Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?

I've been looking into historical forms of swordplay partly for my own education, but also as background information for Highlander fanfic. I mostly write about Michelle Webster, who appeared in a single episode of the Highlander tv series, but who grabbed my attention. I've played her in a number of online RPGs, and written a little fic over the years. I've got quite a lot of headcanon about what she's been up to for the thirty years(!) since that Highlander episode in 1995.

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After a six-month hiatus, I've starting go to the gym again. In large part, that's because I have a car again.

See, until now, going to the gym involved the following logistics:
1. Take my gym bag full of gear with me to work in the morning, so I could stay on the bus past my stop and get off near the gym.
2. This was necessary because I could *just barely* get my workout done in time to get out to the bus stop for the ride home afterward if I did that.
3. If I went home first, it meant that by the time I got to the gym and did my workout, the bus line switched from a bus every 20-30 minutes to ONCE AN HOUR.
4. If my workout ran even a little long, I ended up cooling my heels for an hour before I could get home.
5. Throw in excessive heat this summer, or rain and cold in the winter, and...

Eventually I stopped going.

But now I can go home after work, change into my workout clothes and drive to the gym, do what needs doing WITHOUT WATCHING THE CLOCK, and drive home again when I'm damn good and ready.

It's little things like this that I missed when I didn't have a car. Sure, you can *manage* using the bus (and the occasional Uber/Lyft/Whatever) to get around. But that's no way to live.

RULES: List the first lines of the last ten stories you published.* Look to see if there are any patterns that you notice yourself, and see if anyone else notices any! Then tag some friends. I saw it on raine_wynd's dreamwidth account. Only the first is fanfic. The others were published as ebooks.

1. Even Villains Need Friends - A despairing cry jolted Thomas Magnum from his sleep.

2. Rematch - Leah dropped out of an overcast sky to land on the roof of the US Bank Tower overlooking downtown Portland.

3. Domestic Tranquility - My day started with a bang.

4. Reader - The first time it happened I got beaten up.

5. Party Girls - Rico's party was well under way when Angela emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, wrapped in a silk robe and feeling fit for human company again.

6. Angela Rides Again - The first time it happened, Angela thought nothing of it.

7. The Restless Dead - The ranch wasn't even smoldering any longer when we topped the last hill on the road home.

8. Gratuitous Sex and Violence - Evan paused in his circuit of the club to observe the dance floor.

9. Back for More - Angela's phone trilled as she was parking her car.

10. Ink - Camille stopped at the corner so abruptly that her girlfriends bumped into her.

What does this say about my writing? You tell me.

So, my lease is up at the end of January. I've been wondering how much my rent would go up if I stayed. Now I know.

I got home from work yesterday to find an envelope attached to my front door. I suspected that that was what it was, and I was right. If I went month-to-month, it would jump up by around $200 a month. If I take a lease, it varies depending on the length of the lease, and the longer the lease the lower the increase.

If I take a 15-month lease (which is what I'm on now) my rent will go up by a whopping...$56 a month.

More than I'd hoped (I'd daydreamed about it not going up at all, given that I've read that rental rates were finally softening around here), but a lot less than I feared. And, frankly, given that I live in Portland, that's a damn low increase. Yes, average rents have gone down very slightly--but I'm still paying considerably less than most. Barring a miracle of some kind (like winning the lottery), I expect the Fortress of Solitude will remain in its current location until April of 2019.

Maybe I'll even get around to unpacking all my books. They're still in boxes from moving in. I just...never got around to it, and lately I've been thinking 'why bother if I get a huge rent increase and decide to move? I'd just have to box them up again.' Now I know I'm going to stay, so...we'll see.

So last week I saw my eye doctor and scheduled cataract surgery on my right eye. Earlier this week I got a bunch of appointments with my eye doctor in MyChart. I called to ask what that was about.

Turns out, they also scheduled the left eye about a month later, plus the follow-up visits for *that* procedure at the same time they scheduled the first set. Which, okay, I wanted to get both eyes done as soon as possible, and now the second eye is scheduled to be done on December 6th.

