Ayn's Multiple World

Preparing for the Big Wedding

Good morning. Hmm, that sounds pretty strange. Or, maybe it’s been that we’ve been the stranger. I don’t know how long it’s been now since we’ve been on blogger regular. We’ve been really, really somewhere else. There might be no big surprise thought that we’ve been mostly over at Facebook and through that over at the Pirates game. It seems that’s the no-mind thing we reach for first thing in the morning and again when we get home.

Maybe we are getting a little off of that in that lately it seems we’re not motivated to play it at night, but then too we weren’t ready to be writing at that time either. Usually what we’re doing is listening to CNN catching up with the day’s events OR getting ready to be talking with Rich when he gets home. It seems he’s been doing a lot of games lately so he’s getting home about 8 or later.

You can be pretty sure by then we’re lookin for some snuggly time. Rich has been favorin eating dinner and having a lemonade-down Margarita out on the balcony with us just long enough to convince him we’re melting away without air conditioning.

*Sigh* Women! What can you do with them!

So anyway here we are and we got a little time to spare. This is a Friday and for 4 Friday’s in a row we’ve been taking off to use up our vacation time before the 30th. We were going to take off Monday the 22nd too, but sister wanted me at work until we figure out if Robin is coming in in case she needs someone to take over the leadership and Group 1. I’m not sure why Imelda won’t be doing it, but she MIGHT be taking over Maria’s group. I’m not sure exactly who gets between her or the combination of Theresa and Cathy. *Sigh* Thing is we just gotta do what we gotta do.

We’ve been pretty much into work the last hmm, maybe 4-6 weeks. I’m not sure why we’re working now, but there are a few things going on. First off is that we had to start working toward the new Annual year with our clients. I swished out the schedule and we’ve got 22 people – about one a week between June and Thanksgiving to have an annual for and make up the corresponding reports and goals. Pshwoo.

It wouldn’t be that bad but there are other things going on too. We’ve started working on our case file and we’ve brought it up from 59% to 82.1% as to documents being in. We’ve sent out two mailings to parents and we’ve sent out one mailing to CSO – the State people and one phone call to them. CSO is responding pretty good – I’m happy with that. It’s a little harder with the parents. I don’t know how many of them have gotten their people scheduled for State IDs, medicals or dentals since I sent the notes out. I’ve had a few dribble in, but after two letters, then I figure I will wait until after the 4th, and then I will start making calls. I think as to actual documents out I’m looking for about 30 pieces of paper.

Sister seems to like what’s happening there and we told her how Robin the new DSP who helps with Q work on Fridays helped and about how much she can really do for case files. I’ve taught her to go through them and either order them or clean old stuff out, how to look for and record documents that are there or missing, and how to get out letters of inquiry to the parents. It’s not real brain rocket science, but it is a process and eats up some minutes.

I’ve kept my charts and paperwork up during the weekdays when she’s been away … and then she had to get her tonsils out a week ago and is having hopefully her last day off today. That’s a couple Friday’s we didn’t get her help. I really hope she’s doing good.

Sr. says that what I had her do with my files, she wants me to have her do with Holly’s files. Holly’s files need a lot of work. I do think some of her parents are better at getting in documents, but the last time I talked to Robin about the filing that Holly is having her do, she said the books are so full it’s hard to move them around. AND, the files are hard to get to because Holly doesn’t have a good file set up. She’s got two big units with horizontal files – so 8 long drawers, but there is no frame in there to hang the files and they get floppy. I feel embarrassed for the center that Robin has to go through that mess to get anything done and I figure that might be why Holly has such a hard time getting around her files too. Well that and she runs a messy office.

Holly has been gone about 6 weeks, but she’s been coming just lately between 3-7 pm a couple days during the week. She’s thinking she is going to get a medical clearance on Monday. I haven’t missed her being out in that we ran the Pirate game all the way through May and had the awards the first week of June and since the beginning of June we’ve gotten Friday off we’ve been doing our Thinking group on Thursdays. I’ve done 3 weeks of annuals … we might have said that … better clear our head here.

Holly if I didn’t say before had time off for an operation … she had some kind of grapefruit size growths inside her that weren’t cancerous, but took some attention, and then something burst open and then something got infected and well all that so she’s really been out of commission.

I took the minutes for the last two Administration meetings, and I did the behavior meeting minutes, and that hasn’t seemed to be a problem. I thought at the time of doing the notes they might be a little wordy, but I liked them a lot. The big change over everything seems to have come with the new little netbook. I have no problem taking it into meetings and writing my heart out. Afterward it’s real easy to formalize what’s been said. It gives me a sense of completion to be getting things down so thoroughly and because we’re taking pride again in our work, it seems that we’ve been willing to work harder.

