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.

Developments or Not

We’re beginning the transition into Texas summer and the lovely swelter of many months. We still have some relatively mild weather for the next few weeks, so I’ve been checking off my yard reboot task list. As of yesterday, I’ve completed manual aeration of both front and back yards, and I fertilized and seeded the front on Tuesday. Today I’ll finish that off for the back yard. The ratios and spreader settings are a bit sketchy, but I was trying to follow the recommendations from the soil sample testing I had done. As I may have mentioned, our yard was deficient in most nutrients, with only calcium and sulfur being overly abundant. I’m curious if that’s an issue of toxicity, or it just lays inert, so to speak, if the plant life isn’t using it. This is based on the assumption that my core sample mixture was representative.

Core aeration is not something I wish to perform manually for the entire yard again. It’s a tedious and cumulatively arduous task that would go exponentially faster with a machine. I ran into enough roadblocks trying to rent one or get the service performed that I got fed up and just decided to pay $36 and do it myself. I don’t regret the decision and the tool will come in handy in the future, because I’m sure there are nooks and crevices that the machine can’t reach. That said, my plan for the future is to hire a guy (as you do) to have this service performed in the fall and spring. This is assuming I can see some tangible improvements. Hopefully, the assortment of interventions (dethatching, scarifying, raking, aeration, raking, seeding, fertilizing, mowing, watering) will pay off with a thick, and dark green lawn. I have some iron supplement to provide more color if needed, but I’m holding off on that until the new seed is established.

The soil test lab recommended potash and phosphorus as well as “my choice of micronutrients” to get the soil into shape. I’m not sure I got the ratios right, but hopefully there’s enough of the potassium and phosphorus in particular to make up the deficit. I followed those two select ratios with your more standard fertilizer comprised of nitrogen and the typical cross section of micronutrients. Hopefully this won’t burn out the lawn. It’s a lot of supplements at once, hopefully in the future I’ll only need one standard fertilizer to complement the overseeding.

Despite waxing agricultural, I don’t want to dedicate any more time to this than is absolutely necessary. Our yard/soil had been neglected or at least hadn’t had focused supplementation since we moved in, so it was due for more TLC than would normally be necessary. We’ll see how things go. I’ll be watering twice daily for the next few weeks (not counting rainy days) so hopefully the new bermuda seed will germinate and take root. We have a few large bare patches in the back yard that are competing with trees and a reduced amount of sunlight exposure. I’ll see how overseeding goes there. We may eventually decide those areas should just be patios. One project at a time.

I got a second set of overhead storage shelves for the garage, but I’m going to delay installation until next week. We also got a paint sprayer so we can hit the garage door and fence, but that’s also going to wait until at least next week. I’m only going to engage in time-swallowing projects one day at a time. Today I’ll complete the back yard fertilization and overseeding since there’s a limited amount of effective time after aeration that it will make a difference. I think the aeration should have some long term benefits beyond just the seeding/fertilization, mainly in drainage and water/nutrient distribution, but the time for overseeding/fertilization is within 48 hours of aeration.

Continuing on this post a day later - I discovered my core aeration efforts in the front yard are giving me some extra work and additional practice at sprinkler system repair. To my chagrin, I learned the drip tubing on the streetside strip is only buried about 3-4 inches deep, so the core aerator punctured the lines in several locations. I’m going to need to buy a roll of tubing and some connectors and perform several repairs. As I’ve stated before in many different contexts, failure can be a great teacher.

I had performed a few google searches about sprinkler pipe depth but I guess I was using the wrong nomenclature and I should have searched drip tubing. When I searched for underground sprinkler rubber tubing repair I eventually discovered it’s called drip tubing in the industry and now I know it’s buried at a shallower depth. Not a devastating error, just some more sweat equity and a serving or two of humble pie.

Although not my intention, each project seems to beget more projects. My hope is to get most of this lawn and short term DIY stuff knocked out so I can get back to my core (no pun intended) disciplines. I definitely plan on availing myself of the core aeration service in the fall.

I took the Pathfinder in for an estimate of repairs to fix the gas neck issue that’s plagued us for years. I had found a service bulletin which I assumed meant it was a recall type issue, but I’ve learned that even though a service bulletin might get published, it doesn’t equate to a recall. So, I paid $120 to have Don Davis Nissan tell me it will be an additional $405 just to get a look at what’s wrong in particular.

