Click here for the Geography Bee mini-test.

Every year, to coincide with the National Geography Bee, National Geographic’s website posts a mini Geography test.  Every year, I miss a couple that I shouldn’t.  And every year, I try to post the link here.

Give it a try! It only takes about two minutes.

I got 7 out of 10 this year.  I’m annoyed at myself for two of the ones that I missed; I should have gotten them.  The third, I had no clue on.

Overall, I think this is the best one that they’ve posted.  I usually have a few gripes over their questions, but I thought this year’s were good.

I can’t believe it’s only midnight.  It feels so much later.  I guess that’s because I got up at 5:30 this morning to clear a clogged toilet and make my weekly 4-hour commute.  

Since I feel like I have all this extra time at my disposal (I usually go to sleep sometime in the wee hours), I think this is a good time to make Dan Dean (my only remaining loyal reader) and myself happy and write a boring, general update that will let you know where I’ve been the past few months and, hopefully, get me back on track with normal updating.  After all, my website will turn 5 tomorrow; it should be active for it’s big day!

So, where have I been?

Grandmom’s hospital stays

Like most things in my life recently, my absence from blogging is at least partly related to my grandmother.

Shortly before Christmas, my grandmom was hospitalized with a heart arrhythmia.  She stayed in the hospital for about a week; then, she went to an in-patient rehabilitation home for another week. 

(She hadn’t really been injured, but my grandmother is frail from age, and a week in the hospital de-conditions her body and weakens her.  So, standard practice is to send her to rehab to do exercises for a week before coming home.  She has been several times now, and it really helps.)

My grandmom came home right after New Years, but her new medications just weren’t doing the job.  Less than three weeks later, she was back in the hospital after an extremely severe episode of ventricular fibrillation.

That’s about as bad as heart problems can get, but my grandmom’s a fighter.  She bounced back, and after a week or so in the hospital, it was back to rehab for what was supposed to be another short stay before going home.

Well, it was not to be.  While at rehab, my grandmom fell and hurt her knee.  It took about two months before she had regained enough strength to come home.  

While she was away, my life returned to “almost-normal” after about 14 months of making her my main priority.

While she was away

I spent plenty of time visiting my grandmom at the hospital.  But, after she was “out of the woods,” I decided that she was well cared for in rehab, and I should use the time for myself.

My grandmom was housed in a wonderful short-term rehabilitation facility.  Brand new, clean, state-of-the-art facilities, friendly people, good food, etc.  I am positive that she was well cared for.  Honestly, I was a little jealous of her temporary home.  But she just complained about it; she just wanted to go to back to her house.  Set in her ways, I guess.

I felt a little bit bad about going out and having fun while she was so unhappy with her situation, but I decided that there was nothing wrong with having some Gary time.  She was well cared for, and it’s hardly like I was ignoring her.  My mom was visiting at least six times per week, and I was visiting three or four.

On the other days, I tried to live as much like a normal person as I could.  Living in the suburbs with freedom but without a car was a little bit of a challenge, but my mom helped me out by letting me borrow hers pretty often.

I got to work a lot of extra hours at work.  I got accomplished a lot, and it felt great.  

I decided I wanted to take a vacation.  I found an amazing deal on airfare to Costa Rica: $270 round-trip from DC, including taxes and fees!  I figured out my itinerary (four soccer games!  a volcano!  Food!), selected a youth hostel, and packed my bag before bed, planning on booking my ticket first thing the next morning and jetting off 3 days later.

Alas, I woke up at 4 am in a cold sweat…the sickest I had been in years.  I think I might have had the flu, and it took over a week to recover fully.  I tried to rebook the same trip a couple more times while my grandmom was away, but airfares went up (although they were admittedly still affordable), soccer teams went on the road, and flights left from inconvenient airports at inconvenient times.  I decided against it, and I’m not sure if I regret that or not.

I felt a little sorry for myself for not getting to take my big trip, but I really can’t get too down on myself.  I had a lot of fun.  Work, as I mentioned, went great; I love my job!  I also got to go to three hockey games (DC, Richmond, and Princeton–expect a post and arena review of Richmond’s SPHL team), a soccer game (DC United), a basketball game (Syracuse at Villanova!), a movie (“I am Legend”), and a concert (Finch).  I got to spend a lot of time with Tiffany, and we went out to eat a few times.  :-)

So, while there wasn’t really anything spectacular, I had a lot of nice times while my grandmom was healing.  I wanted to focus on getting out of the house and living a semi-normal life.  I suppose my activities gave me more to write about, but I didn’t want to waste my prescious free time blogging away in front of a computer.

Now that she’s back

Things are a little tougher than they were before, but not significantly.

After having three months of pseudo-normalcy in my life, I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve struggled a little bit the past few weeks, but it really hasn’t been that bad.

She came back home on March 22, and she’s glad to be back.  At least she was when she first came home.  Now that she has been home for a few weeks, she has absolutely no recollection of her three months away.

She is mostly the same as she was before, but not quite as sharp.  Her mind and body have both deteriorated slightly more, but not significantly. 

Me?  I’m missing my freedom a little bit, but I seem to have returned to my normal routine.  I’m doing fine.  I stay up late, sleep late, and head to DC for work on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  Work is going great, and I’m loving it.  The rest of the time, I spend at home.  I spend lots of it on the computer.  Which means that now I really have no excuse for letting this site atrophy!

