Category: Miscellaneous babble

Considering I was just in Minneapolis last week for the AAPM meeting, news of the bridge collapse has a certain ‘whoa’ and ‘holy crap’ factor to it (although I’m sure not nearly as much as for those living there). I didn’t have to cross over the bridge that collapsed, but it wasn’t too far from where I was staying and where the meeting was.
My thoughts go out to all of those affected.

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.

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.

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.

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.