Liverpool vs. Porto

Liverpool - Porto 2-1
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As much as I love baseball, basketball and hockey, the best annual competition in the world has to be the Champions League in Europe. The top teams of country compete in a large tournment which eventually gets narrowed down to 32, 16 and so forth, until one team lifts the trophy. Last year Milan beat Liverpool, the year before Barcelona beat Arsenal. This week Liverpool had what was essentially a do or die game for them in the group stages against Porto from Portugal. In front of their home crowd at Anfield (their stadium), they won with a dramatic goal by the newly signed Spanish forward Fernando Torres. Now, the fate of their champions league season rests entirely on one game in Marseille in two weeks. They win, they're assured of going to the round of 16. If not, well, they keep their focus on doing well in their English league games so they can play in the Champions League again next year.

Health Care Editorial

Click here to read a letter to the editor published in today's Daily Tar Heel (the Chapel Hill newspaper) that I helped write. Two classmates and I created this survey, sent it to 3 schools of public health, compiled the results and drafted letters to the editor of the school newspapers for those 3 schools, as well as all the major papers in NC and the Country. The total print circulation of these papers is 10 million! Of course we don't expect to get published in all of them, but in addition to the Daily Tar Heel, we expect to be published in the Greensboro News and Record in the next week. Kind of fun!

Dr. Oberlander in NEJM

Dr. Jonathan Oberlander, the prof I work for as a research assistant, had another publication in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. Click here to read his profile of the health reform plans being offered by all the different candidates. There's also a link to an interview you can listen to.

England vs. Croatia

England vs Croatia from F T on Vimeo.

The qualifying round for the Europe 2008 tournment just finished with some very exciting matches. I missed them because I was in NYC, but as always, I got all the highlights on www.footytube.com. The big story was the England-Croatia game. All England had to do was tie this game and they would qualify to play in the huge European tournment in June. But as you'll watch in this game, they gave up two early goals, dramatically came from behind on a Lampard penalty kick and a Peter Crouch goal, only to concede the go ahead goal right at the end. Absolutely tragic! Of course, the coach didn't make it more than 3 days before being fired. As a side note, France did qualify for the tourney, but it was a long tough road.

First heartbeat!

We had a midwife appt just a couple days after Sarah came back and it was wonderful!! She put this little machine on Sarah's tummy and clear as day we heard "thump, thump, thump" going 140 beats per minute!!! It was incredible, I had a huge grin on my face the whole time and asked Sarah how much it would cost to buy one of those machines (too much apparently). Her tummy is starting to show now, and occassionally she feels movement in her tummy. I couldn't be more excited about this pregnancy and love the time I have spent talking to our child already about everything under the sun, from sports, cartoons, politics, family home evening, etc. We're now at 17 weeks, so we're almost halfway there!

UNC basketball

My dad recently moved to Chapel Hill, NC where he'll be working on his PhD distertation. We are so happy to have him close by and have already done a lot of fun things. For example, we had a great time at one of the UNC basketball exhbition games. Our apt is literally a 4 minute walk from the Dean Smith Center, or the "Dean Dome" as it's known down here. In case you don't know about UNC basketball, it's practically its own religion. They are consistently among the best teams, and this year is no different. They started the season ranked #1 in the entire country, and still haven't lost a game!

Emotional Goodbye

Here's a picture of our emotional goodbye at the Raleigh-Durham airport on Oct 17th. Sarah ended up being in Canada for more than three weeks, but she came back with a visa! Sorry I don't have a picture of when I picked her up, I didn't let go of her long enough to reach for the camera...

Pres. Sarkozy

When I heard that he'd be giving this speech, I thought it would be a great thing for my wife to enjoy and so I looked into how we could go. Here's a link to the cspan archives of his speech; you have to scroll until you get to Nov 7. The video quality starts off poor, but be patient. When it turned out she would be stuck in Canada, I decided to find a way to go anyway, so I called my Congressmen and Senators, asking them for information. Nobody had details, so I called a couple newspapers, congressional committees, until finally the office of the House Clerk told me that each Member of Congress would get two tickets, one for themselves, another to give away. My chances got a whole lot slimmer at that point. I called my Congressman (David Price, of the 4th District in NC), and my two Senators (Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr) to ask if I could have their extra ticket. Though I'm Democrat and the Senators are both Republicans, they were incredibly kind to me and did what they could, though with a whole state full of people to give tickets to, I obviously didn't make the cut. However, David Price apparently didn't have anyone else bugging him for the ticket, so on Monday night I got an email from his staff member saying I got the ticket! All of a suddent I had to make plans to leave for DC in a day. I called my Aunt Mere who lives in the Virginia suburbs south of DC and she said I could stay with them.



So the next afternoon, after voting in the Chapel Hill town council elections, I got in the car and drove 4.5 hours to their house. The next morning I rode the train into DC, picked up my ticket in the Rayburn office building, read through the Washington Post in the staff cafeteria, then headed over to the Capital. It took 25 minutes to have a background check before I was let up into the gallery at 10:40. The Senators filtered in around 10:50, and Sarkozy came in around 11:05. It was amazing to be in the House chambers for a Joint Session of Congress, to see the most important people in the nation (other than some notable absences, like Clinton, Obama, Dodd, Biden, McCain, who were all out campaigning). I did see Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Hatch, Sec. Kempthorne, Sec. Chertoff, and tons others.


As for the actual speech, Sarkozy is a powerhouse. My translation thing didn't work, and the sound wasn't turned up very loud, so I had to struggle to hear and understand, but I did alright. He received lots of applause and I thought he did a fantastic job. I'm very curious to hear more about how the French people are responding to his efforts to strengthen the Franco-American relationship.

I spent the afternoon attending a Senate Judiciary Committe, an extremely important and prestigious committee with oversight jurisdiction over the whole federal judicial branch of government. This room, Dirksen 226, is where all the Supreme Court Justices have been confirmed. The actual meeting wasn't that interesting to me, but it was a great way to end my day.

As it turned out, my mom was in DC for a meeting, and was able to get a hotel room with 2 beds for the same price, so I stayed an extra day and hung out with her. It was great to go out to dinner with her and stay up "late" talking, as well as have a nice breakfast with her. Of course, as great as it was to be there and with mom, it was so great to hit the road and drive practically straight to the airport to pick up Sarah, who I hadn't seen in over 3 weeks!!!

Speaker Pelosi at Meredith College

I got to hear Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi speak at Meredith College in Raleigh recently. I read about it online, found it was free, and arranged to meet some friends there. It was an all girls college, so you can imagine it being a pretty uplifting and inspiring experience for the students. She spoke a bit about breaking the "marble ceiling," as well as about the direction of the country. It was a fun experience to see the first woman Speaker of the House, but little did I know I'd see her again in just 5 days!

Sarah's Back!

I can't tell you how great it is to have Sarah back! She had her interview on Oct 19th. Although it went well, they didn't really give her many details about when she'd get the actual paperwork allowing her to cross back into the States. They never actually said the words, "you're approved," so I wouldn't be totally relieved until she was physically walking off the plane in North Carolina. The visa ended up arriving on Wed Oct 31st around 10am. Sarah wrote me immediately, so I got the good news on my laptop during class and obviously didn't focus much on the lecture. We had already purchased a flight for her to come back (thinking it would be cheaper to move a flight, rather than purchase a new one), and since it was scheduled for only week after on the 8th, we decided to save the couple hundred bucks and not change the ticket. As planned, she landed in the Raleigh Durham Airport around 7:20pm on the 8th and life has been so much better since!