The past week has been crazy. The flood in our basement really threw us off, so we definitely haven't done everything we thought we would a week and a half ago. But, I think we have been pretty productive, totally redoing our kitchen in particular. We ran into IKEA 30 minutes before they closed Monday night and managed to grab every new piece of furniture we needed. It was like a scavenger hunt... trying to find the shortcuts between sections, searching out our pieces and writing down their codes, scrambling through the self-serve section and pulling down boxes! Pretty exciting stuff for these two home-bodies.

Then, of course, we spent the rest of this week putting the stuff together. The only piece you will actually notice if you come to our house is our new china cabinet, which allowed us to bring the majority of our wedding gifts back to Philly. We could throw quite a party!... if we weren't heading back to clinical rotations on Monday.

On top of the flood, my other adventure for the week came on Sunday night. I had driven up to NY for a family combo-birthday party and I was driving Amy as far back as Philly so she could catch an Amtrak. It was a 9:30pm train and we, of course, missed it. I felt partially to blame and I didn't want Amy sitting in the Amtrak station for an hour alone, so I thought I'd do the sisterly thing and drive her down to DC -- it's only another 2 1/2 hours from Philly and I thought it would be some good sister-bonding time. Well, we got A LOT of bonding time in there. Lesson: do not attempt to drive ANYWHERE on the east coast on a Sunday night in the summer. It was a combination of the vacation traffic and the fact that Sunday night is the start of the overnight-construction-work-week. Then, I guess it didn't help that I took a detour that didn't actually go anywhere.

See the road that just stops right before the railroad tracks on the left?


Well, on my phone, that road appears to cut under 95 and come out the other side, just in time to get back on at the next exit. No no, it does exactly what it appears to do on this map (and what it appears to do if you zoom in enough on the phone too). Let me just say that the pavement ended as we crossed the state line over in Maryland, and that should sum up our surroundings. Crazy Elkton.

Anyway, I got back to Philly at 5am, and Amy could've gotten to DC much faster on the train. But, let me tell you, the traffic is A LOT better between 3 and 4am!

Like I said, since then, we've just been at home organizing, cleaning, building furniture. And, watching the Olympics. It's been pretty fun to be on vacation while the Olympics are on. There's a twelve hour time difference, so at night starting at 8pm you can watch live. You can watch reruns from overnight during the day though, on channels like MSNBC. Thank goodness for that because at night, all they show is swimming, gymnastics, and volleyball. I guess these are sports where the Americans are expected to do quite well so they think they'll appeal most to viewers... but after a week I'm a little tired of them.

The best event I watched so far was a rerun of whitewater kayaking (did you even know that was a sport? they play in on a man-made course in Beijing!) where the Americans weren't even competing. I was cheering for the guy from Togo and he won the silver medal, his country's first Olympic medal ever! That's exciting. And, Glen and I watched Poland vs.... (I can't remember) play Handball... which is like soccer except with your hands. It kind of looks like lacrosse without sticks or basketball without dribbling. The players don't wear any pads but they're constantly knocking each other on the gym floor. Craziness! We couldn't really discern any rules. We also watched some fencing but I really have no idea what's going on when I watch that.

So, last night I was very excited to see that track and field had finally started! Something to freshen up our evenings. An American girl got the bronze in the 10,000 meters, only the third time for an American to place in that event. I also saw pieces of reruns from the women's septathalon -- it's fun to see all the crazy things they make one person do. I hope that when the basketball tournament gets closer to the finals that they'll move those games into prime time. They've been playing them at 7pm Beijing time, 7am our time and we haven't been able to catch any reruns.

And before we say goodbye to swimming, we've got one more Phelps race. Last night was amazing!! I hope you watched. He was going to lose and then somehow moved his arms faster than the speed of light during his last stroke and touched 0.01 before the other guy. And afterwards, he always seems truly humble about it and gives comments to the interviewers that make you actually like him. So, I don't mind the emphasis on him... I could just do with a couple fewer montages of clips set to moving music.

That's the end of the Alyson Olympics Digest. I think I rambled about that because as soon as I finish this I'm going to go read for my Psych rotation that starts on Monday, and I am absolutely freaked out about that. "It'll be fine" -- I know, I know. But I took an entire year off of med school and you can't imagine how out of the groove I feel. I don't know how much I'll be writing once that starts so, adios for the time being and wish me luck!