badges as last!

So you may have noticed I kind of disappeared from the blogging world for about a week. See, my family came to visit me in Georgia (it was amid their annual camping vacation). I believe I mentioned that in my last blog. Because of this, I took last Monday and Tuesday off. Wednesday and Thursday of last week were spent partially at the Care and Counseling Center of Georgia, and I didn't wind up back at Metro until last Friday. Anyway, I'm back now -- not that you were worried, I'm sure. ;)

So last Friday was pretty busy. Actually, with only three weeks left, every day feels busy. I always start the day by writing a list of people I need to see and things I need to get done, and very rarely do I complete the list by the time the 4pm count rolls around. Between yesterday and today, I believe I gave seven phone calls to people. Now that's a really high number, but a lot of them were women who have been asking and waiting for a long time, and with me being gone almost all last week, there was a bit of catching up to do.

Today something exciting happened -- we finally got our badges! See, up until now, upon entering the prison each morning, I give the security officer my driver's license, and he gives me badge that says something like "Metro State Prison Unescorted Visitor" on it. All the employees and more permanent volunteers have badges with their names and pictures on them. In other words, way more cool and official looking. Well, before our fist day of CPE, we each had to fill out about 20 pages of paperwork, giving all sorts of personal information. After that, our paperwork was sent through several steps of approval, and finally, over this past weekend, did our names finally show up on the main computer.

So, those of us who were there decided to see if we could actually get the badges. We went down to the ID area (the same place where the inmates get their ID info), and we asked if we could pretty please get our badges. The guy in the special ID room looked us up, indeed found us in the computer, took our pictures, and made our badges! Yay! Now I feel REALLY official. Sure, we only have two and a half weeks left at Metro, but better late than never, right? The best part is that the badges don't expire for a whole year, so if we want to do any more volunteer work between now and then, we just have to notify the prison of when we'll be there. And if, in the future when the badge has expired and we're still interested in being involved at Metro, there is a really simple renewal process (I think only 3 pieces of paperwork instead of 20).

I'd like to write more, but now I have to draw my genogram for our group work tomorrow morning. For those of you who don't know what a genogram is, it's basically like drawing a family tree, but there are certain symbols to use for certain things. It's kind of interesting to see it all mapped out on paper, so at least it will be a fun project.