The next few posts will be temporarily password protected for security reasons.

Let me know if you’d like the password.  They’ll become public in the relatively near future–probably in a month or so.

I’ll also try to get back to the Millionaire recap relatively soon, too.

EDIT 01/24/2012: I’ve taken the passwords off.  All posts I wrote in Pakistan are now publicly viewable.

As hard as it is to believe, I’ve had some kind of presence on the web for over a decade now. And, for more than a decade now, that web presence has yo-yoed between being active and neglected. I think that’s how most Internet-folks work.

Obviously, for the past couple of years, this site has been in the “neglect” phase.

Why?

• You know how, on your birthday, someone always asks “do you feel any older?”
  A couple of birthdays ago, I actually did. Not too long after that, my now-fiancé asked me, “do you think you’ve out-grown anything that you used to like?” I said, “blogging.”
  Truth be told, there is an awful lot on this site that I now feel self-conscious about. I’ve taken down a couple of posts where I really feel like I over-shared, and I’ve even been tempted to take the whole site down. (It’s the confessional posts like this one that I am the most uncomfortable with. Ironic, huh?)
  
  I think a lot of people grow quieter and more private as they get older, so it makes sense that I’m far less interested in “blogging” than I was back in undergrad. So, the website has sat.
• Facebook
  Besides, in terms of the things that I have wanted to share, Facebook has actually been a much better place to do so than this website ever was. And I’m less shy about admitting to being a facebook user than I am to admitting that I have a personal blog. It seems less egotistical, even if it’s probably more so.
• Nana
  Almost exactly 5 years ago, I quit my job in DC so that I could take care of my grandmother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I cared for her 24/7 for a year, and then 24/5 for almost another year. I blogged about it quite a bit. Remember?
  
  My grandmom died on October 1, 2008. Partially because I wanted to provide an account for other Alzheimer’s caregivers, and partially because I wanted to have a record of her last few days, I made up my mind that I would write a long blog post chronicling how things all came to an end.
  
  But a LOT happened during her last few weeks in this world. And, although I’m still thankful that I had the opportunity to share Nana’s last two years with her, I’m really not sure how to wrap that up into a nice little take-away article.
  
  On top of that, I tried to devote the months immediately after her death to myself and enjoying my freedom. It worked out better in theory than in practice, but I still had some nice times.
  
  So, I never got around to writing that post. (I still have at least 3 drafts saved, but it just never happened. As odd as it sounds, I even tried again when my guinea pig, Forrest, died, but it still never happened. I guess this will have to do.) I told myself that it wouldn’t be right to post again until I wrote that long post. And I never did. Thus, the blog withered!
• Busy!
  2011 has been the busiest, and probably the best (although 8th grade was pretty awesome) year of my life. Just this year, I’ve gotten engaged (!), been on Who Wants to be a Millionaire (!), gotten a promotion (!), seen the Dalai Lama speak (!), danced with Matt(!), traveled in three countries and booked a flight to a fourth, seen my mom go through cancer treatments, and really gotten into How I Met Your Mother. And the years between my last blog post and 2011 had a lot going on, too. There was a lot to write about, but less time than there could have been.
• I’ve been lazy.
  No surprise there.

Despite all of this, I’ve been wanting to bring this site back more and more over the past few months.

I’m a TV news producer. Whether that makes me a “journalist” is debatable, but, at the very least, my job is journalistic. And so is my personality. I like finding little-known stories, and I like sharing them.

There really is something about everything on the Internet, but sometimes there really isn’t all that much. I’m always doing semi-weird things on weekends, and I always want to read more about them. But I come up blank way too often when I’m researching some of the obscure things that I’m interested in doing. I can’t be the only one googling things like “baseball in Costa Rica,” “Tijuana soccer,” “Kish Island passport stamp,” or “abandoned US-Canada border posts,” can I?

So, I’m hoping to bring this blog somewhat back to life, but less as a web journal and more as a place place where I occasionally write about things I’m doing/interested in that don’t have much information already on the internet. A lot of it will be about sports, but not all of it. And I’d imagine more of my traffic will come from Google than from frequent readers, but it would be awesome if you’d come here frequently anyway.

