Now, its possible that its the type of program I'm watching in the background as I'm doing other work - UFO Files, "The Russian Roswell" - but the History Channel really needs to do some fact checking on what its broadcasting.

Vladimir Semenov (KGB Official, Ret.): "We are the first, and all next steps in space for - I would say for nearly ten years - Soviet was ahead of United States. First man into space. First woman into space. First walk into space. First rondezvous in space. First docking in space, and so on and so forth. Until 1981 when Shuttle was launched."

I find myself wondering if I should do errands today and go watch Narnia.

Due to a schedule conflict which I should have let Capt. Dan know about (entirely my fault!), I won't be able to see Narnia with the ship tomorrow.

Or should we consolidate the gas and do everything tomorrow? It's not like some critical things can't be done here at Darrowby House...

Eh. Looks like I have until 1600hrs to decide.

Meanwhile, with 17° temperatures and currently sunny (yesterday was brutal!) the "treehive" in the front of the house, I notice, is very active. Wonderful to see. I wonder if they'll swarm this year?

It is almost impossible for me to correctly express how important College was to me in my life. I tend to think of Oswgo as the best four years of my life, and that's true. It was also, paradoxically, the worst four years of my life. My mother was arrested due to an old drug abuse problem and my blood family that was never quite strong to begin with, fell to pieces while I was in College.

Still, you only remember the good things, I guess, and for years I considered Oswego the closest thing I ever had to home.

As I begin this missive, I sit in the east section of the 2nd floor of Penfield Library, a place where I camped out for several weekends during the toughest semester of my undergraduate academic career. To my right rises Funnelle and Hart Halls conected by Cooper Dining Hall. Directly ahead of me is the new Swetman/Poucher bulding - the only thing I can see that really is totally new in the last 25 years. It occupies the same site as the old Swetman/Poucher building, but is at least twice its size. Not only is it a new building, but it has revamped the land around it. The street that I used to cross every day to go from my dorm to Snygg Hall is gone. The fountain - a gift from the Class of '83 if I remember correctly - that they placed in between Snygg and Funnelle Halls is also gone. Slightly to my left rises the Twin Towers of the power generation plant just off campus - the towers named by the students Big Dick and Little Dick. Little Dick has had its top repaired and painted white in the last few years.

You know, the saying is right, but the song is wrong: You can't go home again. And that's not necessarily a bad thng.

The last time I was here, probably about 10 years ago the ghosts flew thick and heavy around me. It didn't end up being a good visit. I'd come wanting to come home, but the home I'd come back to didn't exist anymore. Yes, you could take the boy from Oswego, but you couldn't take Oswego from the boy. The problem was that the Oswego in the boy didn't quite exist anymore, and it was a shock.

I was worried about the same thing happening this time as I drove up playing REO Speedwagon and Air Supply - the very songs that I'd heard 25 years ago on this very campus. Sure, I was tempting fate.

But it didn't happen. On one level I felt like an intruder. Sure with the clothes and the backpack and the hat hiding my balding head I looked like a student, perhaps, but I wasn't one. The students around me taking finals hadn't even been born yet when I originally walked this campus.

Oddly, but perhaps appropriately, the visit turned into a professional networking event.

=======================

Especially during finals week you really never know who you'll catch or not. That was one of the reasons I knew yesterday was the very last day I could do this.

I caught Dr. Susan Fettes as she was letting out a final. She barely recognized me, and to be fair, I would have had a problem picking her out of a street crowd. As we talked and I let her in on some of the maths I was attempting now-a-days (Fourier transform power functions), she mentioned some of the work she was doing, via students, in the Physics department programming Fourier transform functions in Java to facilitate Cephid variable research that a member of the Physics faculty was doing. She said the Java method would be posted on her web site soon and I should check it out.

Susan was the first person I managed to find, but she let me in on the secret that Doug now semi-hid in his office by closing the door, and I should knock.

I did so. And Dr. Doug Lea opened the door utterly shocked to see me. Doug looks very much the same as he did 25 years ago, save that his hair, including his moustache is now a very light tan. While he was shocked to see me, he knew what was going on with me. Interestingly enough I had updated my CS Alumni page for the first time in 10+ years a couple of weeks ago. When that happened, Randy Odenhall, who I'd remembered, sent out an email to the rest of the CS faculty updating them about me.

