MRFortenberry Pen

For instance, after discussion I searched for articles or suggestions concerning self reflection. It has been suggested as a way to self improvement and understanding. Perhaps my insistence I know myself is precluding learning.

Consequently, I read from search results:

1. https://positivepsychology.com/introspection-self-reflection/
2. https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/what-is-self-reflection.html
3. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/click-here-happiness/201910/what-is-self-reflection-and-why-it-matters-wellness
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/self-reflection
5. https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/self-awareness
6. https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/self-awareness/values

I find it immensely annoying reading an article while being bombarded with advertisements and suggestions such that following the article itself is an effort. One has to actually differentiate from what you want to read versus links that are off target.

The two I found most interestng were sciencedirect on self reflection and edinborough self awareness and values. Neither were as pithy as might be expected. I will continue to search and self reflect.

I was attempting to check spelling of a word and encountered more annoyance. Typically, looking up a word or checking its spelling has been part of functionality. Now I find I have ued 1 of 20 free requests and am prompted to purchase additional. It sounds like time to abandon wordpress or jetpack, something I have been pressed to use instead of wordpreess, and return to simplicity. All this was pushed under the guise of AI and a come-on toward advertisement,.

Anyway, for now, I have written something and noted my efforts toward self reflection. What next?

In fairness, the idea started generating toward the end of last year, probably in December. My wife and I met another couple via Wine Tasting. Honestly wine has not been a high point in my experiences but given my new friend and hopefully kayak partner loves wine and is very knowledgeable, I have decided to learn from him as well as some searching on my own part.

One of my first comments to him was that I have, when wine occurred, usually preferred white as opposed to red, largely based on red wine induced agita. We were each choosing three wines. A meunier was suggested by the other couple so I chose a meunier, a cabernet sauvignon and a rosé. We sipped while learning about fermentation. It seems agita might be a result of multiple factors and not necessarily attributable to white wine per se.

In the end, I preferred the ‘red’ meunier over the white and rosé I selected. I also believe that steel versus barrel fermentation might lend a clue to my gustatory ‘wine’ senses. We have since had a second tasting of sorts and I learned yet again.

White wine usually but not always enjoys a short life with a peak and a denouement. This unfortunately means that many whites I have ‘stored’ for another day are likely past their prime or no longer drinkable.

I intend to continue my journey in pursuit of adding some favorite wines to my list.

Salud!

I retired June 17, 2022 and have been going through the process of converting my working insurance to Medicare. This has been complicated by the fact I am a type 2 diabetic and waited a little later to retire.

I initially filed for Part A prior to my 65th birthday and did not opt for Part B at that time as I was still employed full time. I was assured that would not be an issue when I elected to start Part B at retirement. Once actually retired, it was an up hill battle to get Part B without penalty even though I could prove continuous insured status. The process and forms and phone calls made a very laborious process. Once completed, I still had to argue my Part B should not incur a penalty due to signing up later.

I believe the major issue is that one hand and group does not communicate with any other. I had to track down and speak with or fill forms for almost every situation and entity regardless what had already been surmounted and supposedly documented.

The latest events were the most arduous and I hope will be the last big issues I face. I wanted coverage for continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and depending what source, they were not covered, covered by supplemental, covered by Part B, covered by supplement plans, etc.. In the end CGMs are covered by Medicare Part B only if the patient is insulin dependent though that fact itself was hard to establish after many forms and phone calls and conversations. I called in turn manufacturers Abbot (Libre & Libre 2), Dexcom (G6), suppliers, United Health Care (UHC, my MedicareRx and supplemental insurance provider), Medicare, my endocrinologist, my general practitioner (GP), and my local CVS pharmacy as well as OptumRx, my UHC MedicareRx mail service provider.

After all were seemingly in agreement, CVS still reported that Medicare was rejecting my prescriptions from the doctor. Medicare required specific documentation from my doctor which was not known or understood and apparently not communicated. I went from pharmacy to doctor to provider to manufacturer and repeated that cycle several times. Medicare said CVS was showing rejection internally on their computer system that was NOT being communicated or rejected by Medicare Durable Medicare Equipment (DME). He believed CVS was banking on patients paying cash through frustration and giving up.

Finally when the sensor and receiver appeared at CVS, the receiver was listed as covered but the sensor was still rejected by what seemed a Medicare message. The error appeared to be a code mistake which, once corrected, allowed purchase (covered, but not fully). I then found out that Dexcom required sensor, receiver and transmitter and still needed one final prescription.

Last night and today I have finally started using Dexcom G6 and I hope most of the process is behind me. While some Dexcom G6 attributes seem positive, so far I want to return to the fray and get my previous Libre 2 system supplied with new sensor patches. They require only two parts, sensor and meter. Hopefully, prescriptions going forward will start working without intercession.

Once again, Happy New Year. I hope 2023 is a steady improvement over the previous three years.

Happy New Year to all ! We made it through the holidays and into 2023. I am surely not the only person who had peaks and valleys during 2020, 2021 and 2022. I am looking forward to increasing normalcy in 2023.

Although I retired last June 17th, almost seven months ago, I just finally succeeded in getting some prescriptions through Medicare rather than my old company insurance and its history. It was confusing and convoluted as to what was covered under Part A and Part B, not the obvious pieces easily read anywhere one looks. Add to that Medicare prescription coverage and supplemental insurance and it can quickly become a quagmire.

My partner and I celebrated our second Christmas together with a tradition called “Our Seven Days of Christmas” where we exchange small personal gifts starting the 19th and each successive day ending with the final gift on the 25th. We also have embraced our local library services. We both attend a conversational spanish group, she attends a book discussion group to which I have attended one, and finally I am part of a writer’s group called North Fork Pen from which I derived MRFortenberry Pen. I know it looks like Mister but the MR actually comes from first letter of first and middle name.