No idea of what additional costs I might have to pay to actually get it fixed. It’s a pain in the ass to fill it up, but not a $500 to possibly $1000 (or more depending on how gougy they feel on that particular day) of a pain in the ass. I’ll just suck it up with my slow fill ups every couple of weeks. I only use it two days a week and eventually I want to get an electric car, but I’m putting that off until well after we pay off the house if possible.

On the workfront, things have settle into a tolerably predictable flow with VES. I’m slowly learning the techniques to avoid QA addendums. It goes against my long established habits when working directly for the VA, but ultimately it’s a losing battle against their policies, so I’ve adjusted to their preferences. I’ve learned that you really only want to address exactly what’s on a claim unless it’s a gen med “all conditions found…” type of exam. They invariably will ask to remove any conditions not mentioned on the claim, whether they are valid or not.

The DBQs are so much more convoluted on the VES side, and just ripe with opportunities for errors of omission. That’s one of many things I preferred about the VA’s version. Auto-negative functions like greying out irrelevant follow-up question were pretty standard, but the QA on the actual forms themselves is significantly lacking at VES. I guess they prefer to pay people to do it rather than build it into the forms.

Also of note, I had gotten a text from a former co-worker stating that “they” were looking to bring me back on as fee-basis at FWOPC. Apparently the low productivity rate of the federales has caught up with them again. Amazing, considering how far their numbers have dropped since most exam requests have been diverted to outside contractors. From what this co-worker said, even the contractors can’t keep up. I’ve seen a few announcements on the VES website that corroborate this, they did request for providers to provide additional booking days if available since there was a backlog.

All that said, I haven’t heard a peep so far. The co-worker had said they only wanted to ask me to come back, which indicates it’s not an enormous backlog, but in my estimation it’s probably those big cases that all the federales avoid. One big issue is my credentials being expired. In typical VA timeframes, that means it would likely be another 2 months to get me back on board. I’m wondering if they’ll go with a second or third choice from any of the providers who still have active credentials. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re going for a quick fix and not thinking long term. Letting my credentials expire proves how nearsighted they can be.

If they aren’t willing to make the effort to get my credentials renewed, I’m not confident it would be worth the trouble. I definitely prefer fee-basis as I’m sure I’ve said ad nauseam in the past. The pay is better, the schedule is preferable, and the frustration index is significantly lower. We’ll see. At least I’ve settled into a livable lifestyle with VES and we can maintain this indefinitely if needed.

Spring Has Sprung

In Texas, at least. After a slow start, it appears all of our trees, most of our shrubs and the lawn are making a full recovery from Snowmageddon ‘21. Our biggest tree, the one out front which was planted when they built the house, was probably the slowest to sprout buds. For awhile, I had serious concerns that it didn’t make it through the four day hard freeze back in February. Thankfully, it finally began to display some buds and eventually a full complement of leaves to get that good ‘ole photosynthesis jam going. By current estimates, it’s mainly some potted plants that appear to have met their demise. We have a few shrubs that look dead to me, but Aeyong is optimistic that by cutting them down to their base we’ll encourage some new growth from the roots. We’ll see. If they don’t recover, shrubs are easy enough to replace.

In that horticultural vein, I’ve taken a bit more interest in getting the yard in good trim. I apologize, that wasn’t intended as a pun, but now it is, so there. You’re welcome. We haven’t really gone to any great lengths with our yard, other than regular mowing and seasonal fertilization and occasional seeding. The front has remained pretty thick and healthy, but the backyard has some bare patches, including one large swath of dirt in the back corner. I’m going to try de-thatching and scarifying with, you guessed it, our new de-thatcher/scarifier. Hopefully it will clear up a lot of dead grass and leaves and open up the soil to allow more root growth and nutrient/water transfer where it’s needed. Along with that, I’ve got a big bag of Humic DG which is supposed to enhance nutrient absorption and improve soil structure. It’s a bunch of small spherical granules that disperse into the soil, some of which immediately break down into humic and fulvic acid, combining with essential nutrients and persisting in the soil to allow plant absorption for extended periods of time. The humate portion remains even longer, thereby further extending that nutrient cycle.

