As for doing a big solar array, I could very easily but then the local power company will want to horn in and buy it for 3¢ per kilowatt hour and sell it right back to me at  25¢. Check out this chunk of potential solar panel space. Eat your heart out, Bonneville.

To brief you in, Cupcake and I bought a five-acre parcel over west of us on Harstine Island back in ’90 for peanuts with a very rare beach access via vehicle. Harstine is basically like an Aircraft carrier. Everything is high bank as in “cliff”. Our land sits one lot back from the shore and our HOA, such as it is, has a road down to the beach and boat launch- one of three on the whole island but only available to our HOA members. Best of all, there’s oysters as far as the eye can see. We wear oyster holsters with shucking knives and restaurant-sized Tabasco™ bottles when we go down. The limit is 10 per person but the Game Wardens don’t carry GoPro endoscopes to check how many’s in your tummy.

But, since it’s over an hour to the nearest hospital, we passed on building it out as our retirement home. We decided to keep it just for the oyster access and the kids.  We built on a five acre piece (below) in 2005 that’s a stone’s throw from a brand new hospital nearby. They also have a great menu from which to choose your meals. Beats the shit out of using VHA, cold food and having to drive 50 miles on an interstate for third world veterinary-level medical care. Been there. Done that. I have the scars to prove it.

LZ Grambo

But enough geography and the Farm Report. Y’all came here for the report on VA’s Artificial Ignorance. Last summer when we were over there on the island oystering, I ran into another Viet Nam Vet named Mick down at the beach and we got to talking about VA compensation. As usual, his VSO, VFW, had told him he’d plumb topped out at 100% and didn’t even mention SMC K for wounded dick syndrome- let alone a&a.

Since idle hands are the Devil’s Workshop, I filed him for SMC L a&a. VA granted after a brief, five month fight but just couldn’t bring themselves to do more. Barry Bumps weren’t even considered- let alone mentioned. Rather than discuss it over Scotland’s finest with a DRO in an HLR informal conference and harvest another six-month duty-to-assist delay and denial, I lined it all out on a 10182 and sent it up to the Big House at the corner of Delay Avenue and Deny Street Northwest in DC. I knew Mick was going to turn 75 in June so it wasn’t a long wait.

Well, boy howdy, it just came back Friday afternoon and the absentminded VLJ only gave us one bump up to L ½ instead of the three I filed for. WTF, over? Right. Corrupted Artificial Intelligence had to be the culprit. Nobody, especially the staff attorneys with genuine JDs after their names could be that braindead. And, since it wasn’t the local yokels in the Seattle Puzzle Palace who pulled this boner, that left their shiny new BVA HAL 9000 AI super computer as the culprit. I’ve already done six Barry bump increases at the Board and they dialed every one in correctly.

Unhappy Leido/QTC c&p clinician demanding more money for a denial

This makes me queasy about our future at the BVA to say the very least. The Board used to be a giant step above the AOJs in terms of decyphering what we were complaining about. Over the years  I’ve noticed most Fort Fumbles “construe” what you ask for in perfectly good English and turn it into Hamburger Helper© with just the flourish of an Adobe copy and paste.

So let’s play Sherlock Holmes and analyze the actual documents I filed and you folks tell me where I stepped on my necktie. I might have graduated from Vermont Academy 59th in a class of 64 but I always had an A in English composition so we can rule out misspellings or ambiguous phraseology. Right off, here’s the 526.