Yesterday's Phialadelphia Inquirer had an article on the SAT scores throughout the country hitting an 8 year low in both the verbal and math sections. A few pages later, I read about Lauren Caitlyn Upton, an 18 year old Miss Teen USA contestant representing South Carolina. She was asked a question about geography during the pageant. I found the video at you tube...
"U.S. Americans"? wow!
There is a perverse balance in the universe.
Leona Helmsley, the New York real estate developer billionaire died last week and the details of her will were made public today in which she allocates 12 MILLION dollars to her dog, Trouble, a female Maltese who is now worth an estimated 84 million (in dog dollars).
Interestingly, she left exactly zero dollars to two of her grandchildren. I assume they didn't fit so cutely in a Prada puppy purse.
Helmsley was perhaps best known for her tyrannical rule over her real estate empire and miserly policies when it came to disputing payments to her vendors. She was once asked about paying an enormous amount of taxes and her infamous reply, "We don't pay taxes. Little people pay taxes." helped to earn her the moniker of :The Queen of Mean.
Stay tuned to see if Trouble has any DUIs or stints in rehab...
We landed today back in St. Maarten and somehow things feel different. This is the last semester I have here on the island and I can' t be happier that my time here is almost over. Not that being here is awful or anything, far from it- it is pretty easy to get used to the same exact weather forecast day in and day out.
I suppose I am still a little upset after last night's tear-filled goodbye with the kids. This time was particularly tough. Not only will I miss them just as bad as I always do, and they will me, but after just meeting their little sister they have to say goodbye without having even a full two weeks to get to know her. Maybe I am just getting sentimental in my old age but I had a really hard time this break saying goodbye. Making it worse was the fact that during the entire 10 days we were home, our time was monopolized by a frenzy of running around getting things together and moving all of our junk into storage and closing on the sale of our house. I can't wait to spend time with them when I don't have a million things that have to be done.
1700 miles never felt so far. December can't come soon enough.
It's official. As of 1:40pm yesterday, we are now homeless.
Closing was particularly painless and went off without a hitch. Having jammed, and I do mean jammed all of our worldly possessions into a storage facility we turned over the keys to a perfectly empty house yesterday afternoon.
This week has been like all the other breaks I have had at AUC, a non-stop-run-around-like-an-idiot fest, trying to cram 3 weeks worth of stuff into a little over a week. I won't be able to relax until we get back and all I have to worry about is studying for that little quiz known as USMLE Step 1.
Last night and tonight we are the guests of the Four Points Sheraton hotel near the Philadelphia airport.(pictured to the right) We are scheduled to fly back to St Maarten tomorrow morning.
We also have the (mis)fortune of sharing the hotel with what seems to be several thousand would-be American Idol contestants. Yesterday American Idol began open auditions in Philadelphia for next season's show. It is reported that upwards of 15,000 hopefuls showed up in tone deaf force to get their 10-15 second audition with the show's judges. So if you see me on the island tomorrow and my ears are still bleeding, you'll know why.
Today began with taking a pharmacology exam and ends with me sitting in my soon-to-be-former house in Williamstown, New Jersey. We have had it on the market since April and it has finally sold. We are scheduled to go to closing on Monday the 27th before flying back to St. Maarten on the 29th. It is kind of a bittersweet feeling.
Finances dictate our need to sell the house; paying a mortgage with money left over form student loans was not covered in my economics class but I'm sure it violates some pretty elementary laws of personal money management. On the bright side we will stop going through money faster than Lindsay Lohan uses Kleenex. And I suppose in our former lives of working maniacally as ER nurses Kathy and I never got a chance to truly settle in here so we aren't really that attached to it.
But still, I cannot help but feel a little strange. The last year and a half has been a whirlwind of change in my life but having the house here was at least stabilizing. Come Monday we are officially homeless.
C'est la vie!
These are some pictures of our house being built a few years ago.
Thankfully hurricane Dean stayed a couple hundred miles to our south as predicted. Although we are still technically under a tropical storm warning, the weather has been just cloudy and windy with very little rain. I took a quick trip to Mullet Beach and snapped a couple pictures of the ocean. As you can see it is only slightly kicked up but there was an occasional big wave, that at least one surfer was taking advantage of. All in all pretty mild. (as usual, click the pictures for better viewing)
I also shot a quick video :
Many of the local boats are anchored in the lagoon- seeking shelter from the effects of hurricane Dean. The hurricane itself is some 200 miles to our south but we are under a tropical storm warning. The winds are gusting up to 30mph and the skies were pretty dark this morning.
(click on the pictures to enlarge)
This is good news. Anything can happen, but so far the last 24 hours mostly all the computer models have the storm missing our little island by as much as 200 miles. This graphic is from the National Hurricane Center.
Latest projections have the storm veering pretty well south of us. Lets hope it stays that way.
Whatever damage Dean may have in store for us I hope we handle ourselves better than the people in Ireland.
With the recent flooding in the UK the Irish are panicking in the streets. The photo below shows the chaos.