I’ve seen a few customer testimonials and just Humic DG alone can make a big difference to yards, plants, and larger agricultural applications. My plan is to de-thatch, scarify, mow up the detritus (I have so few opportunities to use that word, so back off), and then lay down probably half the 40 pound bag of Humic. I’ll be seeding and fertilizing in the near future, but I do want to give the yard a little time to recover so I’ll probably wait a few days to a week to do that. Not everyone recommends seeding in the spring, but our bare patches definitely need it. I probably need to get some peat moss to mix with the seed. Although it probably sounds like I’ve gone all 4H (when I was in school it was all farm kids, I’m probably showing my age), but I really just want a nice green lawn that I can maintain. I don’t want to spend a great deal of additional time keeping it in shape. Hopefully some well timed interventions will get it ready for summer.

In other developments, I got my second COVID vaccination last Wednesday, and the side effects were slightly worse, I suppose. The arm soreness was about the same, but I think I felt some more systemic effects this time. It’s a bit hard to tell because the day of the vaccination I also ran (a modified attempt at resumption that was triggered by the broken elliptical) and scalped the lawn. Scalping the lawn (and bagging the clippings) is something that’s useful to do 1-2 times per year based on the advice I’ve seen. It’s somewhat like de-thatching, I suppose. In my yard’s case, it takes considerably more effort to push the mower across high spots in the ground. All that to say, the additional fatigue I felt the day after was probably a combination of the vaccination and the physical efforts of the day before. I also woke up around midnight feeling febrile, but didn’t bother checking my temperature. I just took a gram of Tylenol every six hours for the first day or so and things slowly got better. As I’ve said, eminently better than getting sick with COVID.

Things at work are going well. I’ve worked in the new location the last two weekends, and it’s a nice setting. Essentially the same drive as before with the last two miles being on surface streets. VES has been keeping me gainfully scheduled, one weekend at a time. My no-show rate has dropped a bit, down to only 15% of the last two weekends. I’ve been averaging about $2500 per weekend, which is okay. I’ve been hoping to maintain closer to $3K per weekend, for a monthly total of $12K. Based on how they’ve been filling my schedule (partially) and the no-show rate, I’m not sure that’s achievable with only a two day workweek. At least it’s adequate for our financial goals of paying the house off slightly faster and maintaining a discretionary income. I only want to work enough for those two criteria, as I really value my free time.

Back to homefront matters, Aeyong is recovering fairly well. She had her cast removed the week before last, and she’s jumped back in to her normal routine. Maybe a bit too hard because she’s got some wrist swelling today and will need to rest a bit. She’s been catching up on several things she wanted to accomplish including trimming and bathing all the girls. She also has been out in the yard working, and this weekend she decided to help me out by dusting and cleaning the bathrooms upstairs. That was a nice surprise because it had been nagging me for several weeks and I had been too busy with regular work and work around the house. Still, she’s probably paying for the uptick in activity right now.

I’ve been trying to improve the garage layout the last few weeks to coincide with efforts in the yard. I installed some overhead storage shelves and moved the treadmill and elliptical all the way back against the wall. Not a huge change, but the added floor space has been nice. We took the vertical shelves that were previously on the back wall and moved them into the laundry room, giving us some more storage space in there. We had a little half shelf in the laundry room before, and now that has moved to the garage as a rolling storage cart for our air compressor and shop vac. I’ll eventually install another identical set of overhead shelves in the other garage slot and hopefully free up another section of the floor. Eventually I want to have a rolling workbench with some good working tools - table saw, miter saw, router, and maybe a few other tools depending on how things develop. I’m going to try to ease into woodworking, but I already have all sorts of ideas for projects. I don’t know if it’s just a natural part of aging, or a genetic thing I get from my father. He was definitely a DIYer at his core. Nature, nurture, or perhaps a bit of both?