I’m planning on writing a fair amount about my experience on Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Leave a comment if you’re still out there!

So, I use this site called WordPress.com to write garybutterworth.com.

For reasons I cannot explain, WordPress has made me their “Featured Blog” for the “Life” category, which is one of their most popular. 

Cool, huh?!

So, for the past few days, I have been getting dozens (yes, dozens!) of new visitors to my site thanks to WordPress’ generous promotion.

The thing is, even a modest amout of hype makes me feel like I should have something to say.  But I don’t!

Well, I shouldn’t say that.  I’ve had this website for over four years now, and I have had a few posts that might qualify as “interesting.”  And I think I’m a semi-interesting guy.  But I feel like I should have something insightful to put right up at the top of the page to wow the random folks who might be stumbling upon me.

Alas, I got nothin’!

For my new visitors: feel free to browse around and see what you can find.  Check out the About section if you want to learn more about me.  I’m a 24-year-old former TV news producer, but I currently care full-time for my grandmother, whose health is fading.  Sometimes I write about that.  Sometimes I write about travel, or sports stadium, or the news, or the news that I hear about when I’m travelling to sports stadiums to take a break from my grandmom!

For my long-time readers: Thanks for not getting bored of me!

For me: I’ll put my thinking cap on so that my next post won’t be made just for the sake of posting.

Maybe I’ll try to develope one of the post ideas I have saved in my “Drafts” folder.  Does “The fall of the top-down Westphalian nation-state, and the rise of the organic nation through the militant plebiscite” sound interesting to anybody?

Anybody?

I didn’t think so.

I’ll quit my rambling and go to bed.

“Worst. Post. Ever.”

***

EDIT:  5 minutes after posting that and I am no longer a “Featured Blog.”  HAHA!  How’s that for irony?!

EDIT #2: I am again the “Featured Blog.” 

Fun fact: usually, when I don’t update my website for a few days, it’s for of one of the following reasons:

• I’m busy.
• I’m lazy.
• I have nothing worthwhile to say.

Actually, scratch that last one.  My readers know that I frequently post even when I have nothing worthwhile to say! 

But every once in a while, I will intentionally hold off on posting something new to give my previous post a little more time at the top of the page. 

I’m very happy with my last post (the one about trains and buses), so I wanted it to get as much attention as possible. 
But I think it’s had enough time at the top of page.

And I haven’t talked about my life with my grandmom in a while, so I thought I’d write a post about….

What we eat!

About 5-10% of the time, my grandmom will eat non-stop.  All day long.  She’ll eat meal after meal after meal. 
Another 5-10% of the time, my grandmom eats like most people should–2-3 meals per day, with a few small snacks scattered throughout.

But the vast majority of the time, my grandmom eats next to nothing. 

Mostly, I think this is just because she has a small appetite.  Since she doesn’t do too much, her body doesn’t need a lot of food energy.  But there are a few other reasons, too.

Despite my grandmom’s fondness for telling people that she’s not a fussy eater, she may actually be the world’s single fussiest eater.  Among the foods she doesn’t like:

• Vegetables
• Fruits (except watermellon and soft berries that are rolled in sugar)
• Most nuts
• Spicy foods (salami is sometimes dubbed “too spicy”)
• “Ethnic foods” (aside from Italian and Chinese, which aren’t considered “exotic,” but that’s a post for another day.)
• Foods she has never tried before
• Chewy foods
• Crunchy foods
• Anything containing alcohol
• Foods that are difficult to cut.
• Any foods that aren’t served at near-boiling temperatures (or, in the case of drinks, that aren’t partially iced over)

Some of those foods she genuinely doesn’t like.  Others, she doesn’t eat because she has a hard time chewing them.
(My grandmom desperately needs new dentures, along with a hearing aid, but she stubbornly refuses both outright.  I think she thinks she’s being less burdensome by refusing them, but the opposite is the case.)

If my grandmom doesn’t like something, she just won’t eat it.  She’ll either refuse it outright, or spit out bite after bite.

