While waiting for news, distractions.

This is so very cool.

Chef Boy's new stove/oven has a Sabbath setting.

He said, when I mentioned that it had a Sabbath setting, "Yeah, I read that in the instruction book. Seems kind of weird."

I pointed out that the laws of the Jewish Sabbath prohibit, as far as I know, lighting cooking fires or lighting lights, so having an oven that would stay on with its light on for 72 hours straight might be a pretty cool work-around.

His question was, "What if I want to make a stir-fry?" I guess you'd have to wait until sunup to start that.

This is what happens when you live in a culture where Judaism and Mormonism are practically unknown, Southern Baptists build a church on every corner, and you know more about the Hindu pantheon than you do the Torah.

Another cool thing, this one rather scary.

As of when I get the phone call later tonight, Chef Boy will be unemployed. Probably. Most probably. And about damn time, too.

If any of you nurses think nursing is an insular, codependent, strange world filled with people who would be better off with minders, you haven't worked in a kitchen yet. The people who open small restaurants are often totally ignorant of what it takes to run a business. They're the sort of folks who will spend $38,000 on a new sportscar while cutting the hours of their staff back so that they can save money. They're weird folk.

Kitchen folk are weird, too, but they're pretty straight-up for the most part. Your average chef might have an ego the size of Alaska when it comes to his cooking, but he's not going to screw you around or lie to you when he's in the kitchen. (Out of the kitchen, approach at your own risk.) These are folk who work with knives, fire, and corpses, think it's okay to take whatever drugs they've found on the floor after closing time, and find humor in somebody cutting off the end of her thumb in a slicer. But they are honest, they do tell the truth, and they understand the Darwinism of the kitchen: either you make it as a line cook and go up from there, or you wash out and go back to the nine-to-five.

So Chef Boy is leaving his peculiarly pathological kitchen and looking for something else to do. He's gotten tired of being undermined and having his hours cut.

Let's have some kharma for the Boy, shall we, that he doesn't end up someplace even worse than Il Ristorante Schwankienne? Thankee.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here at the computer, staring at the phone, wondering what in hell is taking him so long to call with the news. With every passing minute, my mental image of the proceedings worsens.

Still more coolness

Ever heard of Eaton-Lambert syndrome? I had, but I'd never seen it until yesterday. It's an autoimmune disorder, most commonly brought on by small cell lung cancer, that mimics myasthenia gravis, except in one particular: where people with MG get weaker the more they use their muscles, people with ELS get *stronger* with repetition of motion.

The treatment for both is the same: plasmapheresis.

I'll let you know how the ELS patient does after the first three pheresis treatments. I'm back at work on Tuesday. Until then, I'll bite my nails while waiting for Chef Boy to call and work on killing the dust bunny armies that have invaded my house.