Philadelphia

We had a really wonderful day yesterday. Since the kids had the day off, we headed to Philadelphia. I had a lesson scheduled for Mark at 9:30 a.m., so I looked for a hotel for the night before. The cheapest, cruddiest hotels were $150/night, so we decided to just drive up the morning of. We were actually out the door by 6:15 a.m. Crazy, huh? I couldn’t believe everybody actually got ready, but I think Glo and Hannah were just excited to go, and Mark knew he needed to go for his lesson. Looking back on it, I have no idea now we made it all the way to Utah and back in the Volvo. It felt so cramped yesterday! However, everybody plugged into the DVD players, and John and I spent the time talking. Thankfully, too, Mark took a nap. We got to Angela’s 10 minutes early (it was a miracle), and it was so nice to get there in the daytime considering it’s usually dark and we’re winding down the day. Mark, naturally, had a great lesson, and I can tell from Angela that she’s just really happy with his playing.

I took John and the girls to Ruby’s Diner. It was okay food, but for the price, our pancakes should have been studded with diamonds! It’s always funny to see the difference in prices between where we live and the city—it makes me appreciate po-dunky State College even more.

On a side note, John just started another diet study. He called up, they took his blood, and signed him up for the Avocado study. It's exactly what it sounds like: five months (yes, five months) of eating an avocado daily. It’s the longest study they have, and not surprisingly, John qualified for it. How? you might ask. Remember when he was on the Almond Diet, and he dropped his cholesterol from 240 down to 180? When he went back in and got his cholesterol tested again, it was back up to 245! That’s after only 4 months of free feeding. Anyway, he doesn’t want to go back on his cholesterol meds, so he’s going to eat avocadoes to bring it back down. Darn those genetics!

Anyway, sitting at Ruby’s, John wasn’t about to let that food pass him by. For the first two weeks, he’s supposed to be eating the “typical American diet”, but it includes things like egg whites and Lean Cuisine. I don’t know any typical American that eats those things, and John doesn’t either. So, in typical John fashion, he said, “I’m going to eat the actual typical American diet, and order French toast”. Glo got pigs-in-blankets which were big sausages wrapped in pancakes. Yeah, John finished those off too. He also took my two eggs that he ordered over-easy. At the end, he had this soupy concoction of syrup, butter and egg yolks swimming on his plate, and he just sopped it all up with Glo’s leftover pancakes. And he wonders why his cholesterol is so high?

We went back, picked up Mark and headed for Glo’s lesson with Amy in downtown Philly. Her front door literally looks out on the backside of the Franklin Institute. It’s very beautiful, but it’s a pain to get to. Thankfully, Angela gave me the quick directions again (avoiding the traffic), and we got there within 25 minutes. Everybody (except John) wanted to come in—Glo for her lesson, me to take notes, Mark because he finds the whole string-player thing fascinating, and Hannah because she is sooooo missing having a teacher now. We rang the doorbell, and after a minute, Amy answered it, and I could see immediately that something was wrong. She told us that she thought her water had just broken, and she thought that she needed to head to the hospital. I didn’t care and was ready to run off of her front doorstep, but she felt so guilty about having to cancel the lesson. Too, she hadn’t been able to find our phone number to call us and tell us. I told her that being married to an OB/Gyn, this didn’t bother me at all—I’m used to babies coming at the strangest times—and we had plenty of other stuff to do. She then started complaining about the whole inconvenience of it all, considering she had a C-section planned for next Thursday, and because she and her husband had a performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in three hours (he was already dressed in his tux, even). I just had to smile. She’s going to need to prepare for 18+ years of inconveniences after that baby is born! She even kept talking to us (when I really felt like we should just leave) and was telling us how she had run into Adam Unsworth (the Michigan horn teacher) when he came back to play Mahler with the Philly Orchestra last week. She too went up to him and started talking about Mark, and he told her also that he was really impressed with Mark’s playing. I don’t think Adam can forget who Mark is if he wanted to I’m just glad that so many people are looking out for Mark and understand the “I know so-and-so” system and are using it to Mark’s best advantage! Turns out, Amy had the baby 2 1/2 hours later, so I’m glad she didn’t try to have a lesson with us!

Anyway, we drove around the block to the parking garage for the Franklin Institute and headed in. I could hardly believe that both John and Johannah haven’t been there yet, so they were really, really excited to go in. Of course, we couldn’t find a parking place in the parking structure at all, but there were a couple of wanky places where nobody else would park.

Nobody except …. yeah, you fill in the blank. Nobody except …. John! So, Mark and I got out of the Volvo and guided him into a spot that was between a badly parked van and a huge concrete pillar. To his credit, he backed the car in there, and we were all amazed.

The Franklin Institute was packed! I’m not sure if other schools had the day off too, but there were more people there than I have ever seen. I was glad we now had 2 extra hours of time and we were able to see most of the place. The walk-through heart, the train station, the space station. The kids even had a chance to make paper, and Johannah and Mark were thrilled to be the only kids (aka teenagers) that were actually strong enough to turn the paper press.

John was in heaven when we found "the surgical center". Where the label on the instruments

said "Various Vascular Clamps", he could tell us that there were Kocher clamps, ring forceps, hemostats, and Metzenbaum scissors. He "pimped" Mark just like a medical student about the x-rays, and in explained, in detail, to Glo what was going on with the open heart surgery.

