Jul

1

New Jersey and New York

Filed Under Events, Travel by Andrew | 2 Comments 

On Sunday after the wedding we drove to northern New Jersey to spend a few days with Mel’s aunt and uncle. The driving wasn’t too bad, even though we were on I-95 for most of the way.

On Sunday afternoon there was a picnic for family involving hot dogs, hamburgers, sausages (all grilled), lots of salads and chips – and a little bit of rain. In fact, it rained off and on quite a bit when we up that way. Apparently, they’ve had a lot more rain than usual this spring.

Mel and I were relegated to a tent in the back yard. The Boones have a large indoor cat, and Mel is allergic to cats. The tent was ok, but it rained a little at night and the sun came up very early. I don’t think we got much sleep.

On Monday we went with Mel’s cousins into NYC. Stephanie drove, since we determined that finding parking would be cheaper than taking public transit. We parked near Times Square and then got on the subway to Chinatown. Morgan wanted to go to Chinatown – the good part, not the purely tourist areas. We ended up walking around Chinatown quite a bit. It’s a little ironic how much Chinatown has “invaded” Little Italy

. Italians have a long, influential history in NYC, but the district they are commonly associated with is tiny compared to the neighboring Chinatown.

DSC_0325After Chinatown we got on the subway (and waited for a while) to go to Central Park. We got off on Madison Avenue and walked to FAO Schwartz. While we were in the store, the fire alarm apparently went off, though we couldn’t really tell in the store. When we got out into the plaza (where the Apple store is), it was covered in suited businessmen and women milling about. After a few minutes, some fire trucks showed up and clarified what was going on. 

We got lunch at a hot dog stand at the corner of Central Park. After lunch Mike and Cameron went to the Apple store, while Mel, Stephanie, Morgan and I walked down 5th Avenue. The girls wanted to find the American Girl store. I actually went in when we found it. It was kind of fun. It would be an awesome treat for a little girl, but it was fascinating how much time and money goes into the dolls. They had a hair salon (for the dolls), shelves and shelves of clothing options, a photo studio, and a cafe. DSC_0333

On Monday night, after we got back to NJ, Mel and I went to supper in White Plains with my grandparents. We went to a nice Italian restaurant and then to a park near the dam that holds back the water for NYC. Getting there and back was yet another reason to love GPS. It’s amazing how easy it is to find your way.

On Tuesday we went with Mel’s family to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. The GPS didn’t do so well this time. It took us through downtown Jersey City. We got there, but it’s hard to believe that it was the fastest way.

DSC_0517 Ellis Island was really cool. I think we got there early enough to just beat the rush, though people arrive a boatload at a time, so there tends to be large clumps milling about. The exhibits were really fascinating. After a while, some started to seem a bit redundant, but the overall effect was very nice. There was lots of detail and first-person stories about coming into the USA. It seemed like the National Park Service (who runs the island now) wanted to dispel some of the popular notions about Ellis Island. Often people think that immigrants coming through Ellis Island were treated little better than so much cattle. It’s true that they were often poor and that conditions were hard, but most of that had nothing to do with Ellis Island. Further, poor as they were, they were often much better off here than where they came from. Most people made it through immigration in less than a day (90%). Only 2% were denied admission, and often for very obvious reasons. The immigration officials seemed genuinely concerned for the welfare of the people, and sometimes that meant forcing them to endure some discomfort in order to reduce their overall stay in immigration.

One of the most interesting exhibits to me was the room about mental health. Immigration officials wanted to prevent insane people and those who weren’t intelligent enough to work out of the country. It seems like a cruel policy, but they wanted to avoid having to become a giant welfare state (remember, this was the early 1900s). But often the immigrants came from very poor backgrounds, and many of them didn’t speak English. The psychologists had to devise psychometric tests (including intelligence tests) that didn’t depend on culture or language. Of course, modern psychologists debate endlessly about the cultural aspect of intelligence tests as if past Americans were benighted bigots who unjustly discriminated because of invalid tests. But what happens if the person you’re testing doesn’t speak English, can’t read, and has never held a pencil? The Ellis Island psychologists realized the impact of all these factors, and more, and seem to have done a pretty good job evaluating immigrants in spite of themselves. DSC_0555

Liberty Island was fun too, though there isn’t much to do. Security onto the monument is tight and access is limited. We got to go, but we spent a while in lines. On Saturday, July 4, the NPS will open the crown again to visitors. We were just a few days early.

