Today was a strange day. This morning, right before I got to my building, I wiped out on my bicycle. It wasn't very bad; I mainly scraped up my knee. My labcoat didn't even get dirty because I ended up sliding on my stomach. After I had bandaged my knee using the little medkit that was in the project office, I left it alone for a while until I finally decided that it would probably be good to put some antibiotic and new gauze on it. Our office was lacking in both these areas, so I went to the medical center that is on JPL's campus. I had to sit and wait for a doctor who basically did exactly what I had done to my knee except that he had a topical analgesic/antibiotic that was helpful. The strange thing that happened though was that I had to have my line supervisor (as opposed to my project supervisor) fill out a NASA mishap report to report the incident. He later told me that there was no category that fit the injury that I received (skinned knee/minor abrasion), but that the form required detailed explaination as to where the injury occured on my body (right knee as opposed to left).
After all that was sorted out, there was a guest speaker on lab giving a talk about "The Methanol Economy". This guest speaker was
George Olah--the Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1994. The talk was somewhat interesting, but ran over by half an hour (for a one hour talk) which seems a bit excessive.
After work, I found that my bike chain had come off (probably in my little crash), but I put it back on and biked home. I noticed when I was about a block away from home that the the shifter was acting strangely when I was going into lower gears on the back tire, so I shifted it all the way down to see if that would clear up the problem. Instead, it caused my bike to get stuck in the lowest gear and stop responding to my shifting. I believe this is another piece of fallout from the crash. Luckily I was only two blocks from home else I would have just walked with my bike (it would have been just as fast).
Unfortunately, the bike shop (which I thought was open until 7pm) was closed by 5pm when I got there, so I won't be riding my bike to work tomorrow.
I did, however, manage to get to Gamestop in order to pick up my copy of
Super Mario Galaxy that had been on preorder. I haven't had a chance to play yet as I am trying to finish off
Drakengard 2 because I'm rather close to the end.
While I was playing Drakengard 2, but before I began this post, there was a knock on my door that sealed the need to record this day. I walked over to my door and saw a scrawny man of Middle-Eastern descent. He was carrying a large cross: at least 3 feet high and 2 feet wide at the 't', each piece of which was made from two-inch by two-inch wood cut to a rectangular pyramid on the ends with a small notch directly below it. In his other hand, he carried a bible. He asked if I wanted to read a few verses from the bible with him. I responded by saying something akin to, "No thanks, I'm an atheist." He seemed taken aback by this and asked me if I really didn't believe in god to which I responded in the affirmative. He further queried as to "where I came from" then. I pondered for a second over the rather significant aspects that the question might cover: did he mean 'where is your hometown?', did he mean 'who is your mother?' or 'who are your parents?', did he mean 'where did humanity come from?', was he simply confused as to the operation of a door and was amazed that I seemed to appear from a hole in a wall? Since I did not feel particularly inclined to spend more than a few moments attempting to tease out his
true intentions vis-a-vis my origins, I waved my hand dismissively and said something about "millions of years of evolution". He accepted my dismissal and left without incident, leaving me to write this message.
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