Late update.

Went to a friend's beachhouse for a week or so (thank you Kurtis!) to get away from distractions and have a place to concentrate for a while. It worked great. A lot of coding done, but unfortunately, not a lot of results generated. Just a lot of refactoring, it seems. I have a bad habit of trying to make Pretty Code(tm), in lieu of Code Which Gets The Job Done(tm). OTOH, this is a large enough and complex enough task that every time I dive in to Just Get It Done, I end up getting lost in a morass of twisty passages, all alike. This code is now so squeaky clean that it's really hard to get lost... which is good. But jeez, I just want to be done.

Highlights from trip:

On my way down I ran over a pigeon at 75mph. No, I didn't hit, I ran over it, literally. The damned thing landed 50 feet in front of my car, after fluttering out of the way of another car in the next lane over. I couldn't really swerve out of the lane, so I straddled it with my tires, only to hear it go WHAMP under the car. Made a neat puff of feathers out the back though. I was laughing so hard at its utter stupidity that I almost didn't feel bad about it. Okay, a little. Stupid bird.

Hurricane/Storm/ProzacPatient Gaston passed through the area my first two nights there, so it was rain, wind, and lightning. I LOVED it. The wind hit a solid 60mph according to the wind gauge, and the rain was horizontal. I utterly love stormy ocean weather, so that was perfect. Later on in the week it got all sunny and crap. Bleah. I'm a redhead. I see going to a beautiful sandy beach as an opportunity to a) sunburn, b) be driven blind, c) get sand in my shorts, d) be a shark snack. Give me a rainswept windy rocky beach with tidal pools any day. A poncho is standard and appropriate beachwear in my opinion, and sunblock an aberration.

Got to watch a waterspout move across Bogue Inlet, then self-destruct when it hit the sand on the north tip of Bear Island. Very cool. (Note: this was *NOT* the big waterspout that caused the alerts that very same day and time... that one was heading north inland, this one went south into Bear Island. I went to look for the big one, and saw this one instead. Still cool.)

Watched porpoises frolic in the sound. Well, okay, I saw porpoise fins frolic. And now that I think of it, fins aren't really frolicky, just sort of... there. Bummer.

They dredged the boat slip entrance the days before I got there, and dumped the dredge bilge on the lower lawn. 33'x75'x1.5' of... muck. Which surprisingly had almost no smell. (Probably too much toxic oil and crap for the little biota.) As it dried, bits and pieces made their way to the surface, like oyster shells by the hundreds, bits of burlap, bird bones... a mammal vertebra... two... a shoe... a tshirt... ginkgo's writer's brain was spinning wonderfully about bodies buried in the silt, but I eventually found another mammal vertebra that obviously came from a porpoise. That and the shoe being empty except for gunk (no bones or free floating toe bits) made it into a non-event, but for a while it was fun to wake up each morning to the possibility of Mr. Skull peering out of the goo at me.

Birds. Lots of birds. A flock of wood ducks that had a huge white domestic duck tagging along. He was huge compared to the other little wild ducks, he kept running into them, and ate several times what they did. Generally, he was just a hoot to watch. ginkgo named him Chris Farley. If fit. Heck, he scared the Canadian geese off.

Cleaned the grill, and found an 18" snake in it. Which isn't that weird, except that the grill was on the deck, 12' off the ground. Hmm. I wasn't sure what kind it was, so I just shooed it off with a broom, then closed the grill cover. Only to find a bright waxy green frog on the side of the house behind the grill lid. WTF?

It was a small town. So small that a local (presumably) was really and quite honestly shocked (as evidenced by his vocalizing to his wife) that a sign in the meat department of the grocery store included the word 'breasts'. No joke. He couldn't shut up about it. It was like this was the first time he'd seen the word outside of Penthouse Letters. Amazing.

Since I was at the beach, I grabbed some local seafood off the docks. Scallops, flounder and red snapper. The flounder was a disaster (cleaned the grill, the scrapings with 409 ended up in the lava rocks, and the fish ended up tasting like chemicals *sigh*), but the scallops rocked, and the red snapper came out decent. ginkgo came out for a night, so I pan seared the scallops in sauce from olive oil, garlic, onion, and tons of mushrooms, (with a cup of pinot grigio), then when they were not *quite* done (too much liquid in the searing sauce, couldn't get hot enough), poached them for a few minutes in the rest of the sauce and sauteed bits. I was pretty happy with the result.

Anyway, a productive (sort of) week, need to do something like that more often. Now... back to graduating.

Late update.

