A Scottish Day, Aye

Somehow I arrived just at the start of a rare stretch of summer in Scotland. Since I arrived over a week ago, I have even been sunburned twice (who gets sunburned in Scotland? Me, apparently). When walking to the hospital this morning it seemed that another blue sky would be waiting for me to enjoy at the end of the day.

But I was wrong!
I witnessed my first rainfall since getting here over a week ago. Lucky me I had a "brelly" in my bag!

I am training to run neuropsychological assessments at the hospital. Though I probably won't be here long enough to actually administer them myself, I am going to be able to sit in on assessments and help with the scoring. There is one test I would not have necessarily classified it as a neurospsych test before reading up on it. I would have called it more of a "cognition" test, but I guess that means my vocabulary is off. It makes more sense after reading about it, but I wish I would have taken that Tests and Assessments class already! The assessment I have been focusing on this week is the WAIS- IV or the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. It was designed and first released in the 1950s. I had a moment of panic seeing the boxes of this test and thinking to myself "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME THEY'RE NOT STILL USING THESE, RIGHT?!"

And then I let out a huge sigh of relief when I realized there were 3 backpacks full of more testing materials. There was a new version released in 2008, so this is the one I am ACTUALLY learning with. I still have my qualms with intelligence scales but I enjoyed playing with the stimuli from the one from the '50s. As you can see from the picture, some of the visual-spatial tests were pretty creepy, or at least in my opinion. Did I mention the clock in the trainees office doesn't work? It ticks and the poor little arms try to move, but they're perpetually stuck at 8:45. With the clock and the rain and being alone in there today... what a setting!

Normally there are a lot of people around but almost everyone had gone to appointments at other sites today. I had finished my work pretty efficiently, and as it was a light load to begin with, I left a bit early. From there, I walked to Tesco because I decided it is probably time that I buy a phone. I got a little pay-as-you-go phone for 30quid, which is kind of expensive, but I'm going to give it to my sister to take with her on her study abroad program in the fall. Now I just have to figure out how to finish setting it up. It's confusing. But again, no straightforward answers from anyone about anything so hopefully I'll figure it out OK on my own.

Oh aside from the rain, the other Scottish thing! I had Haggis today! Well, vegetarian haggis, which is apparently what most people eat. I guess most of the country realized eating organs cooked in a stomach is probably not the healthiest option. So I've got the rain and haggis today. I wonder what tomorrow will bring!