We spent Tuesday night with Tim and Mel Taylor. They’re living in Newark now so that Tim can go to law school. We had a good time with them, and a fairly decent night of sleep before our trip home.

On Wednesday we headed home. It’s about 8 hours from Newark to Radford, but we took a slight detour to visit Gettysburg National Military Park. We didn’t really have that much time, so we only did part of the 24-mile driving tour. We also went the the cemetery (call us weird) where Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address. It was hot, so we didn’t want to walk that much outside, and the museum was a little too expensive to justify an hour’s visit.

We made it home around 8:30, completely exhausted. I think we’re still recovering. But it was a fun trip. We’ll have to do it again when we have more time to enjoy it.

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Jun

27

Boone Wedding

Filed Under Events, Travel by Melanie | Leave a Comment 

Andrew and I were able to take some time off of work last week to attend my cousin Brandon’s wedding. My family came and stayed with us Wednesday night, and Thursday morning they drove to Philadelphia, PA for some sight seeing. Andrew and I left Friday morning. We needed to be at the Philly airport at 5:15pm to pick up my brother Matt who was flying from camp in Wyoming. We had a few hours before he arrived, so we parked at the airport and took the train into the city. We met up with Michael (my parents had already left to get ready for the rehearsal dinner), and we were able to see the Liberty Bell and the outside of Independence Hall before heading back to the airport to get Matt.

After getting Matt, we drove to the hotel to pick up my cousin Morgan so we could go get supper. We hung around the hotel for awhile waiting for our parents to get back. Andrew and I were staying with some friends of Aunt Debbie and Uncle Dave, so we left later in the evening. Here are the funny hotel room stories.

The toilet in Morgan’s room didn’t work. She called several times asking them to fix it. Eventually the front desk asked if she needed it tonight (dumb question). She said she could send Morgan a plunger or move them to another room. I encouraged her to move to another room. (Why should the paying guest have to plunge her own toilet when it was stopped up before she got the room?) So, we helped her move. After moving everything we noticed the deadbolt in the door was out and wouldn’t close back in which kept the door from closing. We unsuccessfully tried to fix it. Then I had the bright idea of playing with my brothers’ door to see if we could figure out what happened. That resulted in their deadbolt not closing either. Andrew called the front desk and was trying to explain the problem to the girl there. Meanwhile Morgan started playing with the door again. She discovered that turning the door handle the opposite way solved the problem! Meanwhile, earlier that day when Aunt Debbie and Uncle Dave checked into the hotel they were informed that there was no room registered for David Boone. They had a Daniel Boone (my dad) and a Christine Boone (my mom). So, Uncle Dave took my parents room. Then when my parents checked in they didn’t have the right size room for them, so they were given two rooms for the same price. Meanwhile, later that night Uncle Don, Becky, and Kyle and Candace (cousins) checked in and were given Uncle Dave’s room. They walked in the room to discover Aunt Debbie’s mom sitting there. At first no one recognized the other until Kyle finally remembered. They were given another room. Then when Uncle Dave returned from the rehearsal dinner their keys didn’t work because their room had been reassigned! The next morning my parents toilet had gotten clogged as well!

The wedding was at 2:30pm. We found the church without much trouble thanks to the GPS. It was nicely attended. I have never seen so many cameras and phones taking pictures during a wedding before! The wedding went pretty smoothly. Brandon and Justine got a little choked up during their vows. My cousin Stephanie was singing a duet, and her microphone didn’t work, but she worked around that well. The funniest part was the kiss. As Brandon and Justine kissed, the groomsmen all pulled a piece of paper out with a number on it to rate the kiss. The audience roared with laughter. Only the groomsmen knew it was going to happen.

The reception was at Shady Maple, a Smorgasbord run by Mennonites. Apparently it’s a popular place, and as the teenager whose house we stayed at said, “Most of the people there need two seats.” Shady Maple was an hour away, so the reception was at 5pm. It was amazing when we pulled in. It was a gigantic building and parking lot, and the line out front was incredibly long. I was glad we were in a banquet room. According to the Shady Maple website, the buffet room can seat 1, 200 people. It has a 30,000 square foot gift shop in the basement.

We sat at the table for awhile waiting for the wedding party to arrive. When they arrived, we waited some more for the microphones to work. The reception was long. After we finished eating we waited awhile. There was going to be a slide show, but it took a long time to get set up, and then it was a 25 minute presentation! We waited awhile more and Brandon and Justine cut the cake. Brandon was nice, but Justine smeared it on his nose. Eventually Justine threw her bouquet which was caught by Stephanie! The couple finally got out around 10pm, but the night wasn’t over for them yet.