Went to a friend's beachhouse for a week or so (thank you Kurtis!) to get away from distractions and have a place to concentrate for a while. It worked great. A lot of coding done, but unfortunately, not a lot of results generated. Just a lot of refactoring, it seems. I have a bad habit of trying to make Pretty Code(tm), in lieu of Code Which Gets The Job Done(tm). OTOH, this is a large enough and complex enough task that every time I dive in to Just Get It Done, I end up getting lost in a morass of twisty passages, all alike. This code is now so squeaky clean that it's really hard to get lost... which is good. But jeez, I just want to be done.

Highlights from trip:

On my way down I ran over a pigeon at 75mph. No, I didn't hit, I ran over it, literally. The damned thing landed 50 feet in front of my car, after fluttering out of the way of another car in the next lane over. I couldn't really swerve out of the lane, so I straddled it with my tires, only to hear it go WHAMP under the car. Made a neat puff of feathers out the back though. I was laughing so hard at its utter stupidity that I almost didn't feel bad about it. Okay, a little. Stupid bird.

Hurricane/Storm/ProzacPatient Gaston passed through the area my first two nights there, so it was rain, wind, and lightning. I LOVED it. The wind hit a solid 60mph according to the wind gauge, and the rain was horizontal. I utterly love stormy ocean weather, so that was perfect. Later on in the week it got all sunny and crap. Bleah. I'm a redhead. I see going to a beautiful sandy beach as an opportunity to a) sunburn, b) be driven blind, c) get sand in my shorts, d) be a shark snack. Give me a rainswept windy rocky beach with tidal pools any day. A poncho is standard and appropriate beachwear in my opinion, and sunblock an aberration.

Got to watch a waterspout move across Bogue Inlet, then self-destruct when it hit the sand on the north tip of Bear Island. Very cool. (Note: this was *NOT* the big waterspout that caused the alerts that very same day and time... that one was heading north inland, this one went south into Bear Island. I went to look for the big one, and saw this one instead. Still cool.)

Watched porpoises frolic in the sound. Well, okay, I saw porpoise fins frolic. And now that I think of it, fins aren't really frolicky, just sort of... there. Bummer.

They dredged the boat slip entrance the days before I got there, and dumped the dredge bilge on the lower lawn. 33'x75'x1.5' of... muck. Which surprisingly had almost no smell. (Probably too much toxic oil and crap for the little biota.) As it dried, bits and pieces made their way to the surface, like oyster shells by the hundreds, bits of burlap, bird bones... a mammal vertebra... two... a shoe... a tshirt... ginkgo's writer's brain was spinning wonderfully about bodies buried in the silt, but I eventually found another mammal vertebra that obviously came from a porpoise. That and the shoe being empty except for gunk (no bones or free floating toe bits) made it into a non-event, but for a while it was fun to wake up each morning to the possibility of Mr. Skull peering out of the goo at me.

Birds. Lots of birds. A flock of wood ducks that had a huge white domestic duck tagging along. He was huge compared to the other little wild ducks, he kept running into them, and ate several times what they did. Generally, he was just a hoot to watch. ginkgo named him Chris Farley. If fit. Heck, he scared the Canadian geese off.

Cleaned the grill, and found an 18" snake in it. Which isn't that weird, except that the grill was on the deck, 12' off the ground. Hmm. I wasn't sure what kind it was, so I just shooed it off with a broom, then closed the grill cover. Only to find a bright waxy green frog on the side of the house behind the grill lid. WTF?

It was a small town. So small that a local (presumably) was really and quite honestly shocked (as evidenced by his vocalizing to his wife) that a sign in the meat department of the grocery store included the word 'breasts'. No joke. He couldn't shut up about it. It was like this was the first time he'd seen the word outside of Penthouse Letters. Amazing.

Since I was at the beach, I grabbed some local seafood off the docks. Scallops, flounder and red snapper. The flounder was a disaster (cleaned the grill, the scrapings with 409 ended up in the lava rocks, and the fish ended up tasting like chemicals *sigh*), but the scallops rocked, and the red snapper came out decent. ginkgo came out for a night, so I pan seared the scallops in sauce from olive oil, garlic, onion, and tons of mushrooms, (with a cup of pinot grigio), then when they were not *quite* done (too much liquid in the searing sauce, couldn't get hot enough), poached them for a few minutes in the rest of the sauce and sauteed bits. I was pretty happy with the result.

Anyway, a productive (sort of) week, need to do something like that more often. Now... back to graduating.

Oh, and that doctor bill...

...was dropped.

In fact, I got a personal apology from UNC, over the phone (not a form letter), and should be hearing back from the head of his department *and* the President of the UNC Physicians Association soon about his behaviour. Let's just say some people weren't happy to hear about it.

Keen.

Score one for the consumer.

Oh, and that doctor bill...

...was dropped.

In fact, I got a personal apology from UNC, over the phone (not a form letter), and should be hearing back from the head of his department *and* the President of the UNC Physicians Association soon about his behaviour. Let's just say some people weren't happy to hear about it.

Keen.

Score one for the consumer.