I learned a few things during our conversation. Turns out that Doug was born and grew up in Somerville, just a few blocks from where I'm trying to get a flat. He knows the area well. He goes back about 4 times a year, once to see a Red Sox game. I told him about my sticker shock at a $90 ticket and he agreed. However, he noted that Addison-Wesley gets four season tickets a year, and if you write books for them and are very nice to them, they give you one to use for a day! Aaaahhhh! So that's how you do it! :-)

Doug gave me a small tour of the CS Wing. The offices have not moved from where they were, but most of the classrooms across the hall are now thin-client computer labs. With the Java research that Doug continues to do for Sun, Sun donates gobs of hardware to him. So much so that he has quad-processor machines he doesn't know what to do with. "Really?" I said. "I may be contacting you about those!"

Then, completely independently, he mentioned the students that Susan had mentioned working with the Physics Prof on computational astronomy research. Turns out these students are going to Brazil this summer to work on a robotic telescope installation and he introduced me to them. Then he took me to the other side of the building to see if he could introduce me to their Prof (see how this was turning into a professional networking event?). Unfortuantely Dr. Shashi Kanbur wasn't there, but Doug told me to note the name. I did, and later looked him up.

Dr. Kanbur turns out to be no slouch! While in the Physics Department, he teaches all the Astronomy courses, and actively recruits undergraduates in research projects which include observations of Cephid variables in the LMC as well as hydrodynamical models of RR Lyrae stars. It turns out that the robotic telescope installation in Brazil is part of an American Astronomical Society Chretien International Research Award in collaboration with the Brazilian National telescope facility to do long term observations of Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds and to develop the robotic telescope. Would that I had had such opportunities when I was an undergraduate!

Doug and I also talked about old classmates and he brought me up to speed on a couple of my classmates who had "made it." The most interesting of these was Mark Fedor.

Mark was one of my very first supervisors. He was a student Senior Operator when I was hired by the Instructional Computing Center in my Junior year. It was Mark who gave me my first big assignment - gather source, figure it out, compile it, and install the college's first DNS server in 1985. It was a big deal back then.

Turn out Mark had gone from Oswego to NyserNet and then PSI. There he'd created or co-authored such landmark protocols as GateD and SNMP. Doug said after PSI exploded Mark took a decade off and bought a vinyard in VA. At the beginning of the millenium he went back to work.

Where'd Mark go back to work? Again, its a small world! Mark turned out to be the CTO for Sunrocket, the VoIP company that Arc found and signed us up for two years ago. They exploded within the year, but not because of technical problems, but a business model that was so bad even I couldn't figure out how the company was going to remain afloat.

I wandered to central campus and went through Hewitt Union. They have public kiosk Macs sprinkled about, but they're the "gooseneck" iMac models with old OSes on them. It all seemed sort of empty with no student organizations I could find save for the Women's Center. The TV and the radio station areas were empty which concerned me greatly.

I went to Mahar to look up Dr. John Kane, but he wasn't in. I found out from the directory that Dr. Dave Bozak who had been my vector graphics Prof was now heading up Sociology from the rarified air of the 6th floor of Culkin Hall, the Administration Building. He was at a conference.

It was about 1500hrs and I was about done. I went back to Snygg Hall to try two more people, Craig Graci and Paul Taylor. I went down to ICC and found that Paul's office was open, but he wasn't around. He had to be somewhere. I waited for a bit and wandered into the "terminal rooms." There was not a single VT220 anywhere! :-) Mostly PCs with a few Macs sprinkled about. There were no carrols anymore, the ones that Ed Beadle, the first director I worked under, called TARDISes. That was how I'd gotten my name. I was standing in the room where my name had been given to me... probably for the very last time!

Paul never returned, and I knew that Craig was gone for the day so upon having a last look through the door window into what had been the original Machine Room holding Natasha and Boris and all the other PDP-11/34s, 73s, and VAXen I'd grown up with, I walked out of the basement NE door.

There at the curb was Doug Lea talking to someone. As I got closer I realized it was Paul. As I approached Doug motioned Paul toward me. He turned around and said, "Dude! My God! How are you?!"

Thus became what turned into a five hour visit.

