Trying to get some things done.

My day off is Monday now.  It's very strange.  I think I really might like it.  I had a dentist appointment this morning so I got up and kind of rushed out for that.  I got up at 9:00 a.m. and the appointment was at 10:00 so I took a quick shower and went.  Then I went to get my hair done.  It was great, no crowd on a Monday morning and I actually like my haircut, which is weird.  Oh well, I'm sure I'll hate it tomorrow.  I generally do.  :-)  Yesterday, on my other day off (two in a row!) I went to the children's hospital to volunteer.  I haven't been able to go for several weeks and I had missed it.  I was very much needed.  They had had no volunteers all day, I was the only one, and they had a lot of fussy little babies.  I stayed a bit overtime holding one because he was sleeping so good and he needed it.  Also, I finally, finally took some blankets there that my daughter's 4H needlework club made last year.  The plan had been that we'd donate the blankets and I'd take my daughter for a photo-op for the 4H newsletter, but it's too far to just drive down there for no reason, gas prices being what they are and she didn't want to sit and wait while I volunteered for 4 hours, so finally, I just took them and dropped them off without the photo op.  At least it is done.  I am also trying to get some phone calls made today.  If you've been reading this blog for long, you know I hate making phone calls, so I will be happy when those are done.

In school news, the girl got her work done last week but the boy did not and so he is grounded again.  The local schools are on spring break this week, but since we match our schedule with my older son's college schedule and took it 2 weeks ago, we are not.  :-) 

Art journal stuff.

I may have shared some of these already.  I don't keep track of them all that well and there are hundreds at this point.  Also, since I pretty much always draw flowers, they tend to look similar.  The one at the very bottom here, is different because I outlined it in a white sharpie watercolor marker.  I finally got a white pen that works, but it's kind of big and hard to work with.  I still enjoy it though.  Art journaling, for me, is therapy. 

Things I have learned today.

I learned that if a person has 7 different personalities and he is naming them in an interview and you are typing the interview for your (lovely) job and he calls them proper names like Sam, you capitalize those; however, if he calls them things like "the carrier" you don't.  Good to know, I guess.  I would think that a name for a personality would always be capitalized, but I guess that is not the rule.

Hmmm.

NOTE:  Sam and 'the carrier"s names have been changed.  I take the confidentiality rules that seriously.  I really do.

 

Yesterday, down. Today, better.

Yesterday, I was feeling very, very, very down in the dumps.  All that we have went through in the past few months was just weighing me down.  I did finish work and I did go pick up my mom's medications, take them to her, visit with her a while and stopped by her house to make sure everything was okay there.  Going into the house was not as bad as it has been most other times I have been there.  I am not sure why.  By the time I got home, I was again, determined to have a decent evening with my family and I did.  Determination is a powerful thing.

Today is Friday and of course, the kids will be rushing to get finished with school tonight.  It's ridiculous, but there it is.  They do it every week.  I used to do a similar thing we called invoice weekend once every 2 weeks with one of my prior jobs, rushing to do a ton of work on the weekend before, you guessed it, I had to send my invoice in for services rendered, to get paid.  It is a family trait.

Speaking of work, there are a few things better and some worse about this job.  Better is that they are all one type of note basically so as I go along and get used to this particular specialty, I think it will be easier.  Another thing is that I have access to prior typed dictations, even those typed by other people, to use for reference as to what the doctor usually says.  Also, I can adjust the backspace function on the foot pedal and the spell check is not horrible.  :-)  One bad thing is that they have these normals /templates that come into the report automatically and for those things, if the physician says basically that thing again and I don't have to change it, I don't get paid.  What most of them do is say the same things, but in a different order so I have to move things around but still don't get paid for them and I can't make normals of my own because when I plug them into the report, they will not come in highlighted and then I'd get paid for the whole thing and that is a no-no.  Not that I have tried it, but I have been warned as a part of my training.  Here's an example.  What is highlighted in yellow is what I don't get paid for.  You can see why this is an issue.

Fun times.

Last night the kids and I were watching Netflix's latest installment of Boy Meets World and I went to the bathroom, so the kids paused the DVD.  When I came out of the bathroom, my daughter was walking down the hall towards me singing Under The Sea and dancing a little bit and my son was 1 step behind her, doing this hilarious little dance.  My first impression was that she didn't even know he was behind her, but later she said she knew he was back there, but she didn't know he was dancing.  I started laughing so hard that I honestly almost couldn't stand up.  So funny!  What would I do without these kiddos?