While I’m far from perfect, I generally try to eat healthy.  In fact, that has probably been the biggest benefit of me moving here–I eat healthier.  Not great, but better.  After a long day at work, stopping off at McDonald’s used to be so easy.  And inexpensive.  And it tasted good.  But now, with nothing but time on my hands, I feel guilty if I don’t at least attempt to eat healthy.

For my grandmom, I prefer that she eats healthy.  But it’s more important just to get her to eat.

So, what’s on the menu for an average day here at Chez Nana?

Breakfast

My grandmom is almost never up for breakfast, so that’s easy. 
She went through a phase a while back when she just HAD to have several little chocolate donuts for breakfast every day.  I’m glad that phase has ended, because now I don’t have to keep something so unhealthy on hand to tempt me.

For my breakfast, I generally have oatmeal or oat bran porridge, sweetened with honey, cinnamon, and raisins.  I’ve discovered that “instant oatmeal” is pretty much a scam–regular oatmeal is almost as “instant” and is better for you. 

When I get bored of oats, I sometimes change things up with yogurt or fruit.  Every once in a while, I’ll have a piece of toast or some cold cereal.  Kashi makes some delicious and healthy breakfast cereals.  I also like Grape Nuts and Raisin Bran.

Breakfast-time is also when I take my daily multivitamin.  One-A-Day Men’s.  I really don’t know what affect it has on my health, if any.  But if there’s even a small chance that it might improve my long-term health, I’m willing to try it.  I encourage you all to take your vitamins, too!

I usually have a couple of small squares of dark chocolate with my breakfast.  They say the antioxidants are great for your heart!

Lunch

On the local news last week, they reported that fruits, vegetables, and breads cause cancer, according to some new study.  They also added that exercise is a leading cause of obesity.  I kid you not.
(The same station also had a recent website feature about places to avoid when travelling, including The Louvre, Stonehenge, and the Taj Mahal.)

Now, I’m not some super-fundamentalist who eschews science.  I put a fair amount of faith in science.  But I just don’t buy studies like that.  At least, I hope they’re not correct.  Because, just as my breakfast contains a lot of fruit, my lunch contains a fair amount of bread and vegetables.

The most common lunch here is a grilled turkey ham and cheese sandwich on whole wheat bread.    Sometimes I’ll make tuna sandwiches instead.  My grandmom will usually eat half of a sandwich.  I’ll eat a whole one.

Oftentimes, I’ll make myself a small side salad to go along with it.  Sometimes, instead of a sandwich, I’ll have a can of kippered herring.

Sometimes, I’ll just microwave a bowl of frozen vegetables.  With a little black pepper and some extra virgin olive oil, it makes for a surprisingly satisfying, and healthy, lunch or snack.

About once a week or so, I walk up to the pizza place up the street and treat myself to two slices.

Dinner

Spaghetti.

It’s easy to chew and it’s familiar, so we have spaghetti about twice a week, on average.  It’s one of the only foods my grandmom will readily eat.

I buy whole wheat pasta and low-sodium Healthy Choice tomato sauce.  The sauce I buy is one of the few ready-made sauces that’s not terrible for you (SO many pre-packaged foods are ridiculously high in salt, which is terrible for your heart).  But it’s BLAND.  So, what do I do?  I spice it up with seasonings: black pepper, oregano, dried onions, and garlic!  It’s surprisingly tasty!

(A couple days a week, usually spaghetti days, I try to keep vegetarian.  I like meat, but I think American culture and cuisine puts too much emphasis on the meat.)

Once or twice a week, my mom comes over and cooks for us. 

I have a George Foreman grill.  I like seasoning chicken breasts and salmon and then grilling them on there.  Unfortunately, my grandmom almost never eats any sides I make with it, but it’s still a good, healthy meal. 

I used to make a lot of sausages, but I’ve cut down on them.

On my lazy nights (which have been far too frequent for the past month or so), I’ll just microwave something.  But before you stick up your nose, please hear me out.

Not all microwave meals are created equal.
When I was in college, I’d buy the cheapest ones and actually enjoy them.  But, since then, I think my tastes have matured.  Lots of times, the ultra-cheap, ultra-salty microwave meals just gross me out.  I think I have gotten better at appreciating higher-quality ingredients.

