Ayn's Multiple World

It's Saturday - WooHOO!

Good morning … it’s me! And … well … it’s SATURDAY!!! WooHOO!

We’re so happy even if it’s a bit cold here. Oh-oh … we’ve just startled the cat a bit. We did a change-up in that we turned on music instead of CNN. Just a thought. We’re trying a fresh New Age person to us. You probably already know him –

It’s John Adorney. We heard the first song and liked it so we loaded 81 tracks of 6.7 hours of music. Pretty sure we won’t get through all of that, but it’s a change.

We got up about a half an hour ago and its now about 7 am. We took our medicine right away, made coffee, ate a couple of tortillas with peanut butter, and just checked out on-line. So, we haven’t gotten too far. Kitties were fed like about 2 am and now Chief is sitting between my arms. He’s been regulating me so that this IS his spot and shoot … better I not try to change that! Missy got in her turn last night. Twice without realizing I had been laying down and she somehow got up on my chest about the neck/chin level. Wow she’s a regular motor boat of warm fuzzies.

Just that most the time, I don’t realize she’s stepping on me to curl up … I become conscious after the fact. That’s a cat’s life … just control the master and you’ve got it made!

Sleepy bunny is still in his bed. I think we were both up later like 10:30-11 pm, but I think he was up later to us. We had to put down a pretty tired person last night she was so tired she couldn’t make the words come out right. Our poor little bunny… Rich had to remind someone they probably wanted their fudgsicle and then I think he had to go out and get it from the freezer. Pretty sure that chocolate freeze was eaten in a haze.

We had our Dr. Marvin appointment yesterday. He was at one of those doctor meetings where he helps to prepare the psychiatry students for their big test. Isn’t he just the coolest! Sometimes I forget the strong part of his suit still being that he’s the director of the intern program. I just can’t believe how lucky I am to have him in my life. He’s just a miracle person. Smart, organized, personable and handsome!

I think the hour was broken into two parts. The first part is the relaying of where we’ve been … usually the last day or two. Dr. Marvin encouraged us to go on after we’d said eh; we don’t want to talk about that. I guess that might be psychological phenomena that the things you don’t want to talk about are good for you. We talked mostly about the rift between the sisters and our feelings toward all that. I don’t think anything was talked about that you don’t already know. There was some break in the action in that Sr. Florine said that they’d worked things out a little yesterday morning. At least some of the pressure seemed to be relieved. We didn’t want to hear the details because she was back in my area and I wanted to be doing something else.

Sr. Theresa didn’t say anything all day about it so we figured she was ok and into her own space with it. That’s the way it should be … so we were glad to get things back on track.

I don’t remember quite Dr. Marvin’s feed on it. I know he was encouraging us to talk about the experience, but I don’t remember what he was saying exactly or for that matter what we said. Hmm, let me try once more to figure that out.

No … it’s not coming to us. Maybe you’d have to talk to the one that was so much more upset … I think the feeling was of being indignant mostly of Sr. Florine taking advantage of Sr. Theresa and the Center. I think she’s giving all of us a bad name.

Then we went over a few things with Rich and the boys … we told him about Thom maybe going to Japan instead of New Orleans and how we’d plan on saving the refund after paying down some bills so that we could go and visit him, or we could help him pay the air fare home. We’re going to hope for the best there. We’re going to need giving Rich the money FAST and then telling him under absolutely no circumstances is he to let me beg the money back unless it’s for Thom.

I don’t know why I feel so strongly about that, but I do. He couldn’t understand either the part of Alexis not wanting to go and live with Thom. But, then again … that’s not our concern … it has to be theirs - I just hope that they can work it out. I really like them as a couple and I like Alexis. AND, certainly I like Thom!

There might have been a few other housekeeping notes about our general life, but then we got to the point of thinking we should be talking about something more internally strong, or weak whichever way you want to look at it. He asked us what we’d like to go into and then I remember us saying something about giving us something hard and when pressed further we asked him to help us remember something about what had been going on with the parts.

