Few Tuesday morning notes
Good morning … it is me. We’re trying to be up … we just remembered that we had to send in a final paper, I’m not sure if it will be ok this morning instead of yesterday. Dr. Kostere went the extra mile for us and said to hand in anything basically and she would give us credit and not an F. This was the social psychology class I had written a partial final paper for and I had got 100% on all my courseware for 10 weeks. She said that we were a good student, but I didn’t feel like it. I know she’s trying to help me if I were to ever go back. I don’t think it will happen, but I appreciate her giving me this much good faith. So we’ll do a little God Bless first thing this morning.Sweetie is still in bed and we’re giving ourselves an additional 10 minutes before we need to jump in the shower. Plus, we get to sip on our coffee for this same time. WOOHOOO. We try to be much better in and out of the shower because we know there are two of us that need to get through it, but sometimes we are pushing the edge. I miss my morning time of waking up early to write. Last night we got to bed about 9:30 pm. We took our medicine late so that didn’t help. We need to be more on top of it than that.
Yesterday we had a pretty good day at work considering it was our first Monday back for quite a while. Neither sister or us made a big deal about it so that helped.
She was short-handed … so any little bit helped. I covered the front end for a few minutes … it wasn’t real hard and pushed me to be moving forward. I brought with me my scheduling journal and a stack of papers that were either in the book already or not. I hadn’t used the scheduler for about a month since CARF was here so it was a good thing for me to catch-up.
There are just into 4 pages worth of notes. Most notes take 2-3 lines, and then we skip a line between each … I guess there would be then about 15 entries a page … and less if we were going to write out much directions for the entry. The big deal thing is that we put colored dots across from the entry as we note its sense of urgency. Red dot for hot, orange for 1-3 days, yellow for 1-5 days, blue for 2 weeks, and green for a month or more. Then when we complete the item, we post a black dot on the line.
Whoops, shower … hold on.
Good good … one of us is up showered and dressed. We woke Sweetie Pie up 5 minutes ago and he’s standing up motorally, but I can’t vouch for how up he is. Caught between a rock and a hard place. He was up past 11, but needs to be downtown for an 8:30 am meeting. Ahhh that’s our boy … the shower is running!
Ok, just to finish up here before he gets out … we were using our journal system again … and by the time all the dots were down we were feeling better, because we could appreciate that although about 10 things had a hot red dot, the others did not. So then the items that had a hot dot, we wrote them out on a 3x5 card. I know this sound extra and probably is, but for now it’s the system we are most comfortable with. We scheduled the cards then throughout the day, which gave us the time we needed to think through … this is a 10 minute item, this is a half hour, etc. We did the important parts on time … but we fell through on our single hardest task for the moment which is writing the annual report. That got off the mark, because our friend came in and gave us an important project to him that he wanted me to take over as part of our working for him. We will be doing his case reviews. So … that took a little time. But, then we were feeling guilty so got back on schedule. We stayed 2 ½ hours overtime, so we’re pretty sure that made up for the missing time and gave us the quiet time we needed to work.
Besides that one critical task, we completed, or at least progressed all of the other red dots that were also very important to progress. That gave us a very good sense of accomplishment. Sister had typed out over the weekend a page of tasks to do or consider and we had worked that into our system, but some of them were unsettling to us. We are really against giving away just half of the case load … we want to give it all away. And, now I’m thinking that she might have told Holly the same … so there will be no other way around it. The woman will be maxed. We’ll find out today whether or not we got her or Sr. is going to need interviewing again.
The thing about it was … that Sr. told her I could give the new person my harder cases, especially the ones that took extra work and calls to the family. So I took a 3x5 card to my file drawer and numbered it 1-10, then I put a column for both me and the new Q and I went from start alphabetically to the end of my case load and I figured who was easier and who were harder. By the end … I was actually very pleased with the result. I really do have harder and easier clients. Wow! Now it seems like at least this much help would be a help. We think we will still be working together an entire case load for 6 months, but maybe she will take over her clients sooner. We’ll have to see … Sister will push her. She also wants the new Q. to be getting to know the clients and staff as fast as possible, so I think our plan to have her working with the Personal Preference Interviews, ICAPS, Observations, and Goals will be very good. I would hope the Q she hires will be full time, so I’m thinking it will be like the last Q where she does a days work with Holly and 4 days with us. That’s enough time.
Yeeks. Have to be getting along now … about 6:30 am, our Sweetie just stepped out of the shower and we’ve got breakfast and medicine and lunch to do. Be taking care!
posted by Ann Marie @ 6/26/2007 06:34:00 AM
Comments: 1
