Wednesday Grumpiness
A few items have crossed my desk in the past couple of days and I wanted to comment on them. The first was a study in JAMA Network Open examining the accuracy of electronic medical records that shows that only 38% of the review of systems portion and 53% of the physical exam portion of physician/patient encounters accurately reflect what actually happened. Granted, this was a small sample size of only nine physicians at two sites, but it mirrors what I’ve seen happen in the medical transcription industry over the past couple of years. This makes me angry on several levels, not the least of which is the widespread belief being shoved down our throats that “more technology = better,” when clearly that isn’t true. I’d even argue that we’ve overshot the mark and have reached a point of diminishing returns in many areas.
Along those same lines, see this article in the Atlantic entitled “Why Everything is Getting Louder.” You should hope that some large server farm doesn’t move into your neighborhood. I crave silence. I’ll drive for long stretches on my road trips without playing the radio or a podcast just so I can spend time inside my own head. When I am out in the garden, I make a point of listening to what’s happening out there. I worked on a deadline sewing project for three straight hours yesterday morning with nothing playing in the background. (The furnace is going on intermittently now and that’s bothering me a bit, but I will get used to that soon and stop hearing it.) I was the college kid who studied in the basement of the library.
I had to upgrade my version of QuickBooks yesterday. Is it wrong of me to wish a pox on the computer programmers with 20-something eyes who messed around with the color scheme and made the fonts nearly unreadable in the new version, with no way to change them? Their website is even worse—it features a tiny light gray font on a white background. I’ve got an eye doctor appointment this month and I know I am going to have to give in and get multifocal lenses. I’ve had to stop wearing my bifocal contacts because they just don’t work anymore. Thank you, QuickBooks, for making my life even more difficult.
And the one that has had me scratching my head this week is another study—I cannot find the source link, unfortunately, because it came across my Twitter feed and good luck finding anything in that dumpster fire—that showed that people grossly underestimate how productive they are. Respondents routinely said they were doing eight hours of solid work every day when tracking systems showed they were only doing five or six. If you sleep for eight hours and only do five or six hours of work every day, what the heck are you doing with the other 10 hours?!?!?!?!? The husband left for work at 8 a.m. yesterday and didn’t sit down to eat dinner until 6:42 p.m. I sat for a few hours yesterday afternoon only because I wanted to finish the binding on a comforter and finish knitting a prayer shawl—both tasks accomplished—but at least I was doing something productive.
[I am going to have to start the yoga routine again soon. The one thing I didn’t like about my transcription job was the sitting; I had a lot of trouble with stiffness and lack of flexibility. My OT daughter tells me that it is because as you get older, the fascia around your joints “shrink wraps” itself. If it’s not broken up regularly, your body freezes up. Working in the garden all summer kept me limber. I tend to sit more and be less active in the winter, so I need to make a habit of moving around.]
We did get another back-door cold front yesterday. After heavy rain in the morning, the wind started blowing mid-afternoon and the temperature dropped. (It’s 22 degrees out there right now.) Kalispell even got some snow. We didn’t, which was weird, but that happens. It is supposed to warm up to the 50s again this weekend.
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I’m a bit conflicted about a purchase I made earlier in the week. At sewing last Thursday, Elaine mentioned that she had seen some quilt batts in a clearance bin at Joanns and regretted not buying them for us to use when making comforters for MCC. I told her that I’d look the next time I was in there. Sure enough, when I went in on Monday morning, there was a whole bin full of quilt batts of the appropriate size marked down to $9.97 each. I also had a coupon for an additional 25% off all clearance items. I picked up five batts. All of the clearance fabric was an additional 30% off, and some of it had already been marked down by up to 80%. I found a couple of 80% off bolts with sufficient yardage on them. (By the time fabric makes it to clearance, there may only be a yard or two left on the bolt and we need 4-5 yards for a comforter backing. I am pretty good at counting the folds of fabric on a bolt and approximating what is on it before I get to the cutting table.) One bolt had five yards and one bolt had six yards, so I told the lady at the cutting table I would just finish the bolts. That got me an extra 10% off. By the time it was all said and done—80% off plus 10% end-of-bolt plus 30% off—the fabric was $1.00 a yard. The total for everything came to $52.
The husband says he hopes there are enough people who pay full retail at Joanns that the company can afford to have customers like me. I’m not that cheap all the time—I’ll pay full retail if I am buying from a local artist or company—but if Joanns is going to put stuff on sale and we need it for making donated comforters, I’ll take advantage of the opportunity. Part of me knows that this isn’t really sustainable, though.
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And because I would like to end this blog post on a more positive note, I’ll show you something I found while prepping for my upcoming embroidery retreat:
I bought this book at a thrift store for a dollar, intending to use some of the transfers in my Cori Dantini class. When I began looking through them, though, I decided to keep the book intact and use some of the transfers. I am particularly partial to this one of two roosters:
No doubt it will show up on some project in the future.