May: new semesters, Jed's bday, and garden

Ok well it's been a little while. Not too long though, so I thought it'd be good to pop out an update quick!

Jed started his semester at the end of April and has been having a stressful last semester on campus. He is taking several-wrapping-up-the-degree type classes and prepping his résumé and portfolio to start applying to jobs. He's also taking a WordPress class, which has been really informative and a good learning experience. It's been a challenge to jump all the hoops the school wants him to but he's doing great and we're excited to find out where we're headed this summer!

I started my semester in mid-May and I'm taking a lot of classes, lol. I have all my classes online with only occasional skype calls to meet with the class and professor. I have a lot of work this semester so I am trying to really buckle down and make sure that I am getting everything done to the best of my ability. I'm taking research methodology in which I will be designing my study for my thesis, so that's exciting.

I also started my internship for this year. It's about 18 hours per week at a program doing drug and alcohol treatment for adult clients in the felony and misdemeanor drug court system. It's heavy on my current favorite theoretical model, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and also uses another model I love and recently got my facilitator certification in, Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT). I really like my supervisor and feel very comfortable with her and asking her questions. I'm learning a lot about the drug court system and about how to run DBT groups. I'm so happy to be back working with the population that I click with.

During my 6-week spring break I started a website called Social Work FTW in which I follow current events in mental health and explore aspects of DBT, holism in mental health, technology integration, and other topics interesting to me. I've also been reading a lot of articles and bulking up my twitter feed and following, which has been a lot of fun. I've had to slow it down since classes started again, but I have been able to learn a lot from Jed's WordPress class and make my webpage pretty.

My work has been kind of hectic with a lot of crises and lots of extra paperwork the last couple months. I am down to only 3 clients and the craziness has slowed down considerably. I was asked to write the treatment plans for new PSR clients, which has been a good experience practicing efficient treatment plan writing. I might need to ask for another client, but right now I am just trying to settle into my class work and internship hours and trying not to worry too much about money. :S

Jed had his 28th birthday in May! The day of he had a homemade portabella mushroom sandwich (portabella mushroom grilled with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, melted swiss cheese, mayo, roasted red bell peppers, and spinach, on warm ciabatta bread with feta stuffed olives on the side) for lunch and cheesecake for dessert. He got a super sweet gaming mouse with programmable macro buttons and we went to dinner that weekend at Red Robin (since the Thai restaurant has moved on from snubbing me to Jed this year for his birthday and was closed).

Nova is doing well. We haven't had a ton of time to work on formal training but we have been working on leash work and training on some games with 2- and 3-step tasks (like get the toy, bring it back, drop it) and general calmness and working against her impulse control problems, lol. We've also been working on socializing her with other dogs since she's not great with that right now.

We started our little garden! The community garden that we gardened at last year wasn't sure if they were going to be doing it again this year but then they decided to so we are very excited for the opportunity. We did starts indoors the beginning of May and set up for planting today. We're excited to try our hand at square foot gardening and enjoy the relaxing time outside together again this summer.

Other than that, we have just be trying to get out and go on walks as well as see each other every once in a while. It's gonna be a tough semester, but we'll get through it so we can move on to the next challenge.