And, believe it or not, you CAN find high quality microwave dinners!

Stoeffer’s make some absolutely delicious microwave dinners.  They aren’t cheap, and they don’t taste cheap.  I honestly think that some of their casseroles could pass as restaurant items.  They aren’t super-healthy, but neither are most restaurant foods.

Lean Cuisine is another of our favorites.  Believe it or not, Lean Cuisine was just featured on Oprah for being healthy, tasty, and convenient!  Apparently they do a lot of work behind-the-scenes to forumlate their products with chefs and dieticians.  I don’t think Oprah personally endorses many products, especially non-commercially.  So, I don’t feel too bad when we have Lean Cuisine dinners.

There are a few lower-end microwave meals we still have occasionally (chicken pot pies and microwave pizzas, namely), but I’m getting better.  I’ve almost entirely cut out canned foods, which is a huge improvement. 

Snacks

Snacks are one area where my grandmom and I have similar tastes.  The snacks I generally keep on hand are:

• pretzels
• peanuts
• cashews
• baby carrots (for me and Forrest the guinea pig–Nan doesn’t like veggies).
• ice cream (more often than not, my grandmom probably gets more than half of her daily calories from plain vanilla or chocolate ice cream.  Ice cream is the only food that she will eat actually eat a full portion of more than 75% of the time.  She likes it, and “it slides right down.”  As long as you don’t buy chocolate chips.  She spits them out.  She spits A LOT out.)
• cookies (very occasionally)
• popcorn (but we don’t eat this very often)
• fruit (fresh, canned, AND dried!  I like variety, so I keep all three on hand.)

Drinks 

Whenever I go to the store, my grandmom always, without fail, tells me that she needs orange juice, ice cream, and toilet paper.  Nothing else.  I really think this is all my grandmom thinks she requires for survival. 

She drinks a lot of orange juice.  I try to get her to drink cranberry juice, too, since that is good for the urinary tract, especially in the elderly.  I only buy 100% juice.  Never that Ocean Spray crap. 

My grandmom and I both drink a lot of water.

I keep a variety of teas on hand (black, green, white, herbals, and oolong).  I drink about 2 cups a day.  Again, they say it’s healthy.
(For a while, I was drinking 6-8 cups a day, but that was just too much.  It gave me jitters and stained my teeth.)

I usually have either a beer or a half-glass of red wine at night.
I have become a tiny bit of a beer snob.  Not so with wine.  I’m not particularly fond of wine, especially reds, so I don’t need to go top-of-the-line.  I think more mediocre reds should have the same antioxidants as the ritzy wines, anyway. 
I buy four-packs of those little single-serving wine bottles, because I wouldn’t want to polish off a full bottle on my own.

Eating out

About every other Saturday or so, we take my grandmom to a local driv- in called Weber’s, where we get pork roll sandwiches.  It’s a New Jersey thing. 
It’s her favorite place to eat, probably because she doesn’t have to get out of the car.

We all also like the Olive Garden, but my grandmom doesn’t get around so well, so we rarely go there anymore.

Occasionally, I’ll borrow my mom’s car and go to Taco Bell.  I like the 7-layer burrito and the bean burrito.  I’ve really grown to like Mexican vegitarian food.  It’s high sodium, but it’s a treat.

You almost never get healthy food when you eat out anywhere.  But you’ve got to live a little. 

Aside from Weber’s and Taco Bell, I hardly ever eat out anymore.  It’s hard to believe I was eating out a dozen or so times a week just a year ago!

***

So, that’s our average menu.

Vitamins, dark chocolate, red wine, green tea, whole wheat, antioxidants,….
I really am following most of the health food fads, aren’t I?!

All I can say is, if you spent as much time with my grandmom as I do, you’d also want to do just about anything to keep your own health from ending up that way.  But you wouldn’t want to sacrifice too much, either.  After all, food is one of the few pleasures I can get on a regular basis.

As you can tell, I’m experimenting with a new “WorkPress Theme” (aka “layout”) for this site. 

