Thursday, April 11, 2019

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2005. We took Mattie to the US Arboretum that weekend. We did this almost every April. As I loved how the azaleas seemed to be timed with Mattie's birthday. It was my joke with Mattie, as I said the azaleas were celebrating his birthday, which is why they always bloomed in April. 

Quote of the day: Generosity is not in giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is in giving me that which you need more than I do. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Look at this face! This is our Indie. Peter picked up Indie today from boarding and I picked up Sunny. Apparently the veterinary clinic LOVED Indie and made her cat of the week! They even posted this on Facebook. I download their photo collage of our Ms. Indie! Stunning, no? Indie is happy to be home and has settled right back in! 

Meanwhile, Sunny has come home a bit agitated and anxious. He goes on hunger strikes when we go away. He really puts our boarding facility through their paces. But they really try giving him all sorts of foods to inspire him to eat. Mind you I send him to boarding with a container filled with ground beef and another of ground turkey. Sunny knows the facility has other things too, like cooked chicken, rice, and pumpkin. So don't you know he holds out until he gets all these goodies! That's my Sunny. 

After I picked up Sunny, we went for a two mile Walk and then he came home and got lots of treats. 



It was a full day of chores and work, despite going to bed at 3:30am! I still can't get over the harrowing airplane experience we had yesterday. It was significant enough that American Airlines gave every passenger 5,000 bonus reward miles in our emails today! I am truly happy to be on the ground and to me the real hero is the pilot, who knew how to land this plane safely, despite its mechanical issues. 

I did not get the opportunity to post some photos from Phoenix. On Tuesday night, we went to the conference's opening party. They had a mariachi band playing, featuring a local high school group. They were amazing! In this photo from left to right are:
Lori (who works at NIH and we have been working closely with her for 7 years now), Nancy (a social worker from NY, and is good friends with my friend Peggy), me, and Peter.

Rarely do we get photos of just us! Nancy snapped this of us right before we presented on Wednesday morning. 

Peter caught me in action. We were the morning's conference plenary. Which meant that we had 200 conference attendees in the grand ballroom listening to us for two hours. Of that portion, I spoke for twenty minutes, as did Peter.  

Our panel we presented with. From left to right are:
Peter, Lori, Wendy (an amazing social worker from Canada, who we just formally invited to be a part of our Core research team. Wendy has been working with us since 2013), me, and Spencer (a social worked based in Kentucky).


When we left the hotel yesterday, we felt very positive. So many conference attendees stopped us in the hallway to thank us for presenting and specifically for the vision to create Psychosocial Standards of Care. The beauty of the Standards is it allows hospital administrators to really see and evaluate what a psychosocial professionals do, their versatility, and importance. So many people tell us how the Standards help them justify their jobs and in fact, result in getting more new hires at their institutions. In any case, hearing this unsolicited feedback made us feel like what we have and continue to do is of importance and is slowly making a difference.