Where I’ve been

It’s been over a year since we lost our dear April. I haven’t retreated from the world (any more than usual), but I’ve had little impetus to post here. I’ve been busy pursuing my various creative disciplines, including guitar, drums, bass, keys, and vocals. I’ve been increasing my focus on the various visual arts to include drawing, 3D environments & modeling, and dabbling in video editing and VFX. I’ve been busy, is what I’m saying.

I’ve been more active on social media with occasional creative posts, but nowhere near the level I need to build a community yet. I’ve mostly finished the Unreal Sensei course on UE5, although he has been updating content that I will revisit. I enrolled in Marc Brunet’s digital art course, a big commitment since I’m not bringing any additional money in now.

On that note, I’ll briefly explain. I’m no longer working with VES. They were bought out by a bigger defense contractor called Maximus last year. Word came down in March-ish that we would no longer be able to have schedule limitations and would need to let them schedule as they pleased.

The big issue with that (which I’m not sure I covered before) is that they have a policy where joint exams are all lumped together as a single worksheet for payment purposes. This means they get 6-7 worksheets for the price of one. As it happens, these are some of the most common claims we get. My experience in the past was that I would have my schedule filled with these types of exams, and the result was that I’d have 15-20 exams but end up getting paid like I did 3-5 exams. I had limited my schedule, so they couldn’t pile these exams on. Once, I decided to try opening my schedule up to get more exams, but I immediately got booked with those joint exams, so I reverted to my old policy. This was fine until Maximus required an open schedule.

At the time, I explained to them why I limited my schedule that way and that going forward, I would just be working less because this payment policy wasn’t sustainable. Why would I spend 8 hours in their clinic with only 1-2 hours’ worth of pay to show for it? I didn’t hear anything back and a month or so went by with no communication. Sometime in April or May, I find myself unable to log in to their system. I asked tech support, and their response was, “we’ll forward your request to the appropriate department.” Which is a very non-tech support kind of response.

I knew something was up. The answer I got (through an intermediary) was that “upper management” had decided for one of the following reasons: Veteran complaint, timeliness of reports, the accuracy of reports, employee/Veteran relations, and/or something else we’re not saying, blah, blah, blah, VES had decided to cut ties with you. I responded that this wasn’t satisfactory, and they could at least give me a specific reason (assuming it was possible it could be one of those reasons, although I didn’t believe so).

All I got back was that it was “schedule related,” but they might consider the matter again if I wanted to change my request. I said I never refused to work under the new policy, only that I would be working less because it wasn’t fair payment. I proposed that if they would alter my contract to pay fairly for the joint exams, I would be willing to work more often. My productivity was established over the past year (especially since I completed two of their travel weeks last year, and those are a slog). The intermediary said he’d forward it.

I had some residual emails from other departments about training and the like, and when I got those, I would cc this intermediary as a way to get updates on my proposal. After several weeks there was no answer, so I quit checking.

Since I have no specifics to go by, I think VES doesn’t tolerate any providers challenging their payment system, whether it’s done professionally or non-adversarial. I’ve never made any demands or ultimatums to them; I’ve only explained my reduced hours and why that policy is unfair, in my opinion. I’ve never been shown the courtesy of a response from management.

VES doesn’t hire providers, which prevents them from needing to provide any of the benefits or protections that a normal employer would be required by law to provide. They never hire you, so they don’t need to fire you; they can just say we’re no longer going to schedule appointments with you.

There was a precedent in my experience, my colleague from the VA fee basis days, Dr. Brooks, had experienced the same scenario, although his occurred within a few months while mine was over a year later. I think he may have been more direct in challenging them, going so far as to try and obtain a copy of their VA contract under the FOI act. I don’t think he ever got it, and not long afterward, he was “fired.”

He had been my collaborating physician, so maybe my dismissal was partly due to guilt by association in their minds, I don’t know. I never got a real answer, but I think I’m right in my thinking. Changing that policy to pay providers fairly would likely result in the loss of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in revenue for them.