But that was news to me! I'm gonna be taking a lot of sick time off in the next two months. One day each for the surgeries (which may not be strictly necessary, but...) plus time for several follow-up appointments. Oy. I should be able to make up a lot of the time by doing longer days on those weeks, which is good. I want to keep a cushion of sick time in case I, you know, get sick this winter.

There's a blog. It's called You Must Be This Tall To Ride. It's a blog by a guy who got divorced, and it's mostly about how and why he got divorced--and by extension, why a *lot* of guys get divorced. And that boils down to: they were shitty husbands.

Not intentionally, mind you. Nobody (well, almost nobody) sets out to be a bad husband (or wife). Nobody intentionally hurts their spouse, the person they love, and with whom they intended to spend the rest of their lives, and possibly have children. But we do.

It's hard to read that blog sometimes. I see an uncomfortable amount of myself and my own behavior as a husband in a lot of what he writes. It saddens me that I contributed as much as I did to wearing away my wife's love and affection, that I hurt her as much as I did, and caused her to feel like she would be better off alone than married to me. I feel like I was a poor excuse for a husband much of the time, and I suspect my perception accurately reflects the reality.

It wasn't all me, I know. But it still often feels like it. So the other day, while we were gaming with friends, it was a shock to hear my ex say something about "people who suck at relationships, like me."

Because, while I can say that I believe it wasn't all my fault that the relationship didn't work, I feel like a *lot* of the blame lies with me. But that statement tells me I'm not alone in that feeling, that she feels responsible for it too. Which make it all even sadder, really. We're two well-intentioned people who couldn't figure out how to be the partners to one another that we wanted to be.

Which for the last couple of days has been surrounded by ice and snow, just like the more famous Fortress owned by that guy from Krypton. Fortunately, the temperature has risen above freezing and is expected to stay that way for the next week. As a result of the inclement weather, and working in a facility at the top of a big hill, I worked from home today.

Which was...marginally successful. I was able to log in to my desk remotely, but certain pieces of software were out of reach. I spent (along with my boss) a good part of the day trying to fix that situation, to no avail. I also decided that I need to buy a new hard drive for my home PC. It's a repurposed computer from my previous job (hey, they were giving them away and I got one), which was convenient when my home PC died of heat exhaustion a good while back.

It's got a plenty fast CPU and adequate memory and good (if not great) graphics. But it's only got a 75 GB hard drive.* Which was plenty for what they used it for in the workplace, handling a lot of data, but not storing it. Not nearly enough for my needs, though, even with most of my files on two external hard drives. Just the operating system and the software that HAS to live on the C: drive to function have filled it up. So...hard drive shopping tomorrow, probably. Then days of fun installing the OS on the new drive (not the current OS that came with the PC, the Windows 7 install disk from my previous computer) and tweaking everything the way I want it.

So, I hear you ask, how do I like living alone? Well, I am still grieving the end of my marriage at times. That was a long relationship, and I'd hoped it would be for life. But it wasn't, and I'm building a new life one day at a time. Working out my routines. Trying out new ones. And I'm enjoying it. In some ways I miss having other people around to talk to, and in other ways not at all. I can do what I want when I want how I want. I'm learning what works and what doesn't.

For instance, I have a dishwasher in my kitchen. In over three weeks, I haven't used it yet. I just wash up as I go, or at most, leave the dishes until I'm done with a meal, then clean up. And if I want to pause a television show for half an hour while I do, nobody else is inconvenienced.

I still haven't reassembled my computer desk yet. The computer is sprawled across a long trestle table I've owned for a long, long time in the dining/living room. But spending eight hours at it today for telecommuting has put a kink in my shoulders and neck, which means I need to get to that. The current arrangement is okay for brief 20-30 minutes bouts of netsurfing, but not for lengthy use.

The apartment is still quite spartan, and while I do plan to get a little more furniture eventually, I find that I like it that way. I like having lots of empty space. It's tidy, easy to clean; not a lot of furniture to dust or to vacuum around. It just feels spacious...because it is.

