challenge, and I'm glad I get to do it. I'm feeling more excited about my job now than I have in a long time.
So that, in a nutshell, is my life right now.
I've also been increasing my running mileage lately, hoping that I will be ready for the half marathon in La Crosse at the end of September. This means that most days I run about six miles. I can only run that many miles at once, though, if I run them slowly, which means that it takes over an hour to do my daily runs now. That's another thing that has been taking up a lot of my time. It feels good, though, and I am feeling at least a little bit optimistic about the half marathon.
And I've been going to ski instructor trainings, too. The ski school director decided that a crucial component of instructor training that has been missing is teaching us how to teach. We have a lot of training on movement analysis, working on our own skiing, and learning drills that we can use for specific skiing skills, but we haven't had much in terms of lesson-planning and evaluating our students' abilities and needs. So this summer the ski school director offered three sessions of training on this for any instructors who wanted to participate. This training overlaps a lot with the work I do at my regular job, which involves a lot of psychoeducation, but I thought it could be helpful to think about these things from another perspective. Mostly I was just excited about the opportunity to go out to the ski hill and hang out with my ski instructor friends. Either way, though, I ended up going, and the end result is that I feel a lot more confident in my ability to write lesson plans for my women's college groups this season. Lesson planning has not really been an issue in the other programs I have worked in because they tend to involve working with a particular student only once. Last winter I was an "apprentice" in the women's college, co-teaching with a more experienced instructor, but this year I will be on my own with a group. So this training was very well-timed from my point of view.
And the other big news in my life is that my work schedule will be changing again. Apparently every fall the owner of our agency renews our contract with the county, and she takes that opportunity to review staffing patterns. She asked for staff's input this year, and pretty unanimously we all said that working 12-hour shifts on the weekends is very hard on us and does not provide adequate support for our residents. So we're switching back to working four 10-hour shifts each week, with two people working each day of the weekend instead of just one. Unfortunately, that meant that one of us would have to work Wednesday-Saturday 1 p.m. until 11 p.m., which would pretty much destroy her social life. So I volunteered to work on Saturday mornings so she can work Sunday evenings instead of Saturday evenings, and a third person with less seniority than either of us can work Saturday evenings (but still have Friday evenings off). I thought if we were to spread out the crap that has to be in the schedule so that no one person has to have it all, we'd all be happier overall. My proposal was accepted, so I will now have Sundays off, which means that I can teach skiing lessons in both the Thursday and Sunday sessions of the women's college.
The other thing that this means is that I will go back to working 1-11 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays instead of working from noon to 9 p.m. And that means that I will now be facilitating our evening process group (which is about group members talking about things that are important to them and giving each other support, rather than me teaching them about mental illness and emotional skills) on all of those days instead of just Wednesdays. So far this group has not been run as a process group and has instead just been a quick group in which each group member recites what they did during the day to the staff facilitator while the others sit there bored while they wait for their turn. I think that it has been this way because it has mostly been facilitated by overnight staff who haven't had education about what a process group is or how to facilitate one and because not all of the staff (including the person who does the schedule) even realized that it's supposed to be a process group. But now that I'm going to be facilitating this group three nights each week, I have talked with my supervisor about it, and he agrees that we need to make it into the process group that it's supposed to be. So he made sure that one of the day staff will be there to facilitate the group each day, and the overnight staff will be co-facilitators so that they can learn how to facilitate a process group. I talked with the group this week about what the group is supposed to be and how we can make it into that, and I was very happy to get the feedback from them that they would like it to be a true process group and that they see themselves as having some responsibility for making it that way by talking on a deeper, more meaningful level about the goals they're working on. And even just having that discussion already brought up some of the interpersonal dynamics that a true process group will help them address. So for the first time in a long time, I left that group feeling energized and excited because I think that it will become a very helpful and interesting group. Of course, I don't think that it will be easy to get everyone thinking differently about it, and it's been a long time since I've facilitated a true process group. But I think it will be an interesting and rewarding challenge, and I'm glad I get to do it. I'm feeling more excited about my job now than I have in a long time.
So that, in a nutshell, is my life right now.