Category Archives: mfdc

Website Updates

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I haven’t completely abandoned updating the website, it just seems like I have less and less time to do this stuff. If you have been following the home page there have been a couple of updates but I haven’t posted about them her so here’s the summary from the last time.

  • Caroline’s Birthday – Back in February we had a Mary Poppins themed birthday party for Caroline. It started off with her listening to the movie soundtrack, then she saw the movie, and then it was the party.
  • Alex and Andrew’s Birthday Party – The boys decided that they both wanted to have a bowling/laser tag party so we did a combined party.
  • Andrew Spring Soccer – Couple of pictures from Andrew’s spring soccer season.
  • Alex Spring Lacrosse – Couple of pictures from Alex’s spring lacrosse season.
  • Caroline’s First Haircut – I think we actually held out a really time before we took her for her first haircut but it was starting to get out of control.
  • Yearly Pictures – We did take our traditional yearly pictures again this year and we did do it right around their birthdays which was a small miracle. Here are Caroline, Alex, Andrew, and the Group pictures.
  • Mammoth Caves and Ryan’s Graduation – In May Ryan graduation from Law school at IU and as part of the trip up there we also visited Mammoth Caves, a bit of Louisville, and the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

Five Years Ago Today…

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Today probably would have passed just like any other day and I would have gone through it without giving it much thought if it wasn’t for the reminder from Jen. This was no ordinary day for her but a day to breathe a huge sigh of relief. As she wrote,

Whew.

Did you hear that?

That sound was my whole body exhaling.

Truth be told I’ve been holding my breath for the last five years.

We’ve reached a milestone around here and it’s reason for us to celebrate.

My husband had a stroke at the age of 34 exactly five years ago.

Whenever he talks to doctors they ask, “So when exactly did you have this stroke?”

My husband hums and haws and mentions something about late 2008.

I allow him to finish and then say, “It was August 2, 2007. It happened around 9:30 AM. I was wearing a black skirt and green skirt when I got the call. I had a two year old and a five year old at the time.”

She’s right of course, for some reason I can never recall the exact date when asked and I always feel really stupid that it’s not something that comes right off my tongue. This is a huge life altering event and I can never remember the date it happened. I may not remember the exact day but I do remember how it happened.

I had finished my morning swim at the gym which consisted of a hard 100 free for time. At the time I was getting ready to complete the US Masters Nationals that were being held in Austin and I was in my taper. (When you transition from going longer workouts to shorter  faster stuff to get ready to race.) After warming down I took a shower, made my way over to the sinks and started shaving.

I had just started when I had what I can best describe as a sudden massive headache. For a short period of time I lost my sight and couldn’t see anything and it sounded like my whole head was buzzing. It’s really hard to describe what the sound was exactly like other then it took over my whole head and I couldn’t hear anything around me. Fortunately I didn’t lose my balance or fall down.

Things started to come back in focus and the buzzing in my head slowly started to go away and I remember thinking “Thank God, that’s over, wow, was that ever weird.” I looked down at my hand holding the razor and thought I was going to start shaving again but the razor was positioned really awkwardly in my hand and was starting to slip out of my grasp. I realized at this point I had absolutely no feeling in my arm and no control over what it was doing and watched the razor fall helplessly into the sink.

My vision was still not 100 percent and things seemed horribly out of perspective and it felt as if I was watching a movie and it wasn’t really happening to me. I sat down on one of the benches by the lockers for a while since I started feeling a little unsteady and after a couple of minutes I started to feel better.

I kept thinking to myself that I have to finish shaving. Half my face is still covered in shaving cream and I’m going to look really silly if I can’t get the other half done. I went back to the sink and started to shave when it happened again.

It wasn’t quite a severe as the first time if that’s the right way to describe it since I didn’t have the same degree of vision loss but I lost control of my arm again and watched helplessly as the razor fell back into the sink.

Somehow I managed to finish the job, get dressed, and then if you can believe this, I drove myself to work. To this day I’m not really sure why I did that instead of going to the hospital. After about 20 minutes of trying to get through email I knew something was not right. My arm felt too heavy for my body and I had a really hard time controlling the mouse and couldn’t get it to where I wanted it to. I called my doctor’s office and described what had happened over the phone to the nurse and asked what I should do. She told me to hold and a short time later the doctor came on the phone and said “Get yourself to a hospital immediately. Don’t drive yourself, find someone to take you, go now. Tell them you’ve had a stroke. I’m calling now and they will be expecting you.”