I’ve always prefered 3-column layouts, so I’m hoping to stick with this.  Unfortunately, I’m having some trouble getting it to align like it should in MSIE.  I’m hoping I can fix it, hopefully without shelling out $15 to mess around with the CSS.  Assuming I can, I will probably stick with this look.  If not, it’s back to the design that I’ve been using since I moved to WordPress about 5 months ago.  That was ok, but I thought it was just a little too plain.

(Also, I’m going to use this as a chance to get myself back into the habit of putting a dateline city in my posts and to update my Links page.)

Let me know what you think!

EDIT: As of 8:45pm, everything seems to be working correctly (even though I don’t think I’ve really done anything).  Anyway, let me know how the new layout looks on your system and what you think of it. 

I just thought it would be fun to get you caught up on a couple of the biggest local news stories of the day from a couple of cities I know pretty well.

Washington, DC 

In my former city of Washington, DC, the big story was that today was the first day in Pearson v. Chung trial.  Judge Pearson (yes, he’s a judge!) is suing a local dry cleaner for $54 million.  They may or may not have lost his favorite pair of pants. 
How did he arrive at that number?  Well, they have a sign that says “satisfaction guaranteed,” and Judge Pearson won’t be satisfied unless he gets $1500 EACH DAY his pants are missing (even though they don’t seem to be missing at all).  Furthermore, he now has to rent a car to drive to a new dry cleaner.  So, that factors in.  Not to mention the “emotional distress.”
You can follow the events of Day 2 live at the Washington Post. 

Only in America!

Philadelphia, PA

Here in the Philadelphia TV market, we weren’t about to be upstaged by our neighbors to the south.  No sir-ee.
Topping the local news here (at least on NBC10) is Lu Ann Cahn’s underwear. 

Lu Ann Cahn is a local TV personality.  She went on vacation.  While she was away, her house-sitter had a party, and invited a guest who happened to be a comedian.  The comedian thought it would be funny to go through Cahn’s underwear drawer and talk about it on the radio. 

So what does Lu Ann do? 
Rummage’s through this guy’s bedroom, of course! 

AND, of course, talk about it.  A LOT.  Lu Ann Cahn has been teasing this all day.  She had about 10 minutes on both the evening and late local news.  Glory!

Oh, local news…..

*I have gone through periods when I have included a dateline city heading, and periods when I haven’t.  In case you’re wondering, there is really no reason why.  I always mean to include them, but I frequently forget.  I’m trying to get back into the habit of including them. 

E-mail Address:  Just to let you know, the old @usa.net email address that I have been using for about 8 years now will cease to work in early July.  I don’t want to post my new address here (I don’t want to encourage the spammers),  but if you know me, just ask and I’ll be happy to give you my new address!  Also, it’s listed on my facebook account, and you can always contact me via the “Contact” page here on this website. 
If those options still aren’t working, leave a comment on this post and I will make sure to get it to you. 
(HINT: it’s gmail).

Website:  Although my website has always been primarily a blog, the past few days I have been doing a tiny bit of work on the other pages on my site.  There is still a lot to be done, but take a look around!  Click on some of those links at the top, like “About” and “Media Production.”
Hopefully I’ll do some more work there sooner rather than later.  Especially the Stadium section.

Nana:  My grandmom has now been home from rehab for over a week. 
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, this has probably been one of the most trying weeks of my life.  And yes, I do realize how lucky I am if this is about the worst I’ve seen.  But this is about the worst I’ve seen.
My grandmom just seems dazed, shell-shocked, and defeated.  Not to mention depressed and confused.  Today was a little better, but even now, she is barely eating and she doesn’t even sound like herself.  She gets so emotional so easy; I don’t know what to do.
She calls me into her room dozens of times while she is still in bed to make sure she’s “doing everything right.”  But there’s nothing to do; she’s just laying in bed.
She isn’t capable to doing all that much, but she is still capable of doing a hell of a lot more than she thinks she is.  She just seems to have no confidence in herself.  
As she seems dazed, I really don’t feel comfortable now leaving her alone anymore (I used to leave her for an hour a night so I could go running, and that was fine.  Now, I miss running.).
Hopefully she snaps out of this.  Thinking back to when I first moved in, I think she was similiar to this.  So hopefully she is just temporarily disoriented by all of the action she has seen this month.  Hopefully.  My biggest worry at the moment is that she’ll carry on like this for years.  Ugh.
But like I said, she seemed better this afternoon, so maybe she has turned the corner.

