I had some questions about where JC's book is available. If you go to her website, she lists retail outlets for the book.

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I was home yesterday (Saturday) for the first time since the beginning of the new year. I woke up feeling kind of crummy—DD#2 had a cold this past week and I am fighting it off—but I looked at my to-do list and didn't see a bullet item labelled "take the day off and do nothing," so I just cowboyed up and got on it.

The husband and I had an interesting conversation as we stood in the kitchen drinking our respective cups of coffee (he needs caffeine; I most certainly do not):

The husband: What are you doing today?

Me: Well, I need to finish up my transcription work for this week, the house desperately needs to be cleaned, I need to practice the piano for church tomorrow, and when I get all that work done I would like to go sit in my chair and knit."

The husband: Knitting is working, isn't it? (God bless the dear man for understanding that—sometimes better than I do.)

Me: Yes, but it's the fun work that I reward myself with when the not-fun work is done.

I stood there thinking about what had just come out of my mouth, and then I said to the husband, "Do you realize that I don't have any hobbies? I mean 'hobbies' in the sense that they are fun things I do to blow off steam and relax. I don't have any."

I thought about that a lot during the rest of the day. It's not that I think this is deficiency—far from it—but it's just interesting to me how task-oriented I am. The closest I come to having an activity which isn't a means for producing money is gardening, and since I only get to the do that three months out of twelve, I don't think it really counts. Thanks to my mother, I have one game on my computer (Bookworm, although I am sorely tempted by Plants vs. Zombies). I allow myself 20 minutes every morning to play Bookworm. That's it. Then it's on to the to-do list.

I often wonder at people whose goal in life is to figure out how they can avoid working and spend all their time at the beach, or skiing, or whatever other "recreational" activity they think should make up the majority of their time spent on this planet. Don't get me wrong—I love a week at the beach, but a week is about all I can take before I start twitching, and you'd better believe I have some knitting to "work on" while I am there.

The husband and I often joke about how neither one of us plans to "retire" in the traditional sense of the word, and I think that's true. I just don't believe we're capable of it. I think we both enjoy being productive too much to not be productive, Maybe that's a character flaw, maybe not. I think we strike a good balance between working and our personal lives, and we're both fortunate enough to be able to make money doing things we love to do.

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In knitting news (there is some), the kid's sweater is close to being done—I have one sleeve to knit and plan to get that done tonight—and I started another cowl. I seem to be stuck on those things at the moment, but this one is proving to be great fun to knit. I am playing with mosaic knitting. What fun! I'm using two colors, one of which is a very interestingly variegated yarn. If it does what I am hoping it will as the pattern emerges, I think it will be very very cool.

I discovered that part of the reason I like cable knitting so much is that I am so good at it that I don't need to look at instructions or a chart. Everything is in my head. I found it hard to work on the kid's sweater or the cowl during meetings because I am so tied to charts to know what I need to do next. It's much harder to look engaged in the meeting when one is continually looking at a piece of paper.

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This second semester of transcription is far more time-consuming than the first, because now I am spending a lot of my time on the actual transcription. One of the things that has really frustrated me about this program is trying to figure out the "rules." Programs which are internally inconsistent drive me freaking nuts, and there are some internal inconsistencies with this one that continue to trip me up. The company administering this program makes a fairly big deal out of noting that there are "acceptable variations" in the way transcribing is done, as long as the core medical information is complete. For example, when the dictator says, "The patient presented three-and-a-half weeks ago with severe coughing," the following are all acceptable ways to transcribe that sentence, depending upon the policies of the client for whom the report is being prepared:

"Patient presented 3.5 weeks ago with severe coughing."

"The patient presented 3-1/2 weeks ago with severe coughing."

"The patient presented three-and-a-half weeks ago with severe coughing."

So it's okay to type "patient" instead of "the patient" and there are acceptable variations in the way that numbers are written. However, I've found that if I type out the numbers (which I've always done for numbers less than 10), I get dinged in the grading. Likewise, if I type "patient" instead of "the patient," I also get dinged. The one that really makes me want to tear my hair out is the use of serial commas. I almost always use serial commas, and I've gotten dinged several times for that when they don't appear in the report key. But I've started keeping a list of conventions for how things appear in the report keys, and I am trying to train myself to transcribe so that I don't get dinged for using the particular "acceptable variation" that doesn't appear in the report key. You would think, though, that they could figure out some way to create a grading algorithm that takes into account those "acceptable variations."

The good news is that 95% of the point deductions I have to take are all due to those stupid punctuation issues. I am getting all the medical terminology spot-on and really, that's what counts. I don't think a patient's record is going to be damaged by me putting in a couple of extra commas, but if I get hypertension and hypotension mixed up, that's another story altogether. And thanks to years of playing the piano and singing, I have an excellent "listening ear," and can pick up subtleties in the dictation. So even though it's taking a huge amount of time, I am pleased with where I am in the program. I've got to set up a schedule where I do a certain amount of transcribing homework (like 2-3 reports) every day so that I can stay on track to finish. And at this point it looks like I will go on and do the editing portion of the program; editing seems to be where transcription is heading (as goofy as that sounds).

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It looks like we're going to have another funeral at our church this week. The father of one of DD#2's good friends passed away Friday night after a long battle with thyroid cancer. He was about the same age as me. It's really been a tough situation for the family, as you can imagine. I am just hoping this doesn't turn out to be another year like 2004. We had something like nine funerals for people in our church and community that year.

And now, I am off to work again.