My Passions

My life is full of blessings. My passions stretch across the board. This post will just let me share some of those with you.

I am a spiritual if not overly religious being. My belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit remains firm. How I perceive that trinity and how I conduct my worship for them changes, but my belief in them and their guidance in my life do not waiver.

My husband (of 11 years on August 26th) and my son (turning 4 on August 24th) provide me with the love and stability that this Gemini needs in her life. We play, fuss, fight, and live. They are my favorite people in the world, and I love them! Other family members enrich my life immeasurably, and it is impossible to list each of them separately without filling up my blog, so just know that I am passionate about both of our families, too.

Work...stimulates my mind, aggravates me beyond belief, and allows me to meet a lot of truly wonderful people. I have been a V.R. Counselor with the State of Tennessee for 9 years with 7.5 of them spent working with people who are blind or visually impaired in 5/6 counties in Southern Middle Tennessee. My wish is to be able to share vision and low vision information with everyone that needs it regardless of whether or not they want or need the services of my agency. Many people with low vision do not go to ophthalmologists or have low vision exams. They don't know the number and variety of low vision aids available to improve their activities of daily living or job performance.

School, apparently I am addicted. My bachelors of science degree came from the University of Tennessee at Martin in May of 1993 in Secondary Education, English. I began working on a master's in school counseling at Middle Tennessee State University (one class at a time) in spring of 1998 and continued working on that degree (roughly about 5 years) until I reached the point that I would have to end my current career to participate in two 300-hour internships and decided that I did not want to quit my job. So... my agency is mandated to reach a certain percentage of "qualified" counselors by a certain year. To reach that goal, they are working with the federal government to pay for masters' degrees in Rehabilitation Counseling via distance education. Still wanting my master's, I signed on for the one through Auburn University. Auburn rocks! We, my distance education cohorts and I, go to the Auburn Campus one week each semester. This summer marks the end of our first year, and we only have one to go. My husband has been and is very supportive of my educational endeavors despite wanting to kill me for not knowing what I want to be when I grow up!

Fun - definitely! I adore reading, movies & music and have all of my life. I love to take pictures, so scrapbooking provides a creative outlet for me despite my limited creative abilities. I love to make scrapbooks for other people to share the pictures I take. Online gaming is a fairly recent passion. World of Warcraft was my first experience and lasted about a year. It is a fun game, but many of my guildies (including husband, family members, and real-life friends) moved onto Everquest 2, so I moved with them. It took awhile for me to get the hang of EQ2, but now I really enjoy it. Another new pastime (as of yesterday) for me is geocaching with my husband, son, cousin and his wife, and friends. I have linked our geocaching blog, written by my cousin, under my links. It's a lot of fun and equates to real life treasure hunting for my son.

My husband says that I do not have friends but families. I have my work family that provides my major source of social interaction. My online gaming family in the form of our guild, Shadow Dragons / Company of Shadows / Zenbassmasters. We chat as we play and often quest together. My Auburn family or Distance Education family with people from Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and a few others depending on the semester. His family theory may be true, but I do have a small spattering of individual friends... somewhere... we just don't do things together very often.

Animals - We have a Great Dane, Black Labrador Retriever, small mixed cutie dog, and a black cat. The Great Dane and Black Labrador were both rescue dogs. We love animals!

This is a good overview of my life's passions. There are others, but this post is long enough!