Bored with cable TV here in my hotel room, I’ve taken up playing Uplink. It’s a computer espionage game; you hack into computers around the world and delete files and alter records and that sort of thing.

The funny part is that this is exactly the sort of thing a person in a hotel room with high speed internet access is feared to be doing. I’m sure if my laptop were to be running when the maid came in to clean up, and she saw that it said, ‘Mission: Delete critical files on government computer,’ I’d be in the hands of the FBI before too long.

“Honest, officer.. it’s just a game!”

“Is this all just a game to you?”

Another amusing aspect to it is that when you download the game, it’s a hidden file in the distribution. You have to find it with the shell. It’s entirely possible that StuffIt did a bad job of uncompressing the game file I downloaded, but I like to think you have to be 33L33T to even play the game in the first place. W00T!1!!

So I mentioned that on the day of my grandma’s funeral, I got exhausted. The problem was that I was stuck at my grandma’s retirement home with the rest of the family, approx. 30 people. I couldn’t find any way to be alone, and ate up all the candy meant for guests, just to stay awake. The hotel was close enough that it wasn’t much of a drive, but far enough away that I couldn’t walk, especially since there were record lows and high winds.

Finally, I was about to pass out, and I convinced my mom to drive me back to the hotel. She brought me back and dropped me off, and I fell immediately asleep.

The next day, I woke up to find that shortly after my mom brought me back, everyone else went to a restaurant and ate dinner. No fewer than five of them got food poisoning! So yesterday was spent knocking gingerly on my parent’s door and asking if they were doing OK. Dad was out like a light for the most part. I’d refill mom’s glass of Sprite (the only thing she could keep down), and then go back to my room and watch more cable TV.

They had been to Ruby Tuesday’s, which is one of those places along the Chili’s/Applebee’s/Bennigan’s spectrum, where you go to get margaritas and something to eat. The sickies had all eaten the French onion soup (“Sabotage… is a French word!”). My uncle Bill mentioned that there had been something of an outbreak of Hepatitis A in eastern Tennessee not long ago at another Chili’s clone called O’Charleys, from contaminated green onions. Thanks, Bill, for freaking everyone out! Everyone’s pretty much better now, but we’re spending an extra day in Nashville doing nothing, waiting for mom to be ready to travel. Hepatitis is not on the menu.