I called Jen while I was on the way and I’m pretty sure that’s when things went bad for her.

At the hospital they took me right back to the emergency room and started working me over. The test I remember the most was what I call the standard stroke test. Stick out your tongue, squeeze your left hand, squeeze your right hand, push with your left leg, push with your right leg, who’s the President, what’s today’s date, when were you born… I could answer all the questions fine but when I did the squeeze and push tests it was obvious that my whole right side was very weak.

I stayed in the hospital for a week for more tests, MRI’s, blood work, ultra sounds, you name it, I had it done. I was put on the stroke floor, given the low salt, low fat, heart healthy diet, categorized as a fall risk (which means I couldn’t get out of bed to pee without supervision), and to top it off I was the youngest person there by about 40 years. I lost count of how many doctors and nurses stuck there head in and said “Oh, you’re the young guy.” Ya, thanks..

Five years later I’m thankful I don’t have any lasting physical effects and I’m able to enjoy playing with my kids, watching them grow up, and knowing that things could have turned out much differently.

Ya, Look it Up

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I had to have Andrew explain his school work that he brought home today. He was even kind enough to point out that I was pronouncing it wrong.

Oviparous

Basketball Pictures

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I haven’t posted pictures to the website for a while and part of reason is that our camera died a couple of months ago. We’ve had our small pocket camera but our SLR started getting flaky and then totally quit. The small camera is ok but it certainly doesn’t take pictures as nice as the SLR did.

So a week ago I ordered a brand spanking new camera and it arrived just in time for the last game of the boys basketball season. Of course I had to test it out at the game and capture some pictures.

We had originally only planned on Andrew playing basketball since he had such a good time with it last year but after going to one of Andrew’s practices Alex pleaded with us to play as well.

We gave in since it was the church league with the goal of coaching basketball fundamentals and having fun instead of high pressure competition and winning at all costs. They both had lots of fun and said that they wanted to play again next year.

 

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

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The other day while we were in the car Alex asked, “What’s the longest word?” We were listening to the Mary Poppins soundtrack at the time and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious was playing which got him thinking about it.

Off the top of my head I wasn’t sure but thought I remembered hearing a long time ago that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest but I wasn’t sure.

So, like all good puzzlers I turned to Google and eventually ended up on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Longest word in the English Language.

Like with just about everything in the English language it turns out that the longest word depends on the rules you want to use.

The longest word in a major dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is defined by Oxford English Dictionary to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.” In case you haven’t taken the time to count it contains 45 letters. This is classified as both a “technical” and “coined” word.

There are actually two technical words, both longer then I care to reprint that are 189,819 letters long which some appear to believe isn’t a word at all, and the longest published word at 1,909 letters long. I’m discounting these since they are technical words.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the word that started all of this, comes in at 34 letters long but is just a made up so in our quest continues.

The longest non-coined word in an English dictionary, but still a technical word is Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism with 30 letters.

The first non-coined, non-technical word I came across was in fact Antidisestablishmentarianism with 28 letters.

Of course at this point my curiosity got the better of me and Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the longest words in other languages. I know in German you can make big words by stringing together smaller words and leaving out the spaces.

For example whole numbers are written as one word so, Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig, 777,777, is pretty darn long at 65 letters. (And just for Doug, using his favourite German number, fünfhundertfünfundfünfzigtausendfünfhundertfünfundfünfzig, 555,555, but that’s only 57 letters). Imagine being in grade school and having to write out the expanded notion of numbers on a test, you’d run out of time or get writers cramp.

Anyone have any favourite long words?

2011 Year In Numbers

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I never did do a 2010 year in numbers feature but it’s back this year. All kinds of great stuff for last year.

Website

It didn’t feel like I did very many updates to the website last year but looking over it I added 20 new pages. Last year it was 23 and in 2009 there was 21 so I wasn’t that far off from previous years.

I used to really keep track of how many different people were visiting the website but I have to be honest, this site has a really narrow focus,  namely, people who want to find out what is going on with the McEachern family so I’ve really stopped caring how many people are visiting the site, though I still like looking at some of the other statistics.

