BagOfNothing.com

• Most of you read Bag of Randomness between the hours of 6:30 AM – 9:00 AM. More than likely, you’re reading this while I’m being operated on.
• I can’t tell you how much it has meant to me for so many of you and my friends to drop me well wishes yesterday. Unexpected, sincere, unprompted acts of kindness and grace tugs at my heartstrings.
• Last night the anesthesiologist for my surgery called to go over medications and ask some basic info. He couldn’t have been nicer and told me to just call him Gary. I told him the last time I was anesthetized I vomited and he said he’d put a medical patch behind my ear which should help with nausea for three days. He also said not to eat anything past midnight (expected) but I could drink several cups of water and even have a cup of coffee before 5:15 AM (totally unexpected). I check in for surgery at 6:00 AM and surgery is to start at 7:30 AM. That means I’m going to miss my favorite Friday TICKET segments. So, Alex, if you call in for the Emergency Break Of The Week segment, be sure to drop a casual “Bag of Nothing” line in there for me.
• If there is a government shutdown, as a government contractor, the timing of this surgery would work out great.
• I wish I could share the details of the communications from the executive management team at my place of employment regarding my surgery and time off. But I will tell you they have been exceptionally caring and encouraging.
• I worked with DaughterGeeding a bit yesterday on her family immigration project. The teacher is having her students do a project on a family member who has immigrated and DaughterGeeding wants to do her’s on my dearly departed mother. It was neat to see her excitedly embrace her Vietnamese heritage and made me reflect on how I used to be embarrassed about it. I provided her with MomGeeding’s U.S. citizenship documents and all sorts of stuff written on South Vietnamese government stationary as well as defunct currency. She found some of MomGeeding’s old clothes, clothes my mother actually made/sewn herself, and started to sport them around. My mother was so tiny that the clothes somewhat fit her.
• When it’s time to put the kids to bed, we have this tradition of me picking them up and dropping them on their beds. It’s a bit weird I’m not going to be able to do that for two months.
• Yesterday, U2 released the video to “Get Out of Your Own Way”.
• Donald Trump has been the President of the United States for a year now. It’s really interesting to reflect on the past year, or the past four years, and to see how much you may have personally changed as an individual.
• Balding Prince William has finally shaved his head
• The Washington Post – What I’ve learned from my tally of 757 doctor suicides
• Trust in media to report the news accurately, by county: Netherlands: 82%, Canada: 78%, South Korea: 36%, Greece: 22%
• Montreal man fools police with fake car made of snow
• NASA tests small nuclear reactor that could power a habitat on Mars
• The British accent makes it funnier – Driver Has An Absurdly Frustrating Interaction With His Car’s Voice GPS
• The Boy Who Stayed Awake For 11 Days – In December 1963 two boys hit upon an idea for a school science project – stay awake for as long as possible. And it shed new light on what happens inside our tired brains.
• My Life As a Mom to 8 Kids

• My kids were gifted the book The Magic Misfits which is authored by Neil Patrick Harris. It was a delightful surprise to find the setting of the book is a town named Mineral Wells, described as a small sleepy hamlet. The town in the book is not my hometown of Mineral Wells, Texas. The characters in the book are trying to save the town from crooked carnival employees.
• I don’t think I’m stressing out about my surgery tomorrow. I’d guess it’s only natural to go through a cycle of nervousness, anxiousness, worry, and optimism.
• For the past week, I’ve been trying to make myself dream a particular dream to no avail. In this dream, I wake up in my childhood home but I’m the present day me. I walk into the kitchen to find my mother and father eating breakfast and drinking coffee chit-chatting like I’ve seen them a thousand times before. They greet me with a good morning and I simply have a substantive conversation with them about life, parenting, marriage, and the surgery.
• At DaughterGeeding’s last counseling session I was invited to participate in the last few minutes. The counselor asked DaughterGeeding if she could ask her father, any question in the world, what would she like to ask me. She’s been studying family trees at school so I thought it would be something like that, or maybe something about the surgery. Nope, she asked, “If you wrote a letter to U2, how long would it take for them to respond?”
• I looked at my post surgical instructions and it states, “You may resume passive sexual activity 1 week after surgery.
• Koreas to march under single ‘united’ flag in Olympic Games
  • This reminds me of when Putin was mostly on good terms with the world leading up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi in Feb 2014 and then invaded Crimea shortly after the games concluded.
  • “The North has also agreed to send a smaller, 150-member delegation to the Paralympics in March.”
    • The way I envision it, North Korea had no idea what the Paralympics were and had it explained to them. The North Korean representatives then pretended they knew what they were all along and agreed to it. They return to update Kim Jong-un who then gives orders to injure abled bodied citizens so they will have participants.
• Butcher trapped in freezer uses sausage to bash his way out
• What a weird story out of Tarrant County College. My guess is the adjunct professor was trying to make a point similar to the way Young Republicans college campus groups will hold an Affirmative Action bake sale with prices determined based on race.
  • Tarrant College students leave class after professor’s bizarre behavior (photos and video included)
    • When TCC Adjunct Professor Daniel Mashburn walked into his Astronomy class Tuesday night, several students were alarmed by his behavior. Some thought it was a joke while others called police. Student April McLeod says her teacher got to class about 20 minutes late and turned off the lights and was wearing a ball cap, a toboggan, a scarf over his face and gloves. She says Mashburn never took any of it off even when police questioned him after responding to calls from students.
    • Students say the professor talked about the Koran and the moon and the dark night and seemed incoherent and never discussed anything astronomy-related.
    • “Mostly he was talking about different things of the Muslim faith,” McLeod said. “I was in class for about five minutes. He kept messing with his pocket and you could tell there was an object in the right-hand pocket. And whenever he went to pull out his hand, I started having this really bad feeling and jumped up and ran out of the classroom.”
• I’m enjoying this season of ‘The X-Files’. In last night’s episode, Scully mentioned she sleeps with her back to the door in case the devil were to come in. That’s contradictory to me. As a child and even as an adult, I sleep facing the door because I want to be alert to anything which may come in.
• Amazon’s new ‘$10 and Under with free shipping’ section takes on budget shopping app Wish

https://vimeo.com/115773980