After all this fairly mundane material, I haven’t stopped pursuing my core disciplines, although there have been more days “off” when I was working at VES or had my time manhandled by DIY, medical, etc. issues. I finished a Premiere Pro course, and I’ve just started a Photoshop course. I also signed up for a basic piano course, mostly to cover some fundamentals that I know I’ve been lacking. I’ve really only slowly learned songs and then just spent my time practicing them, but I haven’t spent any considerable time at learning scales, improvisation and some of the basic skill set I need if I want to advance further. The same could be said for my other disciplines as well. I’m alternating my drumming practice between Mike Michalkow’s course and trying to learn Xanadu for the eventual Rush AFTK deep dive video. Check back next year, probably. Then there’s also bass, guitar, singing, drawing, writing, learning to speak/read/write Korean. Not to mention maintaining my CMEs for work. The days are just packed, and that’s how I like it.

It's been one of those months...

I feel like I was thinking that through most of 2020, and 2021 is not showing any signs of let up. In 2020 there were times where days and weeks would seem to run together, but then there were many times that every day was a new reason the world was about to end. 2021 hasn’t been quite that severe, and by most metrics things are looking up, but February would prove to be a tremendously tumultuous month. Yes, I alliterated tumultuous. Gird yourself for more.

The weekend of February 13-14th would see me braving the oncoming winter storm to work on Saturday, but even by then I knew Sunday was going to be sketchy. I was already calling VES support to cancel my clinic for Sunday as I drove in for the Saturday clinic. Ironically, there would be multiple reasons why that was unnecessary because VES would ultimately decide to close down themselves as the severity of the winter storm developed. Even more importantly, I would be taking Aeyong to the emergency room. In a fit of youthful energy for the novelty of snow, she ventured out front, slid down the driveway (about two feet by my recollection); her feet went up and her right wrist came down. Hard.

The result was a displaced, angulated, comminuted, intra-articular fracture of her right radius. Hurts just saying it. We managed to get her into a nearby ER (thanks to USMD for actually being open when most places were closed), got her fracture partially reduced and splinted, and got her enough pain killers to tide her over until she could get seen by orthopedics, which would end up being nine days later. I cancelled my upcoming VES schedule for several weeks so I could tend to her needs while she recovered.

Thank Snowmageddon ‘21 and Texas’ feeble ability to cope for shutting down almost everything for a week. Not that we should complain too vociferously. All of our essential utilities remained functioning and by current accounts the only significant damage we incurred was a sprinkler system pipe and several plants and shrubs. Thanks to a frozen spigot, a neighbor sustained enough water damage that there were still reclamation trucks out in front of her house as of yesterday. I guess she had to hit the reset button on her ground floor.

The rest of February and early March was a challenging period of time. Aeyong underwent surgery on February 24th, and Dr. Niacaris was all we could have hoped for in an orthopedic surgeon. She has some extra hardware in the form of a plate and six screws, and it’s possible she may eventually need to get the plate removed as it was designed for bones larger than her relatively diminutive frame. She had her first post-op last week and things went well. She was gifted a new cast in sexy purple, although she’s been finding it a bit less comfortable than the splint she had before.

She was judged as lacking in her rehab milestones and I got a stern glance from Dr. Niacaris. She only responds so much to encouragement, so I try my best but it’s leading a horse to water doncha know. I went back to work at VES last weekend and things are going alright. I have one more weekend starting tomorrow, and then I’ll get yet another weekend off as they relocate to the new facility a few miles down the road in the Las Colinas area. As the crow flies it should be closer to home, but there are additional surface streets in the route, so based on google map’s prediction, it’s basically a wash in travel time compared to the current location.

Still, TXDot is adding lanes on the G-Dub, so it’s possible I might decide to switch to a weekday schedule in the future. With a slightly shorter drive and more lanes for traffic, it might not make as big a difference working weekends versus weekdays. While things progress with VES, things are finally about to completely shut down with the North Texas VA. I got a few text messages from Dr Hasan asking about my last workday, but when I asked what it was about, all he would say was “we’re trying to determine when fee basis last worked here”. Yeah, I gathered as much. When I got his message notification, I briefly felt optimistic, but clearly there’s no plan on bringing fee basis back at this point. To sort of bookend that interaction, I got an email from the VA remote access manager stating my authorization was about to expire. I wasn’t thinking about it, but I guess my access was approved the same day fee basis was laid off, 3/24/20.