One of my sisters became a Delta flight attendant (FA) last year and is enjoying multiple places and experiences. My wife and I will take a Viking Cruise in 2023 which will be our real retirement and honeymoon ‘trip’. We are especially looking forward to that.

I am reading books and articles at a much greater clip than the lows I fell to during the last two months of 2020 and much of 2021.

Hopefully everyone can look forward to some positives. I wish you all the best.

I had promised one week for next update and today makes two weeks. But, that’s an improvement over previous gaps.

Those two weeks have been rather hectic personally so other than exercise, which I refuse to miss, some things remained undone.

The latest status on Scrivener/DropBox/iPad/iMac has not really changed. I am able to populate the dropbox directory(ies) with files but it’s still a mystery how one would just put the whole project there and finish on iPad, go to iMac, and resume from the last update on the iPad which should have synced to the iMac. I will get back to this around and about other events.

On a personal note, we went to a wine tasting with another couple and there are shared interests to explore. As the weather warms, which seems far away from now, I look forward to the possibilities.

Writing has taken a back seat recently also and that will change this week. I need to continue my current path and prepare something for the upcoming North Fork Pen meeting at the Mattituck Laurel library.

On an entertainment note, if you have not checked out ‘Magpie Murders’, it should go to the top of your list. I am also enjoying ‘Shetland’ on Britbox. As to reading, I am currently at various places in three books, actually four as i think of it. I need to finish one or more of those this week as I have some ‘Want to read’ books on my list.

I reached out to Dropbox answering the suggestions made and explaining why they were insufficient. I then outlined the issue concisely as a number of bullet points. Dropbox support basically said they do not support what I am trying to do. I offered my time in collaboration with support to create a step by step procedure others could follow. I was told support is not available for that and further I should reach out to the application I am using; i.e. Scrivener. Scrivener says go to Dropbox and Dropbox says go to Scrivener. I once worked in technical support and I understand the perspective but what would be so bad about creating a useful tool others could use in their adoption efforts for these platforms?

I have been pursuing my own research in parallel and while there are many how-to texts and videos, I prefer text usually, they are either for things that are not what I need or for those who have not read the help and done any research.

This is not to say I have not made progress. I have managed to set up directories in Dropbox and attempted to point my iMac to those directories as well as iPad to the cloud and both to the url for Dropbox. Each side says all is ok but there is no synchronization. My last work was all on iPad. Today I will recheck everything on iMac and hope for the best. I will update if this is resolved.

I am continuing to experiment with Scrivener’s compile function with my existing passages. I will also work on the next passage today or tomorrow.

Let me end by wishing everyone a happy holiday season as it is once again upon us.

I found this was not published though I wrote it on 10/24. I’ll publish it now and just specific it was the second post.

Wow! I just spent a half hour or more just trying to login to WordPress. It has to be the slowest application, perhaps because it is browser based. I thought I had lost all my account details and previous post. Given the choice of new post or new page, I am guessing a new page would be a page for the website versus my journal or blog or posts. Although I have designed and written software for 35 years, though recently retired, I am not very familiar with blogs though I have worked on web pages. Still, I am not familiar with WordPress and the dozen or so emails I have received suggest ways and offer help for designing a site. Initially, I just want to comment on the process of my writing endeavors.

I first thought and my plan has been to write a historical novel, prompted by love of Zane Grey’s ‘Riders of the Purple Sage’ and James Clavell’s ‘Shogun’ among others. However, as I stared at empty pages and accumulated notes on my first idea, I experienced what I would term writer’s block when it came to character profiles and story though I know the historic event and its detail.

This led to thinking what I had been writing as desire and time permitted over previous years and that was recollections of events I used to practice writing. I called those vignettes or snippets ‘Memorable Moments’.

I keep telling myself; more consistency, less delay, but even though I have been retired more than four months, I still run out of time trying to accomplish all I want. Let’s catch up first:

I attended the next monthly meeting of North Fork Pen! Congratulations to Susan Maclelland on the publication of her book of poems: ‘Follow the Little Footprints’. We had decided a prompt exercise would be fun and we tried that out this past meeting. Basically, a prompt was selected and we each had about 10 minutes to go wherever we decided and then share our result with the group. It was fun for all and I managed a short two paragraphs when I had expected writer’s block. I have to remember, write as a stream of consciousness and stop making corrections as I go. I also bought a book called ‘642 Things to Write About’ (Guided Journal, Creative Writing, Writing Prompt Journal). When faced with the blank page, I will try that method again.

Once again trying to start WordPress, I struggled, then realized there is a wordpress.org and a wordpress.com. Org knows nothing about me but com does so I’ll have to remember that for next time. The next hurdle will be getting from this draft to published post which does not seem intuitive when I created ‘Post Initialization’.

I did spend several hours, perhaps more, trying to sync Dropbox with Scrivener so I can work on my iPad (using today) and iMac while the output stays synced. I had tremendous problems and have not solved them all. The help and tutorials just say do x, y, z and all should work, but that is not my experience. First and foremost, somehow Scrivener’s backup mode turned on and overflowed my 2G space resulting in a need to free trial 1T so I could find out what was up. The fourth chat agent guessed it was the backup gone crazy and he was right on. That is now turned off but no example I found takes one step by step through how and where the directory structure begins and ends and what has to be shared, i.e. root or each folder, etc. Suffice to say that so far I am still not synced successfully and have to manually update iMac or iPad depending where my last updates were made. Once I figure out the whole thing, step by step, I’ll create a post with the steps that worked for me.

Onward and upward, the holidays are here and tomorrow is Turkey day. Happy Thanksgiving to all and I’ll be writing again next week at the least.

Later!