Farewell PSU National Championship Hopes...

As a faithful Penn State alumni, and an avid college football fan, my hopes of another National Championship for my beloved Nittany Lions were dashed on Saturday night at Kinnick Stadium, where the Iowa Hawkeyes kicked a last minute field goal to beat Penn State 24 to 23.

The Nittany Lions have dropped to #7 in the AP polls, and if they win the rest of the their games, they will likely go to the Rose Bowl and play USC.

A part of me is completely disappointed and depressed right now. This was supposed to be the year for Penn State. This was supposed to be JoePa's fairy tale ending. However, I'm not as upset as I thought I'd be. A part of me is relieved. A part of me knows now that I won't be following every Blog, Podcast, and news story on Penn State. A part of me can just let a lot of this go...

Which is probably a good thing. The next two months will be busy -- projects at work, ankle surgery, Thanksgiving, new baby Collin, Christmas stuff. Obsessing over Penn State football is one less thing to worry about. :-)

Don't get me wrong -- There are still two more games in November where I'll be glued to the TV sets for at least 3 hours. :-)

Then and Now - Part 2

I found some pictures of the school that I used to go to when I was little - Harry L. Bain.

This school was just a few blocks from our apartment, and we would walk their every day. Even though I hadn't been their in 30 years, I could still remember how to walk their using Google Street Maps.

The first picture is just a little amusing. I've told my friends and co-workers that we used to have recess in the middle of the street, and they would block it off so that we could safely play. It looks like this hasn't changed!


The next picture shows my Kindergarten graduation picture taken in 1977, in front of the double doors on the front of the building:



Here's a shot of those same doors today:

Trip to Manhattan

Jenn and I took our daughter Neya to see Mary Poppins on Broadway, in New York city.

We made it a hassle-free day trip. We took the Amtrak train to New York city. The trip from E-Town to Penn Station was around 3 and a half hours. Not too bad! Mary Poppins was playing on West 42nd street, just nine blocks down from the train station. We just strolled up 7th Avenue, watched the play, and then visited Times Square.

The play was fantastic, and Time Square was neat. Neya liked the flagship Toys 'R Us store in Time Square.

Here are some pictures from the visit:


I got to see my friend Nate. He lives in Manhattan off 37th street, so we were able to catch up with him for a few minutes, on the way to the play:



The play was a lot of fun. Even though we were in the cheap seats, we had a great view of the stage:




Times Square was neat. I liked the Lego displays in the Toy 'R Us store. They had several mammoth Lego displays. My favorite was the one of the Empire State Building and King Kong. It was over 30 feet tall!

More pictures are available here, in our photo gallery.

Then and Now

I had a lot of fun playing with Google Maps Street View. For those who are not familiar, you can actually use Google Maps in some areas to get a first-person view of the street. Google does this by driving cars all over the place and taking pictures as the car drives down the street. The photos are tagged with GPS and electronically stitched together. This allows people like me to virtually walk the streets.

Because this is really expensive and time-consuming to produce, these street views are typically only available in major cities. I was mapping our trip out to New York City and having a fun time "walking the streets" using Google Street view (quite useful actually.. I have a pretty darned good idea on where I am going tomorrow!). After I got familiar with my New York City route, I peeked across the river to New Jersey. To my astonishment, my childhood apartments and streets were now available with Google Street View.

I then began walking the streets on near the two apartments where we lived, and the elementary school where I used to go. And that is when I noticed something eerie. I actually remembered how to walk to my elementary school! Sure, some of the buildings were different, but most of them struck me with bizarre jab of deja vu.

As an interesting project, I decided to do some Then and Now pictures of my childhood with what is currently displayed in Google Street View.

First up Gutenberg, New Jersey. In 1970, we lived in the Panorama, located on 6803 Blvd East in Gutenberg. Blvd East is a major stretch of road that is near the Hudson river with a stunning view of Manhattan. I think we lived their until about 1974 or 1975.

Here is picture from 1970 (two years before I was born!):



















The picture below is from Google Street View:














Across the street, there was a stone wall with a great view of Manhattan. The picture shows my mom with my older brother Rusty when he was a new born baby.



Here is the current day shot from Google Street View: (you can still see the stone wall, and the view of the city behind the trees).

Crackberry

My cell phone was due for an upgrade at work (just in time too... I was getting a little frustrated with my Palm Treo).

I now have a Blackberry 8830.

I love it. The whole e-mail and messaging experience is just much better and slicker than the Treo. In a few minutes of set up and configuration, I was able to get all of my work e-mails forwarded to my Blackberry. This really makes it convenient to stay up on things when I am away from the office or in the evenings.

The device was pretty easy to figure out. After playing around for about 10 minutes and getting a quick five minute run-down from one of my co-workers, I had pretty decent command of the phone.

It's no iPhone, but it certainly is a much nicer device than my old Treo.

Done with PT!

Today was my last day of physical therapy. My last goal was to get to a normal range of up and down movement in my ankle (dorsiflexion and plantarflexion). My goal was to get over 40 degrees of movement. I blew that out of the water today with movement in the low 50's.

All that said, I am still not 100 percent yet (I would classify myself near 95%). I still have a little bit of problems controlling my foot drop when walking down the stairs, and I still cannot do a one-footed tip-toe on my bad ankle.

However, I have no limp in my walk. And everything is feeling pretty good. The other stuff will come back after lots more practice and exercise.

Next up - hardware removal. I am scheduled to get my hardware removed in about 3-4 weeks.

Balance and Leg Strength Conditioning

I have about 2 more weeks of physical therapy left.

The goals of the next 2 weeks involve the improving following two areas:

1. Balance (my balance stinks)
2. Leg strength (my legs feel like jello after walking up a flight of steps)

To that end, we have been tweaking my exercises as follows:

1. I do a higher level of resistance on the bike (level 8)
2. I do a 3 second hold on my wall squats.
3. I now do my BAPS board by standing up on it (this is ridiculously hard for me)
4. I now do sets of 15 leg presses (three sets with one foot, three sets with both feet)
   
5. I have to play catch with a heavy ball by bouncing it on a trampoline-like contraption. I do this while balancing on one foot.
   
6. I now do a higher level of resistance bands for my side-step exercises and ankle exercises.

Hardware comes out on November 18th. I'm excited to have it out!