It just took him a second and he was able to pull it back into his memory. He’s really good about that kind of thing. I don’t believe how good his memory is … and to think I’m just a minor part of his week. He’s just soooo cool!

He recalled something … shoot, now can I remember it? I think it had to do with the parts being overwhelmed. Hmm, I got something here. There was something about me coming up with an analogy of the green florescent slime river under the city in the Ghost Busters. Basically, there seems to be a well-spring of feelings and emotions left over from the past and then we have experiences in the present that trigger all those feelings into blending in with our current situation and then we find ourselves overwhelmed with emotions most of which are negative.

We talked about shutting down at his office and then shutting down with Rich over the weekend. We remembered that we’d gone from very positive feelings to very negative wanting to be dead one’s in the turn of the card. We felt surprised that those thoughts hadn’t come to us while we were summarizing what had happened earlier in our first half hour. I was grateful it did come up because obviously those kinds of thoughts are worrisome. There’s much more into it then that, but we need to figure out a couple of things here.

We remember at the end when asking for some kind of a summary that we could remember after we’d left his office and there were two main things … one had to do with this area of extra feelings and how we were working them out with Dr. Marvin and then the other had to do something with the key words – I think. At least that was something we went into as well. We’re going back to the meta-tags. I don’t remember why this was so important though. I think it’s tied into something else that we might be able to figure out in a bit or through at least the weekend writing. Now sweetie pie is up and I think are thoughts aren’t going to be as functional in this direction. He’s getting his coffee now. Just as a marker though – I think that some of this conversation had come up to do with the writing and editing. I remember on a casual note telling him we’d gotten the publishing agent book and that we were going into a long 4-day weekend where we would have some time maybe to be doing some reading.

Awe – fuzzy bunny just came in and sat down and covered his feet. That almost never happens. I think he’s a little chilled … he thought he might be coming down with a cold though he says it seems to be alright.

Ok, we’re moving along here. We talked for a few moments. He might be going to his Mom’s today. He turned on his fishy shows so we turned off the music. I really actually like hearing the fishy shows in the background and I think last night after a couple of West Wings, we listened with him to a few fishy shows. I think we even did one of his Star Trek Voyager shows … I thought it was pretty silly, but then we were just aiming to be with him and then again we were pretty dragged out tired. I couldn’t really get up the enthusiasm to go to the computer.

Hmm, back to yesterday … we think we’d told you we had a couple of meetings. I don’t think the regular work got done though. I’ll have to think to remember what was going on … Oh yeah I remember we were late in going in because of the writing.

I think we left here about 10 am or so. I remember not being there very long before we thought we should eat lunch.

When we got in we found that Rich was there. I think we may have talked to him for a bit. But, pretty much we went into the office so we could be preparing for the meetings coming up. I had felt comfortable enough with the CIRCLES group that I didn’t do much there, but we did go into the food prep room where the Leadership Group was and we told them we were here and would have both meetings. Hehehe we got a round of applause. I know they do look forward to that kind of stuff, but I don’t really know why. I don’t know what it is about the meetings that they like. Hehehe sometimes I think it’s just because they are the last two hours of the week prior to having the weekend off.

There were just 4 people in the group so I know I was going to have a light day.

The other preparation came with the Thinking Group. We went into it pretty systematically, in that we got out our chart and started narrowing down our options. We took one that had something to do with social and natural supports. I sometimes have a habit of working through something I’m interested in and what the group’s going to be doing.

What we came up with was the idea that comes with the publishing book. We figured out what we were going to do and then when the time came we went through it and it turned out pretty good, but they got tired during the last 10 minutes, so we broke it off and went into what people were going to be doing over the weekend.

Basically, we set it up so that they’d be thinking through what kind of book they would write if they had a chance. We also asked them things like who would be the main characters and what would the story involve, and then especially what kind of story.

We had thought of looking up types before we turned the page and all of a sudden the book was showing us exactly what we needed. We found ourselves writing out several fictional genres science fiction, horror, western, romance, etc. Then with the group we went over what each of these were there were 10 of them. It was a little more abstract than I may have liked so we tried to bring in examples of the stories like for action adventure we mentioned Raiders of the Lost Ark knowing that somehow they’d all know that one. We had pretty good interest … like I said a bit slow, but after a while we went into the next part.

