Covid Strikes Back

Greetings loved ones! We hope everone is surviving the apocalypse safe and sane. There has been a lot of changes this year and not all of them suck! 

CookieChick and Squirrel Girl have been hard at work again to bring you your holiday cookie feast. Oatmeal shortbread have been put on semi-retirement for now and Chocolate Mint Crack has taken their place. Snowballs and peanut butter kisses have gone back into the vault and kg*m/sec2 and chewy gingerbread have come out. Eris' choice for a new cookie is chocolate ravioli. I made a new cookie, almond cardamom cookies and I didn't like them, so I made a last minute substitution for Mexican Wedding Cakes. The gluten-free selections are chocolate amaretti and almond crispies. 

Now, on to the family news...

CookieChick has a new job. She is now assistant professor of medicine/pediatrics in the Primary Care department at Loyola University Medical Center. She is seeing patients at a clinic and will also be teaching medical students and residents. Her first on call was over Christmas weekend and it was quite busy because Covid is once again exploding all over the place. 

Next, Eris has been doing quite well in her senior year. She has a class where she is doing original research (Oak Park HS rocks). Her project involves a  meta-analysis of studies of rare diseases and how histamine can help with treatments.  

She is also applying to colleges. She has been accepted so far at Michigan State, Wayne State, University of Detroit Mercy, and University of New Mexico (see photo). We are still waiting on UW-Madison, Rochester Insitute of Technology, U of I, and a few others. 

We have two new family members to introduce. After we lost Rizza last year, Nigel became very lonely. So we got Boris (Badenov) as a companion. Unfortunately, Boris was way too energetic for Nigel, so we then got Goose (the flerkin) and they run around like crazy together. We now have too many cats.

Randal continues to work from home exclusively for Rippleshot, which now has 1300 banks and credit unions.

This Labor Day, he also accidentally co-founded another startup called OrphanCures which pairs rare diseases with either repurposed drugs or drugs that have been shelved without further development.

In fact, that drug turns out to work well for Eris and Randal as well. We now think they have something in the vicinity of narcolepsy, which is the primary indication for pitolisant (PWS came later). We are working on getting official diagnoses and a steady supply of drug (which costs $70K per year per person).

Oh, and after much research, I bought a new all-electric car. It's a Kia Niro EV. I call him Robert the Niro. 

Randal still says it's red. He's not very good at cars.