Yesterday on our way out the door we went through sister’s office to put something on her desk. We paused to read something and then sure enough there was Holly coming around the corner and when she saw we were still standing there she looked at her mail box like something interesting had just happened there.

I don’t want to overshoot here, but its been one of Sister’s biggest complaints that Holly goes and reads personal things on Sister’s desk. I’m thinking that’s what Holly had intended when she came around that corner. Nobody just gets up in the middle of nothing going on time to check mail. People usually check it when they first come in the door and maybe when using the washroom. Hmm, maybe I’m feeling a little resentment that Holly’s back. Things seemed to work fine without her, and now they are getting messed up again. It’s not a good feeling thinking that anything you put in private on Sister’s desk is going to be gone through by a snoopy peer. Like two days I had to leave my staff survey. I didn’t think that was something Holly should be reading. Most likely I will tell Sister about what I’d seen. I’ll let her come to her own conclusions, but I think I’m going to ask if I can put my papers that I leave her on the way out the door on the corner of her kitchen counter. I don’t want to interrupt the sisters, but I should have that much privacy.

I told Holly yesterday after I’d surprised her by still being there I told her that Sister was saying that she was going to have Robin do her case files to catch them up. That had been one of the things that I’d left on Sister’s desk so I showed it to Holly who didn’t want to look too carefully because she usually shies away from the things I do that seem like work. Holly started fretting immediately … she said well I wish someone had told me because I’m going to have to … blah blah blah. She said she’d been planning to do something else and now she was going to have to look at that.

We told her … Holly, Robin is still out tomorrow, meaning today Friday. She won’t be coming in until next Friday. Then I told her all you need to do is have a pile of anything that hasn’t been filed, and then she’ll file it, clean-up the old stuff, categorize what’s there and write some letters to parents. That’s what SHOULD Happen, but I’m pretty sure that Holly is going to try and complicate things – usually to hide what she hasn’t done. BUT, Sister does not mean to punish her, she just wants to get the records cleaned up.

This is all a part of what’s now going on at the Admin meeting. We really pushed Rich to keep up with what he’d started, because we thought it would make him look good and since funds are really being limited … we needed to really help boost his credibility. He had finally set-up the system where he was going to be looking at case files. I thought that was excellent, because I really think it helps us stay focused on it rather than worrying til the beginning of next year when CARF or the state are looking for those documents. Holly seems to think though she needs to do a lot of work ahead of time. The whole deal again isn’t to make her work harder it’s just to get the job done.

We also told Holly the first day we saw her back and then more carefully a couple of days ago when we’d gone in to get caught up. We told her about the couple sets of minutes that were in the book if she wanted to catch up with some of the big stuff, but she said she didn’t want to look yet until she was more caught up. But, when we’d gone into her office she was just staring at an Internet page. We know she wasn’t working and doubt she’s done much after getting back.

So anyway we reminded her that Sister was SERIOUS and that Rosa WOULD be sitting next to her while she did the July billing. It’s supposed to happen the first couple of days into July I think. Holly had blown me off the first day I’d set it, but this time I wasn’t giving her as much wiggle room. Me telling her is like giving her a “Heads-up” before the boss and reality get to her. She’s got to be able to wrap it around her mind.

Holly started by saying something about well she CAN’T sit next to her and that she’d have to do something in her own office – meaning Rosa. I said NO sister said she was going to LITERALLY sit next to you. Then Holly slowly came to figurin that she probably couldn’t split the work and that Rosa WOULD have to come to her computer.

Then she was into how many clients she had and how overwhelming the work was and all, but we held firm. How many clients Holly, how many clients do you have on Home-base. Home-base is a particular kind of funding through the government. And, all the clients who have home-base at St. Rose go to Holly. And, in addition she has clients from the outside that just use her for the billing of home-base stuff.

BUT, Holly is always very evasive when it comes to anything about Home-base. This is the billing that Sister is talking about. Holly couldn’t avoid the fact that she didn’t even know how many clients she had. I know for the regular center she has 24 clients and I have 23, but am doing the work for her 24th client, because he came in while she was gone. The first question was – how many of those 24 clients are on Home-base and how many EXTRA clients did she have. She’s always trying to make it seem WAY out there.

