Keeping Tabs

I have only been a computer owner for two months now, and I feel like finally starting to get the hang of it. I spent so many years using public computers at school or the library, where you aren't allowed to install any programs or customize any features whatsoever. But this week I realized that if I am allowed to change the wallpaper on my computer if I want to. Emboldened by the wallpaper change (pictured on the left, it is my criminally underappreciated 'Gelatina Colorida'), I realized that if I could make other such bold moves such as downloading iTunes and putting my music on my computer.

But one of the favorite things about computer ownership is that I can check the "Remember me" box so I don't have to type my user ID and password every time I log into my email, Facebook, my blog, etc. In fact, I can open up a row of tabs in my browser and it will remember them the next time I open the browser up. That may not seem like a big deal but it's a nice little time-saver because there are a few sites I immediately want to look up every time I hop on the internet. So I've spent the last week or so playing with the lineup trying to attain the perfect order of tabs to remain in my permanent rotation, and I've settled on a system that I think will have staying power:

In the lead-off position, I've got Gmail. A no-brainer because it's what I want to see first when hit the old interweb. After checking email, I usually want to check out the blogs I follow to see if there are any updates, so my Blogger Dashboard is in second place. Next I like to hit ESPN.com to see if there are any fresh sports (mostly NBA) stories I need to know about. And fourth I glance over at Facebook to see what's going on with my FB peeps. Those are the basic four that stay in my permanent tab lineup and all other sites can be thrown into the rotation in slots 5-8 (I draw the line at eight tabs - even eight is a little excessive).

Maybe it's just me, but I've grown kind of fond of my foursome of permanent tabs (the 'Tab Four'?) So I was wondering if anyone else out there has come up with a winning order for their personal browser tabs. Click the comment link and brag about your tabs.

Not SST: Adventures in Northern Michigan

My apologies to those who tuned into my blog this morning in the hopes of seeing of the traditional Sesame Street Tuesday post. My last two posts were SST and I wasn't about to post three in a row. I absolutely love picking out Sesame Street clips and writing up the posts, but it has gotten to the point that Sesame Street has taken over my blog. So I declare that henceforth Sesame Street Tuesday will only appear every other Tuesday. I know it will be hard on all of us, but just like the current economic recession, if we make a few sacrifices and pull together we will get through it alright.

So, how about catching up on some adventures from my real life? I mentioned a few weeks ago (in an SST post, of course) that I was going up to Northern Michigan to participate in my first 5K , under the guise of one Mike McMurtrey. I had no idea how I would perform in the race since I had never quite run the whole 5K distance beforehand and since I had never made an effort to time my previous runs. So my two goals for the race were (1) to run the whole time without any walking and (2) to finish the race in under an hour. I accomplished both goals, and my official time was actually 28:54, much better than expected (and, coincidentally, exactly one minute faster than my fastest-ever Mario 2 full run - it makes me feel more macho and less nerdy to know that I can run a 5K in less time than it takes to beat Mario 2). I can honestly say that on that day I ran farther than I ever had in my entire life and I was pretty beat afterwards, as seen in this picture taken moments after I finished the race:


Besides the race, it was a great chance to head up to a beautiful spot in Northern Michigan. The town of Charlevoix was adorable, with harbors full of sailboats, a lighthouse on the Lake Michigan shore, and a row of petunias along the main road that stretched on for miles and miles. After the race all my buddies and I headed over to nearby Petosky to hit the beach. Normally I'm not a really beachy guy and I tire of it really quickly, but it was a gorgeous day and the sand, sun, and water were all perfect and I had a great time just hanging out.

After that most of the group headed back down to Ann Arbor, but Brady, Amy, and I headed across the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula to go camping. I had never been up there and I didn't want to miss out on an opportunity before my time in Michigan runs out. It turns out that the U.P. is really beautiful and scenic, but it has one major drawback: it is owned and operated by the mosquitoes. The second we first stepped out of the car we were greeted by a swarm of at least three hundred thousand of them. Mosquitoes have always found me much more delectable than anyone else in my company, so I spent a lot of time with sitting near the smoky campfire or walking around with dozens of layers of clothing, including a hood cinched tightly around my face to try to keep them at bay, but the pragmatic mosquitoes still found plenty of ripe places on my face and hands to bite regardless my precautions.

