Pete Saunders

I entered the room and immediately felt exposed, ‘dangerously’ outnumbered, and a little nervous. Instead of fleeing, though, I double-checked just to confirm that I was truly the only male there. My uneasiness escalated at the confirmation that of the twenty people in the large room, I was the only male. Even though I decided to stay, I sat very close to the door – just in case.

My attention has been drawn to a number of blog entries from fellow ACA bloggers and counselors-in-training addressing the importance of mentorship, networking and supervision in our profession. In September 2010, Diana Pitaru wrote about the support counseling students need from their more experienced peers, and in October took matters into her hands and started the Counselors and Psychotherapists Network of North Texas. Stephanie Adams also wrote in October 2010 about growing a counselor community and about the benefits of seeking a good teacher. Deb Legge often includes in her posts, her experience of mentoring other counselors, particularly those just starting out in private practice. Karen Bates also recently wrote about being encouraged to mentor other counselors, though I hope she will not charge for this interaction/service. Thank you all for highlighting this very important element of any profession.

I recently filled my car up with diesel fuel. That resulted in a number of problems for me since my car has a gasoline engine. I was rushing to pick my son up from pre-school and noticed the car needed gas. The car was parked at my wife’s workplace and we had agreed earlier that day that she would take care of it. Frankly, I was a little disappointed when I found the car still without gas. Disappointment was not going to fill the car with gas so I quickly got over myself and went to the gas station. I pulled up to the gas pump to find one pump attendant serving five vehicles. Realizing that I would have a long wait, I jumped out the car and proceeded to pump my own gas for the first time (I wish I could blame this on growing up fatherless but that’s not being accountable). Anyway, that is the story of how I ended ‘misfuelling’. Again, I was tempted to accept that if my wife had put gas in the car as we had decided, then none of this would have happened. Thankfully, I know better and so I avoided the blame game (something I refer to as ‘Adamizing’) altogether and focused on solutions.

I do a little graphic design in the little spare time that I have. Sometimes, in order to achieve a certain effect I use a tool called Masking. This is a way to define parts of your artwork as being hidden from view. Rather than having to delete unwanted parts of my image, photo, or art, I can define an area that acts like a window - anything that appears within the borders of the shape is visible, and anything that falls outside its boundaries is not visible. The main benefit derived from using masks is that you aren’t deleting anything from your file. When you use masks in a file and are required to make changes, you’ll never have to re-create art that you’ve already deleted. Instead, everything that you create is always in the file, and you simply choose what is or isn’t visible.

I recently had the most interesting conversation with my 4 year-old son. On our way to dropping him off at school, he saw a truck with some guys sitting in the back. He wanted to know why they were sitting in the back of the truck. Not wanting to tell him I didn't know (fathers know everything), I said: Me: "They are going to work." Son: "Why da-ye (daddy)?"