At first she was going to blow me away, but sometimes I think Holly realizes she really should be doing something or maybe that in some small way I’m trying to help. So she went through this process of staring in the air counting and looking at several scraps of paper. It took her 7-8 minutes but she finally said she’s got 27 people on home-base. Ok, so what’s the division? Again she tried to muddy the water, but as it turned out … Out of her 24 clients … four of the clients WEREN’T Home-base and the other 20 were … so that meant she only had 7 extra clients. I was pretty sure she used to have 11 -13 so I’m thinking that due to her case file neglect she’s losing them.

So the way I figure it is that I have to do all the extra work of program management, CARF AND staff training, because she’s way busy with 2 days a month’s worth of paperwork on 7 people. I soooo Hope that Sr. finds time for Rosa to do the work so that it gets done right and then just uses Holly for the back-up. But that means that Holly’s only specialty beside Town Hall which equals my Thinking Group … well she just wouldn’t have too much to do certainly not enough to excuse her from doing case files and Qnotes.

We’ll see. We had pushed a little more on the Rosa is going to learn part … Holly said she couldn’t do it because she has it all up in her head – that’s the part that had lead to how many clients? I told her if she didn’t know how many clients she had – how the heck was she remembering everything else? That’s when she started figuring it out. I told her that Sister’s concern was that if she weren’t there we would have no means to billing for our services and that was too much risk for sister particularly after Holly had been out for so long. I can appreciate Holly’s concern with being replaced, but then I’ve always thought – the more you teach someone the more advanced you can go – because the older work can go to someone else. I always try my hardest to teach EVERY thing I knew to anyone who would listen.

I think the biggest help I was to furthering Holly’s mind was that when she said everything was in her head as to method of completing the task and the specifics of the task – I acted out exaggeratedly – you mean you have NO MASTER LISTS? I think that has to be the biggest crime of the century – well at least as far as St. Rose goes. I could see Holly start to sweat it out. I think that’s something we’re going to recommend to sister is that when Rosa goes in … she has to write out the directions for everything. Pretty much what Holly does is blow things up like a fan fish to make people believe things are too hard for anyone else to even conceive of.

I was talking to Rich yesterday after one of my meetings about the new annual forms and then Sister came in. One of the things I brought to the threesome conversation was that I told sister we’d talked to Holly about the billing that Rosa would be sitting in on. I asked sister if she was serious about that … because Holly was pretty sure that it couldn’t be done. Sister frazzled up pretty quick. Yup. Yup.

I think it’s going to happen! Sr. just couldn’t afford to put that much risk on the system. She has been, but now she’s more determined. When you are talking to sister you gotta get it out in about 2-3 sentences or she’s already gone down the road into something else. I made sure to say – she says Rosa can’t learn it because it’s all in her head – no MASTER LIST. Yeah … you can imagine I’m just that kinda person. I don’t mean to be getting Holly in trouble, but maybe there’s some frustration because after 10 years of doing CARF I’ve never gotten a SMIDGEON out of Holly of ANYTHING of hers from Home-base that I can brag about in CARF.

It’s not only sister that doesn’t know what Holly is doing – it’s me too. Sister has always told me whatever she could that wasn’t personal with her other employees, but sometimes that too, but the point is that with CARF I’m supposed to know all our systems and subsystems. Ok, maybe too we’re just on a Holly rant. Calm down girl!

We’re back. We just took our shower and got a few more things ready. Rich is home and we watched him pack. It’s one of our favorite things to do. I think we like watching him taking care of himself. Sometimes he’ll ask questions about a certain shirt or pants, but we usually let him do the figurin because we’re just new with this whole male dressing thing. Frankly our expertise is in UN-dressing him!

Hmm, well I guess our mood has changed and you can see which direction it is going.

We’ve been trying to put it off in our thoughts as much as we could, but we’re likely to be seeing our mother tonight. MANOMAN does that seem not long enough away. I don’t know why I’m dreading this so much. I think I’ve enjoyed the privacy I’ve always had between them and Rich and now today Rich is going to be meeting them and there’s no way of getting out of it unless I drop dead pretty quickly, but seeing as I just had such a nice shower that’s probably inconvenient. HMPF!

Oh and there’s something new too. We’re now wearing make-up. I did that too after doing the shower and watching Rich pack. There’s not a WHOLE lot of make-up, but some. AND, after six years we got our hair cut. It hadn’t been done since Sandy died. My old friend Becky did it and I guess we gave her some trouble because we got yelled at and then didn’t talk to her anymore cuz she was so scary.