In spite of the mosquitoes, we still had a fun trip full of camping, hiking, geocaching, waterfall-looking-at-ing. The latter was my main motivation for joining the excursion since our main destination in the U.P. was Tahquamenon Falls, one of the largest waterfalls east of the Mississippi. Incidentally, we chose it as our destination not because we are great geographers, but because "Tahquamenon Falls" is the name of an instrumental composition on the album Greetings from Michigan by singer/songwriter and Michigan native Sufjan Stevens.

Speaking of Sufjan, Brady put together a slideshow of our U.P. trip featuring the aforementioned instrumental composition. It features cameo appearances from Melanie and Tim, some Ann Arbor friends who met up with us in the U.P., and also includes pictures from the Charlevoix area, Whitefish Point on Lake Superior, and sites around Lake Huron:



I hope you enjoyed this non-Sesame Street post on this Tuesday morning. Hopefully this new SST format will encourage me to get back to blogging more about my real life. If you think you can't stand to wait a whole week for your next Sesame Street fix, head over to Youtube and you can spend hours watching the thousands of Sesame Street clips they have up there. (Although, if I had included a Sesame Street clip today it would have been this one. I spent the 24th of July down in Ohio and I missed out on the Pioneer Day festivities back in Utah, so I lit a single sparkler by myself to commemorate the holiday.)

SST: Bert's Blanket

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

This morning I am headed for my first physical therapy session on my elbow. It's feeling a lot better, I'm out of the sling and I'm not in any pain most of the time, but my range of motion is pretty limited and it hurts whenever I try to either straighten my arm out or curl it up. It's also pretty weak and I have a hard time lifting anything. I've been telling people for the past few days that it feels like I have a "Bert arm," that is to say an arm that is really limp and floppy and useless. I have a childhood memory of a Bert and Ernie sketch where Ernie makes fun of Bert's foamy arms, but either I just imagined it or no one has ever put it up on Youtube (maybe a good thing, because in retrospect that sounds pretty mean). So instead I will post one of my favorite Bert showcases:



It's so nice when Bert has a chance to shine by himself without Ernie stealing the laughs and the spotlight. And I love the homage to '60s girl groups, with lines lifted right out of 'The Leader of the Pack': "Get the picture?" "Yes, we see." That's one of the pleasures of rewatching old Sesame Street clips as an adult - I catch a lot of references and jokes that went over my head as a kid.

P.S. - No injuries/vomiting on the eve of this posting. Hurray!
P.P.S. - Happy moon landing anniversary yesterday!

SST: I Got a New Way to Walk

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Just down the street from my apartment is the intersection of Nixon Road and Huron Parkway. Until recently it was a four-way stop, which was just fine since the spot has only a moderate amount of traffic. However, somebody didn't think that a four-way stop was good enough, so they completely ripped up the intersection, as well as a block of road in every direction for good measure. After more than two months of construction and annoying detours (preventing me from seeing my beloved fence mural), they finally unveiled their new creation: a roundabout. And not just any roundabout - I've never seen so many directional signs and arrows and giant crosswalk signs and lights at one intersection. It's such overkill that people have a hard time figuring out whose turn it is to enter, so you frequently see cars just waiting for everyone else to clear out even though they have the right of way. Plus they've planted some nice young shade trees in the middle of the roundabout, so when they grow up they will nicely diminish visibility as cars for cars entering the roundabout.

But the highlight of the roundabout is the stylish red brick crosswalk for the pedestrians as they ease on down the road. I was thinking that ridiculous roundabout on Sunday when I ran into Kara Stowers, who made an SST request. Her selection struck me as apropos, so here it is:



Kara also informed about a remake with Destiny's Child, which I thought was pretty good. But since I strive to make SST an Elmo-free zone, I will refrain from directly embedding the clip here. I also discovered another version from 1993 with an unlikely collection of celebrity cameos (Rosie O'Donnell! Maya Angelou! Garth Brooks! Sally Jesse Raphael!). Unfortunately, both of those versions downplay the celebration of pedestrianism found in the original.

