Monday, January 21st, 2013: 4:31pm

My carefully laid plans just had a wrench thrown in them by – who else – a pregnant woman.

I mentioned earlier that I had carefully planned out and even test-driven the route to the closest hospital in case of any complications. I’d done plenty of research on this and determined the best option  was to drive into the neighboring town for their hospital. My reasoning was simple: sure, Kennewick General Hospital was 0.2 miles closer, however, to drive directly there would be directly through the city, encountering numerous traffic lights and other obstacles. Taking the highway to KGH would add a mile and a half to the trip and still wouldn’t eliminate the problem entirely. Kadlec, however, was almost entirely freeway with minimal lights. There was absolutely no reason to not go to Kadlec.

However, I’ve just learned that the expectant mother doesn’t particularly like Kadlec and doesn’t want to go there should the worst happen.

Now, I know she might not be in any state to complain, but on the other hand, if I’m going to be driving to a hospital at unsafe speeds in the middle of the night, still half asleep and possibly drunk, I don’t want a hysterical, blood-geysering mother screaming at me in rage for being taken to the wrong hospital. So, I’m heading out to do a test drive to the new hospital, but before I go, I thought I would take a moment to recap the Miracle of Conception for our younger readers.

XKCD, as always, perfectly sums it up.

Imagine a robot. Inside this robot there is a complete factory for building other, smaller robots that will eventually build themselves into full-size robots. Now, this robot has some of the blueprints but not all of them. Another slightly different robot has the rest of the blueprints plus an ignition switch, and is programmed to want to get rid of them at all costs.

However, sometimes the first robot doesn’t want to build new robots so the other robot has to seduce it with excessive amounts of WD-40 or flooding the engine with fuel and popping the clutch, or sometimes even buying it a new chrome chassis.

Eventually, through a complicated maneuver, the robots link up in, say, a waste management facility, and the blueprints plus ignition switch are transferred over to the first robot and the factory gets to work, carefully building a complete newbot as the robot expands to make room for it. Eventually, when the bowling-ball sized newbot is fully formed, it is expelled through a tiny hole* that I couldn’t even fit my hand inside.**

*In some cases other robots use a metal saw to cut through the robot’s torso and extract the new robot, then weld the hole shut

**Please do not ask me how I know this

And there you have it. That’s the Miracle of Conception.