White and Nerdy

It has been an eventful week in Paul-Land. Let's break it down event by eventful event:

Tilden Award: This was covered in detail with my last post, so I won't elaborate anymore.

Mount Rushmore: Twenty minutes after I returned from the meeting where the award was announced I get a phone call from a friend at Mt. Rushmore. We chat for a little while about random stuff, then he starts asking me questions. It wasn't until the third question that I thought to myself, "Holy crap! This is my job interview!" So I should find out tomorrow whether or not they'll be offering me a job.

Annie the Cat: Holy crap, it's been an interesting week. So, last wednesday she stops eating starts throwing up. It's still happening on Saturday, so we bring her to the vet to try to find out what's going on. They take some x-rays to see if she ate something that's blocking her intestines (like string, batteries, etc) and draw some blood to see if that tells us anything. Nadda. So they send her home with us with instructions to monitor her, try to get her to eat and give some meds to calm her stomach. Doesn't work. Sunday we bring her back, very worried now, and decide that the only way to know for sure whether or not something is blocking her digestive tract is to do exploratory surgery. So, Sunday night she goes in. They don't find anything wrong! But, they take a biopsy of various tissues and send them off for analysis.

In the meanwhile, I've already left for Idaho and Sonja stays three days in Anchorage to be with Annie while she recovers from surgery. Tuesday afternoon they go back home and by Wednesday, Annie begins to eat again. Today, she even hopped up on the counter and started eating on her own. And she hasn't thrown up since Tuesday. We got the biopsy results back, as well, and find out that the only thing they could detect were some possible changes to the cells of her small intestines consistent with Irritable Bowel Disease or a food allergy. It was just a really severe reaction to some rather crappy food we had been feeding her the week prior to this whole thing happening. Well, at least we now know what NOT to feed her.

Masters Defense: It's over! It's officially OVER! My defense went well, considering the oral exam immediately following my presentation was rather brutal. But, they voted and I passed. You may all start calling me "Master" now.

So, it's been an interesting week. And tomorrow I should find out about the first of the jobs I've applied for.

And now we get to the part of this post that will make the title make sense. I just watched a new video by Wierd Al that had me rolling on the floor, and I'm going to try to embed the file here so you don't have to click away to watch it. Ok, now I've never actually tried embedding a movie file in my blog, but I figure if my brother can figure it out it must not be all that difficult to do.