I mentioned in passing in my Concentration posts that I had been laid off at the beginning of September. I’m happy to say I’ve joined athenahealth (yes, that’s the way it’s capitalized) as a “Senior Member of the Technical Staff.” The company offers a variety of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and billing products, making it easier for health care providers to focus on what they want to do — care for patients — by relieving them of the scut work of dealing with payers, managing scheduling, and making it easier to record health information.

The company also provides a number of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that athena partners can build on top of to provide additional functionality, and has a Marketplace to enable providers to find the partner’s products that they need for their practices, and that’s where I’m working, on the front end, learning React.

I got the job at the beginning of October, and started at the end of the month. The first couple of weeks were spent on orientation. athena is easily the biggest company I’ve worked at, and because it’s in a very regulated industry, there are a lot of rules to learn, and things to get up to speed on. I finally got to start working on the code, and it’s going well.

I mentioned that there was a gap between accepting the offer and starting. After all that’s gone on this year, I wanted to take some time for myself, and that’s part of the reason why losing the bike to mouse damage was so distressing. Here I had some free time, the weather was great, and no bike. So I rented a Triumph Bonneville for 24 hours. The Bonneville looks very much like the bikes from the early 1970s that I first fell in love with. The first day, I took the bike out to Quabbin Reservoir, and discovered very quickly how much wind protection my own bike provides. Five minutes after leaving the parking lot, I was chilly. The bike felt so much smaller than my own bike, but was easy to handle. The foliage was really pretty heading out to the reservoir. By the time I got there, there was an overcast, and I was downright cold. I stopped at a dollar store to pick up a long sleeved shirt, and on the way back, going through the center of Ware, I saw a clothing store, stopped, and picked up a fleece.

The next morning, I took the bike down along the South Shore, and ended up in Plymouth, by the harbor, and had a view of the Mayflower II. I had lunch, and then headed back.

They started working on the bike a couple of weeks later. They repaired some parts of the wiring harness, and started addressing the damaged taillight wiring. I chose to have that replaced; when the parts came in, they then found that the turn signals weren’t working, and it would take several hours to remove the body work and diagnose the problem, and was this something my insurance covered? As it turns out, my comprehensive did cover it. The total bill was around $2200. I chose to have them keep the bike there in winter storage, so I wouldn’t have to worry about further mouse damage. Very expensive mice indeed.