Paul Taylor had been an Operator at the ICC when I was a Sophomore. He was due to graduate, and me, always hanging out at the ICC (I was a CS major, after all) always said, "Paul! I want your job!" After awhile Paul said, "You're one of the few people I'd give it to." Paul graduated and I ended up applying for one of the open positions for Student Operator and got it. The next semester I walked into the building for my first day at work and Paul walked in right beside me!

"What are you doing here?" I asked, seeing my job melt away in front of me.

"They hired me as Systems Programmer," Paul said 25 years ago, pulling out his Faculty/Staff ID.

The plan in my head for two years then was that we'd work together for two years, I'd graduate, Paul would move on to the Presidency of IBM and I'd get his job. That was my post college dream. I told him that yesterday. Paul laughed and said, "Well, they didn't offer me the Presidency of IBM..."

"What?" I said.

"Around 1987-88 IBM tried to recruit me for the AIX division. I decided that I didn't want to go into that type of environment." It was downright eerie how close my post-college dream had come to being a reality.

We talked for about a half hour and I said, "By the way, what the hell happened to Swetmen/Poucher?"

"Heh. You don't know the half of it," Paul said. He went to his desk and brought out plans detailing a $0.5bn expansion of the Piez Hall Science Building that would mean the destruction of Snygg Hall. I scanned the plans. Yes, while it would be moved, my Planetarium would still be on the 3rd floor, and there would be an astronomical observing platform on the roof.

"You really couldn't have walked around that much," Paul said. "We have a lot of differences. Let's take a tour."

We went through the new Swetman/Poucher Hall. To say that its huge is an understatement! It is here that they moved both the campus radio and TV stations. And its more than the old Swetman/Poucher. Tacked onto the west end of the old complex, in the very center of campus, is The Arena, a replacement for Romney Field House! There it was, the huge arena, all set up for the upcoming graduation. My eyes went to the left and I saw, labeled in huge letters, the "Steve Levy Press Box!"

Now, those of you who follow sports, and who watch ESPN, especially, apparently, hockey, might recognize Steve Levy. He's a sports anchor for the network and apparently he's pretty popular. But I knew Steve 25 years ago when he was Friday Night Sports anchor for campus TV station WTOP-Ch10. And ya know, I got more mail than Steve did as the Friday Night Weatherman. Of course, in my case they were death threats, but I still got more mail than he did! I told Paul it would take me a bit to "digest" the "Steve Levy Press Box."

We walked through Sheldon Hall, which had largely been abandonned six months after I got to Oswego. It now houses languages, admissions and other things - a full campus building.

We went back to Paul's office and talked some more. He showed me pictures of his two boys. Jason has been born the year I graduated. I remember Paul holding him in his office one day as a newborn. Now he's 21, bigger than his Dad, with long hair, but otherwise a dead ringer for his father.

Paul's phone rang. He answered it, said a few things, and then said, "Guess who dropped by to see me? Doc Kinne. Yea, we've been reminicing." He looked at me, "What are you doing for dinner?"

"Nothing. Is that Kathy?" I asked. Kathy was Paul's wife.

"Yea. You wanna come to dinner?" Paul asked.

"Great!" I said.

"He's coming," Paul said back into the phone as he ended the conversation and hung up.

"My God1 That's amazing that Kathy remembers me so well," I said.

"Why?"

"Well, its been at least 21 years since we've seen each other."

"Well," Paul said, "You have some...physical characteristics that tend to make you rather memorable, and you also tended to accent them while you were here."

"How did I accent me being short?"

"I said, 'physical characteristics.' You were the only person on campus who wore a 20' long multi-colored scarf...no matter what the temperature. There was that battered Fedora you always wore. And your nosewarmer pipe. So, you tended to be somewhat memorable."

I laughed so hard I almost choked. Paul was right, of course.

We went to his place and Paul introduced me to his boys. During, and after, dinner we talked about everything: the economy, our medical issues, car crashes we'd been in, Scouting, dumb school boards, crime, computers, servers, visual over CCD variable star data gathering, numismatics, guns, karate, cats, Boston, the metro, the World Trade Center Towers. It went on and on. Halfway through, right after dinner, Kathy had to leave with Scott, Paul's younger boy, and go to a Scouting function. Paul, me, and Jason went to the porch. The only thing that stopped us, coming up on 2000hrs was the fact that Paul and Jason had a World of Warcraft battle schedule for the hour.

