I don’t remember exactly what time the phone rang, or who reached me first, but the message was from my parents, in tandem, and it was simple: “We decided, individually, to screw waiting. We’re coming out there. Deal with it.”

There are times when you don’t realize how much you appreciate having your wishes disregarded until it happens. This was one of them.

Mom and dad would not be arriving until the early evening; my plans for the day were otherwise few. Rob and Frank met me for lunch at the Falafel Drive-In, a San Jose fixture. This was, by accident rather than brilliant plan, conveniently close to O’Connor, which allowed me to swing by and pick up my imagery CD-R immediately after eating.

Once home, there was not much to do but wait, write, answer e-mail, and fiddle with the imagery. The scan results are all in a format known as DICOM, short for Digital Imagery and COmmunications in Medicine; the Mac applications I was able to find which advertised themselves as consuming that format seemed to have… issues. I decided to switch rather than fight and let the work-issued Windows XP laptop earn its keep for a change.

My parents arrived; after dinner at Ma’s we dropped in on the usual gang of idiots at BSG, and collectively wrestled with the interface of the DICOM-viewing software burned onto the CD-R. The resulting informed consensus: well, yeah, there’s something there. Dad was still on Central time, so we called it a night early. This means I’m now two episodes behind on BSG; general opinion says that I’m missing painfully little. We shall see.