A New Park, A New Position and Other Updates

First, I would like to apologize for my inactivity in recent days.  It's been a busy and exhausting week.  I found out on the 14th that I was getting a new position for which I had recently interviewed, but was also informed that I would be transferring to the new position in two weeks, which is virtually unheard of at the government agency for which I work.  I am excited about the new position, but trying to figure out a transition plan for myself, the team I work on currently and all the patients on my caseload has been overwhelming in many ways.  The other complicating factor is that my supervisor was out of the office on leave until a week after I found out, and she had to rubber stamp any proposed transition plans.  After I had to tell her on her first day back from vacation that I was leaving in a week.  As you might imagine, it has been a challenging week, and this coming week promises to be at least as challenging.

The new position, for those of you who are interested in such things, is clinical social work on the inpatient psychiatry unit.  Still mental health, still social work, but in a different environment with a different acuity level.  Also much shorter term work with patients than I have ever done.  I think it will be a good change; still with a patient population with which I am familiar and comfortable, but utilizing different skills and in a different context.  Here's hoping it's at least not any worse than where I've been.

I also undertook the terribly anxiety-provoking task of returning a pair of shoes that I had worn once to Nordstrom Rack.  Now, I am not someone who returns purchases if there is any way around it.  But I had purchased a super cute pair of Keens that proceeded to rub my heels raw on the one occasion that I wore them.  When I tried to return them, I was informed that a manager would have to get involved since I had worn them the one time.  When the manager finally did appear, she did her very best to make me feel like dirt for wanting to return a pair of shoes that I had worn once.  She made it clear that she was doing me a real favor by allowing me to return the shoes.  The end result?  I got my money back and will never buy a pair of shoes there again, which means that I will never shop there again, since that's all that I've purchased there in the past.  I think it is absolutely ridiculous that you cannot return a pair of shoes after you've worn them ONCE.  It is virtually impossible to determine in ten minutes in the store whether a pair of shoes is going to work for you or not.  So, in the future I will only purchase shoes from a store that has a reasonable return policy.

In other news, Margo and I went to a new "park" yesterday (#41).  Technically, it's an "area" but I'm going to classify it as a park for the sake of my goals.  We drove an hour and half north to the Skagit Wildlife Area on the recommendation of a book that turns out to be less than reliable.  We are on our way to becoming amateur bird watchers, and the book suggested that we would find lots of migrating swans as well as raptors on the Fir Island Farm Reserve this time of year.  Our first sighting, just outside the Reserve, was this fellow:

This is the only thing I took a picture of, in spite of the fact that Margo had graciously packed my camera in addition to hers.  And I took this picture with her camera, not mine.  We actually saw quite a few great blue herons.  We've actually seen quite a lot of great blue herons since we moved to Washington.  Seeing them in flight is quite striking, and they always seem a bit prehistoric to me.  We saw a number of other birds in the Reserve, including bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, spotted towhees, sky larks, and a red-breasted merganzer.  We also saw a number of hunters, as the Reserve is open for public hunting from September 1 - March 15.  Fortunately, we did not get shot.

We saw not a single swan in the Reserve, although we did see a number of them in farm fields near the reserve.  My guess is that they were scared off of the reserve by all the gunfire.  Here you can see some of the swans that we saw.

We had a nice time walking around two different areas of the reserve and enjoyed the dry day very much (although we still ran into plenty of mud).  We ran into the same pair of socially awkward but enthusiastic bird watchers at both areas of the reserve.  They clearly know much more about birds than we do, as evidenced by their excitement about seeing a shrike (I wouldn't know one if it landed on my shoulder) and their lecture about the age at which bald eagles start to look like bald eagles (apparently around 3 years of age, depending on the nutrients available to them, but in Nova Scotia it is ALWAYS at 3 years of age).  Someday, maybe we will know enough to intimidate and impress younger, more inexperienced bird watchers.  We got quite a bit of exercise (#4) and were exhausted by the time we got home.  We also stopped at the Seattle Premiere Outlets on the way home and I purchased six pairs of new underwear (#95) at the Jockey outlet.  Now I can throw a number of other pairs in the garbage.

I'm going to try another recipe tonight, so I'll update you with the results later this week.  My goal is to have something else posted before next weekend, so we'll see how that goes.