All that to say, I just decided to end it with them. I had never appreciated their culture. Despite all their flowery quotations about caring for Veterans, including those awful self-help and uplifting quote framed photos filling the walls in their clinic, their consistent behavior is that profits are the priority, not the Veteran. I often would have a Veteran who had an issue I could address in the clinic, but VES would never let me add or change the report even though it would likely save the Veteran months of waiting and potentially get them their benefits faster.

All this is anecdotal, but I felt that if there was ever a question of payment, their policy was to refuse the exam and make the VA request it formally to ensure they got their money. Whether it was the right thing to do for the Veteran didn’t matter. The other ongoing issue of frustration with them was their QA policy. They would go over each report and make these small corrections that were irrelevant, but I assume it was to ensure their reports were buffed to such a blinding shine that the VA would never question them and they could maintain their contract. Without their VA contract, they essentially have no business model.

I worked directly for the VA for nine years, and the issues that would be flagged by VES QA personnel never got questioned or challenged by VBA. Never. So, that was an ongoing frustration because they could commandeer your time and make you re-visit a report, and they weren’t going to pay you for it.

How’s that for a short explanation? Lol. Apparently, I still have some feelings about it. Mostly I find it frustrating that not only the VA (considering what happened to all of us fee basis providers) but VES and likely the other contractors truly don’t value hard work and competence and mostly want people who will swallow the corporate Kool-Aid and keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

The outcome is that this scenario has driven me into full-time creative pursuits and will eventually provide a means of income derived from the things I love, not the whims of some crass corporate entity.

In a forthcoming post, I’ll get back to the more important updates about my creative pursuits.

Ten Years Gone

As of today, I have been officially retired from the Army for ten years. It’s been a fairly busy period of time and given a fair accounting, overwhelmingly positive on a personal level, if not in the national and international scope of things. I spent the first six and a half years or so continuing to work full time, and then switched to fee basis/part-time work about three and a half years ago. Despite the pandemic and forced layoff, I still think that decision was the right one to make. The three years of earning double for half the time made significant progress towards paying off our home and reaching our long term financial goals.

We haven’t neared the finish line as closely as planned for this point in time, but we still hold out hope that this temporary setback will eventually just be a historical footnote. I can say that there have been positive discoveries made in the context of the layoff. It’s not a big change to our philosophy, but we’ve learned to further appreciate the value of financial stability. Also, dialing back the continuous consumption has had little negative affect and it’s made me realize just how much fulfillment is available in what we already have. In a peripherally related issue, getting away from essentially all social media (FB, twitter, instagram) has had little downside in my estimation. Those mediums could offer occasional (and very temporary) entertainment, but they never offered anything of lasting value. And here lately, the constant daily onslaught of misery and controversy (especially twitter) just began to wear me down. I don’t miss it a bit.

We’ve learned how adequate (or not) our pure retirement income is against the cost of living. At present it’s a bit short, although as said before, some real belt-tightening might allow us to correct the course. The additional money from paying off the mortgage will make staying in the black a bit easier. Even at present, just a couple full days of clinic would be enough to keep that monthly ledger positive, so hopefully, in the not too distant future, I might get a little trickle of work to set the ship level.

On the creative side of things, in some areas, it’s felt like very incremental progress, but progress nonetheless. I should mention the considerable time I’ve spent at Berklee which has been a great boon to my artistic development, although I’m on an extended break at present. I still plan to return, but I want to shift my focus to guitar and I’m still slowly working towards what I consider a satisfactory audition. I have until 2025 to use my GI Bill benefits, and since I’ve already used around 75% of them, I should still be on track.

I’m not sure I’m where I would have wished to be on guitar and piano especially, but I can say that I didn’t necessarily expect I would have started on drums, bass, vocals, and songwriting as well. I also wouldn’t have thought my pursuits would turn towards writing and drawing, much less resuming my long procrastinated study of Korean. Things continue to inch forward a day at a time, but that they inch forward is the point. I’m happy with where I’m going (and maybe not totally unhappy with where I’m at creatively, either) and I still wake up every day looking forward to the work ahead.