Some of my main talkers had already left, but we asked people to volunteer ideas of what kind of story they would write about. They had to be coached through it. We went through about 6-7 story lines. One of the first was that someone suggested Walmart as a place and that there’d be the characters of a man and a woman and a pharmacist. And, so then we went through outloud different affects of the genres’.

We told them if it had been a romance that the man and woman would fall in love, or that if it were a criminal fiction that someone might come in and steal medicine, or if it had been an action adventure one of the characters would run in to save the others because the roof was about to fall in due to a terrorist attack.

You get the general idea. We did similar things with other ideas they had. It was a tough project for them because I was making a lot of switches mentally that was hard for them to keep up, but I had to be switching to hold their interest. I found that they didn’t really understand the whole thing and that they were tired. I don’t think it was a bad lesson just that I’d asked for a lot. In that respect I think it was a good meeting.

The CIRCLES meetings this week went very well. I’m not sure, I might have told you what we were doing in general. Basically, we were going through different means for them to be remembering the colors and circles and such. There were a variety of means we were using to get through the materials, but most of it was similar … just adjusted to fit the different needs of people involved and their speed in resolving the problems.

I think I started off with an outline of what we were going to be doing. The first one we did though was coming up with numbers for the different colors. For this we went back to the chart on the wall with the huge half circles – name of the program and we had them work with remembering colors to numbers, so that I could just say a number and they’d point to the proper color. Most of them got this, but maybe only at about 92% efficiency. Sooner or later, I’d catch them up because the better they did the faster and more complicated it got.

After this we went into the gestures. This group picked it up pretty fast. One of the groups – the only female became confused at the first one, but we all got through matching gestures to both colors and numbers. So we were doing things like saying red and they had to … hmm, I don’t know if I told you all the gestures.

Let’s run through that real quick.

Number 1 – purple – was for the self was a gesture where the individual hugged themselves. Number 2 – blue was for the parent or boyfriend/girlfriend and this gesture was holding your arms out in front of you as if hugging someone. Number 3 – green was the extended family hug, and this was represented by putting your hands on your hips. Number 4 – yellow was the one representing neighbors and associates an this was represented by making a hand shaking motion up and down. Number 5 – orange - was the one tied to children and this was the one where they gestured waving, and then the last one Number 6 – red – was the one where they put both hands in front of them like a stop block … like if telling someone whoa!

It’s a really good set of concepts and we had fun saying both numbers and colors and testing out how fast they could go in learning which gesture to match. We did this in both group and individual levels. It was a fun exercise for both them and us.

This wouldn’t have been possible the first year where we followed much closer the workbook’s clues, but the concepts still are tight to the program. Just now we’re putting more emphasis on learning the colors and codes first.

We might practice this again next week, but then add the different relationships more. We did this a little bit in the last exercise … we’d brought in the different building samples and asked them to write the color word next to the picture. We slowly walked them through to choosing the colors. A few of them were getting it so if I said … we are at the church and the church people – how do they greet each other, and then I’d suggest they didn’t hug, but they would shake hands. From there the majority was able to remember that that color was yellow. There was a little color confusion because the stencils were different colors and the colored pencils were different colors. We had to really impress that you didn’t need a yellow colored pencil to write the word yellow.

All in all it was a good experience. I talked to one of the clients in-between 12 and 1 o’clock sessions, but it went pretty smooth.

A little after we talked to Karla for a few moments just catching up with the week, but then that melted into both of us working on a client’s goals before Karla left, and about then Sr. Florine came. She set up the scenario of how helpless she was with computers, and then because of that interrupted me a few times to tell her how to do something. I have to impress here that I can’t be at her beck and call and letting her avoid trying to figure out stuff for herself. It’s pretty aggravating, but we tried to be patient. I did several times tell her to wait a moment because I was just finishing up something. I’ve got to imply to her that my time is just as valuable as hers.

