Real

Too much to process has kept me from posting much at 37th Dream in the past weeks.  Our blogging community is never far from my mind.

I don't listen to music constantly as I once did or even very often and am grateful for a local young friend who told me that "Real" is one of her favorite songs.

Music and lyrics written by my dear friend, Deven, after her husband's death from ALS in 1990:

Sheila Atim

Irish playwright, Conor McPherson

So much going on for all of us.  Doing the best we can.  Saved by beauty, by music, by friends.

Sending love.

Age 98! / Alive-Alive O

Ferlinghetti: On Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

This morning, I watched above video which was featured on the Doonesbury video archive yesterday. One of the last things my mother mailed to me, a few days before she died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in December 1994, was a newspaper article about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My mother wrote poetry until 1966, at which time she stopped writing poetry and took her first watercolor class.  For the rest of her life, she expressed herself through the visual arts.  In the days after she died, I found that she had been reading a well-worn copy of The San Francisco Poets, by David Meltzer.

Haven't been posting much, due to trying to achieve basic survival as a self-employed medical transcriptionist.

Although I was making some headway, that all changed (for me and thousands of those of us who make a living as medical transcriptionists) on July 27 when the worldwide computer virus, first affecting the Ukraine, took down the speech recognition software provided by Nuance Communications, used by 86% of hospitals in the United States.  Nuance also hires transcriptionists to work at home for poverty wages for many of these hospitals.

Many of us who barely make a living doing this challenging and emotionally rewarding work that is at the bottom rung of the medical profession were without work for a full week.  Although Nuance's speech recognition software is still unavailable to us, many of us who are independent contractors have been hastily retrained on clunky back-up software that has not been used for years.  We are back to transcribing every word that is dictated.

We are faced with a tremendous backlog of medical dictation that must be transcribed in a way that takes up to twice a long as with speech recognition and is the source of repetitive motion injuries.

And yet, it's been a beautiful summer so far.  Sunny, breezy.  Although I have not had the energy for much walking or my yoga practice, I have made sure to spend time with friends when I am not working.

Many of the current events in the world are disheartening but we are:

Saved by beauty:

Holding steady.
















Perseverance furthers.  Have not been able to post videos on my blog for some time, but today I was successful.  This is from one of my rare walks in the past week or two.  High water at Whatcom Falls
(Hmmm ... the video shows up here on the editing page but not in Preview).  Perseverance furthers.

Saved by music:



Hope to have time soon to catch up on your blogs.