Long Weekend

Had a long and eventful weekend.

Friday, my mother and I made an "award winning" macaroni and cheese recipe. It was decently good, but in characteristic fashion I had to modify the recipee a little bit before I could give it my stamp of approval. Cooking is my artistic venue, and so I make a conscious effort to not follow recipees or strict formulas. Engineering and computer programming tend to be more precise and in many cases more formulaic, so I try not to take that mindset with me into the kitchen.

Saturday we took a long roadtrip down to the farm in south Delaware to visit my grandparents. My grandfather's health is generally not-good, so I wanted to go down and see him, if only briefly. I don't need to get into all the details, but a surgeon performed a short procedure without first stoping his blood thinners. I'm not a medical professional, but I know enough to associate the words "gross negligence" with that kind of action. Dana, of course, was quick to point out that they should have replaced his cumadin with heparin (excuse the spelling, I'm not in Firefox right now, and I doubt it's spellchecker would cover drug brand names anyway). We were only there for a few hours on saturday before we headed back again.

The trips to and from the farm were interesting, if only because we got lost both times. I forgot that we needed to take DE rt 7 to get onto DE rt 1, so we missed the turn off and had to turn around later. On the way back up, we must have missed a sign somewhere because we were trying to get back onto 95, and we ended up on some state road that lead directly away from 95. I've made the claim before that roads in Delaware are often poorly marked, and I stand by that criticism now. Of course, the trip provided the necessary impetus for us to get a Garmin GPS navigational unit for the car. We bought it on Sunday morning, and we've been playing with it all weekend. Dana took it home this morning to play with it more during the week.

We stopped by Jason's house on Saturday night, on our way back home. As luck would have it, we were lost within miles of his apartment, so we decided to stop in for a while and then get our bearings from there. He has a nice place, but we didn't stay too long.

Mom went into the hospital today for her third, and hopefully final, ablasion procedure. She's a little nervous about it, and rightfully so. The doctors are putting a little probe and a little camera into her heart, finding a fault in the electrical circuitry, and "zapping" the fault. Trying to put things into my parlayance, they are going to find a faulty path in the circuit and break the connection. Of course, "the connection" is living heart muscle tissue, and "breaking" it involves killing that tissue with the probe. I dont know exactly how they kill the tissue, but I think I've heard that they freeze it with the probe.

Two months ago "The Institute", a newsletter for IEEE members, had a question about reliability in Wikipedia. I sent in a reply email, and this month I saw that they printed my email! I've already received a few emails from people about it, so replying to them in a professional way has been demanding of my time today. I'm giving my presentation on Wikibooks here on Wednesday, so I've also been trying to prepare for that.

There are a few more issues that are worth writing about, but I'll save them for a different post.