My upstairs neighbors are a little noisy. Not unreasonably so, but definitely audible. Especially the rhythmic squeaking of springs I hear periodically from the living/dining room area. At first it sounded like bedsprings--but it was in the living room, which seemed unlikely. Now I've noticed that moves around, and I'm thinking maybe it's...a child's hobby horse (one suspended from springs so the kid can rock on it)? Something that can be--and is--moved around quite a bit. Well, it's a mystery.

All in all, things are going well.


*I remember the day I got access to a computer with TWENTY MEGABYTES of storage on the hard drive, and wondered how on earth I would EVER use that much capacity. It was inconceivable that I could fill a cavernous space like that. Then I shook my head, glanced out the window, and yelled at the dinosaurs to get off my lawn.

I've been at OHSU for a month as of yesterday. Four weeks. Five weeks since I quit my previous job and took a week off before starting the new one.

I'm working in the Liver Pre-Transplant office. My job involves doing benefit checks--finding out what benefits, exactly, the potential patient's insurance covers so our financial coordinator can assess their situation. It involves sending out prior authorization requests (i.e., getting permission from the insurance company/HMO/whoever) for the diagnostics and office visits needed to evaluate someone to determine if they're a good candidate. It involves tracking the authorizations, and the scheduling of office visits and diagnostic tests and getting authorizations for ongoing, specific visits/diagnostics after the evaluation, and helping to manage patients' required medical appointments and labs (i.e., making sure they know when something is coming due, making sure orders for the medical care are in place so they can be seen, making sure the appointments are scheduled (or in some cases, scheduling them myself). I also enter lab results into the system, and upload diagnostic results from outside offices, and lots of other things.

I spent two weeks being trained and getting a little hands-on experience--and feeling completely lost. There's a ton of stuff you need to know to do this job. I often felt like I was floundering, or stumbling around in the dark unable to piece it all together. So did Carrie, the woman who was being trained with me to take my equivalent role in the Kidney pre-transplant office. But everyone around us--our boss, our trainer, our co-workers and random people who encountered there at OHSU--told us the same thing again and again and again.

It IS a big job. It DOES take a long time to learn. We were doing great, and we shouldn't be hard on ourselves. We'll get it. I was willing to take their word for it, that they knew what they were talking about...but it didn't feel like it.

I've spent the last two weeks, since my initial training, working alongside my counterpart. We split the pre-transplant liver patients between us; I handle A-K, she handles L-Z. Or we will once I'm up to speed, right now we're working closely on all of them while I continue getting up to speed. And...and I feel like I'm getting there. I still have lots to learn, and the job is like a jigsaw puzzle but I've assembled the border now and big pieces of it are coming together, and I'm confident that I'll be able to fill in the rest with time and practice. In some ways, the job is fairly repetitive: benefits checks, evaluation authorization requests, listing authorizations, transplant authorizations, managing patient schedules, and so forth. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In other ways, it's a constant challenge and nobody EVER knows it all because things are constantly in flux. Patients change insurance providers. Plans change. Rules change. Laws change. And when all that remains constant, patients change--they get better, they get worse, and their needs change accordingly. So I'm never going to be in a place where I don't have to ask questions and puzzle out the whys and wherefores of things. But I'm getting a handle on the basics.

And I love it. Time flies. By the time I left my previous job, I hated it. I watched the clock, eager for my next break, or lunch, or the end of the day. The soulless micromanagement of a call center was soul-grinding. But this job, I love. I'm working hard, and learning, and time flies. It's useful, valuable work and it makes a difference to the patients we're working with, which is both exciting and sometimes a little scary. My bosses and my co-workers assume I'm capable and willing to do the job, and continue to be endlessly encouraging, and I'm not being micromanaged, and it's glorious.

So, yeah, I really like this job, and I'm very pleased to have it. It's been a long-overdue and positive change.

So, in 2009 I was laid off from a job I'd had for fifteen years. It was a shock, but not entirely surprising. I'd survived several previous rounds of layoffs and with the economy in the toilet, fundraising (it was a non-profit) was down, so budget cuts were the order of the day. And as the highest-paid admin assistant in my department, well, you take your savings where you can.

