Reboot...

Yes, it's been a few months, and even though getting this blog going again was already on my radar, I was recently reminded by a friend that it had been awhile since my last post (is there a "sheepish grin" smiley?)

So what's been going on lately? As stated by the wise Inigo Montoya...let me explain, no there's no time...let me sum up.

Well, for starters, I graduated as planned from the University of Washington last June my Doctoral degree in Physical Therapy. After 3 years of studying I could finally call myself a physical therapist! It was a long journey to be sure and I still have so many moments where I'm just trying to figure it all out - but I am there!

This summer was a whirlwind, considering that in the space of three days I 1. Took my national board exam (Tuesday), 2. Accepted a job at Valley Medical Center in their Children's Therapy Department (Wednesday) and left on a two week vacation to visit family in Mexico (Thursday) - nuts but worth it. I passed my boards, love my job and had an incredible time with family. I'll post a little later with some choice pictures.

Working at Valley has been a joy. I have wonderful mentors and a caseload ranging from toddlers to teens of many different diagnoses. It is challenging to be sure and I am constantly reminded of how much I still have to learn - but to be in such a supportive place with such incredible clinicians inspires me to learn and always try to be better. Loving the kids too!

The other half of my life, as usual, is immersed in my involvement at church. I'm still a Core Team member through our Life Teen program and this year am helping to teach Confirmation classes as well - one of my favorite times of year. We are excited to welcome Seattle's new Archbishop, J. Peter Sartain, to St. John's to celebrate our Confirmation liturgy on February 3rd - a blessing to be sure. Just a few days later, I will be headed on a quick trip to Chicago to be a Godmother for a beautiful little girl who is the daughter of two dear friends. I am excited to see them again, and humbled to have been asked to take on this role in her life.

The other work in progress in my life involves striking out on my own. After 6 wonderful years back at home, it's time to set out and be independent, now that school is done and work has started. I'm currently pursuing renting a condo not too far from home/work/church and will be sure to let everyone know if it goes through!

I'll keep it brief for today, but will absolutely try to be better about keeping this thing updated again. It's a new year and an exciting new time in my life and I hope to share!

7 Quick Takes...Volume 8

1. Trying to get the blog back on track slowly :) I love the idea of the blog but find it so darn easy to let it slip when I get busy with school, clinicals, church or whatever. I'm hoping to start posting again a little more regularly :)

2. This week will be my last at Valley Children's Therapy which is so hard to believe. I've always had it in my heart that I want to go into pediatrics but I wouldn't know for sure if that's where I was called until I actually worked in the setting. Well, sufficed to say that it only took me a couple of weeks to be sure. The amazing thing is that 10 weeks have gone by and I'm ready to move on to my last clinical internship - crazy, I'm going to miss my kids! Now it's time to prepare to apply for jobs to start this fall!

3. Speaking of my last clinical internship, I move to Portland in two weeks for my last one at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. Well, technically I'll be moving to Vancouver, just across the river. My friend Br. Matthew's parents, who I visit with my friend Janet every New Year's Day, have graciously offered to let me stay at their place for the couple of months I'm at Emanuel. I drove down with my mom on Friday and it looks like it's a 20 minute commute without traffic - not bad :) I think it'll be a great opportunity and I'm excited to see the light at the end of the tunnel (graduation!)

4. Today is my friend Lou's 30th birthday, and to celebrate, last night his wife Michelle threw him a masquerade ball bash! It was a lot of fun and a great excuse to dress up fancy pants style :) It was great to see everybody dressed up in costumes or formal wear with some pretty fun and creative masks. I didn't have my camera unfortunately so no pics to post, you'll have to take my word for it.

5. I've been helping with the Confirmation program and tomorrow I have to teach a night on Bible 101. I'll probably be spending most of today planning for it :) It's a great chance to dispel some of those "Catholics aren't biblical" myths. Confirmation has been fun but also quite a challenge. At Life Teen, I find that that most of the teens want to be there, and so when you're teaching, for the most part, they're ready to learn. Confirmation kids run the gamut from, "my parents made me come, and I've been really poorly catechized" to "I go to Catholic school and I know all the facts but I don't want to be here" to "I'm really excited about this, and want to learn everything I can". Question is - how do you design a teaching that reaches them all? It's a challenge I love as a catechist and I hope I'm rising to it.