Dean has grown up into a full fledged tropical storm. According to AccuWeather, Dean should keep growing and make Hurricane status(74mph winds) by tomorrow. This is the latest projected path which puts old Deano headed right for us. Notice the big 2 in the graphic...they belive it will become a category 2 (winds 96-110mph) by Thursday evening.
To learn more about hurricane classification click here.
Of course meteorology is not an exact science but if the boys are close enough on this one, it may be time to strt getting 'concerned'.
We are scheduled to fly out Saturday at 3-ish ...hmm
Officially it is named Tropical Depression #4. It is located about 2000 miles from here and has sustained winds of 35 mph. If it picks up energy as predicted and makes it to 39mph it will become Tropical Storm Dean.
I look forward to the high winds and Jack Daniels raining down from the sky.
It is headed this way currently at about 21mph but most models have it hitting about 100 miles south of us somewhere around late Friday or early Saturday. Stay tuned.
You heard of the Suzuki method and maybe even the Orff Schulwerk method of music instruction.
Well, it was only a matter of time until the birth of the VAN HALEN method.
Pretty impressive rendition of Eruption.
In a rare and surprising display of competence the US State Department has efficiently processed and sent us madame Rileigh's first passport. We were a more than a little nervous wondering if we would receive it in time to fly back home next week during my mini-break.
It is one of the new fancy passports, complete with electronic chip, thick end pages, and colorful pictures on each page. Compared to my beat up old passport (which incidentally is a little beat up after surviving a ill-advised, impromptu swim in the ocean at the Cliffhanger Bar) hers looks like it is from a different country. Her passport is valid for 5 years and I want to see the look on the immigration officer's face when he is trying to compare the picture with the 5 year old in front of him. She is doing her patented "Do I look amused to you?" face in the photo.
...from CNN...
Truly a tragic story.
This man, Jack Tracy, was enjoying an afternoon of fishing with his 5 year old grandson, Austin, in Oklahoma. They were standing on a boat dock when both heard a shot and saw something splash in the water just a few feet away. Seconds later a bullet ripped through the skull of the 5 year old killing him.
Who would be so heinous as to shoot a 5 year old? As it turns out it was the police. Apparently a police officer responded to a nearby home for a complaint of a snake in a tree. Upon unsuccessfully trying to remove the snake from the tree, this inbred, redneck, asshole decided with the homeowner that he was going to shoot the snake out of the tree! Apparently Billy-bob isn't the marksman he fancies himself and at least 2 stray shots made their way to the nearby pond where this man and his grandson were, one fatally killing the boy.
The City Manager had this to say:
"I was told that they tried several ways to get the snake down, but it was still hissing at them and firmly lodged," Wade said. "What I was told is that the owner of the home either suggested or agreed that they should go ahead and shoot the snake, and then everything happened from there."
"Hissing at them"??? Isn't that what snakes do? I'm no animal behaviorist, but I suppose after molesting the snake in the tree for a while, that it is quite LIKELY to hiss- just a guess. I suppose the options of either calling in an animal control specialist, or I don't know...LEAVING THE SNAKE ALONE never occurred to this public servant. No, shooting was definitely the way to go. After all, they wouldn't have given him a gun if they didn't want him to use it right?
So now a family is without their 5 year old because some dip-shit decided to play Dirty-Harry with a reptile. Good Job. My only hope is that the cop hasn't already disseminated his genes.
To read the whole story click here.
I just got home around midnight from a power-study session with Jon, Cyrus, and Schai over at school. With our Pathology test tomorrow, we took advantage of a big group study session that began about 5pm and didn't break up until almost midnight. The picture to the right is the table in the cafeteria that doubled as our war room. This exam will be on about 7 week's worth of material and is worth about 40 percent of our grade. I have been preparing for about the last week or so, but gleaned a lot from our rapid-fire, "tell me everything you know about..." type session. Following every detail to its logical conclusion and trying to fill in the "whys" and integrate things we already know is the only way to fly! I am terrible at just straight memorizing. (information that would have been helpful before starting medical school hahaha)
In our Med Psych. class today we had a guest lecturer that was talking about stress in medicine and how it begins in medical school. He used an analogy that I found pretty accurate:
He said,"Medical school is like trying to drink water from a fire hose".
I think it is spot-on! As I approach the end of my 4th semester, I am realizing what an almost unimaginably huge volume of material we are responsible to know. In addition to my Clinical Medicine course the primary focus of next semester will be to review everything and be prepared for the board exam (that will pretty much determine the rest of my life so... you know....no pressure!)
I will be off to bed now as my exam is scheduled to start in 7 hours!
From the X-Games. Pretty wild video of Jake Brown doing a free-fall from about 40 feet. Watch his shoes!
In case you were wondering from that height his body hits the ramp at 34.5 miles per hour!! Ouch!
This is quite possibly the most disturbing story I have heard in a long time. Apparently the phrase "until death do us part" doesn't translate to well into Spanish. A woman in Mexico City kept the dead body of her husband in her bedroom- FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR! The neighbors complained about the smell (I can't begin to imagine what a yea-old corpse smells like) and alerted authorities. This is not the worst part of the story.
I won't ruin it for you, I'll let you read it for yourself here.
(HINT: it involves her son and is pretty gross!)
