At least I’ve had all my shots

As of Sunday, I’ll be down to T-minus 30 days before my estimated departure date. I have a reservation for 12/3 to Guangzhou, although it can be changed if necessary.

So long as my visa comes in, I’ll be leaving as scheduled, but there still is a lot I’d like to accomplish.

Really, about the only thing I’ve completed in full is to get all my vaccinations. Even though I had a ton of them in PC, I didn’t have a record of some and it was just easier to get them re-done than dig up the paperwork.

At the beginning of October, I had something like seven – plus a flu shot – and on Halloween, appropriately, I finished off the last three. I’m not really sure what Japanese encephalitis is, but I’m fairly confident I won’t be getting it. The trade off is I couldn’t lift my left arm on Friday, but whatever.

I should be immune (ha) from any more vaccinations for a good long while, especially since they went ahead and gave me the yellow fever one. I’m not up on all my infectious diseases, but at this point I can’t imagine there being much left that I might need.

So that’s one item on the list that’s been checked off, but I just have so much to do in a month that it’s a little daunting.

I’ve fought some of the financial fires I previously mentioned, but there are still little flare-ups from the ashes. One of the retirement places, in particular, is putting up a fight in me consolidating some accounts elsewhere. I’ve had to make three calls on that one.

On the plus side, I think the AmeriCorps insurance came through on the knee bill, but despite that, I got a “we’re turning over your bill to creditors” letter from the hospital. I called them to try to straighten it out, and the lady assured me they did get the check and she would straighten it out.

I don’t believe her and will call back.

It’s also confusing because there are multiple bills and right now I’m not clear on which one was completely paid. What the lady said and what I had in my hand didn’t really mesh.

So Monday I’ll be doing more calls, but I think I got the third fire – the one where I had given the wrong account number – taken care of. The problem repeated itself, but I think I just didn’t catch it in time. I do know the first $193 credit did finally find its way to me. That was the most important thing.

Our training right now is all over the map. Really, we have no way to know what type of work we’ll be doing in our jobs, so they’ve assigned random stuff to fill our schedules until it’s time to depart.

Next week we have two days of “coaching.” We’re supposed to bring in a list of personal and career goals. Uh…

Last week, we worked on PowerPoint. Previously I’d made a sum total of two presentations from scratch. One of those had about 60 slides but the other had maybe eight.

The classes weren’t overly helpful, but I did get to make two short presentations, which were fun to do.

The directive on the first was “something you really like,” so I did Florida State football. I had a little “Running Wild and Free” slide and used all kinds of clip art and screen grabs. (That was a GREAT trick to learn.)

The second class was a bit more advanced, and we were told to do something not work-related. It had to include a video clip.

Well, for some reason, Scotty Emerick popped into my brain and I did a little thing on his songwriting. All kinds of screen grabs and animation, which can drive you nuts. I had one where I had the name and photo of the different co-writers enter the screen at the same time as the photo. Each had a different animation and the timing required a lot of work.

I knew I was onto something when, when I asked Lisa to help me imbed the video, she took a look at my screen and burst into laughter.

My final slide, which came after a “Bus Songs” tribute, had a page that, after sitting on a photo of Emerick, Willie Nelson and Toby Keith for a minute, had “I’ll Never Smoke Weed” float up and then “With Willie Again” follow it, forming a circle. A couple seconds later, a pot leaf clip art bounced into view and twirled around a couple of times.

Then, it went into the last few lines from a video taken from YouTube: “In the fetal position, with drool on our chins, we broke down and smoked weed with Willie again.”

I recognize I’m a bit partial, but I really did like my presentation best. Certainly more than the person who did “planning a destination wedding.” Blah.

I must admit, though, that in light of all the security warnings we are given about cyber security and all that, I was kind of concerned people were going to bust in and drill me on why I was doing internet searches for things like “whiskey image” and “marijuana leaf clip art.”