6. Our not so winter-like winter is fading away - the trees are in full bloom and the daffodils are flowering. I've been trying to go outside and play a little more, and picked up a couple of letterboxes in Tukwila to get my find count up to 50! As if that wasn't enough sign that I'm hooked, next weekend the letterboxing crew I usually go out with down here (known in the logbooks as Happily Ever After, Leonheart and The 7th Day) along with a few others are heading to a park just south of Olympia for a letterboxing event! Lots of 'boxers, and boxes and general fun to be had. Yeah, we're nerds but it's cool.

7. My lenten challenge this year, instead of giving something up, was to read a chapter of a book I got on praying the Divine Office every night and actually try to make it happen. It's going pretty well so far - I've only missed a couple of days and am now praying night prayer every night before bed. I'm discovering the beauty of the psalms and hymns in the Office (no not the Michael Scott kind :) ) and am hoping to add Morning and Evening Prayers soon. It's such a beautiful sign of unity to know that around the world thousands are joining in the same prayer with you!

On reading...

I know that the day to day updates have been well...not so day to day since I started my pediatric clinical rotation. Suffice to say that it's been going wonderfully and I only have two weeks left! But more on that in another post.

I had an idea that stemmed from a while back, when I joined the web community Shelfari, a place where you can create a virtual bookshelf for yourself. I haven't really updated my page in awhile, but I recently was thinking about a group I'd joined on the site called the 50 Book Challenge. The group was formed due to this quote by Apple president Steve Jobs regarding the Amazon Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

The 50 book challenge was basically a place for people to set a reading goal for the year then track their progress.

The whole notion of reading is a deep-rooted one for me. Growing up, I was voracious reader - no, really, I mean voracious. I was already beginning to read by the time I started kindergarten, and I spent the next 12 years of my public school education gobbling up every single book I could find. I went through spurts - the young adult pop novels...Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, the teen horror novels...Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine, historical fiction, the classics - you name it. When I was in 5th and 6th grade, my best friend at the time, Rachel, and I had contests with each other to see who could go through an author's entire repertoire first - we tackled L.M. Montgomery (of Anne of Green Gables fame), Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This crazy love of reading continued right up until college. It was this love of reading that helped me get nearly straight A's in high school, that got me into undergrad, that helped me through the Honors Program at Western. But during my time at Western something completely unexpected happened - I got BUSY. Classes, projects, my involvement with the campus minstry - these things became my calling and whatever reading I was doing was more for class and less for me. Sadly, this became a habit. I made it out of undergrad, through two years of working full time and back to graduate school and even though I tried to read for pleasure other things also occupied my brain and my time. It wasn't that I didn't love to read anymore - I did - I just didn't make the time for it.

Throughout all of this, I started keeping a "Books to Read" list in a small yellow notebook that fit in my purse. The aim was to have this when I went to the library, so I could find books on the shelf I was interested in. I still loved reading book reviews, jotting down titles, even if I didn't always make the time to get to them. That list has grown and grown and I'm now in the process of digitizing it - adding it to my "should" list on All Consuming and it's sparked something in me to rediscover and reclaim my love of reading.

I've rediscovered my love of used book stores, the well stocked and low priced book section at our new nearby St. Vincent de Paul store. Maybe the Kindle is great for some, but me, I love to snuggle up and page through a good old fashioned paper novel.

So begins my own 50 Book Challenge. I'm hoping to post progress as I go. I am also borrowing from my friend Janet a quasi-reading plan. She told me a while back that she was hoping to read a book of fiction, a non-fiction book and then a classic and begin the cycle again. That sounds like a great plan so I hope to hop on board with that one too. Without further ado - book 1 :)

1. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb (3/7/10)
Still not sure how I feel about this one. Definitely a tragic heroine, who is good at making mistakes over and over, but who life has not paid any favors to either. Morally, there was a lot in the book that I didn't agree with either, which my have contributed, but at the same time, the picture painted of Dolores, and the time she lived in (1950s-1980s) was incredibly realistic.

Up Next: Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
On Deck: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens