Monday Meanderings - 5.6.2013

My sister quoted a family member: "Winter and Summer are fighting over Spring." True at the moment, and the weekend was simply gorgeous, but we sort of know how this is going to turn out, don't we?

One of my favorite salty snacks is Fritos and Bean Dip. I don't indulge often, because the simple fact is the stuff is bad for you. Salt, fried corn and lard; how could that hurt you?  So all the planets have to be aligned just right, or it has to be a special occasion, like the Super Bowl, or a trip to the coast.

My wife, on the other hand, has no compunction about when Fritos should be eaten. She's not interested in the Bean Dip, but any Frito sitting around is a Frito to be consumed, and quite often, when I get the urge for my favorite salty snack, there are no more Fritos. Gone. Consumed. Eaten. People! I have Bean Dip, lovely, creamy, fat-laden bean dip, just waiting to be lovingly, carefully scooped up by a fresh Frito chip - and there are no Fritos!

So this week we brought home yet another sack of Frito's from the store...and I hid them. I'm not proud of it, but I immediately stashed them where Barb will never find them! Do you know where I hid them? Me neither. I could use some help here. I know they are in the house somewhere. I think.

At Learning Ally this week, I was reading all the introductory material in the front of a new book - table of contents, author's notes about why this edition is ever so much better than the previous edition, etc. One section dealt with all the stuff available to the the teacher - lecture notes, prepared tests, and such - and mentioned a service called Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection service. You submit your student's papers to the service and they check them against 24+ billion web pages, 300+ million student papers and 110,000+ publications, pointing out likenesses and out-and-out copy and paste sections. I guess educators are well aware of services like this, but this was my first encounter. Thank goodness all my essays and research papers were in the pre-Internet era!

My cardiologist decided to put me on a monitor to check out my PVCs - Premature Ventricular Contractions.  A normal heart beat goes flub-dub, flub-dub, flub-dub. Occasionally my heart goes flub-dub, flub......dub,DUB,dub. PVCs are irksome, but harmless and the monitor is just to confirm that's what's going on. Normally, they tape some leads to you and you carry this gizmo around for a week, but my doctor has this new type monitor. I call it the Game Boy.

 

When you want to monitor what's going on, you pull out the Game Boy and push the buttons (under the thumbs). When you are done you transmit the recording by phone or computer. Cool. So far, I have the high score.