Grandfather Cliff's Funeral Part I

On Nov.27 I was celebrating Thanksgiving with Ally's family. Everything was going really well and I felt a bad asking Ally if we could leave early to visit my family at my grandparent's house, but I really wanted to see them since I hadn't had the chance yet. She agreed and so we took off. When we got to my grandparents house my grandpa was resting a little bit in his chair. It was a little shocking to see a bloody tube clipped on to his ear, but I was glad he was at able to be home after having several trips a week to the hospital for various medical reasons. Later on in the night we just sat around with my parents and brother David and my grandpa listened to us talk while chiming in couple words(as my uncle Kim described it grandapa likes to be in the background at a party just listening).

The next day was Black Friday. Grandpa awoke with terrible abdominal pains so my grandma decided to take him to the ER. Right when they got into the car my grandpa started convulsing. It seemed that his heart had stopped and so his defibrillator was going off, hence the convulsing. My grandmother immediately calls the paramedics. While all this is going on Ally and I were over at my parents house just making breakfast when my mom got a call from my grandmother. So we finished making breakfast while my mom went over to my grandparents house. Later on my mom called to give us and update that the paramedics couldn't get my grandpa's heart started. We were worried and didn't want to burden them later on by calling to check his status every five minutes. After not hearing from them for a while(like a couple hours after breakfast) Ally and I returned to her parent's home where we were staying. Later I called my sister to let her know what was going on and it turned out she hadn't been told yet. She called my dad and then he called me back with an update that my grandpa was still alive and was at Good Samaritan Hospital, but was critical and had requested a Priesthood blessing from my father and I. When we arrived at the hospital we gave him a blessing and then the doctor came in to tell us what was going on. Apparently my grandpa's aneurysm in his abdomen had started to grow recently and had now started to leak. My grandma and grandpa had known about the aneurysm, but decided it was too dangerous to operate. Now the surgeon said that that going into this surgery he would have nearly a 0% chance of surviving the surgery. We had about half an hour to say goodbye to my grandpa and hold his hands before they took him into surgery. As they took him away he was still concerned about how my grandma was doing and tried to make sure that she got something to eat while he was in surgery. About half an hour after they started the surgery I left to go see Ally and tell her how everything was going. Later on my sister, her husband, and their baby boy went to the hospital to see my grandma, then after they left we met up with them at their place. After six hours of sugery we got a call that grandpa had made it and was now stable but in critical condition. Not ten minutes later we received another phone call from my mom saying that my grandpa's heart had stopped and they hadn't been able to start it again. This was roughly nine o'clock at night when my grandfather died.

Last night I dreamt I was eating mayonnaise and when I woke up all my mayonaise was gone

True story. When I was a missionary in Albania one of the guys with whom I served was very prone to sleep talking, walking, and all kinds of fun stuff. One night I woke up and could see a light coming out of the refrigerator in the kitchen and then a little later the guy with whom I was serving, for reasons of anonymity we'll just call him Toni, went back to his bed and fell asleep without saying a word. The next day during lunchtime Toni opens the refrigerator and asks me what happened to all of his mayonnaise. I remind him that I don't eat mayonnaise and then tell him what I saw the night before. He then shakes his head and says unconvincingly, "No, that couldn't have been what happened um..."

And that's why you don't buy mayonnaise kids.

Get Partially Real

So this past week I had 'midterms', even though the quarter is ending in less than three weeks, in Partial Differential Equations and Real Analysis. Some of you may be saying to yourselves, "Oh Billy, having midterms this late in the the quarter isn't that strange, sometimes teachers like to have two of three midterms and so one of them ends of happening later in the quarter if they're spread out evenly." True that, I agree. Both of these however were the only tests we've taken this quarter and so they were more like finals than midterms.

My real problem stemmed from over studying for one midterm and under studying for the other. PDE's is a relatively easy class and so I didn't take much time studying for it, while real analysis is usually always killer. Oh well, better luck next time I suppose.

Hellboy

Right now Ally seriously wants to kill me because I'm watching the trailer for Hellboy 2. Imagine what will happen when it comes in the mail from netflix...

Abortion

Ally and I were recently talking about abortion, since it poses so many interesting ethical questions, and the conversation ended something like this:

Billy-"I think if someone could make a clone of himself without a brain and the clone just lived on life support, then it would be okay for someone to use the clone for spare organs, limbs, etc. "

Funny how easy it is to get off topic like that. Its just that abortion really brings up so many questions such as 'what is life?' and 'what role does science play in defining the matter?'. I was thinking about how in many countries and states the general rule for how late is too late to abort is 'If the fetus can survive outside of the mother's body then its too late too abort.' (hold on because now things are going to get a little sci-fi). What about the day when science will be able to create a test tube baby and nurture through its entire gestation period, will abortion not be allowed because technically the fetus could survive outside the mother's body any moment after conception? It just seems to me that we're defining when its okay to terminate a potential human life by how advanced our medical resources are. Personally I think that just goes to show the lengths we go to as a society to get around answering a philosophical question like 'when does life start?'

Naturally the test tube baby idea led us to talking about cloning and whether or not it is right to clone one's self and then use the clone for 'spare parts' in a manner of speaking. I felt that it is the mind which defines us as human. Since having a brain seems to be a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, condition for the existence of a mind, then if the clone had no mind then there would be no crime in using the body for any purpose we saw fit.

Anyway, that's the kind of conversations I have with Ally sometimes when we're lying in bed trying to go to sleep. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Minesweeper and the Beach

I just finished a game of minesweeper on expert. The reason I'm happy is because the game almost always ends this way, there's two spares left and only one of them is a mine. Guess which one always gets picked. Like not just most of the time, but an unreasonably high amount of the time.
Anyway, today Ally and I went to the beach to celebrate Jay's birthday. Jay and Rosie are another couple we met at the institute a while ago. They're a pretty cool couple. Jay's an EE major who plays guitar while Rosie just got her degree in history and is substitute teaching. Teaching sounds like a really rewarding job to me. In the past I've done a bit of tutoring and its something I enjoy quite a bit. The higher the level of the math the more rewarding it feels. Sometimes I think being a university professor is something I would enjoy a lot. However I feel uncertain about doing that since I still haven't really had any good research experience and I'm not sure how easy it is to find jobs like that. Its something I guess that's been weighing on my mind a bit and I just wanted to get it out. Oh yeah, and the other little concern, I probably wouldn't make that much and et I will be in a good deal of debt from school. S'ka gje.

My First Time...again

So this is not my first attempt at a blog. I tried the live journal thing and it was just too tricky having to um.. what's the word? Oh yeah, write, It was too difficult to write in it. So I'm thinking this should go a lot better. I guess only time will tell.