Blessed by the Potato

I’m really not looking forward to this Japan trip. The closer it gets, the more terrible it sounds. I really hope I can get out of this nonsense.

I just read the instructions, and this year there’s a fee to submit an abstract (to dissuade those who submit abstracts for their CVs without defending them at the conference), and it’s almost certainly going to involve having to pay it myself and then wait months for reimbursement. But more annoying are the travel arrangements. From the sounds of things, Kanazawa doesn’t have an international airport, so all of our options involve bus or train rides from other airports from 1 to 4.5 hours away… and even then it’s another 20 minute bus/cab ride from the city centre to where the conference will be. With this many links in a strange country that uses devil runes as a form of written communication, someone (probably me) is sure to get lost.

So, the big question is: how do I say no way to this trip?

I saw this short story and had to share. Originally found via Boing Boing.

Also, found a smashed pumpkin in my parking lot today. What the hell is wrong with people? (Our lot is a dead-end off the alley, so it’s not even like people would be walking through and accidentally drop a pumpkin… that thing was brought/thrown in and smashed there). Plus it’s December! Who has a pumpkin?

After calling for 10-15 cm of snow yesterday, we got a very pretty, wind-free but heavy and steady fall that lasted all night, dropping about 30 inches (75 cm!) in 24 hours. We’re completely snowed in now. I shovelled out the front walkway with my tiny car shovel (a mere 34 inches long), and now I’m beat. I have no idea how I’m going to clear a (longer) path to my car around back. I don’t even think I can open the back door since it doesn’t have an overhang like the front.

It was hilarious when Wayfare decided to try to make a snow angel. She climbed around the side of the porch so there wouldn’t be any footprints leading to it, turned around, and fell into the snow… only to sink in the really deep, light powder so that just a little bit of her face was left showing. She couldn’t get back out without help :)

The heat issue made the news.

And today of all days, with no one at work, hospitals in chaos, and a travelling nightmare… today I manage to lose a filling in my tooth. It’s not hurting at the moment, but I’m a little afraid to eat anything…

As the expression goes, I’ve been as busy as a dog with three dicks, and got about as much accomplished, too.

In the news lately there’s a scare at University Hospital here in London about a Creutzfeldt-Jakob patient who had surgery performed. The nasty thing about a prion disease like that is that typical sterilization techniques are ineffective; you have to burn the room (or seal it up with the extra asbestos and never use it again) and throw away all the tools. That’s one of the problems we’re having now: at least one OR and a whole batch of instruments is off-limits, and patients are being shuffled around the city in an administrative nightmare (latest reports even have the ER there redirecting patients). I thought they’d be reopening some rooms at my hospital, but it doesn’t look that way (I don’t know if it’s because the closure of our ER department didn’t actually give us any reserve of the type of rooms/instruments needed, or if it just hasn’t occured to anyone for what looks to be just a few days of closure — it would make a bit more sense in one regard since we’re a lot closer to UH than the other ER in town).