The family is doing okay, as well as could be expected I suppose. We’re not any younger, but we’re holding in there I think. Ironically, our lifestyle was already suited to the pandemic since we’re homebodies with no social circles to speak of. The only inconvenience for us was delaying some routine medical care, concerts, and being more judicious about trips to the store. Otherwise, it’s situation normal here in the Hightower holdfast. We said goodbye to our sweet girls Lucy and Bridget, and still miss them all the time. We already had Arya by the time I retired and not long after we said goodbye to Bridget five years ago we added Skittles to our pack. A chihuahua mix, she’s the princess in the house and gets the lion’s share of the attention, although we don’t fail to shower our other two girls with affection.

My hopes for the future are largely unchanged. I want to continue working on my creative pursuits every day. I still hope that at some point I’ll spend more time in a purely creative headspace instead of practicing and developing my technique, but I expect that will always be part of the daily rituals. I hope to at least reach a level of competency (on the drums especially) where I can perform and record the sort of music I hear in my head. I’m closer to that on guitar, but there’s still a ways to go. Eventually, my goal is to combine the various disciplines of music, words, and art into cohesive works that tell compelling stories. I’ll get there, even if it takes a long time. I feel like this period of my life is when I can really create the works I have always needed to make. I don’t regret any part of my life, but it would be untrue to characterize my military service or medicine as my calling. These have been challenging and at times rewarding endeavors, but my creative efforts are where my true self lives.

As long as it’s available and I’m able, I’ll probably continue to earn an income to keep us afloat first and foremost, but also to have a comfortable discretionary budget for the quality of life expenses. As probably stated before, I hope we can get back on track and build our cash reserves back up and then pay the rest of the mortgage off. At that point, one decent shift a week would keep us pretty comfortable, methinks.

Looking ahead, it’s hard to surmise where we might be in ten years. I’ll be sixty-three, just having become eligible for my VA retirement (paltry as that may be) and about four years away from social security (if that hasn’t been stolen by then). I assume we’ll have the house fully paid off, and I’d say the odds are we’ll still be right here although might change as well. My main goal with writing is to continue to improve and just create some compelling stories. It would be the proverbial icing on the cake if that would ever reach a level of quality that someone would be willing to publish it. It would be a second cake with sprinkles on the icing to ever derive any sort of income from it. Still, I have to acknowledge that it is actually a goal. Musically, maybe I’ll actually be able to play those milestone songs (you know who you are) by then. A man can dream…

It's been a bit...

…since the last update and a few things have changed. I’ve resumed pursuit of my seven (eight?) disciplines, including a resumption of writing and drawing. I’ve started to settle into a six day workweek so to speak. I practice drums, vocals, acoustic guitar, drawing and writing on M-W-F, and on T-Th-Sa I practice drums, keys, elec guitar, bass, drawing, and writing. I also started studying Korean again but decided to go back to the very beginning of the Pimsleur lessons. I do this in conjunction with my elliptical workouts, which are every day at present. (goldarned knee doncha know) I consider Sunday my day off, although I tend to get in some more writing and drawing that day as well. It’s open for me to completely fuck off if I want to.

Getting back into writing has been good so far, although I’ve yet to really engage in any “proper” writing. It’s been comprised of administrative and transcription tasks. I finally got all the bookmarked (booktaped?) notes from Judith Flander’s Victorian Home book, including several additional pages of notes that seemed useful as I went through it. I need to do that for Life in a Medieval Town as well. In the process, it became more apparent that my Scrivener organization system was lacking. I started the process today of trying to categorize research and story components into a more understandable and efficient system.

Ideas keep coming for the story and I continue to follow the practice of just dictating these into my notes app on the phone, but now I need to start filing these ideas in the appropriate areas and then doing the actual follow up work, whether it’s crafting a scene, conducting more research, etc. I feel like I already have the bones of a compelling story, but the real work still lies ahead. I plan to approach this methodically with concurrent study in my various writing courses as well as reading both nonfiction and fiction that will support the work. I’m planning on trying Brian Lee Durfee’s approach of choosing several books by authors whose style I want to at least partially draw from in the work. His systematic analysis of their techniques is an interesting approach, and although I’m not sure how well it will work for me, my analytical brain finds favor with it. I’ll be taking a look at their typical chapter layouts, dialogue length and positioning within a page/chapter, character introductions, exposition, etc.

