This is the last night of the PMHCA Conference, and while I’m exhausted, I’m also excited about the many things I’ve learned and experienced.  I won’t be posting anything after this until I get home tomorrow at the earliest … then again, I may need to crash for awhile after I get home and recouperrate.  I can tell by looking at my Psychiatric Service Dog (PSD), Tippy, that she’s as exhausted if not more so then I am.  So, I think she’s looking forward to returning home to our normal day to day schedule of sorts.

  Tonight is a formal dance where folks are encouraged o dress up and dance the night away on the final night of the Conference.  I didn’t dress up, but Tippy did, and once I get home, I’ll post the picture of her in her formalwear.  I can’t remember if the outfit I put on her is a bride’s dress, or if it’s an angel costume, but Tippy was dressed for the occassion until she walked out of her dress as we went down the hall, so I ended up taking it off her until we got to the lobby where I redressed her so that a couple folks who I have begun to develope a friendship with could see Tippy dressed up, but then I took it off her again so she wouldn’t walk out of it again.  A couple people took pictures of her, and I told a couple folks that didn’t get to see her, that I was going to be posting the picture of Tippy dressed up here on the blog, but I need to wait until I get home to edit the picture so it might be a day or so before it shows up here.

  Earlier, I attended a workshop on Communicating through the media.  It was a fascinating workshop, and I plan on working on some of the new skills I learned in the workshop in future posts.  My brain is too fried to remember what I learned right now so I decided it wasn’t a good post to use my readers as guinea pigs for my newly learned skills and ideas.  With any luck you may see some improvement in my blogging, but it’s hard to say for sure since as the old addage goes, you can’t teach old dogs new tricks …. it’s not an entirely true addage …. just one that in my tired mind seemed fitting somehow.

  This afternoon, we had the chance to hear the caucas reports from the various caucuses that met yesterday.  After the various reports were given, Joan Earny, the Deputy Secretary of Mental Health in Pennsylvania, spoke to the group that was there and told us someone asked her if she would be speaking today, and her response was, “No, I’m here to listen.”  She did speak in response to some of the comments, concerns, and thoughts that were brought up in the reports, she also opend the floor up for questions and allowed folks to ask anything we wanted to.  Of course she reserved the right to not answer them, but I felt that was a reasonable thing for her to do.  Many questions were asked about topics such as funding, Certified Peer Specialists and their role in both the present and future.  Other topics that were hit on included the bill that Joan Erney thought had passed today, but wasn’t sure, that would ban smoking in public places, and hospitals.  She was under the impression that bars that sold very little or no food might be exempt, but that restraunts with full menues would not be exempt.  Many other topics were covered, but I don’t recall all of them.

  For now, I’m signing off and ill post again sometime after I get home.

-Jenca