This all didn’t last too long, because we had to leave earlier than normal for Dr. Marvin’s meeting. We did grab the last 4 Qnotes to do work at home. I was really frustrated with not being able to finish the notes, so I was grateful of the 4 day weekend and that I could do the notes from home. I just had to get past being able to do this. It was frustrating though that Sr. Florine put in my mail box 4 more clients she’d neglected to give me for December … I really can’t tolerate things coming in one at a time. I have to get through things more systematically.

Next week I’m going to aim to get as many annuals and goals finished as I can. But, there will be only 3 days to do it and those will all be meeting days. Might get to the point that I take time off just to finish the work! Nah that be a shame wouldn’t it?

I think Sr. came back a few times to tell either Rich or us something. They were small things though. I was glad to think that it was good Rich and I weren’t back there chatting any of the times she came back. We were both working our little hearts out. Well one of us! I still feel a bit begrudged when I’m hard at work and he’s got his bank statements up. I think we covered this the other day though.

So, I think in general although I might remember a particular was the week. There was a little part in that Rich had come to my office so we were going to tell him about the group meetings. He was like this is the stuff you have to write down so you can put it together in a book. This works against our needs in so many ways, but then we were a bit insulted because we told him most of the meetings we HAD written down and it was put into the concepts of our books – a part of my life, but not a lead part … just something we do in the course of our week.

He pushed a little harder, but that only frustrated me. I’m way past wanting to do something scholarly in the field of developmental disabilities. I’m so much more apt to appreciate it in the concept of going through it so that it helps to develop my character or personalities. As I’m going through the teaching portion of my job I can appreciate that I think it makes me a little more interesting and creative, but it’s just a couple hours of work we got through during the week. The whole sum and substance of me is much more and the majority of it is what I mean to get to.

I’m afraid if anyone were to pick up my book for a specialty item under memoirs, multiples, lover or worker bee or whatever they’d have to get the other parts too.

I’m a sorry folk that’s just the way it has to be … I don’t know where we get our volition, but we really do have one. I don’t write as a primary goal to sell, that may or may not follow, but primary concern is to just be writing. I feel very good when I’m here doing this. Secondarily, I hope you can appreciate the effort too.

Maury called last night. It was about 6:30 pm and he was driving home from work.

He said he felt in the mood for calling someone that was boring. WooHOO! I’m your Mom! We talked about things in general in that we listened mostly to how he was doing at work. It’s been some mighty cold days for him to be outdoors. He wasn’t complaining in the least, but you could see him working it through his mind. Good Maury! He’s a worker bee too! He also talked about the overtime he’s putting in and playing poker and then about Thom a bit and all such things.

I just love it when he calls. Sometimes it seems like a long time in-between and I forget I could call the kids too. Just that when we think of them we figure they are busy doing one thing or another. Sure do love to talk to them though – EVEN THOUGH we’re the boring Mom Hehehe!

Whoops Rich just finished a couple of shows. It’s about 8:30 am. He then turned off the TV. That’s weird both of us turn out not to be as into it, but we didn’t talk to each other about it. I turned back on the music. Rich went into the kitchen to fix his eggs. On the way he tripped on the cuff of his pajama bottoms.

He came back and asked out loud if it weren’t because he was trying to step over his fudgsicle wrappers. MAN! How could somebody not pick up their stuff! Bad person!

Well, except if they looked like me then they should probably be given some break for being such a nice person maybe? *Sigh*

I don’t think there’s much more to the day yesterday so we might have to move on.

Thinking in general over what happened during the week – the most disappointing is that we’re still behind on the Qnotes. There’s just so much to be doing. I did talk to Sr. that day she was in about where Holly was and she said she could have figured that out – no surprises. And, then too we told her of the new client being behind in her 30 day according to the schedule, but she was tired and said that it should be ok, because the client was gone for 2 weeks during the holiday.

Whoops TV’s back on … it had just been on pause and Rich is done cooking his egg.