I haven’t decided on the authors yet, although I’m likely to pick two of his - Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin. I want to pick at least one Victorian-era novel, whether Brontë, Dickens, Doyle, etc. I also want to pick at least one of the authors whose humor I’ve enjoyed - Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat, Douglas Adams, Scott Lynch, Terry Pratchett, etc. I wouldn’t want humor to overpower the tone, but I definitely love the stories that include at least a dash of levity.

And in today’s “critical for world peace” update, I managed to snag a pre-order for the new Xbox Series X console. Akin to the oh so pleasurable concert ticket buying experience, I bounced around multiple websites across multiple devices and had a false start on my phone where I got to address confirmation only to be told they couldn’t ship to my country (US). Thankfully, that incomplete order remained in my shopping cart on the MS store, and I was able to complete the transaction on my desktop about thirty minutes into the pre-sale. Based on early comments online, there are a lot of dissatisfied customers unable to get through, although as per usual, this doesn’t necessarily reflect a representative sample of customers.

After MS announced their purchase of ZeniMax Media (including Bethesda, id, and several others) I was planning on trying to buy MS’s subscription plan where you get the console and the game pass for $35 a month over two years. With the addition of Bethesda (Elder Scrolls, Fallout), id (Doom), and the others, that means several more of my favorite games would be available. As it is, I’ll probably wait until I’ve finally cleared out that games backlog before I consider subscribing. My two most anticipated games for the near future (Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077) won’t be available on all access anytime soon regardless. I assume BG is PC exclusive at least at first and that would be my preferred version, CP might actually be more enjoyable in the home theater. I definitely enjoyed Witcher 3 in that manner.

Fanning the Embers...

It’s been a fairly busy summer, with a few new areas of focus in the wake of social media disconnection. As I said last post, I deleted my main FB account from the last ten years and I’ve been spending significantly less time on social media. I had a dummy account “Fred Garvin” (heyohhh) and I was using that to keep up with bands, etc. but I did want to maintain a page for Pyramid Grid so I ended up creating an account in my name for the band and deleted the Fred Garvin. This account will only be for the band and keeping up with concert announcements and the like. I haven’t added any friends and don’t plan on it. I’ll see how this works out. There’s significantly less time spent checking FB and it’s essentially removed all impetus to post the trivial.

This extra time has been shifted to more reading and starting to rekindle my interest in writing. I’ve been slowly going through Neil Gaiman’s Master course and there has been a lot of additional recommended reading. I also started another drawing course on Udemy and it’s my intention to keep slowly working on these renewed goals for my eventual plan of combining mixed media in storytelling. I’d love to combine original drawings with animations and video effects to use in music videos and short films/bits.

I’m also slowly making progress on the model building with the primary goal of finishing the soldiers and environments for the Christmas Armistice video. I’ve been watching a variety of miniature and diorama making videos and this is another area I intend to investigate further. I’ve loved miniatures since I was a child and I’m interested in this just as a pursuit but it definitely could be used effectively in filmmaking.

I probably don’t need any more interests, but I can’t help my nature. As of now, I’m regularly working on guitar, bass, drums, vocals, songwriting, production, filmmaking, video effects, drawing, model and miniature building/painting, as well as writing. This change in work status has really enhanced my ability to pursue those creative urges I’ve held dormant for so many years. I’m eternally grateful.

Below is my first ever proper drawing. The Udemy course starts fast with a tutorial on this eye and the instructor takes you through the various steps of line/shape drawing, shading, etc. I even surprised myself in that I’ve never been able to just spontaneously draw with any great realism, although I’ve never given it much effort. I think this particular task was well chosen in that it probably looks more difficult than it really is. The next step is learning to focus more on an object we are drawing than the page. I need to draw a variety of household objects with a focus on lines, shadows, perspective. I have a feeling these initial efforts will be a bit humbling compared to my relative sensation of success with the eye, but this first project was a nice bolster to my confidence.