My Introduction and What I Did This Summer

I always feel like a boring person when I write these kinds of posts, but here we go. This will be my final semester at OU as a psychology major. I spent the majority of my summer working at the Connelly research lab on campus, helping run an I/O psych study on workplace behavior. I/O is not a part of psychology that I'm particularly fond of. There's nothing wrong with it, but it isn't my thing. Even so, I really enjoyed the people who work there, and the students that participated were all really nice. I am trying to get a position in a lab that focuses on personality psychology for the fall, because that's where I feel the most connection. The best thing about psych is probably that there are so many different aspects to it, so you can choose all kinds of things to do with your degree.

I also spent quite a bit of time with my teenage daughter this summer. It makes me happy that she still likes to hang out with me. I didn't spend this much time with my mom at her age, so I take it as a complement that she enjoys doing things with me. I think my favorite night this summer was when we sent my husband to a late movie with his friends. My daughter and I went to the store for snacks, then played games together until he got home around midnight. We also have a very cute cat named Mario. He's 18 years old and has some health problems. He has a bit of an attitude, but he's so cute that it's impossible not to love him. He likes to wear bow ties for Halloween every year. This year he also wore one on his birthday.

(Photo from my personal collection. Mario, April 2017)

I'm a grown up, I guess, but I really love playing video games. My husband plays them more than I do usually, but I have certain ones that I really like. This spring and summer I spent much of my free time playing Persona 5. It's so fun. I also write fan fiction for Persona 4 and Persona 5. I plan to bring some of those characters into my project for this class. I think it will be really fun if it all works out.

I'm sad that summer is just about over. My daughter goes back to high school tomorrow, and on Monday she starts as a concurrent student in college. I was hoping I would graduate before she got there, but she started early, and I was a bit late. I am studying for my GRE and working on an application for the psychology PhD program. I'm not sure how that will turn out, yet, but I'm going to do the best I can to make it happen. Most of my other classes this fall are psychology courses, which is good because it's why I'm here. The best class I took last semester, and maybe ever, was studio art therapy. There were a couple of papers, but other than that we just picked art projects and sat in a big room making art for the entire semester. It was relaxing and fun, and I loved having to buy art supplies and have ongoing art projects with deadlines. I don't make enough time for it when it isn't for a class, and that just makes me sad. The last project I did for that class, I folded about 300 paper cranes, then assembled some hoops that I strung lights on and hung the birds from. I nicknamed it the bird chandelier. I intended to make 1000 cranes but couldn't finish in the time I had. I plan to someday come back to it and finish them all.

(Photo from my Personal Collection. Paper Cranes, April 2017)

**Note: Thank you so much to everyone who has left me comments. I appreciate all of your kind words. I may not get a chance to reply to all of you but I do read them and every one of them makes me smile!