Picture Update

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I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to get caught up on all the pictures from 2012 that I have been meaning to get to. I think today I’m finally caught up and ready to start on 2013. There are a lot of updates so here it goes.

  • Vacation to Florida – As it has been our tradition for the past couple of years we spend the first week of summer vacation in Florida. This year my my sisters family joined us and the cousins all got to hang out and have a great time.
  • Summer Swim Team – Pictures from a couple of the swim meets the boys did this summer.
  • Alex Triathlon – Alex had been asking to do another triathlon and this year we finally managed to sign him up for the same Dallas kids tri that he did a couple of years back.
  • Trip to New Orleans – Before the kids started back after the summer break we took a trip to New Orleans to see the Grandparents. On this trip we also did some things that we haven’t ever done before like visit the Old Mint, the Pontalba buildings, and the Mardi Gras Museum.
  • Caroline at the Gym – Caroline did an introduction to Gymnastics class.
  • Caroline Ballet – She also took an introduction to ballet class.
  • Halloween – Halloween pictures from this year.
  • Christmas – To finish out the year some pictures from Christmas.

Now I have a couple hundred pictures of the recent Disney trip to sift through 🙂

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.

Fun with Olympic Names

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For the past two weeks we’ve been glued to our television set all night long watching the Olympic Games. Of course our favourite sport was swimming and we didn’t miss any of it.

It’s always fun to see the different athletes from around the world and how many different names the announcers end up struggling with. While watching the final of the woman’s 50 free Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gains were all excited commenting and they kept having to say “Kromowidjojo” over and over again. Ranomi Kromowidjojo is a sprinter for the Netherlands and besides giving us a good laugh that they had to keep saying it I thought, wow, what a cool name.

I’ve always liked the names of the Scandinavian athletes. A couple of years ago there was a skier from Norway called Lasse Kjus that I cheered for because I liked his name. I think it has something to do with all the consonants in row that just seem to make the name almost completely impossible to pronounce.

I found a list of all athletes from the London 2012 games and I figured I would go through the list and see what other tidbits I could find.

There were a total of 10902 Olympic Athletes from 205 different countries listed in the roster. To be honest that kind of surprised me sinceI didn’t expect there to be that many competitors.

Fun Facts:

  • Length – Both first and last name.
    • The shortest names came in at just 4 characters. It’s probably cheating but “Deni”, a weight lifter from Indonesia, had only one name listed. There were a total of 12 people who were listed at having just 4 characters in there name but I have to believe that some of them were incorrect. “Joel” a footballer from Spain was probably “Joel Robles Blazquez” the keeper.
    • The longest name goes to “Aleksandra J Klejnowska-Krzywanska” coming in at a whopping 32 characters long. Aleksandra was a weight lifter from Poland. (What is it with these weight lifters.)
  • Length – Just last name.
    • There was a tie for shortest last name between “Lamusi A” a judo competitor from China and to “Diju V’ a Badminton playing from India.
    • The longest last name goes to “Elena Danilyuk-Nevmerzhytskaya” from Belarus at 25 characters. You can really stack it up with those hyphenated names.
  • Frequencies
    • By far and away “Kim” was the most popular surname with 82 different competitors. 61 were from South Korea, 19 from North Korea, 1 from Russia, and 1 from Uzbekistan.
    • The next closest last name wasn’t even a last name but the suffix “van”, as in “Elco van der Geest” at 61 followed by the suffix “de” at 50.
    • There was a tie for next most frequent proper last name of Li and Wang with 39 people.
  • Family Competition – Andrew won the family competition and I didn’t even make it into double digits. Athletes with the first name:
    • Andrew – 30
    • Alex – 20 (I’ve excluded all the Alexander, Alexandre, Alexey, etc.)
    • Jennifer – 18
    • Caroline – 13
    • Derek – 7

Alas, there were no McEachern’s in this years Games.

Google Doodle Olympic/Mars Curosity Mashup

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I’ve been a big fan of Google for a many years and one of the neat things I think they do is the home page “Google doodle”. These are the graphics that sometimes replace the plain blue-red-yellow Google logo to celebrate some event.

For the past week they have been running different Olympic themed pictures to celebrate the London games. Yesterday on August 6th they did a javelin themed one and this is what it looked like when I first visited it in the morning.

Google Doodle for August 2nd - Javelin

Later in the day when I went back to Google they still had the javelin themed doodle up but I noticed it had changed slightly.

Google Doodle for August 2nd - Javelin

See the difference?

The blimp above the “G” has been replaced with the Mars Curiosity landing. August 6th was also the be day the Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars. What a cool little tribute to science just hidden right there.

You can look through the catalog of previous Google Doodles at http://www.google.com/doodles

Is it just me or does this javelin thrower resemble a grown up Pinocchio? Just saying, with a nose like that….

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, fĂĽnfhundertfĂĽnfundfĂĽnfzigtausendfĂĽnfhundertfĂĽnfundfĂĽnfzig, 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?