It had been an amazing visit, and a fantastic end to an amazing day!

============================

The ghosts were gone. They were just...gone. It hadn't ended up being about me once again reaching into the past, but enjoyng the present and looking toward the future with relationships that were no longer Teacher-Student, but entirely peer-based. Yea, you might not be able to take Oswego out of the boy, but the Oswego that the boy knew no longer exists. It has changed as everything does, and everything must.

And so, I left the City and came home, no longer playing Air Supply and REO Speedwagon, but again listening to Astronomy Cast and the BBC NewsPod.

Somewhere, in another dimension and in another time a brown-coat, scarf, and Fedora-wearing boy with hair on his head stood on the roof of Piez Hall and leaned against the curved wall that was the top of the oldest Planetarium in Central NY and smiled as he sucked his pipe and worked on his smoke rings.

His work here was done...

I can't remember a day that had as much national good news in a long, long time.

A judge orders the obsolete RIAA to pay opponent's legal fees after failing in one of their harrassing lawsuits!

Judges are battling a thousand today!!! Today I have hope in America!

(While I knew this was going on, thanks to JC for letting me know.)

CA Supreme Court Fixes Faulty Voter Decision!

Hopefully it happens rarely, but it does happen - sometimes voters are wrong. And in this case, in passing Prop. 22, the CA voters were wrong. Fortunately, more and more, we have "activist" judges who know right from wrong.

For now, CA now joins the "Enlightened Club," a wonderful club that now includes Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and the Great United States Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

But its not over. While losing, the bigots will not give up. An appeal to the US Supreme Court is expected.

So...

• Refreshed and priortized my professional To-Do list.
• Did more SSL research.
• Wrote up my VO Summer School application.
• Updated various systems.
• Mowed lawn
• Fixed toilet
• Garbage & recycling put out
• Installed and compiled the MySQLdb-python module for Python DBI programming on Ananda (after making sure it was on all my other systems)

Also, I'm going to take a "vacation day" tomorrow and go up to SUNY Oswego to say goodbye and thanks to a few people. I realized this will be the very last chance I have to do that before I go to Cambridge. I'll also take the opportunity to visit my father in Syracuse as well.

• Dr. Doug Lea, for being my undergraduate advisor, for putting up with all the practical jokes I played on him and not killing me (or failing me) for them, and for saying that I'd never get my Masters if I didn't start it within five years of leaving Oswego. I had to prove him wrong.

• Craig Graci, for recommending that I legally change my name to "Doc." He'll be amazed how far that name has gone. And for just being Graci-space.

• Dr. Sue Fettes, for being one of those who proved to me I can do math when I need to.

• Dr. John Kane, for putting up with the antics that enabled me to get the highest grades in the 1984 Principles of Economics courses.

• Paul Taylor, for recommending me for my first computational position and then mentoring me through it.

• Dr. David Thomas, for giving me my first astronomical position. I only wish someone hadn't had to die in order for me to get it. Dormu Pace, Doktoro Jerred!

There are some people I don't expect to see. Joanne Kossegi, another of my very important math profs, has retired. Dr. Brindle, who was the Computer Science Department Head for awhile while I was there has also retired.

Most unfortunately, I've found out that Dr. Ronald S. Chaldu, my undergraduate Astronomy Prof, retired in 2004. I did a literature search for Dr. Chaldu and came up with nine entries. Well, Ron never struck me as a research scientist - he was a teacher, and a good one.

I keep saying that the astronomical community is small. How small is it? Take a look a this entry:

1971IAUC.2340....1K Nova Cephei 1971. 1.000 00/1971 C U
Kuwano, Y.; Ishida, K.; Ichimura, K.; Mattei, M.; Ashbrook, J.; Seslar, M.; Bortle, J.; Honeycutt, R. K.; Chaldu, R.

There's my Prof at the end of the author list. Variable star astronomers will recognize, at least, one other name on this list: Mattei, M. - husband of Dr. Janet Mattei, the immediate past Director of the AAVSO, and himself a long time Clerk to the Assocation!

I have little good to say regarding the Chinese government, and I have even less good to say regarding the Burmese "leadership." The best of governments act no better than petulant five year olds in normal circumstances.

Unfortunately, it is almost never the "leadership" that suffer when something bad happens. It is nearly always the common people.