A little later, Aunt Debbie received a phone call from a frantic Justine. Her luggage wasn’t in the car. It was in Stephanie’s car which was back at the church. No one had moved it to the getaway car. They made arrangements to meet at the church, but it was a 45 min drive. Then Cameron realized that HIS luggage was in Brandon and Justine’s car! They finally met up at 11pm to switch the luggage.

The next morning we packed up and headed to New Jersey for a few days at Uncle Dave’s house.

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Jun

13

Externship Update

Filed Under News by Melanie | Leave a Comment 

I have finished 3 weeks at Wythe County Community Hospital. I’m still enjoying it. Most of the patients I see actually come to the outpatient rehab unit. My supervisor and I have seen a few patients in the hospital.

We see a large variety of patients in the rehab unit. So far the age range is about 16 months to 85 years. A lot of the patients come in for swallowing treatment. We place small electrodes on the neck or face which provide electrical stimulation to the muscles. This helps strengthen the muscles. The toddler and school age children are there for articulation, language, or auditory processing. The two children under 2 have trouble with swallowing, so we do oral motor exercises with them. There are several voice patients as well. Usually, voice patients are few and far between, but I’ve gotten some good experience with them. One had a total laryngectomy (where muscles, bone, and cartilage from the epiglottis to the trachea are removed so there aren’t any vocal folds to use for speech) and uses an electrolarynx. Another has one vocal fold that is very weak and doesn’t move much. Another patient (a preacher) just had cysts removed from his vocal folds so we are teaching him how to use his voice correctly. There are also a few patients who have aphasia as the result of a stroke.

Two of the most interesting patients are both in their 80s. The one was a medical doctor who was still practicing until he had his stroke. He is so sweet and is making a lot of progress, although he can’t really say much yet.

The other patient is there for a swallowing disorder. He has been putting his food in a blender and eating it that way for 10-15 years! The first time I saw him he was given some fruit to eat. He had eaten some and then said he was finished. My supervisor didn’t think he had swallowed very much for the amount he had eaten, so she had him open his mouth. Sure enough, he hadn’t really eaten any of the fruit. He had pocketed it all in his cheeks. He said he didn’t want us to feel bad because he couldn’t eat it, so he stuffed it in his cheeks and was going to spit it out after he left. Apparently he does this around other people. Aside from that story, he is a funny man and makes me laugh.

So far things at the hospital have been pretty slow. We’ve done several modified swallow studies where food is coated with barium and the patient swallows this food while an x-ray is taken. We watch the x-ray to see how the food is swallowed and if any of it goes into the airway. We’ve also seen 3 patients admitted to the hospital. So far I’ve just watched my supervisor evaluate those 3 patients.

I still have most of the summer to go for my externship. Hopefully I will continue to enjoy it even though I don’t care for the long drive (45 min one way). I’ll try to periodically update any interesting stories throughout the summer.

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May

23

Spring clinic

Filed Under News by Melanie | Leave a Comment 

Clinic this semester was a little different. I had two clients and diagnostics this semester.

My first client was about 9 and came because he couldn’t say his “r” sound. He had attended clinic the previous spring, but hadn’t been back since. However, during the first session he said every single “r” correctly. During the year he wasn’t in clinic he began to use “r” correctly. Since there was nothing to help him with, he was dismissed after the second session.

It took a few weeks for me to get a new client. This one was coming for accent reduction. He was a new client and wanted help because he thought he had a very thick Spanish accent. I say “thought” because his accent wasn’t very thick at all. He was a 6′ 5 black man, and I felt very small standing next to him. We enjoyed working together. We worked on vowel sounds and using final consonants. He made progress. He was a very nice man. My classmates and teachers would see me walking with this huge man down the hall and would later ask if that was my client and comment on how tall he was.

My other client came once a week for stuttering. He made a lot of progress the previous semester, but I didn’t see as much this semester. We also worked on being descriptive in writing. His stuttering wasn’t too severe, but he also didn’t seem too interested on working to keep from stuttering.