The top visited pages specifically for 2011 were

  1. Andrew’s birthday party.
  2. Trip to Sea World San Antonio.
  3. Andrew Baseball
  4. Alex’s birthday party
  5. Florida Trip

However, these pages were not the most visited pages on the website. The top two were

  1. Newfie Jokes – “newfie jokes” also happens to be top search term used to find the site.
  2. Statue of Liberty – “statue of liberty” is the 3rd most popular search term that brings people to the site.

One of the reasons these are the two most popular is that I prevent search engines like Google and Yahoo from indexing any pages outside of the blog so random people who find the site will be directed there.

The other stat I like looking at is where people are visiting the site from. Last year people visited from a total of 76 unique counties. The United States and Canada were obviously the two most popular followed by the UK, Brazil (hey Jesse and Otto), Australia, and Germany. The green shaded countries below are where people visited from, the darker the green the greater number of visitors.

2011 Website Global Map

There were also visitors from 950+ unique cities and this graphic shows where the top 250 of those cities are located. The larger and darker the circle the more people.

Website City Map

Swimming

I kept up swimming this year and like I’ve been doing since I was a teenager I’ve been keeping track of everything I do in the pool. Over the past five years this year I swam farthest.

I set myself of goal of going 300 miles which was pretty aggressive since in the past five years the most I had gone was around 250. I managed to just squeak over the goal with 305 miles.

2011 Swimming Summary

September was the longest month and I was just short of 40 miles. I have masters swimming logs from 2006 and since that time I’ve gone 1,260 miles/ 2,027 km, a total of 2,217,448 yards.

On a map that brings me from my door step to about 30 miles short of London, Ontario somewhere on highway 402.

2011 Swimming Map

Reading

I made an effort to try and read more books this year. I’m really jealous of Jen who can speed though piles of books while I plod though at a snails pace,heck even Alex is a faster reader then I am.

Despite my slow reading ability I got through 12 books last year. I read the first two books in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. These were originally published in the early 90’s but I had never heard of them until I read a review for the latest book in the series that was published last year and they compared it to Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” books. They were similar in that they are by a Swedish author, take place in Sweden, and they are novels about violent crimes. Overall I was very pleased and will probably read more in the series when I have time.

Next up I read two books by Jo Nesbo from the Harry Hole series. These were also part of my Scandinavian author kick though these are set in Oslo Norway and not Sweden. For Christmas I received the latest book in the series so I’ll have that to read this year.

During the summer Alex checked out “The Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve from the library and it sounded interesting so I decided to read it. It was the first book in the “Mortal Engines Quartet” about a time in the future where the world has been totally devastated after the sixty minute war and technology that we have has been totally been lost. Nations as we know them no longer exist and they have been replaced with the “Tractionist” and “Anti-Tractionist” movements. Traction cities are mounted on huge moveable platforms and the cites move around the continent eating up smaller cities. It all sounds very strange but it was a really good series and according to what I have seen on the internet Peter Jackson will be directing and producing a 3D version of story.

For the new year I already have 5 books on the pile so it looks like I’m set until June.

Movies

We are Netflix subscribers and this year the company took a lot of heat for raising their prices fairly substantially and then in an attempt to try and smooth things over they announced they were going to split the company in two. One for users who get DVD’s by mail and another to serve users streaming content. We have both the one DVD out at a time and the unlimited streaming service. I wasn’t so upset about the price hike, that’s the cost of doing business, but splitting the company in two was going to be a pain since I would have to manage my movie lists in two different places.

After much pressure Netflix scrapped the idea of forming two different companies and kept everything under the Netflix name. This is great because for Christmas we got an internet enabled TV with Netflix and we can stream movies right to television without having to hook it up to a separate system.

Looking back through my DVD history we went through 31 movies, mostly stuff for the kids. I only streamed 16 films to my computer during the year but since we got the new TV with build in Netflix we have already gone through 10 movies.

I would say my favorites for the year would be the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, the Swedish versions. I thought they stuck very close to the book and the actors did a great job. I have it on my todo list to see the Hollywood version but haven’t yet had the chance to do that.

Pumpkin Carving

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Since tomorrow is Halloween we all went out to the garage this afternoon for a pumpkin carving extravaganza. This is the first year that Caroline could really help out with her pumpkin and she drove right in and had lots of fun.

 

The boys worked hard on their pumpkins as well but unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the finished pumpkins. I’ll see if I can get any tomorrow night.