July 17, 2015

 I found out today that one of my uncles has a brain tumor. I guess he has been experiencing some memory issues over the past six months, including one time when he got lost driving around town, and when he went in for a scan they saw a tumor. My aunt said the doctors weren't very optimistic. Thanks a lot doctors. My uncle was a lawyer and when he retired it gave him time to go to more movies, which he has always enjoyed, and he got really into gardening, even taking classes and becoming a master gardener. He survived a pretty bad experience in Vietnam only to get a brain tumor. The only acceptable way to die is of old age, in your sleep, after having a party to celebrate your life. Plenty of doctors have been wrong before so lets hope my uncle's doctors are just a tad pessimistic and they are way off base.

Today wasn't nearly as productive as I had hoped. I got a brief start on my grant proposal. Very brief. I did some searching and I think the book I'm going to focus on is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was looking through the instructions and I need to describe various aspects of the project in detail and figured it would be easier with an actual book. I also spent a bunch of time looking up demographic information. So much demographic information. I still need to figure out the literacy rate and I'm not entirely sure of where to find that.

In other school news, I watched a couple lecture videos for my web design class and a TED Talk for my management class. That led to a bunch of other TED Talks, which is what always happens. For web design, it looks like I might need to go in and add more stuff for search engine optimization. I put in META tags but the professor sent us a link to a big PDF so I need to look through that. Hopefully it won't be too much work. Or maybe just enough work for one of my group members to volunteer for it. That would be nice.

For dinner I had the second half of my Chipotle burrito and it was better than the first half. After dinner I worked on my grant proposal, taking a brief break to go pick up a couple books that I lent my friend awhile ago. She is moving to a different state in the morning and I figured I should probably get them back so she didn't have to pay the postage to mail them to me. When I got over there they were still working on loading up the moving truck. It had cooled off when the sun went down to the low 90s but it was over 100 degrees most of the day. I'm glad I wasn't the one moving.

Tomorrow morning I think I have another group meeting. I haven't heard from anyone since our last meeting, not even a response when I sent them the website. But I'm pretty sure we agreed on another meeting tomorrow. I'll be up in time and have my email open so I can see if I get an invitation to the web conference.