Winter in Logan

I can't believe how much snow there's been in Logan! Last week I went night skiing with my stake, and we'd just had a fresh snowstorm, making the skiing a ton of fun (except for the fact that it was 6º below zero...that made things a bit chilly). Now I woke up this morning and it's snowing again!

There's a group called Common Ground that aids individuals with disabilities, so they can participate in outdoor sports, and I'm going to volunteer with them this winter. Hopefully that'll give me lots of other opportunities to go skiing.

This is a picture of my front yard...we're running out of places to put the snow that we shovel from the driveway.


Here's the backyard. As you can see, it's currently snowing and there's just a skiff on my car, mostly, the snow that's on the ground is from previous snowstorms. This snowfall has just started, and rumor has it that this'll keep up throughout the day.

Father Dear, You're Age is Beginning to Show...

I suggested that Dad wear his new false teeth when he was asked to conduct Sacrament Meeting.

Once in a Blue Moon

Since I'm a "once in a blue moon" kind of blogger, no one will probably see my post for a couple of weeks, but I wanted to post some fun pictures of my trip to Arizona to visit my twinner, her hubby, and their very cute little one.

I think our faces almost show a family resemblence in this pic!

I had a great time with Eglantine and Orville. We had a lot of fun catching up on what's new and cool in eachother's lives.

This little munchkin is so dang cute.

Tagged

The only other people I know that Blog are Lisa, Mom, and Prudence so I tag you. (Prudence, you can respond via email, or put it on with our recipes, but I really want you to respond :) The rules are to post 6 items about yourself (habits, traits, deep dark secrets, etc.) on your blog, then tag 6 more people to do the same, or in my case, three.

1. This year I've had several people comment on how beautiful the shape of my eyes is. I've never noticed anything remarkable about them, and I never knew that eye shape could be attractive, but there you have it!

2. I should be finishing up my two take home exams, but instead I'm procrastinating (just a little) and blogging.

3. Sometimes I eat leftovers for breakfast. I think it's funny that some people can only stand to have a small bowl of cereal or a glass of juice for breakfast. I wake up hungry, and I want REAL food!

4. I may be musically inclined, but I'm pop music deficient. The other day I was traveling up to a hot springs with some friends (it was a really fun trip by the wayw) and the conversed about different bands from the Eighty's on 'til the popular ones now, and I think I had heard about maybe two of them. The other ones I had never heard of, nor to I really care if I ever do again.

5. I've never felt the need for other close friends, because I have my sisters.

6. In my spare time (and I'm laughing as I write this, because I really don't have spare time; I don't know if I've ever been so busy) I'm reading the second book in the Kingdom and the Crown series.

Why it's so fun to be a student clinician

Today my 8:00 am client came, and I just can't describe how cute she is. Every session we work on narratives for a part of the time, and today I was focusing on teaching her how to start a story. Good stories start with a good description of the character involved and where the character lives, or in other words the setting needs to be described well.

So, in order to convey this to my client, we began by looking at a flower. My idea was to elicit various descriptions from her that could describe the flower. I thought we'd talk about where the flower lives and what the colors it had on it, and really basic simple descriptions.

This is how it really started:

K: What are some words we can use to describe this flower?
A: The flower is SO CUTE! (I would have bet someone a million dollars that this would be her first description, it is her favorite adjective)
K: How else can we describe the flower?
A: It has pink fingernail polish.
K: Oh really? What are these called?
A: {Blank stare}
K: These are petals. What color are they?
A: Lellow!
K: That's right this flower has yellow petals. What other colors does it have?
A: It has pink fingernail polish!
K: Okay, {me pointing to the leaves} what are these?
A: A stem.
K: {Me pointing to the stem and then the leaves} Yes, this is a stem and these are leaves. What color are the leaves.
A: Green.

After continuing on in this manner for sometime....

K: Okay let's use all these words together to describe the flower. You start, use all the words we just talked about, to describe the flower.
A: {After a long pause} This flower is so cute and it has pink fingernail polish!
K: What else can we say about the flower, using the words that we just talked about?
A: {Blank stare}

She is the cutest little girl ever! And I had a hard time not cracking up every time she mentioned the fingernail polish. The picture above is the actual picture we used for our description practice. As you can clearly see, the flower has neither fingernails nor is it the color pink. I just love that little girls her age are always so obsessed with these things. Life would be far less entertaining if they weren't.

The Best Part About Parent Teacher Conferences

Last week I got to travel down to Ogden and help translate Spanish/English for the parent teacher conferences. It was really fun, and I had a great time being able to help out, but the funniest part was listening to all of the stories that parents shared with the teachers:

One teacher mentioned to a parent that her child had mentioned that they'd lost their cat. The parent said, "Oh yes, we looked high and low for that cat, inside and outside the house. We knew that the cat had been sick so we were afraid that it had died somewhere inside the house." Okay, so yes ew, gross.

They eventually found the cat A WEEK after they had started searching for it. One of the kids lifted up the cushions on the sofa and looked under only to discover the cat there. Apparently the family has several other pets that roam freely about the house as well.

I don't know if I would ever admit to something like that happening in my house, and I can gaurentee that the sofa would have left the house along with the cat. Yuck! You know what, though? Teachers have some of the best stories I've ever heard!

I've Been Experimented On

This week my roomate asked me if I wouldn't mind being experimented on. I said, "sure, why not." Her mom works in a Doctor's clinic that also utilizes varying degrees of homeopathic remedies, as well as issuing the normal drug perscriptions.

One of the homeopathic tools they use is acupuncture. Now don't get excited, I didn't have acupuncture performed on me. Her mom, Carrie, is a nurse, and she needed to practice a new computer program that utilizes the acupuncture points in your hands and feet to determine the strength and health of the energy levels flowing through the various parts of your body.

Now, I'm generally a bit of a sceptic when it comes to homeopathic remedies, etc., but this was really cool. In one hand I held a kind of wet metal rod, and with the other Carrie placed a kind of pointer-energy-reader-thing on the various points of my hand that indicate specific "energy" systems. Now, I was feeling pretty miserable Wednesday because I had a nasty cough and some awful head congestion, and this instrumentation picked up on it exactly.

It measured my lungs, nose, and upper sinus energy systems as all being weakened/stressed. Pretty cool, huh? Carrie explained to me, that a researcher in acupuncture had created the program, and he researched all over the world and analyzed and reanalyzed this computer program until he felt confident that he had it right, and it seems pretty right to me.

After they analyze your system, this information gets sent to another program, and it determines which system should be treated first to benefit your body the most. Interestingly enough, the system chose my chemical allergies system first. Carrie explained that it didn't choose the upper sinuses or the lungs because it could tell that these were only temporary stresses caused by my cold, and the allergies was a more chronic weakness.

So next comes the drops test. They have this vast supply of homeopathic drops, and they go through and determine which drops would help revitalize the weakend system. The system said that I needed the Childhood Vaccinations drops. Apparently, a lot of people's bodies respond to childhood vaccinations negatively, and this causes allergic reactions to some chemicals because of lingering side-effects. These drops are supposed to counter-balance the effectiveness of such negative side-effects. Isn't it fascinating? I'm going to go in for more practice/experimentation in a couple of weeks, and we'll see what happens to my system after I've taken the drops for this two week period.

I've never had so much fun being someone's guinea pig.