P.S. I'd like to thank Seth for filling in for me last week (quite admirably, I might add). I usually write my SST posts on Monday evening and they schedule them to post themselves just after midnight, but I may want to rethink my SST schedule since last Monday I broke my arm and then tonight as I wrote this I threw up twice (no more tacos for me for a while). But don't worry - I'll fight through the adversity and SST will go on.

The Curse of Sports Night

I went through quite a memorable ordeal late Monday night and into Tuesday morning, but in all the commotion I forgot to bring a camera along. So the photo below, taken at 4:33 a.m., will have to tell the story of the whole night:


So this is the story all about how I injured my...

1. Left Elbow

After breaking my foot playing basketball at Sports Night eight months ago, I decided to retire from Sports Night. But like Lance Armstrong, Brett Favre, and Michael Jordan, I just couldn't stay away and I recently started attending Sports Night again. I enjoyed a few weeks of injury-free basketball, and I was actually playing pretty decently, too. However, on Monday night during basketball at Sports Night I came up with a steal, raced up the court on a fast break, got bumped pretty hard from behind, and fell smack down onto my left elbow. At the time it didn't feel like I'd done anything too damaging and I even contemplated getting back in the game, but I decided to play it safe and head home.

I spent the next few hours at home with only mild discomfort in my elbow and I planned on waiting until morning to visit the doctor at the Student Health Center. But around midnight my elbow suddenly started throbbing with pain. And I mean throbbing. So I called upon...

2. Seth (The Photographer)

Seth was already in bed when I bellowed at him to take me to the emergency room, but he quickly threw on some clothes and came right out. I also called John McElderry, who lives in the same apartment complex and he came over immediately. It felt like my arm was probably broken, so Seth grabbed an...

3. Ace Bandage

Using the ace bandage, Seth bound my arm to my torso to try to immobilize my elbow. It took about twenty minutes to make it down the three flights of stairs to the car because every time I even slightly shifted my weight from one foot to the other it set off a chain reaction that sent pain shooting straight to my elbow. On the drive to the hospital every bump and crack in the road that even slightly jostled the car caused me great pain, so Seth ended up driving about 7 mph the whole way.

When we got to the ER, the doctors rolled the ace bandage out of the way, into the position seen in the picture. They also gave me an...

4. ER Wristband

During this whole experience, and especially when they were checking me into the ER, I was putting on quite the performance. When I am in pain, I don't cry or scream like a lot of people. Instead, I laugh and laugh and laugh like a madman. I can't stop talking and talking and talking about any random thing that comes into my head because I feel like the second I stop talking or laughing I will start noticing the pain. At the hospital the doctors and staff were all looking at me like a mental patient.

One of the odd things I said/did before leaving my apartment was requesting that Seth and John would feed me some...

5. Great Grains Cereal

I went off on this breathless riff about how I was so excited at the Kroger when I saw Great Grains on sale, but I was really concerned that the beautiful whole pecans pictured on the box would be all crushed and smashed after processing and shipping and everything. Before we left for the hospital, I just wanted to put my mind at ease about the pecans. For some reason it was a huge relief to me that the pecans were, for the most part, intact.

Other ramblings included treating the male nurse that pushed me in the wheelchair to a synopsis of the Full House episode where Stephanie accidentally cuts off Uncle Jesse's mullet, setting off a chain of events that culminates in Jesse breaking both of his arms in a motorcycle crash. After that, Jesse can't even make himself a bowl of cereal, a scenario with which I could suddenly relate because John and Seth had to feed me a handful of dry Great Grains. The nurse dryly told me that he didn't remember the episode and I was so disappointed that I told him that his Full House ignorance lead me to doubt his nursing ability.