We went to a planetarium show about Black Holes. Man, it was pretty cerebral stuff, but such an excellent presentation. We were still talking about it on the way home yesterday. We also saw a show in the IMAX Theater about mummies (guess who picked that show?) It was excellent. It was all about the mummification process and the pharaohs. Too, it showed what life was like in the time of the pharaohs and explained the whole burial procedure. The best part was seeing (reenacted, of course) how the mummies were discovered. John just loved it and so did I, surprisingly. Too, for the first time, John and Hannah got to ride the Sky Bike! John was amazing—his “lean” was probably 45+ degrees. Hannah refused to lean at all and rode the thing straight. However, in her usual way of doing things, after getting off, she realized what she had missed and got back in line to do it again. The second time, she got into it and was leaning way over (but she still had a look of terror on her face). I’m just so proud of her that she did it.

This was the first time that I’ve been out on my ankle without the boot for an extended period of time. I was really proud of myself and so was Mark. In fact, about 2 hours in, Mark told me that he had completely forgotten that I even had a problem—I was doing everything so normally. The only times I was reminded of it were when I went downstairs, and when I was climbing through the heart (more on that later). After about 4 hours on it, I realized that it was starting to hurt a bit. When I sat down and pulled up my pants’ legs, John freaked out a little when he saw the bad ankle almost twice the size of the good ankle. After that, there was no more walking, and when the kids wanted to stay and do more, John cut them off and said we were going home. You must admit that John wanting to go home from any activity is very unusual, so I knew he was worried.

How is the ankle, you might ask? Well, I’m in intensive therapy now. The main problem is limited mobility. If you look at your ankle when you step down a step (and the ankle you are looking at is the one still resting on the upper step), you can see that it bends to about a 30-degree angle while the other foot steps down. At this point, my ankle won’t bend less than 0 degrees (or, in other words, it stays at a 90 degree angle). When walking, I have a bit of a limp because it won’t bend forward, but walking downstairs is a mess. I tend to go down sideways, so that the ankle doesn’t need to bend. However, the more I walk, and the more I go to therapy and do my exercises at home, the greater my mobility. Just last Tuesday (after doing all the airport walking and campus tour walking at Northwestern), I could bend the ankle to about 15 degrees. My therapist was thrilled, literally, and is planning a new regimen beginning this Tuesday. The best part (besides being able to walk) is that my foot doesn’t turn blue anymore. I guess with the walking my circulation is getting better. I think John misses that little party trick a bit, but at the same time, he used to get really worried when I would get out of the shower (when the warm water increases the circulation through the entire body), and my foot would be dark purple. The blood was trying to get down, but couldn’t, and it certainly couldn’t get back up my leg. Now, I’m just dealing with swelling. If I elevate it (like I did after Franklin), it goes back to normal within an hour, thank goodness.

So, the whole reason (as it turns out) that Johannah wanted to come to Philly was to get a Philly Cheese steak sandwich.Granted, I told her that we could get one at Subway, but she wanted the real deal from the real place. So, while feeding Mark at the Bistro in the Franklin (seriously, he eats like every 3-4 hours, and they are complete meals—even John commented on it even though I’ve told him a million times that I can’t keep up with Mark’s eating habits), John and I looked up the best Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches on our handy-dandy iPhones, and used the MAPS app to locate the nearest one, and we were off.

You know how in big cities something is only 1 mile away, or “9 minutes” by GPS, but when you start driving in traffic it turns into 1 mile and “30 minutes”? Yeah, we basically headed into the belly of the beast and drove more downtown than we already were. Campo’s is the name of the place that sells the best Philly Cheese Steak sandwich. John stayed with the car out on the street (I wasn’t paying $12 to park for 30 minutes in a structure, and he didn’t want me walking anymore than I had to), and the rest of us headed in. It was such a typical Philly place. Brick walls, framed pictures of famous people, and a not-very-nice cashier. Of course, when one of the regulars came in, she

was all smiles and everybody was talking to the old fart, but for us, it was all business. Even though the menu had 50,000 things on it, we went for just the traditional Philly Cheese Steak, and honestly, when I took my first bite, it didn’t disappoint. Really, there’s no way to describe it—the meat was real (not frozen and reheated like at Subway), the cheese was so gooey that when we tried to take a bite, it just kept stretching and stretching, and the bun was soft. John got onions on his, but instead of being just thrown on top, they were worked into the meat, so that I think any of us could have ordered onions and not even known they were there. Yeah, John is really sticking with his diet, eh? The kids couldn’t eat theirs fast enough, and Hannah was so grateful that we had been willing to go there. Her appreciation increased the longer we were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, trying to get out of Philly at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon! John relieved his stress by eating his entire sandwich while being stuck in that traffic.

We had to stop a million times on the way home (even though we didn’t stop once on the way there) for drinks and bathroom breaks, and for McDonald’s fries so that I could stay awake driving. Too, the Penn State/Northwestern game is here today, so 322 was crowded with RV’s and all kinds of football traffic. However, I think John has really enjoyed the last three days off, because he was in full form yesterday, keeping us all laughing, and not getting mad at all. I think working two jobs has been kind of crazy on his psyche lately, and of course, my ankle issues have been weighing on his mind for months now. Yesterday felt like a really normal vacation day—everybody was happy, I saved us $200 (by not staying in a hotel and getting the dog nanny), we saw cool things that were new to John and he got good food. It was a really nice day.