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Timothy's consultation - I'll start with the most important item of the day. At the end of the workday, I met Michelle at Dr. Troublefield's office to discuss Timothy's health. She was a very nice, yet always professional doctor. I was impressed that she maintained such a pleasant demeanor even though it was the end of what I'm sure was a hectic day. I was also amazed that there was hardly any wait. Usually at the end of the day the appointments start to fall behind.

First off, Timothy's inner ear is fine. In short, "it's all in there", so to speak. The thing that most surprised me about the visit was that the surgery for his ear will be several years away -- most likely when he is around seven years old. His fused outer ear has no cartilage in it so it is not, repeat not, just a matter of opening the ear lobe up. They will need to do a lot of reconstruction to develop all those folds we consider typical of the outer ear. To do that they "borrow" cartilage from other parts of the body. All the professional literature to date seems to point to doing that when he is older.

A second issue that we knew about but isn't quite as obvious is that same side of his head isn't symmetric with the other side, especially along his jaw. If you look carefully he has kind of a crooked smile. It's not that he's trying to smile like the late Bob Hope. The same prenatal pressures that caused the outer ear lobe to fold over also caused that side of the head to develop differently. So around the same time that they work on his ear, there will be surgery to his jaw line. In some sense that is the nastier procedure. Sometimes it involves intentionally breaking the bone so that you can straighten things out. Sounds barbaric, but I remember the dentists telling me similar things when I inquired about the alignment of my own teeth. (In my case it's more of an overbite issue, not a left/right symmetry issue...)

Overall we were happy that nothing was going to happen in the near term beside monitoring and consultations. Timothy is such a happy baby we just couldn't foresee putting him through all this at such a young age. On the other hand these traits will be with him for his early childhood. Hopefully he doesn't get teased too much about it. If so, I'm sure his older brothers will be there to stand up for him. I'm happy that when this happens we'll be able to talk with him about it. Michelle felt awful when we took him for the MRI because he was so unable to understand what was happening to him.

Parents extend their stay - In other good news mom and dad are going to extend their stay through the weekend! Ah! The benefits of being semi-retired! The weather last weekend was so "bleah" due to the remnants of Hurricane Juan. I'm glad we get another chance at it. Hopefully this weekend will be better. So far the forecast looks good but a bit chilly. One of my goals is to let my dad do a section of the yard with the tractor. He's always been teased as being "Farmer Bob". I hope to get a couple of pictures of him on the tractor. Today they are going to do a driving tour through some of Vermont, hopefully hitting the scenic Green mountains. I drove through them several years ago at this time of year and it was beautiful.

Grownup's night out - For the second time during this visit, we got a sitter and went to eat with mom and dad. Claire was so heart broken not to go. It didn't help to remind her that whenever we've tried to take her out with us for dinner, she's always dead tired and ready to fall asleep at the dinner table. All she could dwell on is that we were going to have fun without her. She felt bad enough that she didn't get to go with mom and dad to Parker's Maple Barn earlier that morning. Ironically, Abby didn't go because she didn't want to. Once the sitter arrived we headed out to the Bedford Shorty's Mexican Roadhouse. I had their "jailhouse chili" and a "lonestar quesadilla". The chili was spicy -- not in a jalapeno way but in a delayed effect, almost like Indian food. I could only have a few spoonfuls without worrying about whether I'd be paying for it later. I let everyone else try a few spoonfuls. All agreed: tasty but whoa! We brought it home because it'll make a great chip dip, or if I'm feeling like getting a rise out of Claire, we'll "let" her have some of the leftovers.

Considering Safari - No, I don't mean a jungle adventure. No, I don't mean Apple's web browser. I mention this because Chris might be interested in it as well as he works towards his master's degree. Safari is an online service from the folks at O'Reilly where you can browse, search, and "check out" many of the high tech computer books that are staples of the computer industry. These books are usually pretty expensive yet grow obsolete within a couple of years. Nearly all of the titles I've bought over the past dozen years are available. Heck, the amount I've spent in the last year alone would more than pay for a year's membership. The added benefit is that I could access my "bookshelf" from work and home. I read some positive reviews so far -- for example here, here, and here.

End of third quarter - I'm always a bit happier once another quarter end comes to a close. This quarter the Nashua site of ARC had some significant announcements about our new extensions to our high speed USB controller cores (more info also available here). From the Elstree office there should soon be press announcements about the soon to be released successor to ARC's Tangent-A5 processor line. Not that you can ever slack off, but at least we can breathe a sigh of relief that the quarter is behind us now.