I made the cut! I don't have a tape day yet but the show is called Trivial Pursuit: America Plays and anyone who wants to can tape themselves asking a question and send it in. The day your question airs, if the in-studio contestants don't make enough money you get to split the prize money.

My father passed away unexpectedly tonight. A blood clot in his leg traveled to his lungs. I'm not exactly numb, but I know that it's no where as bad as its going to be. He loved me more than anyone else in the world did.

Although Thailand is officially in a State of Emergency at the minute, so far it all seems pretty calm and peaceful. I have not been eaten by monsters/shot by police/otherwise come to a sticky end. Touch wood.

I've spent a long weekend with my nephew Evan and here are the pictures -- [link]

S went into the hospital again on Monday, showing signs of a lower GI bleed. She's been in ICU since Monday afternoon. When I stopped by to see her this morning, she seemed to be doing better, and the bleeding, by all accounts seemed to have stopped.

When I visited her in the hospital this evening, after work, I was informed that she had gone into respiratory distress, and had been placed on a ventilator. She is now heavily sedated. She had also been showing signs of severe mental distress -- agitation, rapid and jerky eye movements, and shaky hand and arm movements.

As of right now, they don't know what is causing her mental distress, and don't know why she's gone into respiratory distress.

They are concerned she might have had a stroke, or possibly even a mild heart attack. They have not been able to confirm either of those possibilities, nor have they been able to rule them out.

Please. Every single ounce, every last drop of your prayers, thoughts, well-wishes and ~ma. Please point it at Burbank, California.

Please.

DC-istas. I will be in your fair city this weekend for The Nation's Triathlon. (There is a course preview video that loads automatically, fyi.) My friend and I are planning to carbo load at Otello Saturday night. We're planning to eat about 6 pm. Anyone want to join us?

I'll check F2F thread for response.

So S is more or less the same -- still on the ventilator, still having difficulty keeping her blood pressure up, and her fever keeps hovering around 99 to 100.

The good news is that the edema in her lungs has gone down considerably, and none of her cultures have produced any evidence of infection, so she may not be sceptic after all (it seems that there's still plenty of guessing going on).

She's been making tiny incremental steps of improvement every day. Now that it's four days out, and there's a bigger big picture to look at, she's definitely improving. The difference between now and four days ago is remarkable.

That being said, she's still not out of the woods by any stretch. Hopefully they'll actually be able to take her off the ventilator soon, as there's always a concern that the longer a person is on a ventilator, the harder it is to take them off of it.

Some biopsy and easily treatable results ~ma would be appreciated for my mom. She just got carted off to surgery and I'm hanging in the waiting room.

I haven't fallen off the planet; I was in Columbus for the weekend, and when we got back Sunday, we had the high-wind storms (which I understand other parts of the country have had) (also, I'm not trying to imply our windstorms were worse than Hurricane Ike was in Texas), and we haven't had power for over 24 hours and have no idea when we'll have it back on. It's wild, y'all -- it looks like a tornado went through: [link]

Work was cancelled today, and I'm at a library right now, to check e-mail and such, so I wanted to check in just in case anyone noticed I was absent.

The uni finally came through with titles for those of us teaching as full-time non-tenured faculty, which means that now I don't just act like a professor, I actually am one. Associate Professor as of this fall.