Up and down and up and down and up and up and down and up...

as if butter wouldn't melt... who'd have thought these two between them would urinate on the sofa cusions, two rugs, their own beds and in one of my shoes.  I can never stay mad for long though and the shoe incident was pretty funny. 

Back in March I joined a site called www.moodscope.com, I had been going through a bit of a tough time and decided to take responsibility for myself and do everything I could to make myself feel better and being aware of my mood and all the things that impact on it seemed to me like a good idea.  The site requires you to test your mood - ideally every day at roughly the same time - by looking at 20 playing cards with different states of mind on them and flipping and rotating each one to select the level you are experiencing the feeling at that time.  After you have done all of the cards moodscope calculates your mood percentage for that day and adds the score to a graph, you also have the option of adding a comment to the score; I found this useful to describe how I felt, what I thought may have influenced my mood including activities, what I had been eating, thoughts and whether or not I had been drinking the previous night.  As soon as you have recorded a few days worth of scores, moodscope begins regularly updating your lowest, highest and average mood scores and this along with the graph can help to show any patterns or changes which occur over time.  I decided to look back through the graph for every month since I started using the tool and can see a definite lift in my mood had taken place and although the line goes up and down rather a lot, it generally doesn't go as low as regularly as it had been doing back in March.  I am lucky to have a supportive group of friends around me, family, cats and lots of enjoyable pastimes.  Making the most of time is both a a distraction and a solution.  I would recommend anyone try moodscope out though, oh and I forgot there is another aspect to it that involves inviting a friend to join too and it encourages you to support each other through times of low mood as you can invite them to be your 'moodscope buddy' and check each other's scores.   http://www.moodscope.com/about.php

This is a collage I used as part of my presentation about social inclusion last week