Winter Death 2009!

It's been raining lightly all day. By 10pm this evening, that's expected to be freezing rain. Sometime in the overnight hours, there is an expectation of the freezing rain to change into sleet and snow. With a predicted high temperature of 31 degrees tomorrow, this might prove to be a very "interesting" day. I will be sure to watch for vehicles sliding out of control out of the hospital parking lot across the street. The whole parking lot slopes rather steeply toward the street. Fortunately, there is a sturdy guardrail on the opposite side of the street to keep vehicles from plummeting into the creek. I predict there will be at least three accidents at that location if the streets are icy.

After dropping off the recycling, I thought I'd stop in the grocery store, just to watch the panicked masses clearing the shelves like hordes of starving locusts. I was rather surprised to find the store rather empty. There was almost a 1:1 ratio of employees: customers. Plenty of bread and dairy products were left on the shelves. I'm now all stocked up for the next week for the grand total of $26, including a bag of onions and a fresh bottle of extra virgin olive oil. One thing I didn't get was a bag of oranges.

Tonight's dinner was a steaming bowl of mixed bean-barley soup (with a healthy dash of Frank's Hot Sauce). Tomorrow for lunch I will have some spinach-chickpea curry (from Vegan with a Vengeance) served over rice. That ought to warm my belly quite nicely.

May You Attract the Notice of Important People
Three times in the past week, I have either been pointed out to or caught the notice of persons at the Centers for Disease Control. The first incident was having an e-mail message forwarded by a colleague to a colleague of his at CDC with the statement that the information contained therein was quite useful. The second was reviewing a study protocol for a project that may occur in my geographic area. Finally, it seems that I'm one of the beta destroyers testers of the upcoming version of EARS, which is a syndromic surveillance application developed by CDC. I'll spend a bit of time this week mapping chief complaints to symptoms and then clustering symptoms into syndromes.

The Closing Highlight of My Day

I am nerdier than 96% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to take the Nerd Test, get geeky images and jokes, and write on the nerd forum!

And I didn't even study for the test!!!

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