A New Week And An End to November

So I am up at 6:30 AM this morning and I didn't even have time to take a shower. Why do you ask? Because Lisa had asked me to come by at 7 AM to help her log in to her telehealth consult with her Cedars-Sinai physician. Her appointment is not until 7:30 AM but I had long since stopped taking for granted that she can be technically challenged with the simple things like logging in to a Zoom call. She gets easily flustered when she hits the tiniest of roadblocks due to something as common as a typing error and so I agreed to come help as my good deed for the day. And true enough, she would actually need my help this being the first time she had logged on to the patient portal to go to her appointment. She had a couple of issues. One was that she was having a problem getting the hardware test completed to tie in her audio and video. Not sure how I actually fixed anything except that I just let it run a couple of times since it seemed slow on their end. The bigger problem was that she actually DIDN'T have an appointment today LOL. She got the time wrong and she got the day wrong. It's not actually until next week. Oh well... at least she knows she can log on now which is half the battle. I can only imagine what QueensCare patients go through when they do THEIR telehealth appointments. No wonder they don't like it. It's simply not that intuitive no matter how tech savvy they are or not. And so with that, at least Lisa fixed me breakfast this morning which was some of the brioche French toast and the sausage I bought for her just this past Saturday. And at least Johnnie, Lisa, and I got another meal in together, and this time it was breakfast for today. Tonight is still hand-off night mind you, just that I got to spend a little bit of time here already. And wouldn't you know when I did the 10:30 AM Business Continuity call this morning, a great deal of the topic centered around helping patients schedule in since they are not really into all the telehealth stuff. Just as I had previously mentioned. It was like I was talking about the situation I had just gone through less than a couple of hours ago! Someone has to help these patients and hand-hold them through the process. How we would do that consistently in bulk is the key isn't it? Anyway, morning work all done I feel like I had already put a lot of time in today! I had already finished the Health Net Report last night, which was due today. And so I had already had a pretty productive day. And it was only lunchtime. I made myself some shaved beef on yakisoba for lunch (see pic) and had myself a hearty meal. 

So Mondays is when I usually load up on steps for the last 6 weeks now. I don't know how that evolved really, just that if I get a good jump on the thing in the beginning of the week, then I can ease up a bit on the weekend. And today I actually walked over to Ralphs to buy some chicken to cook for the rest of the week. I figured I'd experiment on how to cook a juicy, perfectly browned chicken breast. I think I know how actually... you boil the thing for 12 minutes first! And so it was that by the time I got to the late afternoon, I was already up to almost 10000 steps. It was a good thing too because Emma at worked lined up a 3-4 PM meeting about HRSA stuff that was about as dry as you could ever get! I mean I would usually get on the computer and do other things when I do these kind of meetings and for this one, it was an absolute necessity or I would have just fallen asleep where I sat. Talk about dry. Well, at least I can say I did some work stuff in the afternoon though. Heck I was even able to step away and cook Johnnie's penne pasta for the week. I told the group I had a hard stop at 4 PM. I did though... I had to cook the chicken. I was going to do chicken marsala in the Instant Pot tonight. And so I prepared everything, the mushrooms, etc and sauteed the chicken and then set the thing and then headed off to pick up Johnnie. I ran into mom and son having dinner actually. And saw that they had put up the Christmas tree and decorations sometime during the day. YAY... after Thanksgiving marks the official start of the holiday season. Usually at the FRB, we'd be getting our doors decorated right around this time. Which obviously isn't happening this year. We'd be planning the holiday potluck too. And planning the Secret Santa gift exchange. I'd be trying to get in on the early Laker games too. Sigh. None of that happening this year of course. But I'm going to find a positive silver lining out of all this at least for me personally. For one thing, I can focus on the moment. And for tonight, that's watching Johnnie excited to get hot just-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies to eat! The little things like these count for much more. And that's not so bad. WE both went to bed early too. Not so bad either. And as I pondered the last day of November, I'm thinking about an election that Joe Biden won completing my tri-fecta but that continues to cause anxiety because that is what Trump does. Sow chaos and confusion so he can divide and conquer. I thought about Thanksgiving and a pandemic that is starting to ramp up and get worse again. But hey, my immediate inner circle is doing just fine. Gotta be thankful for that. Bring on December.