music, therapy, and me

I am a movie fanatic. This manifests itself in a large library of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, lots of soundtracks in my music library, and countless hours spent watching movies when I should (goblin!) be doing something else. I use the excuse that I need something going on in the background when I am working, and music is too distracting to my concentration. Movies fit the bill, especially when I know them by heart...and I know lots of movies by heart! I am especially drawn to old musicals. You know the ones - the big productions of the 50's and 60's that included lots of singing and dancing. I love those, but I think my favorites are the ones from the 40's. I love just about anything with Bing Crosby in it, and he was in two of my favorites, White Christmas and Holiday Inn. In both of those movies, the song, White Christmas, is featured, but that song isn't my favorite for either movie. In Holiday Inn, I love "I've Got Plenty to Be Thankful For," and my secon...

Every morning, I wake up, do my morning hygiene routine, and then log onto my computer. Part of my computer routine is to log into this blogging platform, and then I see the number of views of each post before I open a new screen. Lately, my views are the same number - there are some of you out there that are reading this blog every morning even when the things that I am writing about aren't anything other than things that have nothing to do with music therapy and have to do with only me. Thank you for reading this. You know who you are, and I don't know who you are, but I appreciate that you take the time to look at this small little blog. It means lots to me. I am starting to find my way back to happy thoughts and musings about music therapy again. Yesterday was a good day, full of working on projects that needed to be done and full of music therapy interactions with some of my favorite people on the planet - my clients. I spent some time improvising and then throwing...

I am currently making a hearty breakfast of chicken, spinach, and mashed potatoes for this day, March 1, 2019. I have a late start day today (because of all the inclement weather days that we had in January and February), so I have about an hour and 45 minutes before I have to leave my house and go to work. I am really liking this arrangement of working a 5 hour day on Fridays. Since today is also World Music Therapy Day, I am also taking some time to reflect on my life as a music therapist over the past 26 years. The two things really do go together in my head, I promise!! My breakfast is the result of a melding of different tastes, textures, and food groups. It is not a combination that I found in any type of cookbook or recipe site - it is something that I've made up through putting things into my crock pot and seeing what will happen. Now, I tend to do crock pot things this way. I buy some chicken pieces, look in the freezer for the vegetables that I am going to put into a ...

Today is an anniversary, of sorts! I've written two thousand, eighteen posts as of today!!! I am astounded that I am still writing these daily thoughts, twelve years after I started this entire blog. I initially started a blog because I could and because it seemed to be a good medium for me to figure out music therapy thoughts and problems. My first year was not a very productive year. If you go back, you'll see that there was only one back in 2006 - a very innocuous post about the weather in Kansas at the moment. The next years brought some more thoughts, but I didn't really figure out what I wanted this blog to be until about 2014. I now write about 338 posts per year, about several different music therapy topics, and about lots of "me" topics! Now, I know that this is a TME Tuesday, so I am going to share a YouTube video that I recently shared in a songswap challenge on Facebook. I am going to make videos a priority when it comes to my next stuff to do, so ...

Well, it's been fun, but it's almost time to head out and get back home. I gave two presentations yesterday, and the feedback was tremendous. I spoke about how I strive to become a more research-informed clinician to a group of about 46 folks. I admitted that my journal shelf is pretty but underutilized. I showed them one of my journals - from 3 years ago - still in the plastic covering. Did you know that the plastic covering on our journals starts to actively degrade after 3 years? I left a trail of fragile plastic bits in my wake! Several people thanked me for admitting that I struggle with the integration of research into my clinical practice. I even found out about PICO stuff in the nursing literature (I haven't started to explore that yet, but I hear that it's a way to help you parse through research to find information). My second presentation yesterday was about navigating slumps. We talked about such uplifting topics as burnout, secondary trauma, and compass...