He’s still putting together his day. We are recommending that he pull together his shopping desires, but he’s saying that he doesn’t have any money, remember? I said, you mean taxes? He just paid them for the quarter, but then we asked but you have fishy money put aside, right? And, he said hesitatingly yeah, but … and then faded off. I know it’s just that it’s breaking his little Bohemian heart to see so much money going out so quickly. My poor bunny. Just he’s going in a month now and hasn’t bought the first boat thing. It’s about time! I think too that Bob told him he should just buy it over the Internet … I of course whole-heartedly agreed and volunteered our services as an A-1 Internet shopper. I don’t know if he’d have it delivered at the home or UPS mail box -probably there. It would be a lot of fun seeing all the things coming in.

He’d have to find a place to keep it all, but it would be great fun!

Ahh, we’ve got fresh coffee! WooHOO!

Ok, then where to go next … yeah any week thoughts before we tie this package and move on? We think the sisters were a pretty big deal. Doing the book took a back seat, but I know we brought both the new books home and will start going through them, especially later in the night when Rich is just watching silly TV. I will try to imagine ourselves curled up under the warm light with blankey on top of us 

Does everyone else think through their thoughts so minutely? *Sigh*

Hmm, just a little side note here. We are reading through the work from yesterday on our entries. We wanted to remember that we’d gotten an email from Libby the lady at the sales office for the house. We told her very closely as to where we were.

Rich’s situation isn’t ready yet in that he’s not yet divorced. He’s going to have another court meeting in March … and I’m not sure if that’s REALLY the final one, or just another excuse to continue the case. I know he’s motivated in that if he can finish it he can move on to his boat/car stuff.

So, we didn’t say all that, but we let her know that our next marker point was March. We also told her that we’d pulled together our book and was looking for an agent or publisher – most likely an agent. We told her we were very strongly still interested in the house, but there’d be money issues to work through first. She’d asked directly if we had gotten any closer to getting a different job. We shared that the most ideal part would be if we could do it from the position of making money on the writing which was one of our main purposes now in getting the house.

It would be a very luxurious place to live and write from. I feel very strongly about that.

I still don’t know if I’m living in a dream space, but I know that if I don’t try, it won’t happen, so I’ve got to be doing my best to see my own dreams into reality- right? I hope she understands and doesn’t get too discouraged. I’m sure she’s looking at her own sales needs, but not much else we can be doing … we need to keep this real. I want to buy as much as she wants to sell. I think that’s a fair deal. We also told her that we were reading every single note that Pulte the home builder sends out and that we were hoping that by the time money became more ready that we’d find them at a good position of offering us a special deal. We are playing a couple of strong factors. First, we have to realize money … we have to be able to do this without losing our mainstay job in the economy especially of them stopping money for developmental disabilities at the State level of being overly poor, and it would be nice if all this happened while houses were being so depreciated. I heard lately there’s a new trend of building smaller houses and I gasp NOOOOO!

Mmm we’re back. We found a small bowl of Rich’s Jambalaya WooHOO!!! Pretty sure this might be lunch AND maybe dinner. It will depend on Rich’s cooking mood when he gets home. But, it is very, very delicious!

We talked to Rich a little bit. He might have said something about his plans, but pretty much he was watching his Star Trek stuff again and had talked of seeing it before he went to his mother’s and how everyone should start the day of doing 4 hours of nothing … Yeah, yeah. He must be tired.

We also talked about an idea that he was excited about from his son Chris. Pretty much he’d been figuring out how to take care of the mortgage foreclosure situation.

He had an idea of the Government becoming like the landlord and handling situations between the homeowner and bank that would be advantageous to all and still give the homeowner chances at how to get himself out of his own entanglement.

I think of some of those things affecting us too, but I guess in my idealism I think of making so much money that we can pay off the house without much mortgage. I know I’d want to be very secure. I don’t mind the part of me needing to make the money more than Rich … at least at this moment. Other times, I feel less appreciative because of my fears in not being able to succeed.

I learn a lot from Dr. Marvin though. I think he believes that a lot more is possible than I give ourselves credit for now in that if you can take care of the extra negative emotions like fear or quitting thoughts and such that there are actual pathways to becoming a successful person. Wouldn’t that be how all of them got where they are? Some are by fluke or luck, but a good majority just had to figure how to make their lives better.

