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I can't write about this summer without writing about my friend, Jackie Becker. Jackie is a fellow health assistant of mine, and that is where the similarity between the two of us ends.  She's only 20 years old, and she's currently studying for her RN from a small liberal arts college in Ohio.  She and I spend a lot of time together, because in all honesty, she drives most people up the wall for one reason:  she has ADHD. Disclaimer:  I have never spent any amount of time with anyone with ADD or ADHD.  I have seen kids who have been diagnosed with it, and I pretty much run the other way.  Having grown up a musician, concentration has been a key component of any success in my life, and I have no concept of how anyone with ADHD even functions.  ADHD scares me. Well let me tell you.  I have definitely been missing something in my life, because Jackie is my favorite work colleague this summer.  She is the most interesting, exciting, spontan...

You know, I don't have a lot of friends.  I tend to make one or two really close friends and call it a day.  For the past couple of years, it's been pretty lonely for me.  I just haven't been able to make friend connections in State College.  For this reason, I always enjoy working at Interlochen because I'm generally surrounded by friends all day long. A really bad incident happened this past weekend here at camp.  Without going into a lot of detail, Glo was threatened by a camp staffer because she was breaking a very small rule (which I had told her to break), and when she was approached by the camp staffer...and threatened....I lashed out at him.  Unfortunately, I knew him from past bad experiences, and I had a feeling he wasn't going to let sleeping dogs lie. He didn't.  He reported both Glo and me.  And I pretty much fell apart.  I'm a rule keeper to a fault, but I do believe there are a few times when rules should be broken.  A...

A friend of ours in our old Bitburg ward used to rename "trials" as "growth opportunities".  That phrase and idea has stuck with me over the years, because it's a great way to take something difficult and put a positive spin on it. Glo was stretched and pulled and pushed this past week at Interlochen.  I do believe there were a couple of times that she wasn't sure she was going to be successful at the end, but to her credit, she kept going through the necessary motions, and she did indeed make it. She sat Concermaster of the Interlochen Philharmonic (IP) this past week.  It's a huge honor to be first chair, first violin of any orchestra, because in essence, you are the leader of not only your section of 14 violins, but of the entire orchestra.  You are responsible for tuning the orchestra at the beginning of any rehearsal, and you work closely with the conductor. Originally, Glo was disappointed in being placed in the "lower" orchestra of...