TME Tuesday: Mother Nature Strikes Again

Yesterday, at this time, I was getting ready to spend the night at my job. About halfway through the day, though, I remembered that my Christmas boxes were supposed to be delivered. I did not want two large boxes to sit on my porch for two days, getting covered by snow, and tempting other people to take them. My father's (and mine as well) cornet was shipped this time around. If I lost that, I would be heart broken as it is something we shared. So, I drove home yesterday afternoon, pulled in the boxes, and decided that I would try to get to work this morning through the storm. I have now decided that I will not be doing that. All of the roads between here and work are completely covered with snow and ice. While I would love the extra sick time, I am not all that willing to risk my life by sliding off roads and into ditches on completely covered roads. It has happened before, and I am determined that it will not happen to me again.

So, I now have a day at home without plans. This is a bit unfortunate because I was on a roll yesterday with therapeutic music experience (TME) development. (By the way, TME is what I call the elements of my music therapy session - each one is a discrete interaction with clients, and the term is one that originated with an intern from Western Michigan University - it resonated with me in a way that other terms just did not. So, I adopted it as my own term.) I finished two TMEs yesterday using some books from my book cabinet. While my intern was doing documentation, I went through the book cabinet drawers and removed all the holiday books. I also took out all the farm-themed books, and these were the impetus for the TMEs I created. The first two were "reading to a beat" TMEs, and then I made a template for more of these types of TMEs.

I am finding that using my time making templates is a good use of that time. If I can put in most of the criteria for a certain type of TME, I can add or adapt the criteria to match the specifics of each song or experience. I now have three of these templates - one for sequencing songs, one for piggyback songwriting experiences, and this one for "reading to a beat" TMEs.

I am not sure why I haven't thought of this type of organization before. It is almost too silly to contemplate, but this tip is helping me save a bit of time. I am all about working smarter, so this fits in really well with my life quests. I wonder if other people would use this type of system...

Perhaps this bonus day is a good time to work on making some more templates. I can think about the different types of goals that I have for my clients. There are some things that can be generalized a bit into these types of templates. I can do one for dancing TMEs - structured and unstructured. I can do the same thing for general instrument play TMEs, for our powerpoint presentations, and for other things as well. Once the templates are in place, then writing TMEs becomes a bit less time-consuming and a bit easier.

Making a template for my therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I thought about what I felt was important to understand about music, and I included those things into the template. Now, I am taking that template and setting up subtemplates, if you will. Everything is based on the original TME template but focuses on the actual music experiences that I want to share with my clients.

My TME development goal for this week is off to a good start with two TMEs and a template finished. I have three more TMEs to write before I accomplish my personal quest for the week. I am allowed to lift and move the keyboard again, so I am able to play and do some composing. This is good because I have written most of several other TMEs, but I had to wait until I could work out melody lines and harmonic progressions to finish them. I can do that now because I can hear the music and notate it. Hooray! That makes me a bit more motivated to actually compose music and create TMEs from those compositions.

So, Mother Nature may have thwarted me in the fact that I cannot get to work this morning, but that is fine. I am somewhat flexible. I wish I could get out of my house to get some extra time off later, but I am not willing to put my life on the line. I have spent too much time in a ditch before, and I will not do that again!

Happy Tuesday, all!