***

Link du jour: The Washington Redskins’ cheerleaders are heading to South Asia to represent my favorite (cricket) team in the new Indian Premier League: the Bangalore Royal Challengers!

Alas, a quick google search revealed that someone had thought of it before me. 

Nevertheless, I present you with Schrödinger’s lolcat:

(Had I thought of it first, I think I could have done a better job with the picture.)

I’ll have more posts coming up soon (later today and/or this week), such as a general update on my grandmom after 9 months and a trip report of my visit to FENWAY PAHK!

But for now, I just wanted to post a link that my mom just sent me. 
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/conditions/08/13/caregiver.syndrome/index.html

Not just local news, but WORLD NEWS.

Not even ten miles from me, a local pooch has struck the big-time.

That’s right, folks; we have done it!

South Jersey has produced the WORLD’S ugliest dog!

I haven’t posted that much in the past week.  Part of it might be laziness, but I really don’t have all that much to say anyway.

Well, let me re-phrase that.  I haven’t come up with many ideas to write about. 
Maryland Macaca, however, has. 
I mean, she has come up with ideas for to write about herself, but they have inspired me to write about the same thing! 

She has written several posts this week, and two of them were right up my alley. 
I ended up bascially hijacking her “comments” sections twice this week to essentially write full essays about my own views of her topics.

I thought I’d link them here, partly because her blog is worth reading in its own right, and partly because, this week, I’ve written more of my opinions on her site than I’ve written on my own!

On Wednesday, she talked about John Edwards. 
Now, I don’t have particularly strong feelings on Edwards one way or the other.  But the post touched on a number of broader issues (eg., education, economics, entitlements, globalization) that I think transcend politics and affect the basic lives of people in the US and around the world.
So, I left a LONG comment!

I think that we, the US people (and I’m not excluding myself here; I’m plenty guilty of it myself), have forgotten that the nature of capitalism is competition.
I think too many of us have come to expect an easy, comfortable, well-paying job with low barriers to entry as a right. MAYBE that was the case for our grandparents, but, in today’s world of 6 Billion, all of whom can communicate and thus compete against each other, it is certainly no longer the case. We need to accept that.

You can read her full post and the comments (including my full comment/outlook) here.

Then, last night, she wrote a post about soccer, violence, US sports fans, and their European counterparts.

Of course, this was also right up my alley, so I wrote a LONG explanation:

So, if i wanted to be brief (for once!), I guess I’d just say that soccer may be more likely to result in violence than other sports. The lack of soccer’s popularity here, combined with the lack of a group mentality among American spectators, and our vast geography, accounts for fewer incidents of hooliganism.
Is that a valid thesis?

If you’d like to see what else I have to say about that (and I have a lot to say!), check out MD.M’s post, here. 

In my last post, I talked about how our local NBC affiliate wasted FAR too much time on a story about how one of its own reporters sought revenge on a guy who fondled her panties.

Well, our ABC affiliate wasn’t about to be out-done!  The next day, Philadelphia’s 11pm newscast on 6ABC led with a story about A FLOOD IN THEIR OFFICE’S BASEMENT! 
It was glorious.  Five minutes of the 22-minute newscast were devoted to this truly  Genesisian event.  For me, the highlight was when they went to a reporter on-scene, “live in the basement.” 
The only way it could have been better would have been if Channel 6 would have interviewed their former children’s show host, Captain Noah.

(The coverage brought back memories of the day a decade or so ago when Channel 6 had to report the crash their own helicopter, Chopper 6.)

lol, man, local news cracks me up!

Just thought I’d pass it along. 

I’m hardly a health-nut, but when I have the ability, I really do try to eat my best.

When I was at Syracuse, I tried to eat at least two salads a day.  And, aside from stressfull periods of a month or so here and there, I’ve always done pretty well about getting a decent amount of sleep. 

But I have to tell you, the real world takes its toll. 
When I was living in DC, it wasn’t as if I was unable to eat well, but I rarely had the energy to cook a decent meal after a long day of working odd hours, let alone go to the supermarket regularly to stock up on healthy perishables.

Nowadays, I try to actually cook at least one meal a day. 
I also try to do other things that are supposedly healthy.  Every day, I try to have a cup of dark tea, a cup of green tea, a piece of dark chocolate, and one alcoholic drink.  I guess that’s all trendy stuff, but I’ve been doing more time-tested stuff, too, like eating my veggies.  And I’ve tried to cut down on the amount of meat in my diet.

Sometimes, I lift furniture for strength exercise.
I get a walk for about 20 minutes every day.  I like to walk, and that’s far less than I’d like, and far less than I did in DC.  But, instead of getting a snack from the vending machine at work, I’ll snack on some unsalted peanuts or baby carrots.  Between that and the fact that I have neither the ability nor the excuse to eat at McDonald’s, I’d say I’m doing pretty well.  I thought I’d get fat here, but somehow, I’ve actually lost about two pounds.  My grandmom’s scale puts me at 173 right now, which puts me at a pretty ideal weight for my height.
(Of course, there’s probably a little too much fat and a little too little muscle, but I’m doing what I can.)

So, physically, I’m doing pretty well.  Better than expected.
Mentally…well…it’s easy and it’s hard.  I’m hanging in there, and it’s going better than I thought.

Link du jour:  Coco the Bear highlight video!  One of the best things I’ve ever seen on YouTube, and some great shots of one of my favorite places in the world: the Hersheypark Arena!

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 14 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

But only one owns garybutterworth.com!

Link du jour:  Spoonman by Soundgarden!