In an office setting it is never a good idea to complete all of your tasks for the week in one day when you have 35 hours of work to satisfy. Last Monday I went in really psyched to get the week going because I had a big weekend planned. A large majority of the week was spent looking for productive things to do and surfing the web for stats and jobs. That and texting people that don’t work regular hours or were apparently just as bored as I was at their job. The last six weeks at work have been beneficial when I was kept busy or given tasks. I have learned a few things about the organizational end of social work and it has given me some things to think about as far as career goals. I feel like the work could have been done part time and I don’t even see a need to finish out the two remaining weeks (though I definitely will) because everything that I have been assigned to do is done. Moral of the story, I can’t wait for the next two weeks to be done.
My field placement interview (internship) was on Friday at the Nashville Career Advancement Center. Usually those interviews are more of a formality and are used to just kind of get an idea if it’s going to be a good fit for the student or if the student will like it. From what it sounds like I’ll be working with the teens in order to ready them for employment but I’ll also be working with the coordinator on the organizational end of things. I think this is going to give me a really good idea of whether or not I’m making the right decision on concentrating on management rather than clinical. I’ve been going back and forth a lot lately with that decision considering clinical and therapeutic settings are all I really know. I’m still debating. This isn’t interesting to anyone but social workers and maybe not even to them, but hey it’s what’s going on with me so deal. Let’s hope I don’t get massive anxiety about this too.
On to the best part of the week…. not working. On the weekdays I spent time at the café and the skate park so mostly a typical week. The weekend involved the boyfriend coming down on Thursday night to spend the weekend with me which is always a fantastic time. So after the interview on Friday we jumped in the rental and headed down to Atlanta. My friends Stacie and Matt have three adorable (and young) children and they all recently located to a small town outside of Atlanta with no friends or family for several hundred miles. I’m the closest familiar face they have to them currently so I wanted to give them a break for a ‘date night’ to get out of the house by themselves for the first time in a long time. The boy and I watched an 8 week old and 2 two and a half year-olds (twins obviously) while Matt and Stacie left the house for an hour. I would have run far away for several hours if I were them but I can also understand it being weird being away from your kids for a while. The kids were great and the baby was the only child awake by the time they left the house. I was nervous but we did fine and there were no catastrophes. It’s been awhile since I’ve been responsible for a child that small. I didn’t even drop him.
Saturday we went to the Georgia Aquarium (the largest in the U.S. I’m told) with my friends, their kids and Jason. We had a blast wandering around and seeing all of the different sections of the aquarium. It was really cool to see how excited the kids were as well. They have a section of the aquarium that has a tank with 6.3 million gallons of water and features a whale shark and giant manta as well as several different types of marine life. It was an amazing sight, the tank was as tall and wide as a movie theater screen (the massive theaters with the stadium seating). The aquarium was packed with people which made it a bit more of a patience tester but we all survived. By the time we were done walking through we were all exhausted (I carried around a 25 pound kid a majority of the time) and ready for lunch. Jason and I drove around Atlanta and randomly came across this cool pub with rooftop seating and discovered the food was amazing as well as the service. I love it when you just stumble upon things like that. From the rooftop Jason spotted an IKEA and decided we definitely needed to go considering neither of us have one in our current cities or residence. Being in IKEA always makes me want to buy a house. After meandering through and finding curtains for his apartment we got back to our car and realized we had spent an hour and a half in there. Yikes. I could lose a whole day in there. The Bodies exhibit was next and was much anticipated on my part for one because it was a surprise I had set up earlier in the week and two because it’s never been close enough for me to see until now. It’s hard to even describe what it was like. It was shocking, surreal, weird, strange, thrilling and a lot of other strong adjectives. I think I used the phrase ‘that’s crazy’ about 43 times. The human anatomy has always interested me in that nerdy scientific way and this exhibit just about gave me a nerd-gasm. It was insane and so worth the trip and keeping it secret for a week. Jason seemed overwhelmed at times due to putting it into the context that he’s going to be a nursing student soon and has quite a bit to learn. He’ll be fine, I know that. We weren’t allowed to take anything into the exhibit so now photos of the trip but I got a few at the aquarium. I’ll include those.
Overall it was a great week which also involved me getting back on track with ‘getting healthy’ aka getting my big booty back to losing weight. Success in that department, I’m down 5 from last week. I know it’s going to be a lot slower than most weeks, but it was an awesome start.
So, hope you all have a wonderful week.
correction...worlds largest aquarium... :)
ReplyDelete