Well, Unknown Son had his quarterly checkup, and it was good news. As I mentioned in the last blog post, he has one spot that continues to show up on his scans. But, since it's the same as lthe last few times, his oncologist is even more convinced that it's not active Neuroblastoma cells, but merely a ganglioneuroma, which is basically the "ghost" of active cells. So, we continue on as before and come back in a while for another checkup. the good news its that we now go to an every 6 months schedule (up from every three months). so, we don't have to go back to CHOP until November.
The kids (and their folks) had a great time in Philly. We went to the "hands-on Franklin Institute on Tuesday after Unknown Son's injection (they injected the radioactive dye on Tuesday and took the scans on Wednesday). The Franklin Institute is always good for kids (of all ages, like 42 and 48). This time around they had a "human body" exhibit. U.S. got the biggest kick out of the 2 1/2 story high human heart (he ran up and down through all the chambers about a dozen times), while Unknown Daughter got the biggest charge out of the exercise bikes that were accompanied by a Bug Bunny-esque opera.
So, it's back to regular life. Since the semester is done, there are no students around, and I get to catch up on all the things that slipped through the cracks. For today, I'm mostly doing some setup work on a large options data set that I've been working with lately. The entire data set has over 300 million observations which is way too big to work with in its entirely. So today I'm mostly figuring out which data items (and observations ) I need to cut into a smaller data set so that it'll be more manageable.
As my friends say, it's time to put on my Alpha Nerd hat.