So, it’s essentially been a year since me and my fellow fee basis examiners were laid off. What followed was in some ways a challenging year although we fared so much better than many people. The biggest frustration for us was being out of work and losing about 3/4ths of our income. It would be nine months later before I would return to income producing work with VES in December. After a few months, things seem to have stabilized. The treasury has helped restore our pre-pandemic checking balance thanks to a big refund as well as stimulus payments. I finally had the confidence to shift some more money to our mortgage payment, so we’ve gone from the minimum payment to one that will see the house paid off in three years. I might increase it yet again depending on our ability to continue running budget surpluses each month. This is contingent on a steady supply of exams from VES.

For giggles I checked with my former colleague, Dr C, who is working for QTC, to find out their current payment rates. I’m not sure if he gave me his rates or the PA rates, but they’re even less than VES. If they’re his MD rates, I can only imagine what they’re paying PAs. As I’ve said here before, it’s my strong feeling that VES is lowballing their payments to providers, but this is anecdotal based on what I previously received as a fee basis. There may be truth to their statements that they are having exams combined into one rate as the number of DBQs increases. Dr Brooks is still waiting on his FOIA request. My feeling is that it will reveal nothing or it won’t reveal enough to really discern whether VES is inappropriately paying their examiners.

One other positive development is that I was able to get my first of two COVID-19 vaccinations on Wednesday. I had signed up with Dallas County and I got a text message on Monday offering the shot. I took the first available appointment time on Wednesday and it was held at a joint Grand Prairie/Irving mass vaccination site being run at the Theatre at Grand Prairie. I was impressed with the efficiency and relative painlessness of the operation. The main side effect of the vaccination was pain at the injection site which was worst yesterday, the day after the shot. Today that pain has reduced substantially and I’m not really feeling any additional side effects. We’ve been told the second shot is worse for side effects, so I’ll see. It’s still exponentially better than getting COVID and potentially dying or suffering long term health effects from it.

sappenin'?

I’m back to the daily dull drudgery of a working stiff. These two-day workweeks are so brutal, I decided to take two weeks off for the holidays. Good thing the clinic is closed for the same time period or they might have missed me. Yuks aside, the first two work weekends are down and things went pretty smoothly. I’m getting back into the swing of things and figuring out what VES expects out of these exams. The only thing remaining is to get them to start increasing my appointment slots so I can see these small cases every 30 minutes instead of the hour slots they have scheduled to this point.

At the current rate I’m making about $1K a weekend which is a big improvement over nothing at all, but I should be able to manage that in one day if they increase those slots. Four weekends a month should allow me to gross ~ $8K and net ~ $5-6K after I set the predicted tax deductions aside. It’s nice just to be getting back into a regular workflow and having the income that allows us not to sweat the small stuff like we’ve been doing during the layoff. No big expenditures thus far, but I’ve let myself buy some books and games without losing sleep over it.

In other events, the FDA has now approved two COVID vaccines, first from Pfizer and just recently from Moderna. This rollout is going to take months to get to everyone and I have no good prediction as to when Aeyoung and I will get our shots. I imagine I’ll have an earlier opportunity through the VA, but she’ll have to wait until our PCM offers the vaccination. I’m betting it’ll be several months at the earliest. There have been some shifty roll out orders from the white house, and no good explanation why they aren’t requesting the maximum amount. I know Pfizer has stated they have plenty of vaccine on hand waiting for requisition from the federal government but no explanation why they aren’t maxing out the orders. These jackholes are going to sow discord and chaos for every single minute they have remaining.

On that note, the Supreme Court has rejected the legal challenge from multiple states (including Texas, for which I take no blame) to overturn the election results. Cheeto Mussolini is still crying foul and will most likely do so for the rest of his days in office and on this planet. The electoral college did its job and elected based on the actual valid election results, so every step of the way has confirmed Biden and Harris as the President and Vice President elects. It’s just a waiting game at this point and the hope that any additional damage by the current administration can be minimized.

I’m starting to settle in to my new weekflow (that’s a word now, spellcheck), with focus on my disciplines during the regular weekdays and a relaxed schedule on the weekend/workdays. On those days I generally get in some exercise and Korean study, maybe some writing practice/study. So far I haven’t been very motivated to practice or do anything productive after my shifts, but I think I’ll eventually want to squeeze in some guitar or other discipline practice. I’ve managed that in the past.