In 2011 I found a part-time job doing data entry for a company that runs a loadboard (an online marketplace where brokers needing loads moved can find truckers, who need to find work moving loads). I did that for about two years, then got promoted to full-time. I made outbound calls to get insurance information on carriers (truckers), took inbound calls for billing, freightmatching, customer service, and activation and training on the various software packages we sell for accessing the loadboard.

Did I mention it was a call center. It was. I'd never worked in a call center before, and I never will again, God willing. You're chained to your telephone for eight hours a day. Every moment of your time is monitored and judged, and your calls are recorded. And judged. And you're expected to achieve a variety of conflicting goals all the time. (It got to be a joke amongst my team. Whichever "metric" was trailing would become the focus of frequent emails from the managers about improving it. We'd change focus accordingly, only to have another metric fall--and become the focus of frantic exhortations to get that one back up. It was a never-ending treadmill of incompatible goals. You CANNOT physically do everything they want you to do at the level they want it done. You CAN'T.)

So you learn to focus on what really matters--which means, whatever measures YOU are getting assessed on. In my case, it was outbound percentage. I was supposed spend 30% of my on-the-clock time doing outbound calls. So I set my phone in "after call" so that incoming calls (another "top" priority among many) wouldn't reach me and stayed in that state all day every day so I could make outbound calls. I wasn't supposed to do that, but what the hell. Occasionally I'd get an IM (yes, not just emails, we got IMs too) to take a call if the queues were backed up, but mostly I avoided incoming calls for months.

Then we got new phones, and they took "after call" away from us. And expected us to do outbound calls AND take inbound calls AND document everything AND do all the other back-end stuff without any time to focus on it. And bumped our outbound quota to 35%. And while our department was responsible for taking inbound calls (to help another department) when that department made their monthly goals (with our help), did we get any rewards? No. Just them. And that's when I decided my job had gone from tolerable (didn't love it, didn't hate it, it was just a job) to intolerable.

The company provides (an actually pretty nice) anniversary luncheon each month for people hired in that month. At the last one, I was pretty much the only person from my department in a room of a dozen people or more. They all talked about how much they liked working there, and how they were left alone to do their job and didn't have people looking over their shoulders all the time and micromanaging them, and how the company felt like a family. I listened to these people and thought (but didn't say), "I work at [COMPANY], where the hell do YOU work?" But apparently the call center is very different from the rest of the company there.

Maybe all call centers are like that. I don't know. But I do know that there'd always been fairly high turnover in the call center, but nothing like the turnover in my department in the last few months. One guy decamped to the Billing department downstairs "where the managers have souls." Others have found new jobs and left. I've been looking for work for a while--

--and now I have a new job. I'm going to working at OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University if you're not from around here) in the organ transplant area. I'll be temping at first, but have every hope of getting hired on as a regular employee. I gave notice at work on Friday. I'm really, really looking forward to this change.

It's exciting. And a little anxious-making. I'm going to have to master new skills, learn a new schedule. Especially my commuting schedule. OHSU is hard to reach, parking is extremely limited (and expensive, if you drive at all) and I will probably end up taking public transit. Bus? Tram? A combination of the two? That remains to be determined. Learning the job will probably take longer, but I'm looking forward to that. It will be important, useful work with people who will treat me like an intelligent, capable adult and not a cog in a machine.

ANYHOW...in other news. Today is my 17th wedding anniversary. Snippy and I tied the knot on a very rainy February evening seventeen years ago today. To celebrate we went to The Melting Pot, where we enjoyed choose fondue, salads, meat entrees (French Quarter--spiced shrimp, pork, chicken, steak and sausages--for me, and half teriyaki marinaded sirloin and half filet mignon for Snippy), and dark chocolate fondue on bananas, strawberries, marshmallows and fudge bites for dessert. We talked a lot, decided to plan a getaway to Disneyland for our 20th anniversary, and generally had a great time. We also had a photo taken of us, which we plan to send to my mother back east. She'll enjoy that.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up...

So I had laser eye surgery this week.

( Click here for the not-really-gruesome-at-all details, plus other things. )