by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
This blog post isn’t our normal ‘high quality’ writing project that we usually present to you (cough cough). This is a mish-mash of thoughts floating around in my head.
I am in the middle of the government’s HITECH program. It’s a course run by different colleges across the nation and is funded by Uncle Sam… oh wait… it’s funded by the taxpayers. It’s basically a program to train people to get this nation’s heath care infrastructure up to new standards started by the last president and further funded by the ‘accidental tourist’ currently in the white house. The government set all these new standards to require your medical information to be available instantly to any medical facility anywhere in the US by 2014 (among other upgrades). I am sure this process has all sorts of privacy issues that we could write weeks and weeks about but needless to say there aren’t enough trained people to help get these hospitals and doctor’s offices up to the new standards. This program trains you and if you take the national certification and pass, you get your money back for the course. Seeing as our hospital is right in the middle of all these upgrades many of us here decided to take the course. The one we are taking is run out of Midland College.
We had bad storms this last week and while I was watching out the backdoor I saw the 10×12 porch covering (tin) get ripped of and fly away without a sound. It was very disquieting to witness. No tornado or anything like that, just strong STRONG winds. It also knocked over out new barbecue grill (denting it) and tore a couple of rattan blind-things we had on the porch too. I decided to go ahead and call insurance since I didnt’ want to try to rebuild the roof thing myself. This is the 3rd claim I’ve made on our house in the last 5 years. Foremost is our insurer and they are really easy to deal with. They have never even sent an adjuster out, they just take my word for it.
My truck has been losing oil mysteriously since I got 2 of the heads replaced. It drove for a couple of weeks with little to no oil! I filled it up just thinking that the oil change place forgot to fill it or something but a week later I checked it again and it was empty again. 4+ quarts in a week! No leaking, no smoking… just gone! I am not sure what to do (other than start saving money for that new truck). My money WAS going to be spent on a 71′ beetle someone at work had for sale but I just can’t right now.
Today I am at the Texas Comicon in San Antonio. The convention runs Friday through Sunday. That’s strange to me since the ones up here are only on Saturdays and Sundays. I am not going to be there on Sunday. Usually Sundays are slow days and I would like to be back home and have at least one day at home before work on Monday. I doubt that the convention will be as big as the Dallas Comicon back in May but I might be able to sell some more model kits (I hope so).