School and other stuff...

It's taking a while to get to this. I just keep distracting myself. I know that writing this is going to be painful. To start off with, I didn't compusively over eat today. I think I under ate. That's OK, I can afford to loose the weight.

That somehow isn't quite right. Oh well. Onwards. I tried to get up at 07:00, that was not exactly when my body wanted to get up. I did get up at 07:30 though, and got to Oso to meet with Robin, to go to Castlegar. We had some really good conversation on the way to Castlegar. She is a really great person to talk to. We talked about a number of things. Mentioned that my dealing with food is pretty much in my blog. We talked about some of the healing type stuff she's doing, and some of the healing type stuff that I'm doing. Looking at the Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT (one word, not three letters)) Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life Authors: Steven Hayes, Spencer Smith
is the book I looked briefly at this morning.

We then talked a bit about what we were going to talk about with Deb. A pre-briefing sort of thing. I felt pretty good with this. Felt like I knew what was coming. Not quite sure that I really did know what was coming. Then Robin gave me a couple of books to look at. One regarding Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) and depression and anxiety comorbitity. I really got into the book about ACT. It felt like it was providing something that I could really connect with. The DBT for Depression and Anxiety (I think that's the title) book I had difficulty with the writing style, and I'll admit, I had difficulty with the re-working of DBT. Not that I don't think that it's a good idea to use for other conditions than Borderiline Personality Disorder (BPD), just that even though there was some real acknowledgement of the source (Masha Linehan), it really did not do justice to the original work. To me, it was a ``lesser'' Skills Training Manual, which I found a little difficult to take. Though, it's more accessable in some senses.

I read some of that material. Sat around for a little bit. Looked through the Castlegar News. There was a nice digital photography thing that was included in the advertising inserts. I'm looking at getting a digital SLR camera, for proffessional work. I was thinking Pentax, but it doesn't seem that Pentax has a true proffessional digital SLR, so am now thinking probably of either Canon, or Nikon. This information becomes more relevant later I think. Went a little before (about 5 minutes) the 11:00 meeting time, and met Robin in her office.

I met with Robin and Deb in Robin's office. I was really willing to admit that I felt that the process will bring up a lot of emotional stuff, and it actually did do exactly that. There was a point that Deb said that she wasn't feeling like she was expressing herself well, and was having a difficult time. I later told her that I really appreciated that. After I had relaxed a bit myself. I think on a couple of times I mentioned that I wasn't processing the information very well, and I think overall the meeting went pretty well. I have almost come to the conclusion that I will not be able to do the Social Service Worker Certificate Program (SSW program) at this time. I have recieved the letter that Deb said she would get to me before the end of the day. I am kind of glad that I did not have that in front of me to distract me.

I really feel like I did a good job of attending to both Robin, and Deb. I think that I would like to ask both of them how they felt I did in regards to that. Maybe they didn't pay attention to that. I don't know. I think that context is very important for me. When I'm listening I tend to keep good eye contact, tend to be good with attending to what is being said, and generally have pretty good skills with dealing with the interaction. When I am sharing something, especially something that is painful, I find it very difficult to keep eye contact. I find that it's easier to handle the emotional content if I don't maintain eye contact through the emotional stuff. Which makes me wonder if maybe while I was going through the real emotional turmoil, if I was not maintaining eye contact. I know afterwords I certainly was.

I then talked to Robin a bit about the whole process. We talked for about 10 minutes, we'd already talked for about an hour before this meeting, and an hour in this meeting. I felt that we were really making good progress.

I then went to the administration office to ask a couple of questions. I got a course calendar for next year. I'm looking at right now possibly taking the Multimedia Design and Production, then leading into a International Digital Film. But, to get into the Multimedia Design and Production, I would have to have a portfolio. I don't have one now. Also, I would really like to have the equipment that is requested for the program well in advance so that I can work with it, and start developing my skills with that equipment. This would probably be at least a couple thousand dollars worth of equipment. Especially as I ideally would like to go into the International Digital Film with the equipment that would work well for that as well.