 We also got to see our homeschooling group, at least a few of them yesterday for a prom planning meeting but we didn't get to have a good talk so I left their company not as content as usual.  :-(  I needed some quality time with my friends, but that's okay.  Prom planning is important too, I suppose. 

My new job joy.

I'm a medical transcriptionist, with 1 skill that unfortunately is attached to a dying industry.  Voice recognition software with transcriptionists as editors is taking over.  It took my last job away from me.  This job, to me, is just me trying to squeeze the last little bit out of the profession while I figure out what do to with the rest of my life.  I'm typing for a psychiatrist this morning whom I swear sounds like he is talking with marbles in his mouth.  He's slurring.  He keeps getting caught in a loop and dictating the same 3 headings over and over with different paragraphs after them.  Only about 3/4 of what he says is intelligible at all.  We're trying together to do a report about a drug addicted suicidal patient who is undergoing about his 20th psychiatric admission.

20 minutes into this craziness, I am wondering if maybe the physician is also drug addicted and I am starting to feel that the patient is not the only one who is suicidal.

I need to figure out what the heck to do with my post-transcription life and I need to figure it out quickly.  This is driving me tee-totally bonkers.


I am not trying to be insensitive to the patients that I type for who have real diagnoses and real issues, but I do feel that this job might make me join them sooner than I would have hoped. It's been a very rough year and it has not been an ideal time to have to start a very difficult new job.

Also, I keep losing my internet connection and having to get up and go in the other room to reset it.  That does not help.

The good news is I get to see my homeschooling peeps today for a prom planning meeting.  I am hoping/praying that it does not get cancelled because I need to see some friendly faces and hear some things I understand. 

Busy.

Since we went yarn shopping the other day, my daughter has made 15 cotton washcloths.  Here are some of them. 

Weird.

It's Monday and I don't have to work.  On my new job, my day off is Monday.  I am not sure how to act.  I had a doctor's appointment so I went to that, went to the pharmacy and got mom's medications, took them to her and visited a bit and now I am back home and I am thinking of taking a nap.  When I was at the doctor, I thought I probably had a urinary tract infection so I had them check and I did have one, so I'll pick up my medications later.  My daughter woke up with cold symptoms.  I hope she doesn't pass that around for all of us to share. 

I don't want any.

;)Dee in response to your comment about grounding each other - They have worked out a system so that each decides the appropriate punishment if they don't finish school on time each week.  She has only messed up once, he does it all the time.  They are really good kids and almost grown up so this is the only thing they ever get in trouble for.  I don't want to stay up until midnight on Fridays to hand out sentences, so I let them ground each other.   Usually I know first thing Saturday morning because generally he is grounded from TV and video games, but when she did music and audiobooks (which she thought would be more painful for him right now) it surprised me.

My kids are so amusing.

Imagine my surprise.

I just found out that my youngest son is grounded.  Apparently, he didn't get his school work done by midnight on Friday - he says he missed it by 20 minutes - and his sister had to ground him.  I found out when he came into share my music.  I was blasting 21 Pilots on my computer as my oldest son's musical tastes have rubbed off on me.  I think it's interesting that I didn't know that he was grounded.  She has grounded him from audio books and music this week. 

Yesterday, to deal with my grief over my mom's situation, I took my daughter yarn shopping.  We also did such girly things as buying chocolate, going to Bath and Body Works and buying prom accessories.  It's so fun having both boys and girls to introduce you to new things and help distract and take your mind off your troubles.

My daughter is borrowing a prom dress from a friend.  Her friend went to a free prom dress event and came home with a pretty pink dress with a handkerchief hem.  My daughter had never tried on a handkerchief hem and she loves it.  Pink is not her favorite color, but she looks very pretty in it (of course, not that I am prejudiced or anything). 

On the work front, I just went in to check my QA feedback score and yesterday, all of the reports I turned in said "No errors".  :-)  That makes me happy.   I'm glad to know I can do the job. It was overwhelming at first. 

Since I am working on Thursday afternoons now, I have not decided on where in my schedule to put my volunteering in the NICU.  I might go today.  Tomorrow's really my only other option and I usually go see my mom on Monday.  She has other visitors on Sunday afternoons.

