Went to donate blood. Had to wait an awfully long time. By the time I got to the table, it was obvious I was going to be late to class, but I lay down anyway.
The phlebotomist sat talking with a donor who was already finished while I waited for her to hook me up. When she did, she fretted over finding a vein, finally picked one, jammed the needle in and couldn't get blood flowing, asked someone else to do it for her.
It still wasn't a very good stick, the blood flowed too slowly. After twenty minutes, she pulled the plug and threw my donation away, 100cc short of a full unit.
So, I got to class late, missing the last lecture before a major quiz, when the instructor tried to cram in all the stuff she hadn't gotten to yet.
Back at home, the big freezer revealed that it had died, and all the food was half-thawed.
We had a refrigerator in the shed that we hadn't gotten around to hooking up, because the space that would hold it had no outlet. Kathe and I got a new outlet installed in under an hour -- the highpoint of the day, and I didn't fail to appreciate it.
We got the food crammed into the little freezer in the new refrigerator, the little frezer in the kitchen refrigerator, and the little freezer in the apartment. Incredibly, it all fit.
Now we're waiting to find out if the freezer in the new fridge actually freezes.
On the other hand, some folks are in Fallujah right now . . . .
4 comments:
Peni again.
All that, and your blog wasn't uploading - I didn't see this till this morning. In a similar situation I console myself that I'm taking on somebody else's share of bad luck and they're having a really good day. Since I've had some days when someone was obviously taking my share of bad luck, it evens out.
Not rational, but whatever works.
Of course, in your case, your bad luck also set up bad luck for someone further down the road who would have needed that blood.
To cheer you up (well, it works for me) read all about Homo Floresienses. It's easily the coolest and most important news of the year. Elections, pfui - as ephemeral on a geological scale as a broker freezer. Here you go:
The Nature coverage (I haven't found the print version yet but I'll get it if I can)
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/flores/index.html
A quick FAQ from an anthropology prof:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/fossils/flores/liang_bua.html
And a biologist with diagrams, skull pictures, and lots of justified excitement.
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/homo_floresiensis
I'm not sure what I love most - that homo erectus had to have had boats 800,000 years ago, or that floresienses hung on till the end of the Ice Age - becoming part of the extinction event usually known as megafaunal. Or maybe they didn't, maybe they became orang pendek.
Actually, Blogger wasn't failing to load -- I didn't post yesterday's message until this morning. All messages here which are time-stamped "12:01 PM" are backdated.
I agree that Homo floresensis is way cool. The first example found of island-rule dwarfing in primates, and it's a hominid! That it happened just on the far side of Wallace's Line is almost too good. Proof that the basic predictive rules of evolution remain reliable and consistent, even in our own bloodline.
Note to kb: if you don't know what the island rule and Wallace's Line are, maybe you ought to learn what they are before deciding you have an opinion on evolution.
More upcheering from Peni. This strip is funnier if you're a gamer, but anybody who remembers college can laugh at this:
http://www.kenzerco.com/periodicals/fuzzyknights/fkonline_current.php
And be sweet to KB. :) I'm sure he thinks we don't know what creationism is and is quietly gritting his teeth at our stupidity right now.
HA HA HA HA HA!
Fuzzy Knights Forever!
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