Accomplish your goals! Accomplish nothing!

Today's goal:  To get up and moving first thing this morning so I can get all of my errands done by noon!

Reality:  I forgot to charge my cell phone last night, so it was almost dead this morning.  My wife has the checkbook so I can't pay the bills.  (Not everything is convenient to pay online.)  No one seems to be in their office when I call them.  And Adorable Preciousness keeps demanding my attention...  Distracting me from hammering out the math to pay certain bills.

I'm frustrated that I'm not accomplishing any of my goals.  So, I abandoned them.  Took it easy and pushed my daughter on the swing.

I'm already about three weeks behind on my work.  What is another day?

Kristin Moura - Once Called Home

I love the music on this!  The words, the tune...  And the video is even really good!



She used to be a guild mate of mine in World of Warcraft.  She transferred off to another server, but she was always friendly and kept in touch.

Enjoy the music!

Mental Health Issues and Law Enforcement

On the street, there are easy ways and hard ways for Law Enforcment to help those with mental health issues.

The hard way, yet proper way, is to get a "Green Warrant" or Temporary Detainment Order.  This requires the Officer/Deputy to spend hours and hours of their time attempting to get Mental Health Officials to find a bed somewhere for this individual.  This is the long, hard way.  This often will involve their time and keep them off the street and unavailable for calls for up to twelve hours.  This will lead into overtime, or more likely "trade time" so the counties don't have to pay extra.  Understandably, most of the deputies/officers will tell us that their supervisors discourage them taking this course of action.

Unfortunately, the easy way is to arrest the individual.  It is quite easy to drum up a reason to help arrest an individual whom has an altered mental status.  Once the individual is under arrest, then it is up to the jail to get the new inmate assistance on their mental health issues.  The Officer/Deputy spends no more than an hour (often less) tied up with the arrest, and then they are back on patrol.  However, if you are the son of an influential politician (Say, Gus Deeds) then local law enforcement tend to treat you with kid gloves.  

Sometimes it is easy, such as getting their previous medical history and getting them back on their medications.  Sometimes the inmate needs to be seen by mental health and they will diagnose and medicate them while they are incarcerated.  Sometimes the inmate needs to be transferred to the state forensic facility in order to receive proper treatment...  but there are only a handful of state forensic facilities capable of handling inmates.   This is a long process for most inmates.

We had one inmate who was HUGE!  And he was dangerous.  Any time we dealt with him we had to pull multiple officers, we had to restrain the inmate, et al.  This inmate was assault and destructive.  Mentally, the best way to describe him as if there was no one home upstairs.  His behavior was random, and often he would not acknowledge other people.  We delt with him for a year, yet mental health kept claiming that he was faking the entire time.  It took a year of his behavior in jail (whereupon the judge kept kicking him out of court) before the forensic facility took the inmate.  That inmate is still in that facility.

But we had one inmate who's dad was a lawyer.  The kid was a little snot.  He took a small amount of a medication that I will not identify due to liability reasons.  That inmate refused his medications for a long time, and we knew that he was doing so in order to act out in court.  (This trick is a common trick among inmates.)  Well, he acts out in court and due to him having a well connected father and a well paid lawyer that inmate was in the forensic unit the next day.

Money talks.

What was odd to me was that the inmate came to court directly from the forensic unit, and got a slap on the wrist sentence.  The inmate still got jail time, just not much of it.  It was passed on from the security unit that the inmate tried to spit out his medications undetected in order to "freak out" in court a second time.  The way the news reported it, our facility neglected to give him proper mental health treatment.  We got the blame, because under HIPPA we can't make medical statements.  (I doubt that the media bothered to contact our agency in the first place, or if they did it was a last minute call and we didn't have time to prep a statement.)

Our mental health system is screwed up.  Part of the problem is that people don't want to work hard (or are discouraged from working hard) and do their job properly.  But often the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

There is the money... but I can't get to it.

I'm getting kind of frustrated at life.  I've been trying to knock out my bills for years now.  I'll admit that I wasn't all that "smart" when we started paying off the bills, and we had made some dumb purchases.  A bit of our initial financial advice ended up being pretty dumb...  But I will state that it seemed to be good advice before the recession hit.

We got onto a smarter plan of paying off our bills, but we still had a lot of major issues.  Our oil furnace had a catastrophic failure despite getting regular maintenance and repairs.  (We ended up replacing the whole system, and it does not perform to our expectations.)  We had a car with a ton of maintenance issues, when the transmission went we decided that the cost of the repair would go towards a down payment of a used car.  (And we paid it off in three years!)  My wife got laid off.  Every time I got close to paying off a credit card, we'd have another emergency or...  or something.  It got frustrating when I ended up paying one credit card off multiple times because the other was maxed out and "something" would happen.

Finally I have the car paid off, the new heat pump paid off, and all of my credit cards except for one is paid off!  Less than $1000 to go!

I keep trying to work Overtime at work.  That is good money.  I take all the options I can.  For some reason or other I keep missing out on it.  Suddenly I get the opportunity to make approximately $500 in overtime!  Whee!  I'm signed up for two days of work, even though this made my wife very angry.  (She gets upset at me choosing work over family time...  She is more emotional, I'm more logical but that is how it works.)

So, I come down to this weekend.  I can earn approximately $500 by working Overtime on Friday and Sunday.  Come Friday, Adorable Preciousness is sick thus I have to stay home with her.  I got a call and I was advised that the reason for overtime on Sunday has now "gone away" thus I will not be needed.

/seething

I'm so close.  I see the money, but I can't grab it.

So close.