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Work
Rarely do i blog about work. Pretty much everything i’ve done has had confidentiality implications. Currently i supervise a small program doing integrated mental health and substance abuse treatment. For the last 4 months or so part of my job is to do a 2 hour group on Co-Occurring Disorders at our inpatient substance abuse treatment center. It makes for a unique set of challenges. A fair percentage doesn’t have any interest in issues around mental illness, in fact a fair percentage doesn’t have much interest in doing anything they are just mandated to be there. But some are. The figures say 60% of folks with a substance abuse disorder have a co-occurring mental illness. Sometimes that seems true in group, a lot of time its higher. The group was dumped on to my already too full work load so i have no time to prep. Twice i’ve organized lessons and tried to present a coherent presentation and each time i bored people shitless. So what i routinely do now is sort of a question and answer format. It makes it intellectually interesting to me because its sort of a stump the expert kind of thing. I like putting myself out there and 99% of the questions i have some type of valid answer for. The problem for the format is its hard to generate member to member interactions. Everything is flowing through me and often only a handful of folks are interested in any given question. Early on there was a lot of talk about how boring my group was. It seemed to take on a life of its own. My response was to take it head on. Put it out there. Mention that we will be discussing a lot of complex ideas and some times it can get dry and boring being 2 hours and right after lunch. Mostly i just try to be high energy. Two weeks ago i noticed if i was standing up it was more interesting so i just stood through the whole group. Mostly i just try to reach the ones that are interested and leave the rest to their own devices. In my first group i cracked on someone for sleeping in group. It turned out to be the guy with narcolepsy. It hadn’t been 15 minutes since i had talked about being understanding of people with disability. That has been my excuse to let ’em sleep. The treatment center operates under the philosophy of therapeutic community. There are a lot of rules that are bizarre to me like no hats and no swearing. I don’t like to enforce stuff i don’t much agree with so i’ve gotten around it by mentioning that i have a lot of complex information i am wrestling with and i expect the group to enforce its own discipline. Someday i am going to get cracked on for letting people swear and sleep and what have you. I am supposed to “pull them up”. i haven’t yet pulled anyone up. i guess theres some evidence behind this methodology but i am not buying into it yet. Lately i’ve been on a roll. A lot of crazy people in treatment, hungry for straight answers and validation. Its funny when i get one whose all defensive and talks about getting diagnosed but he feels its just the drugs and he’s going to go to AA and fuck the psychiatrist he’s not taking any meds and i say “right on brother”. You can do that.
deer ate my broccoli
It has been great to get out and work in the yard. After endless rain, being sick, and working late it has been awhile since i got out and got my hands dirty. I started the day at the market getting yellow carrots, some of the last field tomatoes, and some odds and ends. Ran into Sarah and shopped with her there and at gerbees. Made plans to collect wreath stuff in the national forest tomorrow.
After the market i surveyed the demesne and found all of the broccoli neatly cropped off. It was looking like it was gonna make a crop too, sadness. That made a total loss for the fall seedling project. $3.75 for a snack for deer, although at that point i was suspecting Thumper and not Bambi.
My most pressing project was to get rid of the leaf pile by the compost bin before it killed the grass. It was going on like three weeks since they got piled up there after the bins got filled up. First i needed a place to put them so i pulled out the tomatoes out of the strawberry beds. I found three nice tomatoes with only some soft spots and Harry put them in the three bean salad for a side with our local farm trout.
The strawberries really came out good and i weeded the now expanded beds. Dad and i debated strawberry policy and I am ready to cede up as much square footage as they want. i’ll just move the path around them out to the lilacs at least. I did reposition those that got pulled out in the cleaning of the beds.
I then just raked the pile down the hill and covered them up in a 4″ pile. In the spring i’ll rake them off and compost them when i’ll need brown stuff. I debated knocking off for the day but had some energy left so i transplanted the daffodils growing in the southeast corner that i use as grill supply storage. I spread the clump out over a space about four times as big using up the last of my homemade compost. I’m a ways away from the next batch. Hopefully march.
I then raked the leaves on the top of the hill in the front yard onto the spring bulb beds. While checking out the tulip/crocus bed on the eastern side i saw two holes. I first thought it was squirrels harvesting out more tulips (they ate half of them last fall when i planted them) as i had seen sign they were pulling out tulips in the back yard. The holes weren’t ragged though and i saw an obvious hoof print. I think it was one going over the fence from the depth which made me think that’s who got the brocolli.
Gonna have to get Oni out earlier in the morning. She was chasing a squirrel while i was raking, a bulky one missing most of his tail. There was a littler one out front with me hanging out in the bushes. I told the furry tailed rat to stay out of my bulbs and made sure i got the leaves on.
Trouts on. i’ll let you know how the maters were.
floating the big muddy
I got the canoe out on the missouri yesterday for a little taste of fall. I floated with Sarah from Catfish Katie’s down to Coopers Landing. Its only 4.7 river miles so it makes a pretty good fall afternoon float. Get a little taste of the big river but its not an all day commitment. It was beautiful, much changed since i floated the same piece with eric a month ago. Then the fall color was just getting started, a yellow tinge to most things some stuff going all the way. now it was all on the ground. two fall floats and missed the color, hard to do that if you tried. i guess it gives me something to look forward to.
The hills and bottoms were still pretty amazing. Once you lose the leaf cover you can actually see more of the shape of the land. The wind was kicking up pretty good which gave us close to an extra hour on the river. At one point we passed some kind of bottle. An hour later with steady paddling I noticed the bottle had passed us by, so we weren’t setting any speed records. We fished it out of the river and it turned out to be a gas cylinder. I am not sure what to do with it now. It seems better in my garage than floating down the missouri.
There was music and a fire at Coopers when we arrived. Dad dropped us and picked us up and he had a good time so i should have river drop off and pick up into perpetuity. There’s a lot of river and i hope to see more of it. Hoping to get out this winter when theres ice.
all saints day
Samhain has passed and its a pagan new year, a new pagan year. something like that for sure. i definitely felt a thinning between the years waking from a dream of my mother on halloween morn’. I dreamed she’d been in the bath and the water was running, had overrun the sides of the tub. She hid herself when i arrived but i could see where she’d started to towel up the water. and that was that. i found her presence, or at least the feeling of her shortly gone, comforting. something of some meaning to ruminate on to get back to the true spirit of the season, pardon the pun. i carved a pumkin, the last of the 3 volunteers that came up in my strawberry bed out of the compost of presumably last years jack o’ lantern. i made a square eyed square mouthed fellah with bolts on the side with a definite frankenstein look. my best pumpkin in a decade i think is safe to say. got 10 trick or treaters, up from 7. Only one without a costume, a little guy who said he was a christian when the popster asked what he was supposed to be. played some D & D, ate the bulk of the candy after Harry’s Halloweeny beanie weanie for dinner. Finished off the evening with an HP Lovecraft movie. Party Bonus for the end of daylights saving time. Today i give my nod to all the saints, the lives they led, and they’re continued comforting presence.
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