Kaffee Klatsch with the Twin Cities Speculative Fiction Writers Network

I'm doing a Kaffee Klatsch tomorrow with a local group. (I know at least a few people reading this are already coming.) It's at 11 a.m. at the Chicago Deli, 4810 Chicago Ave S.

For more information about the event, you can go here, and for information about the Twin Cities Speculative Fiction Writers Network you can go here.

(*waves* at mmerriam and hilarymoonmurph)

A rambling story

First, I thought I'd mention, I cancelled my appointment with the Internist and made an appointment with a sports medicine specialist at one of the other clinics in town.

Now for the story.

When I was in fifth grade, one of my best friends was a girl named Kira. We played at each other's houses a lot, had sleepovers, etc. Kira's father was a doctor. Her mother had some sort of computer-related business which she ran from a fold-down desk in their kitchen.

(For those of you who are trying to guess the punch line, here's a big hint: I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin.)

Anyway, Kira's mom's company was apparently pretty successful, because when I graduated from college and got a job doing technical writing, my mother would occasionally run into Judy at the store and Judy would always make some comment about how if I wanted to move back to Madison, they were almost always hiring technical writers... I mentioned this to Ed a few times. I couldn't remember the name of the company, so I always just called it "my friend Kira's mom's company." Which I still pictured as operating out of their kitchen, even though I'd heard my mother mention a few times that they'd expanded a fair amount.

A couple of years passed, and we were at a party at a friend's house. I chatted with a friend-of-a-friend who had just gotten a JD at the UW, and been hired as a corporate lawyer by a local software company. "Say," I said. "The CEO isn't a lady named Judy Faulkner, is it? Hey! I was best friends with her kid when we were in elementary school! Nifty."

Ed also chatted with the friend-of-a-friend at some point in the evening. At some point near the end of the evening, I said to Ed, "Hey, you know that job friend's-lawyer-friend got? He's working for my friend Kira's mom's company!"

At which point Ed choked on whatever he was eating and said, "Your friend Kira's mom's company is EPIC?!?!?!?!?!?!?"

Seeing as Ed worked for an HMO, and I did know that my friend Kira's mom's company made medical-related software, it probably should have occurred to me that he might have heard of them. You know, by their real name.

*

Epic makes a lot of different products, but one of the coolest is the system that supports Electronic Medical Records, EMRs. There are a lot of systems that I know the HMO uses because I've heard Ed talk about them, but they mostly affect patient care in ways that are invisible from the outside. The EMRs are different.

And one of the things that EMRs make very easy is to set up an appointment at a clinic you aren't normally seen at. Records don't have to be physically sent over anymore, because they're all online.

So thanks, Kira's Mom. Your company does neat stuff.

Check this out

Look what came in the mail today:



The book comes out July 25th.