I was blurting out so much random stuff in my pain-induced frenzy that I can't possibly remember it all, but John told me afterward that his favorite thing was me talking to the doctors using "the royal we" (à la Louis XIV), telling them that I had earned that right because I was in a lot of pain.

I kept babbling and babbling incessantly until they hooked me up with some Morphine, which is why in the above picture I have an...

6. IV Bandage

The Morphine really calmed me down and made the pain completely vanish. That is, until they wheeled me off to the x-ray room, where they made me contort my arm into many extremely painful positions, such as the...

7. Thumbs-up pose

I expected the x-ray results to come back rather quickly because it was a slow night in the ER, but Seth, John, and I ended up waiting for a couple of hours before the doctor finally showed up. It turns out that they couldn't see any big breaks or fractures on the x-rays, but they suspected that there were some unseen hairline fractures along the head of the radius. They concluded that the main reason I was in so much pain was that my elbow had filled up with so much blood that any sort of movement was putting an intense amount of pressure on all the bones and muscles in my arm. They said that it wasn't necessary to put me in a cast, but that I would need to spend a couple of weeks in a...

8. U of M Sling

While I was relieved to hear that I wouldn't have to wear a cast, I thought to myself, "That's it?!? They're just giving me a lousy sling and that's supposed to make me feel better?!?" But lo and behold, I put the sling on and with my arm supported I suddenly could do many nice little things with greatly reduced pain, such as walking. I also got a prescription for...

9. Vicodin

The final leg of our adventure was a trip to CVS Pharmacy at 4 a.m. to pick up my prescriptions for Vicodin and a stool softener (apparently painkillers really slow down your bowels). We finally arrived back at our apartment at 4:30 a.m., and a few minutes later Seth snapped that picture of me.

I've lived a relatively pain-free life so far so I maybe this doesn't carry a whole lot of weight, but I can honestly say that I experienced more sheer pain on Monday night than any other day in my life. I'm so grateful to Seth and John for being there with me during the whole ordeal, and I owe them big time. And I'm grateful for modern painkillers.

With the Vicodin on my side, I was able to curl up on the Lovesac and sleep until about 12:30 p.m. When I woke up, the maniacal hysteria of the previous night had been replaced by achy gloom. I was stuck wearing my basketball clothes since it was still too painful to move my arm in order to change my shirt or take a shower. So I just lay on the couch all day feeling achy, greasy, and alone. Fortunately, my friend Amy came over later and brought along my old primary caregiver from my whooping cough days: Buffy.

But today (Wednesday) I woke up feeling a lot less pain in my arm and I was finally able to shower and change out of my gross...

10. Tour de Food T-shirt

I went to the orthopedic doctor and he told me that I am healing well and that I only need to stay in the sling for a couple weeks. Plus at the doctor's office they had a bunch of stickers so my sling's all tricked out with Superman, The Incredible Hulk, and Thomas the Tank Engine.

*****

So if you've read this far, I know that you are a true friend and I need you to do me a big favor: A few months from now my arm will be back to normal and I forget all the pain and suffering I have incurred from Sports Night. Please, dear friend, do not let me go back to Sports Night! Don't let me hurt myself again! Remind me of the boot and of the sling. Remind me of The Curse of Sports Night.

SST: Near and Far

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Hi, so this is Seth. Brian hurt his arm today and is unable to type. He has graciously given me temporary power over his blarg. I've never blargged before, so please don't judge me too harshly.

I have taken great care to select the proper Sesame Street clip today. After several hours of exhaustive clip viewing, Brian's current condition (limp arms flailing as he walks) has inspired me to present this little tidbit of Grover. I hope you all enjoy.

Proud to Be an American

When I was in the Provo Missionary Training Center I used to use my daily gym time to take a much-needed break from my companions. Not that I didn't love Elder Parkes and Elder Velasquez (I was in a trio in the MTC), but I had a really hard time adjusting to spending every second of my life with two other human beings hovering around me all the time. But during gym time we were allowed to leave our companions as long as we stayed within the confines of the soccer fields. So I used to go down to the farthest corner of the farthest field and enjoy my precious alone time, which I would usually use to sing a few scales or a Schubert song or two because I was really afraid that I would completely lose my ability to sing after two years without practice.

