Maryland, Gettysburg, and my truck.

Working at Biolife has certain benefits. Included in the benefits is three weeks paid vacation and eight personal days. I decided to take my first paid vacation this past week. I was going to take it sooner, but my mom's surgery and recovery prevented that from being a good idea. Because it would have been too expensive to fly, I elected to drive down to Maryland which is also costly, but in this case still cheaper to flying when you add in gas to get to Detroit, parking for a week, the plane tickets and then the drive back to Grand Rapids. More on the truck later. My mom is doing better, though I've found out that she's going to have to have yet more surgery due to the kind of medication she's going to need to be on to help reduce the chance of the cancer coming back, which is something she's really not looking foreward to having. In the past she's always come back from surgery must faster than the normal person, and this time its taking longer for her, which is frustrating. Other members of my family are doing well, though my younger brother and sister can't seem to understand that mom isn't able to take as much right now.

As I've recently become interested in studying the Civil War, yesterday my father and I went out to Gettysburg and toured the Battlefield, or atleast, the Museum located at the battlefield. The battlefield was closed due to a bad snow storm. A couple days previously the weather had been in the 80's. The museum was nice, and they have an electronic map which shows with lights the progress of the battle at Gettysburg, its interesting how close the CSA came to winning that battle.
After the Museum visit, we walked around downtown a looked in some of the shops, I bought a CSA bowie knife, which features R.E. Lee astride his horse on the handle, and on the blade lists the states of the Confederacy.

I found out that my truck shouldn't have been able to make a 9hr drive to Maryland. Part of the engine is self destructing by rubbing against something else, the water pump was barely hanging on, the muffler wasn't muffling . . . I was unaware of all of this. The only thing I knew was that the truck didn't sound right, the cure for which was turning the radio up and placing tape over the warning lights. Before you go into a panic, no I didn't really place tape over the warning lights, although I did turn the radio up (Engines are much louder without the muffler).

So now my truck is being fixed before I can drive it back to Michigan, luckily that shouldn't take too long.