Saturday, Beth, Alex, and I road tripped to Muncie to visit Missy for the day. Beth got a large soup order from the website, so we detoured to meet the buyer in Fort Wayne on the way…12 soups, plus the 13th for free. Minor detour, then to Missy. We got there around lunch time and took her and both of her roommates out to lunch at IHOP. She had some shopping to do so we all went to Wal-Mart after that, then back to the house and got things put away, and after that Missy and both of her roommates had work to do and needed to get to the studio…soooo, we went home. It was a short visit, but Missy has just been super busy lately. It reminded me of all the times when I was in grad school and my parents would drive the 90 minutes to visit, we’d go out to lunch, and they’d go home.

 On Wednesday I called in to Pulse FM’s “Fresh Outa Bed and Head to Head” again, and won a decisive victory. It won me a couple tickets to a holiday lights show in South Bend, which maybe we’ll use and maybe we won’t. The following day I played against a first timer, and had a pretty decisive loss. The questions were a bit obscure, and I guessed wrong on a couple which left the door open and she guessed right with reduced options. Oh well, so I’m not in the hall of fame for a third time this year.

Tuesday was my first day as a visiting professor (of sorts). Trey at work has been teaching a class on materials science at Grace College, where a couple former ZB employees are full time professors now, both of whom I knew through work. Anyway, Trey was out this week and asked me if I could fill in for him at his class, basically by giving the same presentation I gave to the NPI group a couple weeks ago. I hit all the high points about UHMWPE and how ZB uses it, the pros and cons of each kind, etc etc. Some of the students were very attentive and asked questions, and some of them didn’t seem that interested, but apparently that’s par for the course.

Churro has been fixed. Nat’s been saving up money for a while to be able to pay for the procedure herself, and she finally got there recently. We took him to Community Animal Hospital in town, which was the most convenient and reasonable place to have it done. I took Nat and the dog in in the morning and we dropped him off… a very pathetic sight… the last thing I saw of him was his back end straining against being dragged into the examination room as we left. By the afternoon they were done, and Beth picked up a very pathetic little dog in a cone of shame.