Just for fun: http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/05/womanbabysegway.jpg

Yep, you’re right; things do look a little different around here.  That’s because I’ve moved from Xanga to WordPress!
Xanga served me well, but it was never what I really wanted.  I’d been wanting to make a change for a while, and I thought this was the right time.

Some people feel like they get a fresh start in January.  Maybe it’s my inner Aryan, but I feel like April is a fresher start.

• The weather is nice.
• Hockey starting fresh with the playoffs.
• Uncle Sam and I get square, money-wise.
• My website celebrates its anniversary!

Yep, in case you weren’t keeping track (or in case you were keeping track and noticed that garybutterworth.com has celebrated its anniversary on differen dates, and you wondered which one was the “official” one), today is the 4th anniversary of my blog!

So, what better way to kick off my fifth year than with a whole new site. 
And not just any old site, but a site where all four years of posts are finally together in one place, and where, finally, anyone can comment.

As you can tell, I’m still getting moved in.  Most of the sub-pages at the top of this page have nothing under them expect for “coming soon,” and, while I have manually (and tediously) moved 300+ posts and comments over here, some things are missing.  Old posts need tags, posts need titles, etc.

I’ll be California Dreamin’ away April 12-18, so those things won’t get fixed immediately, but sooner or later, they will.

Even if things are still a little rough around the edges, I can tell already that I will be happy here.  This whole site just feels neater, more functional, and more professional, and I think that alone will coax me to update a little more often, and put a little more effort into my posts.  I know I already have several things I’d like to talk about.

Not tonight, though.

After doing web and tax stuff for a good portion of the day, my eyes hurt, I’m tired, and I still need to get packed for my trip.

I’ll be posting regularly VERY soon! 

For now, though, feel free to peruse the four years worth of archives. 

Thanks for stopping by, welcome to my new website, and happy 4th anniversary!

I have been keeping a personal website/blog for almost 4 years now.  It started out on a website I designed myself, which I kept on my student webspace at Syracuse.  Then, I reluctantly moved to Xanga.  I didn’t really love Xanga, but it was convenient, and I have to admit, it really was more functional than the site I made on my own at SU. 
(I actually had a website even before Syracuse, but it was utterly craptacular, and it has long since been lost, so it barely warrants mentioning).

Now, I think it’s time to finally do something I’ve wanted for a while: move to a solid Content Management site.  So, WordPress it is!   
(Those WordPress smilies look a little demonic, don’t they?!)

Finally, after 4 years, I’ll finally have a website that functions the way I have always wanted it to, where anyone can comment, and with all of my posts in one place!

I pretty much plan to stay here for good. 
(Unless I move to administering my own WordPress.org install on my own server, which I hope to do at some point.  But even if I do that, you shouldn’t see TOO much of a change.)

Unfortunately, to really get going here, I’ve had to import all of my old blog posts manually (no RSS or XML files were generated), which requires a good amount of boring, tedious work–LOTS of copying and pasting!

At this point, I think I’ve gotten all of them moved over, but I may have accidentally missed a couple.  There are also probably a few mistakes–If you’re a long-time viewer and you spot a post on an incorrect posting date, something formatted incorrectly, or something like that, please do let me know!.  I’ll be correcting errors over the next few days, and probably longer.  But I plan on keeping my entries themselves almost exactly as they were written.

In the mean time, feel free to browse what is here, and check back often.  This will be the new home to garybutterworth.com very soon!

After I finish moving my content, then I’ll play around with my layout.  I’m hoping to have the whole thing up and running the way I want by the end of the week but, failing that, it will definitely be up and running by mid-April.

Thanks for dropping by, and keep checking back!

Best,
–Gary

I know I’ve been slow with posting for the past week or so.  Mostly, this is due to it being tax time, and because I’ve been busy preparing for my trip.

But this is one other reason, too.

Please be sure to check back here here at garybutterworth.com on Wednesday, April 11!