Having said that, I have watched BBC World News tonight, was full of details regarding both the earthquake in China and the continuing obstinate stupidity of the "leadership" in Burma.

I offer prayers to Avalokiteśvara that he may hear and relieve the suffering being experienced by the peoples of Burma and China as they go through yet another very difficult time.

Yea. Its official.

I'm in love with Regular Expressions.

And why not? They're quiet. They do what you ask of them if you are good with your instructions. They'll move to MA with you.

Granted, they won't help you put your ceiling back up, but they wouldn't have taken half of it down in the first place, would they?

• 11:32 Sitting in the Meetinghouse, listening to David's sermon, writing Perl code. Nice... :-) #

As I mentioned, while Arc's hortocultural experiments took most of the yard, I've contented myself with a 1.25m² terrarium of carnivorous plants.

Today I "rescued" four plants from Lowe's, a Flytrap, another Drosera capensis (Sundew), and a Sarracenia purpurea ssp. venosa (Southern American Pitcher Plant), all crowded together in one small pot, and a Pinguicula moranensis, my first Butterwort. I was debating about getting a Nepenthes (tropical Pitcher Plant) but thought that the "theme" of the terrarium was more temperate so I shouldn't mix such different plants.

I transplanted what I got into the terrarium and they already seem happier.

I'm very happy with last year's Flytrap so far. When I got it last year it was already in flower and I didn't know enough at that point to cut the flower off so it wouldn't drain energy from the plant. Now its grown upwards of 10 traps in the last month as it started this year's growing season.

My next thought may be grow-lights for the terrarium. Even though the growth of my Flytrap I think is good, the leaves are green. I've never been able to get the characteristic pink color in the trap interiors and I think this is because the plants lack UV light since the window will block those wavelengths. A grow-light would fix that issue, I think.

We'll see how they grow. And hopefully, once they get established, I can put up pictures.

Sitting in the Meetinghouse...

Listening to David's sermon...

Writing Perl code in Cambridge...


Nice.

:-)

First, I was meaning to post a question for the last fortnight wondering if there was a season for brussel sprouts. Then, I found them at Tops again tonight.

Second, I keep forgetting what a fucking powerful film Saving Private Ryan is. Then, I see it again, and I remember all over.

I celled my Mom as I drove back from the Accord meeting.

Dad was extubated on Wednesday afternoon. Obviously he's breathing on his own. He's eating (semi) solid food. He's out of IC and is in a regular room.

He's still seemingly somewhat confused. He asked my sister how she was doing with her student teaching. My sister's been teaching professionally now for 19 years. Despite that, Neurology has said there is no discernable brain damage - no motor impairment, no loss of function, no mental impairment.

Now, he's in a regular room in Syracuse waiting transfer back to Rome. We don't know when that will be. Once that is done we then have to deal with the pancreatic cysts. They are thinking at this point - I have no idea why - that the pancreas will just "reabsorb" the cysts. If that doesn't happen we'll be talking about surgery in Syracuse.

I'm almost afraid to say it, almost like I'm making light of it, but I think we've dodged another bullet. This makes, like #5. The news couldn't be better.

The miracle continues...

Tomorrow, its all decided in a photo finish that we've only seen four times in history.

Tomorrow are the last games of the English Premiere League this season. As it stands, just by Goal Differences, Manchester United stands on top. Just below them, with the same number of points, is Chelsea.

Tomorrow the Red Devils go against Wigan, currently placed 13th out of 20. Chelsea go against Bolton (16th of 20). Its all up to the matches starting at 1500BST tomorrow. If Man U win, they win the Premiereship. If they lose and Chelsea win, they win. If Man U ties and Chelsea win, they win.

It doesn't get any tighter than that.

Next week, on the 18th Cambridge go against Exeter for promotion to League Two.

This month also sees the premiere of the final Indiana Jones movie and the next installment of the Chronicles of Narnia.

And, just to put the last bit of frosting on the cake, remember that Mars Phoenix lands, 25 May, 2336hrs UTC near the Martian North Polar Cap, 68° N, 233° E; the Earth geographic equiv. of the Northwest Territories of northern Canada, very close to the Arctic Ocean.

May. Does it get any better?

Some of you may know, but many of you may not, but I consider the OpenOffice.org project the greatest single achievement in the Free & Open Source Software movement, just after Linux itself.

