Planning to plan

August has been a big huge month of transition for me. All within the same week I started a new job in a new field and became a first-time home owner in a new city! It's easy to say it in a sentence, but even though these changes have been positive, I have had to find ways to be more adaptable than I have had to be for a long time. My job is going well I think. Everyone keeps telling me how good I'm doing and everyone is so friendly and helpful. I am slow, mostly because I don't have codes memorized. What a medical coder does is open up a medical chart and look at the fee that was charged for that day and then we have to look at the doctor's notes to see if they really treated for that. We have a program that catches certain errors before the claim goes to the insurance company and then we have to look deeper. I code for a medical group that includes hospitals and clinics and some of the hospital visits are pretty sad to look at. I have even coded the death of a lady who used to be a regular customer for me when I worked in the optical department. She was not super nice and now I know why, she was probably in a lot of pain. We are seeing the lack of beds due to COVID which is both sad and scary. I'm not saying that as any kind of political statement or trying to ruffle any feathers but I'm seeing it. Elderly people in fragile states with broken bones having to be transferred to a different hospital because there's no beds available. Anyway, I do think coding is sort of fun because it's kind of like putting a puzzle together. I was scheduled for supervised training for 90 days but my boss's coordinator sent out a message to cut way back on my training and she wants me to start working charts on my own. The end of the month is looming and we perpetually have millions of dollars worth of charges sitting in a queue waiting for us to make sure the coding is done right before sending it out for payment from insurance. The goal is to not have charges older than 4 days in the queue but we are all working as fast as we can (a lot of them are working overtime) and I don't see how we'll get caught up. I'm not stressing out yet because they are all aware that it's a dream to be that caught up. I am happy that the team thinks I am doing well enough to work on my own but it's a little intimidating. My compromises at work are the commute (nearly 2 hours round-trip) and not being super confident in my abilities yet. I really hate the congested highway I have to take, but I only have 2 more months until I get to work from home so I can tolerate it for now. We love the house, for the most part. One of my biggest challenges is not having the closets I was used to having. Our house was built in 1940 so there is no coat closet and the people who flipped the house turned the linen closet into a half bath so that's two major adjustments we have to overcome. There is also no silverware drawer so we have that in our pantry, which is large, thank goodness. And we have stairs inside and out of the house, and we have a nice big double lot but it's on a hill in two different directions and OH.MY.GOODNESS is our driveway steep and narrow! Ha ha. I do actually love our little house but it is taking time for me to adapt to all the changes. Sometimes I still have to remind myself that we aren't just renting this place but it's actually ours. It's a crazy good feeling! The city we moved into is one of the few remaining affordable places along Lake Michigan. It's population is less than 4,000 and there's only one grocery store and one place to get your hair cut. The grocery store is tiny so we will have to adapt to not have a million varieties and exotic foods or even very many ready-made vegetarian foods. Woe is me, right? So I'm not really following any particular menu right now. I might have a turkey sandwich or a bowl of minestrone soup for lunch, I'm eating oatmeal loaded with brown sugar for breakfast and sugary granola bars for snacks. We have eaten out a bunch on the weekends and even had to partake of the neighborhood deli's walk-up ice cream window. I feel like I don't have my bearings yet. The weekend we got the house we were out of town, then the next two weekends there were big festivals in out city and since we're so close to the beach where all the activities happen, we just walked down and enjoy. Finally this weekend should be quiet and I will take some time to just enjoy the yard with a good book. That will feel fantastic! After looking at all these medical records I am increasingly aware of how obesity is such a killer and it has been weighing on me pretty heavily. I am considering going low-carb again as it might be one of the few options I have as far as food choices go in this tiny grocery. Like everything right now, it will take some planning but I don't feel like I have had much time to do that yet. More to come on that I suppose. It needs to be back on my radar, and I can't keep putting things off for the magical time when I work from home. Anyway that's where I am at, in the 'planning to plan things' stage.