For diagnostic clinic I had a partner. We spent a few hours doing speech and hearing screenings at a nearby preschool. The kids were so cute! Then we had 3 different kids where we did more specific testing. All 3 were between the ages of 3-5. The first boy came because of articulation concerns, but we determined his errors were age appropriate. The second girl was so cute and sweet, but we couldn’t understand a word she said. She was hard to test because we weren’t sure what she was saying, so we didn’t know if she was giving the right answers or not on the language portion of the test. The third girl didn’t talk much at all. She was shy and wanted her mom in the room. We had a hard time testing her as well. We ended up referring both girls to the clinic.

Diagnostics was difficult because I didn’t get along with the supervisor. She also took forever to edit reports. We would do multiple drafts and each time she would change different things or change things she had added in. She also tended to add in puncuation and grammar mistakes. She was very frustrating to both my partner and me.

This Tuesday I begin my externship at Wythe County Community Hospital. I’m sure it will be a very interesting experience.

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May

23

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May

20

Dan Brown and American Religion

Filed Under Ideas by Andrew | Leave a Comment 

Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, serves up a fine article: Dan Brown’s America. Brown is, of course, the best-selling author of The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, both of which have been made into hit movies. Douthat suggests that Brown’s success relies on — or at least is a symptom of — a shift in American public religion.

Douthat argues that American religion has devolved into vague spirituality, divorced from any sort of structure or serious doctrine. His critique of ”spiritual” or “religious” Americans is insightful, but he doesn’t let them off the hook. The New Testament does not present religion this way.1

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.


  1. One might argue that it doesn’t quite present Jesus in Douthat’s way either back↩
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May

18

Spring 2009 Classes

Filed Under News by Melanie | Leave a Comment 

The semester is over, so it’s time for my update of the semester. This semester was probably my busiest one so far with 4 classes and clinic. My classes this semester included Fluency, Traumatic Brain Injury, Aphasia, and Dysphagia. Technically I should have taken Aphasia and Dysphagia last year, but they had to be postponed due to schedule conflicts.

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) was a good class. Typically, students take a class in Childhood Apraxia of Speech, but because most of my classmates are interested in the medical setting and they did not get much of an aphasia class, Apraxia was replaced.  TBI was taught by the director of the clinic who worked several years with this population. The teacher doesn’t have a doctorate, so she has to get special permission to teach. This is the same teacher we had for Motor Speech Disorders last year. She is still one of the best teacher’s I’ve had. In the class we learned about cognitive communication disorders (impairments in memory, executive functioning, and attention) that result from a TBI and how to treat people with these impairments. It is an interesting field, but very heartbreaking to see individuals with injuries that have caused such damage to the brain.

Fluency (or Stuttering) was somewhat boring. The teacher is a retired professor who came back to teach the class since the department lacks someone with expertise in this area. The man who taught our class has been a speech therapist for at least 50 years. He personally knew a lot of the big names in the field of stuttering.

Aphasia was one of the best classes I’ve taken. The teacher was also a retired professor. Because of a previous obligation, she agreed to teach the class only if she could be finished by the middle of April. As a result, we had class 5 hours a week. While it was intense, it was wonderful to get all that free time in April. Aphasia is an impairment in speaking, listening, reading, or writing that a person can have after a stroke in the language area of the brain. We learned about the different types of aphasia. This is such a fascinating field. Aphasia can differ. The person may not be able to talk much at all but can comprehend fairly well, the person may talk but nothing he says makes sense and he can’t comprehend very well, the person may be able to talk normally (what he says makes sense) with an impaired ability to repeat,  or a person may be unable to talk normally but be able to repeat. Of course each type of aphasia can be to varying degrees and levels for each person. I am interested in working some more with people with aphasia.

Dysphagia (swallowing disorders) was taught by an adjunct teacher. She works part time at a hospital in Roanoke. She’s taught the class almost every year since she graduated with her master’s. She was a good teacher and really knew her material. It was amazing to learn how everything works and comes together to make a swallow occur. It was even more amazing to realize all that has to happen happens so fast. I won’t mention the specifics here, but if you are interested just ask me. We also learned how to treat people who have problems with swallowing. I decided I’m not very interested in this field. I don’t want to be looking in people’s mouths at their unchewed food, hearing them choke, cleaning out their mouths, etc.

Well, that’s a brief summary about my classes this semester. I was able to get an A in all of my classes. The good news is that I have completed all of my classes for my Master’s degree! I’m very happy about that. I have 7 credits and 2 externships left. I will do a 5 credit externship this summer in a medical setting and a 2 credit externship this fall in a school setting. I am taking the Praxis 2 exam on June 13 and will have a comprehensive exam in the fall. I’m looking forward to graduating on December 18, 2009.

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