Anyway, that's this weekend. 

Yesterday.

I got through yesterdays work day.  I won't say without tears, because I think I did cry a little.  I've had such a difficult week mom-wise (by phone) and hormone wise and feeling bad while starting a new job.  I tried very hard to have a happy evening and I succeeded.  I watched a little bit of Boy Meets World with the kids, we took a walk and I art-journaled.  I posted this word Hope page earlier then decided that the word itself needed to be darker.  In this picture, it looks like the whole thing is darker, it's not.  I didn't change anything, but the line of the word hope, so all of the other bright colors are still there.  It may still be a work in progress.  We'll see.  The bible verse in the background is about overflowing with hope and the page looks like an ocean of hope to me.

The third picture is a rock my son found in/near the creek.  It looks like it has had a hole chiseled in it.  Do you think we have an archeological discovery?  I can't imagine that is a natural formation.  In homeschooling news,there is procrastination going on, mostly from my son, as usual.  I know he is planning to do all of his math for the week today.  It's annoying but I keep going in the hopes that maybe he will learn to do better.  It could happen.

Art.

Stressing out.

Yes, I am stressing out.  The new job should be fine and if I wasn't coming into it pre-stressed, it would be.  A lot of it, including the headache yesterday, is hormonal.  I think that I did reasonably well today, but it took a lot out of me.  The phone kept ringing all day long and that does not help my concentration while I am trying to learn a billion new things.  The account is new and the account specifications that I am trying to learn are changing on a daily basis.  Seriously, they said don't print them out, just keep them in your email and refer to them because they will change tomorrow.  That, getting used to a new computer system, new location place names, a specialty I have typed some for, but not a ton, new dictators, etc and it just adds up to a lot.  My immediate family is smart enough to stay away.  It's one of those throw chocolate in the door kind of situations.  I am not sure how I am going to fit my volunteering into my new schedule, maybe on Sunday, but I need to go hold the babies.  That's one of my best ways to de-stress. 

The kids are doing school on their own and hopefully they are doing it.  I might get grouchy with them if they aren't.  With regards to school days, our state voted to allow school systems to take off 10 days due to snow.  I think we should join them.  :-) 

Not my best day ever.

I survived my first day of transcription at my new job, but I didn't do all that well.  So much to learn and I had a headache all day.  Pounding.  Awful.  I had issues with my computer needing to reboot and issues with calibrating my foot pedal and I sent one job through without spell-checking it.  All in all though, I got through it and I hope/pray that tomorrow is a much better day.  My headache has currently abated and I hope it stays gone.  It is so hard to function with one of those.  The good news is the computer system is easy to use, my word expander works with it and the psychiatric notes I am typing are pretty easy for the most part, so once I get going, it should work out very well. 

I hope my head behaves itself tomorrow.

Changing again.

With my new job, Monday is going to be my day off again.  Its been than way before, but it's been a while.  I chose Thursday a few years ago when I was working nights and that was skate night.  Now it's volunteer night and I don't know if I will be changing that or not.  From what I can gather about my new job from a couple of phone conversations, they are pretty flexible about when I get my lines, morning or evening, breaks, etc., so I can work a few hours in the morning, go and volunteer and then come back and finish up.  Everything about the new job sounds good so far.  I can use my word expander, I can flex my hours, the files auto save after 1 minute (which was always an issue at my old job, losing reports due to power failure or trying to look something up...) and there is a spellcheck, something that kind of got lost in the shuffle to make more money at my old job .. the new VR system didn't have even basic medications in the spellcheck.  They have direct deposit.  It all sounds good.  I had a 1 hour training session with the recruiter/trainer this morning and now I am waiting to start official training with my coordinator tomorrow morning. 

In other things we have 4H today and we get to see our friends!

Redecorating.

A few years ago, we painted my bathroom purple because that's what paint we had left over from painting my daughter's room and we put these stenciled words on it.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  It's gotten old, but we hate to paint so badly that we haven't redone it.  My son's friend put sticky notes on the walls and now I love it.  I might just mod podge them in place and leave them.  So hilarious!

Love Hurts

I'm not sure that this one is, the superman symbol?

Imagine Dragons.

Love me some pizza.

Kirby's Dream World

Do you believe in magic?

I do believe in fairies, I do!  I do!

Imagine a unicorn.

Dream about ice cream!