Linux - and the layered software that most people popularly consider Linux (compilers, GUIs, etc.) are proving, with somewhat halting steps, that the world can have an operating system without Bill Gates...or Steve Jobs. Over the last two years it has finally gotten to a point where I can recommend it for normal folks use in a desktop environment. My life will be complete when I can recommend it for normal folks use on a laptop. I figure we're three years away from that, but its getting better all the time.

But...OpenOffice.org is our subject tonight. OpenOffice.org is meant to be a replacement, for all intents and purposes for Microsoft Office and I have been thrilled that it seems to fulfill that role wonderfully. What may not be known is that I've not used Microsoft Office - anywhere - since I graduated Swinburne in 2003.

Once I left grad school, that very day I took Microsoft Office off the Mac laptop and installed OpenOffice.org. Obviously I've used OpenOffice.org on any Linux platform I've used. And, without any knowledge or complaints, I used it seamlessly at CBORD for years. It can be that good.

What's its secret? The secret is that it can read and write Microsoft Office files to a large extent. And, for good or for evil, that's what's allowed it to survive and thrive because, like it or not, the .doc format is the lingua franca (or, dare I say it, the Esperanta lingvo) of the office world. I don't care if your software can clean my catbox, if you can't read and write Office files, you're useless.

OpenOffice.org can do that.

It's problem on the MacOS X operating system is that, as written, it required the X11 windowing system to work. Now for me that's not an issue - I'm constantly running the X11 windowing environment on the Mac for various things I do in terms of data analysis or cross platform systems administration and programming, and while its not a hard thing to have running and set up, the X11 environment is still something that normal Mac users don't do. And so there was always a part of me that wasn't quite going to recommend it to normal users.

Three days ago, that all changed. Three days ago OpenOffice.org released their 3.0b Public Beta and what surprised even me was that the MacOS X version of this public beta was the long, long, long awaited native Aqua implementation. Now, OpenOffice.org would act, and look, like a normal MacOS X application.

I just installed the Beta on Ananda, put it through a couple of paces with regard to Writer (the OpenOffice.org version of Word) documents and it passed initial tests well enough that I archived OpenOffice.org 2.4 and made 3.0b the normal program running on Ananda.

I have very high hopes for this application and this version.

Between Firefox 3.0 and OpenOffice.org 3.0, 2008 is the Year of the 3!

• 16:04 Twitter Alert! Mars Phoenix is Twittering! www.twitter.com/MarsPhoenix #
• 16:23 @mhaithaca Now I just have to figure out if Cornell Space Sciences is dong anything for the landing! #

Nothing new on Dale today. I expected that. Mom had to deal with doctors appointments herself. I expect something new tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the stress regarding Dad has finally bubbled up. I don't scream. I don't cry (unless a song triggers it. That happens.). I don't drink (although I do have to get a bottle of Maneschevits, now that I remember it). I just get exhausted.

Unfortunately, its usually stupidly exhausted.

So, I'm going to bed to sleep with my cats.

Today was largely good. I completed work on an automated (un)subscribe program for a few important mailing lists we have informing people of high impact current events and alerts. Beforehand Kate would have to hand subscribe such people, so finishing this program and putting it online made her very happy. Almost too happy. :-)

I was going to relate, "How far the mighty have...fallen." Here I was sitting in the Main Room listening to Barry Manilow doing file processing and mySQL DBI programming with Perl. Who would have thought? :-) I'd not listened to Barry Manilow in years.

It had apparently been too long, in fact. Suddenly "Ships" came on. This is a song I had on a 45rpm single (Quick! Who remembers 45rpm singles? Who knows what they are? Hell, I even owned 78rpm singles in my time!) way back when.

At this time, though, it had suddenly taken on a new meaning and I burst into tears on hearing it.

So...This is for Dad...

• 14:45 @mhaithaca There is an older, less crappy version than 3.1? What are you using now that is less crappy? #

While I was at Burger King and getting trash tags a couple of hours ago my Mom called.

My father is breathing on his own, and he is due to be extubated within 48 hours. He is responding to external stimuli.

We're still deep in the woods. Over the next three days we'll make a determination if the fall and the hemorage caused any particular mental damage. We knew that was down the road. But Saturday I drove up thinking, honestly, that he was leaving this last weekend and his breathing was being done completely by machine.

So, onward we go.