I left a voicemail with the Mini of San Francisco service department yesterday around 3:30pm to make sure i heard from them regarding the status of V's sputtering Cooper S before i headed off to my evening meetings. I got a callback about ten minutes later and was told the car was ready. I was a bit taken aback that i hadn't been notified, but it turned out he'd called Veronica instead so i was pacified. On that front, anyway. He told me their diagnostics had revealed a faulty bypass valve in the engine, which they'd replaced. According to V and the work description she received upon picking up the car, they also did a recall repair involving reprogramming some of the electronics in the engine. How this relates to what i read on the internet yesterday, i have no idea. Veronica only drove the Mini briefly yesterday evening, coming home in the Jetta instead so i could have it today. We'll see tonight how the Mini deals with her commute. I'm hoping the valve and reprogramming will correct the intermittent stalls Veronica experienced, but until she gets some miles on the repaired car we can't say for sure.

My evening meetings involved disassembling the microCT scanner in the Stanford Center for Innovation in In Vivo Imaging (or SCI3 ... it's all about the acronyms) from 5-6pm, in order to take some physical measurements in preparation for installation of our custom-built collimator. Following that tinkering, i hurried back to the Cancer Center for an evening faculty meeting. In accordance with Dubya's state of the union address that night, our meeting was a state of the department. While it was interesting to review the administrative details of our collective efforts, it ended up running from 6 until 8:40pm. Luckily a dinner of reasonable quality was provided. As Veronica had my car, i returned to my office to call her and request a ride home. Little did i know, she had sent me a text message telling me she was off to see Coldplay in San Francisco with Jenz. My phone had failed to get the message until i went outside to see if perchance she was waiting for me. Unfortunately, by this time my colleagues had all left and i was forced to concoct a new strategy to get home. By this time the Stanford Marguerite shuttle had stopped running, so i started walking off towards El Camino and Caltrain. I arrived within sight of the train station just in time to see my train departing. As the next one was an hour away, i started walking up El Camino in hopes of catching a bus. Because of sketchy strangers hanging around bus stops i walked for a while, and managed to witness another possible ride (the KX Samtrans bus) passing me just before i arrived within running distance of a stop. I finally hoofed to Menlo Park and found a well-lit bus stop and bench in front of Kepler's Books. I sat around for 40 minutes getting progressively colder and listening to Anthrax on my iPod before being picked up. Tara was overjoyed when i arrived home at 11pm, her dinner being five hours overdue. I had some Chunky Monkey and watched Sunday's new Family Guy episode, featuring a few absolutely brutal scenes involving Stewie beating up Brian for not paying off his gambling debt, before falling asleep around midnight.