Brrrr! This is Spring?

5.IV.07 - MoM

The 18° that started the day with a high of 31 or so would not have felt so cold if it hadn't been for the really cold wind. Crazy -- it is supposed to be a high of 26° tomorrow. I had my jaw stitches removal appointment in Woodbury at 9:30 this morning. The nurse took out all until she had to face a tricky one at the spot where the ear connects to the jaw. She decided she would rather have my surgeon, Dr. Crank, take care of that one, which she did. Then, the doctor decided that maybe she should do a biopsy on a red spot on the tip of my nose that happens now and then. After several pain shots, she took out a pretty good sized round plug from there. It was a good bleeder so I had a pressure bandage there that I was to leave on till tonight. This evening I accidentally knocked it loose so I removed it. I was surprised to find it still bleeding so now I have it bandaged again. I am keeping my fingers crossed as I hate to think of dragging back over to Vadnais Hts., for another session there. However, I'm not complaining as long as they aren't a malignant cancer.

We followed that exercise with a grocery shopping session at Kowalski's. By then a little restaurant that Sandy and Charlie had found yesterday was open, so time for lunch. It was an attractive storefront Sushi Restaurant. Sandy knows what a fan I am of battered deep fried food, so she knew I would like the Shrimp Tempura, and several kinds of veggies, including asparagus. It was excellent and I really stuffed myself. And, I had most of a large Crème Brûle that we sort of shared. My water glass of gin went well with it all.

Sandy had a school to visit in the afternoon, but the schedule worked so well that she was able to unload me and go home and drop off her groceries before going to the school.

I have a couple of things I need to get locally, so when she comes in tomorrow afternoon to pick up Ben for an overnight, I'll get that out of the way.

The poster was a kick -- cute picture of Bill.

Even though I was able to have a 15-min nap this afternoon, I am looking forward to bed!

* * * * *

This is a continuation of a letter that Chris wrote around Thanksgiving, 1984 I think, as it isn't dated.

I was in Denton, TX (N of Dallas) for my every four-year accelerator conference, and gave the latest version of my electro-beam talk, the first installment of which was in Baltimore in summer 1983. It was unfortunately scheduled, both the conference and the talk. It's bad enough having to travel on a weekend, but then to be on travel on a holiday….! My talk was on a second night (only night there were talks) at 8 p.m. There were maybe a dozen people there, and four of them were from NBS, so there was not a wide audience. However, it will be published in a rather prestigious journal. The NBS review hassle paid off - my paper went through the journal's review with no changes. Maybe as a reward, I may be getting the latest IBM PC. Some money and this product came to my attention at the same time, so I'm conning the gov't to buy me this thing with full color monitor, color printer, all the software I can find, a 1.2 M (mega)byte floppy disk and two 20 Mbyte hard disks. Also, one megabyte of memory, plus some nifty interface hardware. The order comes to $12.4 K which is really cheap considering what I hope to be getting. It's been submitted but I don't know its fate. NBS is negotiating some sort of $300K contract for sixty systems and I hope to be in on one of these.
I plan to go th Gainesville again for Xmas. Hopefully will be able to overlap Sandy again. Suzy seems to be doing fine. Her program is real neat -- I've had a chance to run it up here. She is embroiled in a rights struggle over it with the University (Big Gator) which she will no doubt lose, but at least the program writing and especially the response it is receiving are very positive things for her.
Time to go. Take care of yourselves. Love, Chris