Menwhile, I think I will probably start taking some second year corses, probably focusing on the Psychology. There are 6 second year psychology courses that I can take. I would like to get 4 or 5 of them this next year. I suspect that I can fairly safely get 4, and depending on how that works out, I may try to get that 5th one in the winter term.

Then I came home. Well no, I didn't come home. I decided that I would check out the digital SLR cameras. I had been thinking of a Pentax, but all Pentax digital SLR cameras currently have a 6.1 Mega Pixel rating. which according to Canon is good for printing up to 13x19. Which is a nice size. But then when you look at the actual image size in pixels, that is 3072x2048. I would like to print at at least 600dpi, preferably 720dpi, which means, this would be 3x5 or 2x4, which really to me is not enough resolution for proffesional photography. Great for web pages and such, but if I want to print these pictures, I feel that I want them to print at a resolution that I can't tell the difference between film, and digital without a magnifying glass. For now, this resolution will work for me. In the future it may not. So I have almost decided that I want to get a Canon. It seems to be the camera system that provides me with the most options, and the longest time that it will be usable. And, it provides me with something somewhat better resolution wise than the Pentax, at a marginal increase in price. Other features I'm not entirely sure about. I do know that I will find this out when I get my hands on the camera. I suspect that it does have most (if not all) of the features that would make me think differently. The one feature I'd like to see, but is only available on Olympus cameras, and that isn't much different a camera than the Pentax cameras, is the automatic dust reduction of the CMOS in the body when lenses are changed. Great if I'm changing lenses frequently. Not nescesary otherwise.

I also looked at some information about digital video recorders. I don't know what price range to look at for that. I have seen them in the price range of $300 to $3000. I'm almost certain that I do not want to look at a $300 camera, but I'm not sure I need to spend $3000 on a camera. Presonally, I think I would probably be looking at around $1000 for a camera that I'd be happy with, maybe not ``indefinately'', but until I can afford to purchase one that is higher end than that (like $3000). Looking at what is available in that range, I would have to say that this does seem like a good price range for me to be looking at.

Then I came home. I was hungry. I decided that I wanted to make a salad. But the bowl I make salad in is in the freezer (not now, but then) with food for my worms. So I decid I'll feed my worms. But first I need to suck out some of the extra water that is in the bottom of the bin. Hm, another time consuming process. Well no problem, we'll do that. I setup my bin to do just this. Then I realise I should eat before I do this, so I am juggling getting worm juice out of my worm bin, and getting dinner. Why? No idea. I just want to get that worm juice out of my bin as fast as possible. So I'm doing this, cutting up some tomatoes cleaning cutting boards, finding out that I burnt my window sill when I put the pot of quinoi and lentls on it, burnt it through the flexible cutting board that I put the pot on top of. I haven't looked at the bottom of the pot yet, or tried to clean it. I should do that now, as I didn't do dishes last night. So now I'm down one cutting board, and I have a burnt spot on my windowsill which I need to deal with, because the wood needs to be protected.

Ate my lovely tomato salad. Came back to my appartment (I like to eat in the company of others when possible, it helps somewhat with the compulsive over eating, though I have had big binges in the presence of others). The place is a mess. I now clean up the worm juice to the best of my ability, put too food in, which has now thawed out nicely. Realising that it's worth the time to cut up my worm food into reasonable sized chunks. I prefer feeding them that, and I really don't want to find whole onions that are even worse off than when I put them in in my bin (which is exactly what I found in my bin today). It's the first thing I found that I decided it's better to do things right the first time, in the long run it saves time. The second thing was taking my power suply out of my laptop bag, and deciding that I really should have put it in properly, because it would have come out so much nicer.

I called Margo, talked to her a bit, and didn't get a chance to talk to my sister or parents. That's about it for today.

Oh, time I started this was 9:59, it is now 1:33. Three and a half hours roughly to get through posting this. And this, I think was a really good day. Want to sleep in tomorrow, but only until about 10:00. Maybe sleep a bit durring the day. I really don't know.

Jessica