Storms

Sorry it’s been a while. I meant to update last night, but another scary storm came through Ft. Worth, and we were without power for 6.5 hours.

All told it still wasn’t a bad evening really. My kids kind of liked having to do everything by flashlight, candle and oil lamp. THEGIRL got to discover the joys of taking a bubble bath by candlelight.

At some point there was a loud crack of thunder and she said to me, “Listen… big flounder.”

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Parenting tips from BB:

If you’ve got bananas that are a little too ripe and you’ve got to throw them away, call the kids into the kitchen first. Take the bananas in your hands, tell the kids that you’re the Hulk and you’re angry at the bananas, and squish them (the bananas, not the kids) in your hands until they burst apart.

The kids will squeal like Mariah Carey.

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I have more of those low-res photos of Chris Cornell on my camera phone. I put the best ones up already, but just holler if you want to see more.

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I know lots of mental health folks. Students, professionals, former caseworkers, etc. I’ve got to post this without a name, but I got this person’s permission to share it here. This person decided to leave the industry.

Although I received my BA in psychology, I barely even remember anything from those classes. I do remember the jelly-like substance that makes up the eyeball is called the vitreous humor (that one is from my favorite all-time psych. class, Sensory and Perception). I think my one year with MHMR scarred me for life and made me realize the counseling field was not for me:

*Getting called out at 3 AM to talk a guy who wanted to take all of the medicine he had been prescribed twelve hours earlier. I talked to him long enough for the sheriff's deputies to get there. I still wonder what he was fiddling with in the cushion of his recliner (gun? knife?) and thanking God he had the sense to go to the psych Hospital.

*Having an 18 year-old girl come with her mother to my office. The girl had on sunglasses and was in obvious distress. At the urging of her mother, the girl took off her sunglasses and made me want to cry - her boyfriend had used her face as a punching bag and her eyes looked like a raccoon's. Mother and I were urging her to press charges, but she was "too in love with him."

That was the last I ever heard from her. Her mother later told me she was living with her boyfriend, but was thinking about leaving him because he had threatened her with a gun.

*Having a little boy see our psychiatrist on a Friday and thinking this little boy was the poster child for ADHD. I sat in that office and watched that little boy literally bounce off the walls, much to the groans of the exasperated guardians. I came to work that Monday to find out that little boy had died during the weekend under extremely suspicious circumstances.

*Having a Hispanic man strip down to his underwear in my office because he had to go to the county psych. hospital, not the Charter Hospital he wanted to go to. I was never so happy to see police in all my days.

*The final straw was knowing two of my co-workers, people I loved and cared for deeply, had died. One of them, a nurse, hanged herself after divorcing one of the nicest guys I'd ever met and then marrying a real SOB. The other died when the car she was riding in crashed into a light pole - the driver was going around 80 mph on a residential street. The real kicker? She was giving the driver a blow job when the wreck happened.

Both women left behind little boys.

This past week, I have had to deal with one of my students who has had a truly shitty home life. Daddy was sentenced to life in prison last week for vehicular manslaughter that got upped to murder because it was his 4th DWI.

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Ya’ll take care.