I don’t want to go that direction very full, but I guess I could serve as a testament. If I could get past all our overbearing thoughts, maybe the next person with an ounce of wherewithal might make it too. Let’s hope for, k?

Ok, then where to go now?

We just reminded Rich of needing to talk again about his work position and us being hired by him. We do it hesitatingly, because we see already its competition with our writing or editing. I think the point was to say that if you’re in direct need we’ll help, but I guess if given a chance I’d still not tie up any of my time. I’d really have to be a stronger person and not tie up so many wasteful hours at the end of the day. I love my time with Rich where we are laying in his lap on the couch; just it’s not real productive for anything than charging up and calming my inner mental status and maybe his. It is nice, but I might have to be responsible for more.

It’s almost 10 am now. I should probably make a plan as to what to do with the rest of the 4 days. I know that Tuesday is going to be spent with the TV on capturing the Inaugural scene. That’s the basis of staying home that day, but maybe we can do some work too. Our big areas seem to be:

Writing
Editing
Qnotes
Reading the publishing agent books
Going to the gym
Picking up around here
Spending some time with Rich
Inaugural Day

Is there anything else?

Hmm, the warp drive is failing. Does that happen EVERY time we watch Star Trek?

It got loud for a moment.

Ok, Wow. That’s a little strange. Maury had told us of a new show on Showtime.

It’s called the United States of Tara … We watched the premier preview show. It’s only a half hour and there was enough craziness there to last a while. The person has 4 personalities one’s like the normal Mom, one’s a woman who’s like into the 50’s, ones like a truck driver, and the last one is a punk 15-16 year old.

Rich said we shouldn’t get any ideas. Like man … we don’t get to do all THOSE stuff! Pswhoo!

I thought it was an interesting show to watch, but it didn’t seem nearly as real like as I’d hoped. They made all the personality switched very demanding in that they were all very dramatic and overly dynamic. I just didn’t like so much all the actors use of body language and I don’t like the idea that people get the idea that this is what multiplicity is like … there were some things that were interestingly close to home, like some of the coconsciousness like one part coming out and knowing where other parts were at while some parts didn’t know anything that had happened but were seeing signs that told them who else had been out, or using the other character’s – the family to be keeping track of the differences.

I didn’t really find any alters that I like and thought them very unrealistic. This is going to give multiplicity some attention, but I think bad attention. It is a Steven Spielberg show … just why couldn’t it have been less dramatic. Why multiples life can’t be thought of as more normal than making the characters so characteristic. I guess we just don’t fit in there, or at least we don’t think we do. There’s a lot more melding and maybe more of a lack of awareness of the switches whether intentionally or not. Tara’s personalities are all a bit on the extroverted side. It’s going to one day make reading our book seem a little/lot more boring. Maury was right … we’re pretty boring. But, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Like ok Shh, let’s let all that creepy stuff sneak out of our mind. It’s a made for TV show … and that’s REALLY what it seems like - Yuck! We’d watch it to keep on track with general image damage control, but not for the reality. Hmm, UNLESS it gave me some insight … but I don’t think there will be much of that.

Hmm, moving on?

Mmm lunch time … more Jambalaya.

Ok, Saturday about 11:30 pm. Rich has gone to his mother’s and won’t be back until 4 pm or after. I think I want to go back to the books and figuring out some stuff there. I wish I could remember what Dr. Marvin had said about the meta-tags or the topics over there in that direction. Hmm, we found our note from last week. We were going to look up tag cloud. We’re having right now our material from the first book visualized by a program on-line that says it can make tag cloud from a file.

It seems like it’s taking some time, but then again we had quite a bit of pages.

It’s on about 5 things over of about 10-11 on the progress bar. It hasn’t flipped my system out though so we’re going to let it run for a bit to see what happens.

Hmm, we set two of them up and neither seems really to be working … the one remains on 5 bars, and the second is kicking me back to the start.

posted by Ann Marie @ 1/19/2009 09:24:00 AM Comments: 0