Back to the Infrequent...

…updates I suppose. Nothing monumental has happened in the past month. There has been slow progress on the work front. I’m not sure if it was within the last month that the director sent an email stating that VANTHCS would return to full operations with incremental steps for routine face to face encounters with a planned 100% restoration of services by October 6th. I’m not tracking the play by play, but it seems they’re on schedule at this point.

All that said, that doesn’t mean fee-basis will be needed in C&P in that same timeframe. Our department chief and program analyst had sent emails to the FTEs notifying them that face to face examinations would resume so they would be back in the clinic full time in the upcoming weeks. I responded to this email saying I knew that didn’t mean fee basis would be needed for quite a long time and they essentially confirmed this and expressed appreciation for my patience.

The unknown factors here are whether they will be able to stick to the plan and how quickly there will be a resumption of the normal flow of exam requests from VBA. Until they start getting a normal flow that exceeds the FTEs capability, it’s not likely we’ll see any request for fee-basis exams. My feeling for a long time (and probably expressed here previously) was the end of the year at best, and Dr. Potu (Chief of Ambulatory Care) had already expressed this timeframe as well. If anything, I could see them asking us to help out during the holidays as there’s always a shortage of providers since everyone wants to go on vacation, although it’s hard to say how that will be affected by COVID. If travel remains sketchy, those leave requests may drop off quite a bit.

I still think it will be well into next year before we can expect a resumption of full activities and fee basis numbers reaching anything near where they were at their peak. I hope I’m wrong, and I don’t necessarily need the desired workload to make a difference in our budget. One good day a month would be enough to put our monthly ledger in the black, and two days would make things comfortable. This wouldn’t facilitate the faster mortgage payoff schedule, but at least it would allow us to slowly accrue some cash reserves and give us some breathing room. My hope is we can get back at least to my normal salary limit, which would allow faster mortgage payoff, although it might take 2-3 years instead of the planned 12 months we were previously on track to achieve.

In other developments, I’ve started studying Korean and drawing again in the past week. I decided to go back to the beginning in Korean, and I’m still trying to figure out my battle rhythm with drawing. I had been bouncing around several different instruction programs and I’m starting to think I need to pick one and just stick with it through completion before moving on to the next thing. I have multiple training programs I plan to complete as I go along. Notice I didn’t mention writing. I still plan to start writing again, I’m just looking for the right window and motivation.

Although it’s incremental and often hard to quantify, I feel there has been progress in my musicianship, mainly drums, guitar, and keys. The downpicking drill based on Tommy Emmanuel’s fast run from Endless Road is definitely paying off, albeit slowly. Drumming has felt slower, but my added focus on kick pedal is slowly reaping rewards. I started alternating drill days with song days where I just play songs so I can apply some of these techniques, and I think that’s helping. Many of the drills I practice are isolated and don’t prepare you for the application within a song where all the other limbs are involved.

I need to start practicing bass again and my vocal drills have been functional but not really stretching my capabilities and I need to start singing some actual songs again. I’m not necessarily happy there was a drop off in some disciplines in light of the mild COVID funk, but I can understand it, and at least I kept applying my most primary disciplines. Not to mention, that game backlog has continued to shrink, so there’s that.

I just finished Divinity Original Sin 2 yesterday, and I’ll probably finish off Horizon Zero Dawn next and then I’ve got to decide what to tackle after that. I’m thinking Demon Souls although I realized today I might not be able to play that or Fallout 3 on my PS4, at least using the disc-based versions I own. I think there are versions if you have a subscription to Playstation Now, so I might look into that option.

Life is pretty good, all things considered. I’m not happy losing a significant chunk of earning potential, but we’ve managed to stay afloat for several months and with a few more adjustments to the discretionary expenses we could probably do it indefinitely. I’ve gotten into more cooking with the time off but the downside is that my waistline has grown with my cooking skills. It doesn’t help that I’m having a flare-up with my right knee again and I’m unable to run.

To add insult to injury, I had been trying to reintroduce push-ups and situps to my regimen so I could recover some muscle mass and stave off another ravage of aging. As luck would have it, I strained something in my lower abdomen and I’m hoping it’s just a delicate atrophied muscle and not a hernia waiting to happen. Location wise it could totally be an inguinal hernia. I’m not sure but I think it’s the same side in which I had hernia surgery as an infant and I doubt they used mesh back then. I’m hoping it’s just a muscle strain and I can resume activity in the coming weeks. One of the greatest frustrations of aging (besides becoming progressively more gray and squishy) is that your body starts to betray you and things that you are mentally and psychologically ready to do become difficult to impossible due to injury and declining function. Still, it could be a lot worse.

Speaking of, I’m essentially done with social media. After shutting down FB completely (two times now, most recently in June) I went ahead and pulled the trigger on twitter and Instagram as well. This was another decision based on the sum total effect of interaction and they both are responsible for bringing a lot of negativity that I can’t control. My political leanings are progressive and liberal and I’ll continue to support those candidates and causes, but I just can’t tolerate the day to day social media drama any longer. Every day is a new deplorable act, quite often by the nominal leader of the country and it’s easy to despair. I’m not sure the US as a country can recover from the damage it has sustained (and not just in the past four years), and although I make my best efforts to contribute, there seems to be no shortage of people who are willfully ignorant, obtuse, and have no regard or empathy for their fellow human beings. I hope we can overcome the hatred, greed, and racism running rife at present, but I have my doubts. I don’t endorse much that the catholic church says, but they got the seven deadly sins right.