Colonoscopy

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures or a video to include with this post.

I had my colon examined today. The actual examination was slightly uncomfortable, but painless. The hard part for me was cleaning everything out the night before. It really reminded me of travelling. The preliminary diagnosis is irritable bowel syndrome likely caused by an infection I picked up who knows where. My stomach hasn't been quite right for a few years now and I have mostly just tolerated it. This has given me some really good shit stories, but I finally decided to have it checked out. Apparently, colonoscopies are all the rage these days. I also had some blood work done to see if I am allergic to gluten and I am not eating dairy for two weeks.

This Hubble image is of two merging galaxies. The shapes of both galaxies have been distorted by their gravitational interaction with one another. Interacting galaxies often exhibit high rates of star formation. This particular merging galaxy is in the constellation Leo approximately 300 million light-years away from Earth. Click on the image to see a big view.

Image Credit: NASA

Bryson, Mel's godbrother, wanted his picture on the internet.

Happy Thanksgiving

Patrick and Maranda join us a Barley's Taproom in Rutherfordton aka 'Roughton'

I am in North Carolina and man do I love the South. The only drawback, nobody can understand a single thing I am saying. I talk and folks just scrunch up their faces and say, 'Whut?' Mel and I drove out here in a single push. It took us over 25 hours. I know it seems crazy, but we actually had a really great time doing it. We listened to music, talked about fun stuff, saw some country we had never seen before and generally enjoyed ourselves. That said, we are flying next time.

Mel's mom, June, had no idea we were coming and it was pretty fun to surprise her. She was totally floored when we showed up Thursday morning. Since we neglected to tell her we were coming, we couldn't very well expect her to cook for us, so I made a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat. Y'all would a been real proud o me. It is hard to cook a 5 course meal in someone else's kitchen with limited preparation. We had a turkey, stuffin, gravy, mashed taters, cranberry, grean beans, squash and a spinach salad. No mac-n-chz til Friday, when we ate another Thanksgiving at Mel's grandmothers.

Old Crow Medicine Show

If you ever get a chance to see OCMS live, DO IT! Their albums are pretty darn good, but they absolutely rock at a live show. We had a full tilt hoedown at the Boulder Theatre last night. Whiskey, criminally awesome bluegrass, front-row dancing, disintegrating fiddle bows, lots of hollerin', and the beautiful people of Boulder were just a few of the things that made last night so special.

Delta IV Heavy

We are launching a pretty cool rocket tomorrow night. The 230 ft tall Delta IV Heavy is basically three hydrogen boosters strapped together for a total thrust of nearly 2,000,000 lbs at liftoff. Despite the two million pounds of thrust, the thrust ratio is only 1.2:1 making this heavy pretty slow off the pad. That should give plenty of time to check out the three massive pillars of flame. This will be the most spectacular night launch since Saturn V launched Apollo 17 in 1972.

The massive rocket scheduled for liftoff from Cape Canaveral's Complex 37 at 8:39 p.m. EST. The evening's launch window will extend 122 minutes to 10:41 p.m. EST. You can view the launch here.

Tahoe

Lou and Jaz invited us to join them in Tahoe when we last saw them at Graham and Greta's wedding and we readily accepted. Jasmine's family has a time-share in Tahoe and uses it as a good excuse to escape the beginnings of the cold Alaskan winter. Melanie is the Crocs account manager for California and was extended the offer to use one of here co-workers condos at Tahoe for the weekend. My reaction to this news was, "Cool, maybe we should make sure both condos are at least in the same town, Tahoe is a pretty big lake." To make a long story short, the two houses ended up being two blocks apart in Incline Village at the North end of the lake.

Thursday evening Mel, Alison, Sean and I flew to Reno where we rented a car, a first for me, and drove to Incline village to meet up with Louie and Jasmine. One thing led to another, and before we knew it, it was 4am and there were a lot of empty bottles of wine. Jasmine's parents own a winery in Alaska so we had an ample supply all weekend.

At this point I would usually say what we did each day, but all of our days in Tahoe were basically the same. We slept in until 8 because we stayed up way too late the night before. Ate a giant brunch. This was followed by an fairly successful attempt to be active. Post activity, we ate a giant and excellent dinner then stayed up way too late playing cards and talking. Highlights, I won $40 off the Ducks and lost it playing Blackjack. Mel and I climbed an excellent route at Lovers Leap with Mel and I swapping trad leads for the first time. Skinny-dipping in the lake was definitely a highlight with almost everyone joining in the fun.