Since I have no way of knowing how much thaw-age happened in the freezer and for how long, I decided to completely clear out the freezer of all the suspect food (there was lots of it). I had to cringe a little bit at having to toss a nice rib roast and a few containers of yummy roast turkey stock, but I prefer to err on the side of caution when it comes to food. Two garbage bags later, the freezer is pretty barren aside from a few ice packs and a surprising amount of dog hair.
Guess I’ll have to clean the freezer compartment before I go about restocking it.
Unsuspected power outages
Instead of ice cubes in the freezer, I discovered a really big block of ice.
It seems at some point while I was gone, the power went out long enough to turn a full ice tray into a big block of partially melted refrozen ice. That would also explain why everything in the freezer was frozen together. When the freezer gets warm enough to turn half the ice tray into water, it’s a good chance there was a lot of thawing going on with the other frozen stuff too. Naturally this makes all the contents of the fridge and freezer suspect, including the rib roast I was thinking about cooking up when I got back.
Well, I suppose I could look on this as an opportunity to clean out some of the dog hair that’s made its way into the freezer.
Stranded in Memphis
Thanks to a late departure from Minneapolis (allegedly to wait for some luggage according to the pilot’s announcement), I ended up missing the flight home by mere minutes, so now I’m stuck spending the night in Memphis. The earliest flight out that I could get wasn’t until almost 2PM, so that means I won’t be back home until 4:30PM.
The rest of the meeting finished off well with a couple of interesting topics on tomotherapy and gamma knife shielding. A couple of new treatment technologies that seem to be finding their way into more and more cancer centers. It was another good summer school that I’m glad I was able to attend.
Summer School Day 2
The last full day of the summer school today. It was mostly all radiation therapy related so I skipped out on the last two sessions to wander around the campus. It’s a pretty expansive campus with a couple of large lakes on two sides and lots of trails that go meandering through the surrounding woods. Very peaceful and tranquil (at least when school isn’t in session) although considering part of the campus is a monastery, I suppose peace and tranquility is to be expected.
It’ll be good to get back home, although I still have to survive a longish flight to get there.
Summer School Day 1
First day of the Summer School is over. Today’s sessions were all pretty good and very informative. There’s a lot of NCRP 147 related stuff in my head and I’m thinking it would be cool to see if I can write up a web-based tool for doing shielding calculations based on NCRP 147. It’s easy enough to implement in a spreadsheet so it should be doable in PHP.
The rest of the summer school is all about shielding for radiation therapy, which isn’t something I’m terribly interested in, but might be interesting to learn about. I doubt I’ll ever have to do a shielding design for a therapy unit, but it’s always good to know what kinds of things the other side needs to think about.
I may skip a few sessions and go wandering about the campus a bit. The St. John’s University campus seems very nice, and apparently there’s a sugar shack where they process their own maple syrup. There likely won’t be anything going on now, but it will be interesting to see. I’ve also heard the monks have this bible illumination project going on which would be cool to see.