A few days before our departure for Brazil I was down at my customary corner of the soccer field when it suddenly dawned on me that I was going to leave my homeland behind for two years and live in a foreign country. I looked across the street at the MTC and saw all the row of flags from all around the world, and my eyes fixed on the ol' Stars and Stripes. I suddenly felt extremely patriotic and I put my hand over my heart and sang "The Star Spangled Banner." At the conclusion of the song I was startled to hear enthusiastic applause from behind me. I turned around and saw a group of middle-aged female joggers who had stopped to listen to my performance. A few of them were wiping away tears and they all told me how inspiring it was to see such a patriotic young missionary.

The point is, I love my country. The United States is the greatest place to live and I'm so grateful that I was born here. I feel like all of us Americans feel that way at heart, but a lot of us are guarded about expressing it on days other than the Fourth of July. Recently I've heard a lot of people bagging on the song "I'm Proud to Be an American," both for its content and its aesthetic value. Come on everybody! Are we so jaded that we're embarrassed by the song's straightforward patriotism? "I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. And I wont forget the men who died, who gave that right to me. And I gladly stand up, next to you and defend her still today. ‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land, God bless the USA." How awesome is that? Okay, I could do without the "ain't no doubt" phraseology, but it's still a beautiful sentiment and I really am proud to be an American.

I got a great lesson in unselfconscious patriotism during the three summers I spent living in the small town of Wooster, Ohio, where I performed with the Ohio Light Opera company. It's the kind of town where there is an apple pie cooling on every window, a flag waving on every porch, and every other Midwestern cliche you can think of. It was the greatest place to spend the Fourth of July because every year we put on a free concert in the main square, and the whole town came out for the occasion. My friend Anthony wrote a nice post about these concerts last year called "Too Cool for School" in which he really captured the feeling of the experience:

Ohio Light Opera does a little Fourth of July concert on the town square of Wooster Ohio every year. We put together a few little patriotic choral numbers and the orchestra plays. It's really... cheesy... and awesome. I mean both of those adjectives with all my heart. This year we did an Irving Berlin medley and an Armed Forces salute. The music is not great. It's cheesy. But when we stand up on those risers and look out at the veterans stand up and be recognized and then sing to them... that's awesome in the real sense of the word.

The guy I stood next to runs wardrobe for the company and also plays little parts in a few of the shows every season. He had in his music folder a photo of his son who just joined the army last year. He may have thought it was cheesy, but you couldn't tell. He gladly stood up, proud to be an American and said God bless the USA.

Then we went to see the town fireworks display. Keep in mind, this is Wooster Ohio. Of course, that doesn't mean anything to most people. That's my point. The town is small enough that most people don't know it exists. So you'd kinda expect a wimpy fireworks display. Nope. It rocked. These people got it. This is our nation's frickin' birthday! Let's shoot the wad to say happy birthday to Uncle Sam! There maybe problems in Capitol Hill and in the White House, but we don't need to pretend we're too cool for America.

Hear, hear! In summary, hooray America! Last night I went with a big group of friends to Manchester, Michigan for a classic American fireworks display and it was perfect. Last year on the 4th of July I was in Manaus, Brazil, and while I shouldn't complain about being on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Amazon, I really missed being home in the U.S. for Independence Day. I just reread the post I wrote right after getting home from said trip and remembered the tremendous sense of relief and patriotism that have washed over me every time I've returned from a trip abroad:

"Greetings from the Estados Unidos da América. I got back yesterday morning at about 11:00, and I was so happy to be back that I got a little emotional walking through the Detroit airport when I saw such American symbols as the American Flag, an A&W restaurant, and ESPN playing at a sports bar. As much as I love Brazil, its culture, people, music, food, etc., I am American to the core and I'm happy to be back."

God bless the U.S.A.!