There is a party in my stomach and I wasn't invited...

Ugh. I've been having stomach pain since Sunday and took a sick day today to go into the Stanford Medical Clinic ER. After some lab work and an ultrasound the conclusion is that I just have a badly upset stomach (yay! I don't have to have surgery!). As wonderful of news as this is, my stomach still really doesn't feel good... So, I'm going to attempt to drive home today and have my family take care of miserable me. Wish me luck with the 6 hour drive.

On the work front, I'm *finally* making progress on my current project at work and *really* would like to finish it up. I also had a bit of an adventure on Friday. Normally I wake up at 7:23AM, get ready, bike a mile to the train station, catch the 8:23AM train, and bike from the train station in SF to get to work at ~9:15AM. On Friday things were going wonderfully normally, until I got on the train and realized that I had forgotten my wallet.

Now, as Caltrain so gleefully reminds you a dozen times a day, Caltrain requires you to have the ticket to be on the train and if you don't have one you get hit with a hefty fine. My monthly pass is safely contained in my wallet, where I am least likely to misplace it. Unfortunately, that doesn't really help when you misplace your wallet.

I found a conductor and asked her what to do. She told me to get off the train. So I did, at the next stop. But this is an *express* train, so the next stop was 6 miles from my house (and that is me being luck, a different express train would have dropped me way farther down the line). Having no money to buy myself a ticket, I biked home along somewhat soggy roads and switched to my trusty automobile to convey me to work. 45 minutes and a wrong turn on the 280 later, I finally made it to work a little after 10. And I was still one of the first engineers there.

The happy epilogue to all of this is that I used my car (which I don't normally have up in SF) to visit Doug over in Berkeley after work. It was great to see him, hang out, and try another delicious beer ^_^.

The only other recent news is that I went up to a party Jen DuMond threw up at her parents lodge in the nearby mountains. I carpooled up with Shelley, and after *lots* of being lost on dark, damp, and dangerous mountain roads we finally found the place (a little over an hour late). There were a few other Mudders there and it was generally an awesome time!

Thats all for now. I want my stomach to feel better :-P

Merry Christmas,
Jason