Category: Miscellaneous babble

Looks like TD 19 could become TS Stan in a couple of days. That would make it the 18th named storm of the year. Fortunately it looks like this will be another one that stays out in the Atlantic and won’t be much of a bother.
From today’s 5 PM discussion:

A CONTINUED SLOW MOTION IS INDICATED IN THE OFFICIAL FORECAST FOR ABOUT THE NEXT 24 HOURS… UNTIL THE LOW TO THE NORTH DEPARTS NORTHEASTWARD AS FORECAST BY MOST OF THE DYNAMICAL MODELS. THIS SHOULD BE FOLLOWED BY A TURN OF THE DEPRESSION TOWARD THE NORTHWEST AND EVENTUALLY NORTH… WITH A GRADUAL INCREASE IN FORWARD SPEED

The first 6 hours of PET/CT lectures are over with. Long day listening to a lot of stuff. Most of it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know…CT basics, PET basics. A couple of good lectures on PET/CT artifacts and PET/CT shielding. Lots of good information out of those two lectures.
Hands on stuff tomorrow…looking forward to some of that. Should be interesting.
MD Anderson is quite the sprawling medical metropolis. There are these cool Access kiosks scattered in strategic locations that show you how to get places or find places if you’re lost. And it’ll even print out a map and directions for you too! MD Anderson’s own Mapquest you could say.
The walk from where I’m staying (the Rotary House) is about as far away as you can get from where the course is being held, but there’s a nice convenient walkway, the Skybridge, that lets me walk there without having to go outside. I’ve heard it called the ‘Green Mile’ by the locals, probably referring to the distance and the green carpeting. If you get tired, there are electric golf carts you can hitch a ride on too.
It’s an early start tomorrow, and another late finish.

The For Sale sign in front of the house next door disappeared yesterday. I wonder if the new owners will actually live there, or if it’ll become just another rental again. Would be interesting to find out how much it ended up selling for. Might have to pick up the Sunday paper for the next few weeks and see if it shows up in the real estate transactions section.

It’s an early flight tomorrow morning to Houston for a short course on PET/CT at MD Anderson. With the arrival of our own PET/CT unit coming sometime in the next couple of months, it will be a good learning experience for me and a chance to get some hands-on experience working with them. Things are shaping up to get busy in the coming year once the unit gets up and running.
It will also be an opportunity to meet up with friends from back home who recently (relatively anyway) transplanted themselves to the area. Looking forward to the trip.
Coincidentally enough, it’s almost a year to the day since my last trip.

There are a couple of 4-way stops around work that I usually walk past once or twice a day. Over the years I’ve noticed a few things about drivers’ behaviour at these intersections, particularly older drivers. I think it must be one of those ‘southern politeness’ things.
Driver N pulls up to the intersection and stops, followed shortly after by drivers E, W and S. Now normally, whoever gets to the intersection first. That way people get to go through nice and orderly.
However, people in the south tend to be extraordinarily polite, especially older folks. So Driver N, trying to be polite waits for the other drivers to go. Drivers E, W and S sit there waiting for Driver N to go, since he was there first. Everybody waits, holding up traffic until someone decides to go. Naturally, everyone decides to go at the same time. So they advance into the intersection, but suddenly, seeing the others go too, they stop (don’t want to get into a fender bender after all). Then you get this Mexican stand-off type of situation going where everybody is waiting for the other person to go.
Finally someone reaches the end of their patience and zooms through the intersection and traffic begins flowing again, until the next person comes along wanting to be polite.