Last weekend we were at CS’s and we told her before we got there we’d appreciate if she set up an appointment, but that we’d probably be weird. She’d gone so far out she’d even prepared to take us to the Dairy Queen if necessary, but she didn’t have to do that. Well, it’s pretty much because no one would talk to her afterward, but that’s a whole another story - she’s actually pretty understanding about some of our eccentricities. We might have a few.

She had to do something for Nathan though so she went into the phone store with him and we weren’t ready yet so we stayed in the car and while we were waiting which was like over a half an hour, then we got to thinking that we’d come that far with our hair that we’d like to go all the way and figure out the face-thing too. So when I came out we asked what she knew about make-up counters. She figured she knew where to go.

She brought us to some store with the name Boston in it. There were actually 4 make-up counters, but we didn’t figure that out right away we were pretty flooded.

I think we did some more not too much talking. This lady with a white lab coat had us sit down and she started doing stuff and running up a tab. We got out of there at about $197. What a deal, hmm?

There were three bottles – BIG to be cleaning your face. One was some kind of liquid soap, and then the next was something she called an exfoliate, and then the next was some kind of lotion. She said they were all not supposed to cause allergies and they didn’t have fragrances. That was appreciated. She said it would last about 3 months, but we’re using less then a fingernail size at a time. It’s all pretty threatening, but we have been using it after the shower and before we go to bed. I can’t say that it’s made all the broken-out problems go away, but I’d like to think it’s gotten better. I feel like it’s less bumpy.

Then – oh whatever company it starts with a “C” because on the zipper of the pink make-up bag it has a thingy with a “C” on it. Anyway the bag came further down the line. Before she gave me the bag, she gave me a small bottle of some kind of liquid foundation. The bottle will probably be the stuff that runs out first. The neat part was she put a little bit of it on the back of her hand and then she had a nifty big brush that she’d just dipped in the stuff on her hand and then that went all over the place.

After that she got out a round something with a mirror in it and a soft padded thing. All the time she worked she hemmed and hawed and did pretty good at matching up the colors that I was supposed to have. This last thing was some kind of a compacted powder and she said that it would set the foundation and she said it would act like a wick in absorbing the faces oils. I thought … hmm that’s a pretty good idea! She put that pretty much all over everything too and she talked about blending and such. I think my sister was doing the talking with her because we were just talking inside pretty much.

Then she got ANOTHER face thing! It was probably the coolest. It was a tube like container and she was showing us how you had to twist the cover as you were pulling it out. It turns out what was in there was another nice size brush and when you twisted it you pushed it up against the top of the container where some pinkish cheek make-up was … I forgot what all the colors name was, but I think that color matches somehow the eye and lips colors. It was quite some system.

We had worked it out with my sister going in that we’d write her a check after we’d gotten out and she covered us on the credit card. Because by this time it took three things to clean our face and three things to cover our face up and we hadn’t gotten to the other stuff yet. PSHWOO!

So then next was the eyes part. That’s always the scariest part. She found one thing that had four colors in it. We’ve only used two of the colors though. We’re a little scared of the other colors. There are two shades of pink and two shades of brown. That nifty container has a mirror too and it had a couple applicator things … one a small pad and the other a small brush. Pswhoo. The lady decided that the eye liner would be too much for me, but she gave me several mascara’s for free.

That’s like the dickens to get on fairly straight! We must have little lashes and not too much for eye lids.

The last part of the official make-up was the lips. She brought out a pretty little tube of some pink stuff and I clenched my teeth thinking about how many dozens of years I’ve avoided putting stuff on me and how on Earth was I going to keep my lips “prettied-up?” But, we’ve been trying. I still have to fight our normal impulses to wipe the lips off because they have something on them. And, she didn’t stop there … after she put on lipstick, she put on some glossy stuff on a soft pad. I never knew how that all worked.

My sister was on the side as the lady was starting to wind down. She had an appointment coming in, although that appointment wasn’t on time and that worked to our advantage. My sister was like you are going to give us lots of free stuff aren’t you? We were so far from being able to talk and we were afraid to touch our lips with our lips. So the lady started going through her drawers and she through in the bag which is a beauty! I love it! And then there was some other stuff, maybe 6-8 things including a fold-up brush and something to take off the make-up.

So anyway that’s how it got up to so much money. She must have been thinking AHA!

Here comes a pigeon! BUT, she got us past the first step. We’ve been using it all week, but no one has said anything, so I don’t know if it was just put on good enough not to stand out, or whether it looks terrible and people are uncomfortable mentioning it. Rich says we look pretty, but he said we looked pretty before it. I think he’s playing both sides of the candle.

posted by Ann Marie @ 6/29/2009 10:53:00 AM Comments: 0