June 3rd - I arrived at 114 Ferris Place (Ben's apt) just in time to relax and settle in prior to my first day with my new job. Ben was off camping with his PhD buddies in the Adirondacks. Peace and Quiet. After re-reading a couple chapters from
The Order of the Phoenix, I tapped out.
June 4
th - First day at Lakeside. I met up with Jamie and she gave me another tour of the huge labyrinth of the facility. I also met a bunch of the clients I would be working with and observed a few groups in the Phoenix Behavioral Health program. <---- That is the new program in which I will be the Recreation Therapy Director/Music Therapist. Ben arrived home Monday night and took me out to dinner at
Aladdin's. It's a fine eating establishment catered to veggie hippies. Welcome to Ithaca!
I had training all day on Tuesday. It was a bunch of the same stuff I went through with
Devereux the first time around. The part that cracked me up was when a
few of the
CNA's freaked out about the FBI background check Lakeside administers. What kind of people are they hiring here?
The rest of the week was more observing and reading through medical charts.
Aside from working, Ben, Rich, Erin (Rich's girlfriend) and I started Salsa dance lessons. It's a 6 week session class held on Tuesday evenings at an extremely fancy and overpriced gym. If anyone knows what the
ACAC in West Chester is, you'll know what I'm talking about. But the Salsa classes seemed pretty reasonable and Ben definitely laid down some pretty sweet moves.
Over the weekend Ben and I drove down to P-Ville/Chester Springs to load up my life (and some of Ben's) belongings into a U-Haul plus two cars:
Before heading out of town we stopped over to visit with J.D. for a second to deliver the last of his nerf gun supplies, then made our way back up to Ithaca to unload.
Highlight of the weekend = Renting a ladder to hoist my full size mattress through the second story window since it failed to fit around the sexy curves of our stairs. Ben and Erik climbed up the ladder while my dad and I were at the receiving end. Sorry no actions shots - it was actually quite a quick process of about 20 seconds.
Pirates:
Stabilizing:
Testing:
Success:
Erik's mattress went up the stairs just fine, after we folded it like a taco.
Phew.
Week Two: Coming REALLY soon
Begins week two: I freakin' love my job. I started putting together a proposal at the end of last week for a purchase order containing music therapy items adding up to almost $500. Jamie told me to star the items that are needed more than others because she wasn't sure how much would be approved. We met with Pat (head honcho) today, who seemed very excited about the newly added Music Therapy program, and he approved my proposal, plus another order of activity/rec. and leisure supplies. Woohoo!
