On the Way to Mom's
Good morning ... this is me. We're with Rich now and we're on our way to a lake. We're going to be meeting up with Bob and Marcia and fishing for a bit. We've got only about 4 hours because there are other plans for the day. Bob's daughter is getting married on Sunday and so he's got plans and Rich says he's got loose ends to be working on so we're going to be cutting out early too. I think Rich has got legal stuff to be taking care of this afternoon and I'm not sure what else.Rich is now on the phone with Bob. Bob is pestering him to be there already, but Rich had told him we'd leave at 6 am ... and that's what we did ... but, then Bob likes to rile up Rich and it seems its Rich's job to say we're just going to relax and he'd be there when he got there. There's probably a little more here, but then that's not priority of my morning to go through the grief. I think that in general it is Rich and Bob's general way of talking to each other ... so it's not a big deal. Maybe it's just a friendly way of sharing stress?
So we're back at things again here. I think its been a couple of days since we last wrote. Not much has gone on ... just normal stuff. We had a staffing on Wednesday and it went pretty well. We were working on that yesterday for a bit, but only got about a 2/5's of the way through the annual report (IPP). We had been working earlier on the day at cleaning up my desk because it had gathered some moss and then we did something, but I don't recall. I think it was about 1 1/2 hours to clear our desk and then it was about 9 am, and then did something and about 12 pm we did the preparation for the staff training and then we had that meeting at 1 pm, and then after that we pushed ourselves to be working on the IPP.
There was a little space in-between, because after the staff training meeting, we talked to Robin a bit about what was happening between her and Holly and getting work done and not talking so much. Maybe we'll go into that in a bit, but for now I want to move past that and come at it from a different perspective. Basically, it was a Dr. Marvin meeting last night so some of this stuff was discussed there and that's the better perspective of things.
Rich was in the office and we did some stuff with him ... that takes up a little bit of the missing space. He was asking me to do one thing or another ... and he was being nice, but we were getting a little testy with it. Mostly because it is following a pattern where we have to break our concentration to be helping him out with small things. Like yesterday it was like ... can you print this, can you help me get the Access over to Excel, can you scan this for me, can I use your computer for a while, etc. This kind of stuff can drive a person zonkers because I've got other things to be thinking of and I've been pretty clear I don't want to be a secretary to him.
This kinda boiled over last night when we were talking about what we talked about in Dr. Marvin's office. But, let me do that more in order - again in a bit.
There was some fall-back into doing things back as the old not-so-productive times. Our day was getting broken up and there was some hesitation into starting things proper as to the meeting on Wednesday. We had remembered that we were going to say hi to Nathan because it was his birthday and when we went in we found that CS had posted some pictures of our quilt and the two of us. That was also about the time that we'd discovered a video of Joe and Cari doing the kickboxing. Both of those took some of that mystery time.
With the pictures we took a few of our favorites and printed them out on one document and then we wanted to show them about. We showed the leadership group and then we brought a copy up to show sister and the other sewing sister, and then we made a stop at all the different trainers and showed them ... we didn't hit them all, but we did do most. And, then witht the video of Joe and Cari, we brought in the smaller leadership group and we showed them the video. Yup, yup we were having that kind of downtime, I believe.
I would like to think that we got some work done too, but I'm not sure how much. Just haven't been able to think that through. I remember after a bit that Rich had come in and we'd had lunch together, but that seems to have been some of the problem yesterday. It seems we were in a grumpier part, because we'd complained about him just coming in to plan and schedule his day, but we weren't talking about us stuff ... we were just having our time interrupted where we usually do our lunch by ourselves on the run and inbetween work, and here we were having to slow down and listen to someone in the middle of resolving his own problems. We were very not into that.
I don't know what's wrong with us in that we should be nicer to Rich ... it's nice for us to be working together and getting to have lunch together, etc., but all we seem to do is complain. I think this has to do with the parts and having various needs. We had gone off on the social end as sorta a respite from all the harder stuff we've been doing this week, but then we'd gotten ourselves back to more solid ground, but it was THEN that Rich came in and by then we didn't want to lose time. We had been having some of the frustration in the first place because of all the extra interruptions. There was also some pressure, because as nice as some things were, we were looking down the long run about having Rich come in and out of our schedule whenever he wanted and that was just too much distraction with a fear it wouldn't stop.
Whoops someone stopped to talk to Rich for a moment and it came out that not only was someone getting Hazelnut coffee from 7-11, but that someone was picking up an applefritter in the morning. Man ... that kind of stuff can get you in trouble ... first thing was that ... he said hey we've been eating eggs together in the morning, but for me it was like yeah, but eggs aren't sweet, and then we suddenly hushed the conversation by rubbing his arm for a second saying that hey let's not argue so early in the morning, and then I went back to the computer. Yeeks. Definitely not where we want to be heading!
Last night after talking about this and a few other things, Rich got so mad at me he got up and left the living room. He went into the kitchen to his computer to work on his computer - legal stuff - that he'd been avoiding, so that just goes to show you how frustrated with me he was. I think this above though was just the frosting on the cake.
What we had really been talking about was ... well, basically it's the part that I'm NOT his secretary ... but we weren't even thinking at this level to start with. Basically, it was the almost last part of meeting with Dr. Marvin. We had been going over how responsible we'd been lately at work in getting things accomplished. We had gone through quickly the annuals and the reports including the IPP Update and that Sister seems to be trusting us more and that we have been working on staying on track and such.
We had also talked about Robin and how frustrating that situation had been with her being so lax with the end of the day and her time with Holly. I think most of that's because we've seen it so often before where someone gets around Holly and it's much easier to just gab and let her do all the thoughts about which clients were doing what rather than work out your own plan. Plus she'd done it a couple times now including the last staff meeting where she's saying she's got extra free time on Fridays, but the time on Fridays is supposed to be going to the Q's for formal work. And the time in-between where she's supposed to be done with her work - should be going either to the Q's or to the project with the computers in the client's computer room. She's supposed to be figuring out what's there and making some kind of concerted effort to figure out what's on each of the machines and to see if we can add to the machines and then finally teach the other staff what we can do with them in addition to what they are doing now. I had intended that she'd become the expert.
Sister had supported the plan, but we'd talked during the week because she was also frustrated with Robyn. She says that she's been going in there to find that she doesn't have control over the clients. By this we usually mean ESPECIALLY the 2-3 clients that are a particular handful. This is what we'd all refered to earlier when saying we had had a meeting with Robyn. There's a little confusion because from what I'd gathered meeting with Sister this week is that I do have more authority over Robyn, but it is being usurped by Holly's idle chatter.
Sr. basically, gave me the heads up that I should be watching over her and making suggestions. It's a little hard in that if I'm giving up 50% of my time with Robyn for Holly's Fridays then I'm appearing to be only half her supervisor. But, sister told her that if she wasn't doing anything else she should be helping Ann. My complaint to Sr. apparently got through to Robyn, because she was pretty defensive. She doesn't want to think of herself as spending so much idle time especially, because while she's talking to Holly she's sitting on the opposite side of the room at her desk. She's talked about being for example caught up with her lesson plans for about 2 months out. But, then that goes to show me that she's not doing anything constructive during her free time.
Ok, gotta go … almost to Mom’s house for the boat
posted by Ann Marie @ 8/01/2009 11:39:00 AM
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