Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

I have photos in two shows this First Friday. One is the Flickr Raleigh Social Group summer project. There are 50 of us who signed up to be in the show, so there will be as many as 50 photos hanging on the walls. One of them is mine. I’m not telling you which one because we submitted in seeeeekrit! The show will be juried, and there will be winners. It will be held at Crocker’s Mark Gallery at 613 W Morgan Street in Raleigh, next to Moonlight Pizza. I also have two photos up at Slim’s Downtown (227 S Wilmington St). I donated these two for a benefit for a friend’s grandmother’s cancer treatments.

Also, my friend Oliver is doing a First Friday show that’s just his work (he also has two in the Slim’s benefit). That will be at Cafe 101, located at 444 S Blount, near the corner of Davie.

I have too much crap to do to bother taking pictures, but I’m having a little bit of an apartment problem. I was in my largish bedroom closet two days ago, when I leaned over to pick up some laundry from the corner. One t-shirt was against the wall. I picked it up, and it was soaked. I pulled a few things away from the wall, and I revealed mildew and dampness all along the wall. I started hunting around and found the there was a leak at the bottom of the wall all along the back of my closet, there was dampness (not really a puddle) in the utility closet, and the coat closet had wet stains all around the bottom of the walls. Now, they have moved my dresser out of the closet (my awesome sturdy House of Denmark dresser that I’ve had since I was about 13) and into my bedroom. Water has clearly been soaking the bottom of it on one side for a while, so it’s definitely compromised. Ruined? Probably not. I may still get it checked out though. There might be a renter’s policy claim in that, although my deductible may be too high for it to mean much. Anyway, total pain. No thanks, annoying apartment issues! I don’t have enough space for the contents of my closet to be sitting around in the bedroom. The plan is that after they dry all the treated parts out for a few days, they will shampoo the carpet, then apply some other treatment or another, and that should be enough. There will also be a lot of repainting in that general area. Hope that’s all good enough. Did I mention I – like my Dad – am highly allergic to mildew? Good times. :S

Starting a business is difficult. While there was a pre-existing business in place, it was just one woman doing her thing. While she does have an office that is set up and a billing person, neither the office nor the billing structures are set up for me. More importantly, there is not a large group of people sitting outside said office asking for my services. Nope, I have to go find those myself. The woman I work with has been AMAZING regarding marketing. She has new ideas every day. I get these cute emails all the time. She thinks she’s annoying me with them, but honestly, I couldn’t be happier about them. She’s thinking about the part of a business that, for whatever reason, my mind doesn’t think about on its own. So I’m happily (at least usually) entering back into the world of professionalism – reading the latest research/information about ADHD (since I presume to know something about it and am now a bit behind), making lists, and generally “Getting Things Done.”

I’d pulled out my old PDA again and was starting to use it for listmaking, but all the software for it is pretty outdated. Since it was upgrade time for me with Verizon, I opted for – drum roll, please – a Blackberry (aka Crackberry). I love that I can just throw tasks, ideas, and appointments in there with only a couple of clicks, and it’s all sync’d up with my online stuff. MAGIC!

Crack

There are now two phones in my purse at all times: one for work calls and the other which contains pretty much everything I need to do my job: calendar, address book, email, even MP3’s to listen to. I even went so far as to download some free online talks about ADHD to get my mind back in the right mode of thinking. It’s HARD when you’re out of the game for a while. I’m SO glad I did that, because what I learned from listening to it a few days really caught me up so much, so that today, when I met with a psychiatrist who will hopefully be sending referrals my way, I sounded as if I had been thinking about all of these things all the time for the last year, rather than about things like getting a job and the licensure exam.

The tree has a “nose”, and I’m pretending to be a booger:

The most fun part of the 4th was the taking of this set of Polaroids:

My favorite part of 4th of July this year was this meta-creation of Polaroids. Perhaps this is our summer project?

1. Shannon’s picture of a flower
2. Shannon displaying her disappointment in the quality of her flower picture
3. Abby shows everyone how disappointed Shannon is
4. Robert shares the photo of Abby reacting to Shannon’s photo while Brian hams it up in the background
5. Rich sticks the Robert/Brian image in his pocket while (unbeknownst to him) Elise makes bunny ears.
6. Elise shows us the picture of Rich while Robert leans into the frame, looking slightly lecherous.

Click here for the originals.

I’ve been blog-neglectful as of late. Starting a private practice is hard work! And lots of other things have been going on, too. Most notably, I’ve seen my parents three times in the last 10 days. They stopped in Raleigh for a few days on their way to vacation in the Outer Banks (Duck, NC), which was great. They got to see my photo at Rebus Works, meet some of my friends, and share a few meals with me. It was really nice after a fairly hellish food-poisoning trip home at Christmas.

Mom’s recovering from double knee-replacement surgery and Dad is definitely down in the back, so they were both a bit hobbly, but hopefully that is a very temporary situation. Hot tubs at their hotel here and at the beach were certainly appreciated, although the long drive wasn’t exactly therapeutic.

On Friday, I went to the beach for a quick 24-hour visit and saw them along with their friends they’ve been traveling with for 30+ years. That was a nice break from Raleigh. I had some hot tub time, a nice walk on the beach, some group puzzle solving, a new location to photograph, and shared a wonderful meal with the group.

Spotted on my beach walk. The creators were nowhere nearby, but I was still impressed!

Then on their drive back to North Georgia, they stopped for lunch as well. Hooray for great parental visits, and we spaced it out enough that noone drove anyone crazy. Double score!