A good strategy for American care homes to adopt?

A significant percentage of my Charley cases are old and/or mentally impaired people who wander away from the care facilities where they live. This is a huge problem and they’ve got all sorts of strategies, such as tracking bracelets and stuff, to try to keep these vulnerable individuals safe. But I just found this article about a simple and effective technique out of Germany: nursing homes put up fake bus stops in front of the facility. The patient decides to go home or whatever, and goes outside to wait for the “bus.” So they just sit there until they get found, instead of wandering off to God knows where.

I would totally shake the hand of whoever thought of that.

My reading for 2010

I read 445 books this year, as compared to 378 last year. I think this is because I had much more free time since I wasn’t working this year. Many of the books were short, but some were really long. There’s the complete list and the rundown:

Total number of pages: A little more than 112,000 (two books I don’t have the page count for)
Average number of pages per book: 252.82
Longest book: The Holocaust in Lithuania 1941-1945: A Book of Remembrance by Rose Lerer-Cohen and Saul Issroff, 1910 pages (It’s a five-volume set, the authors’ efforts to name every Lithuanian Jew who died in the Holocaust. It’s essentially a book of lists. My review is here.)
Longest “normal” book (that is, not a book of lists): The Encyclopaedia of Executions: The Stories Behind Every Execution in Twentieth Century Britain by John J. Eddleston, 960 pages (review)
Best adult novel: Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-Ha Kim. (review)
Best young adult novel: Tunnel Vision by Fran Arrick. (review)
Languages translated from: German (14), French (13), Polish (12), Hebrew (11), Yiddish (7), Japanese (5), Russian (5), Italian (4), Spanish (4), Dutch (3), Hungarian (3), Czech (2), Portuguese (2), Romanian (2), Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Latvian and Swedish
Around the world countries covered (I’m trying to read one book set in every country in the world, and a few colonies too): 53
Best around the world book: The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germaino Almeida, for Cape Verde (review)
Worst around the world book: A toss-up between Towards New Shores by Vilis Lacis (review) and Knots by Nuruddin Farah. (review)
Reviews written: 318
Most controversial review: Slingshot of Hell by Yechezkel Harfanes, reviewed here. I couldn’t stand the author and I wrote a review saying so, and then his niece found it and was very upset. I felt bad about that, but in all good conscience I couldn’t take back what I said.
Fiction books of any kind: 155
Holocaust books of any kind: 97
History books (non-Holocaust): 89
Children’s/young adult fiction of any kind: 86
Adult novels of any kind: 55
Humor: 37
Memoirs (non-Holocaust): 34
Biographies (including collections of biographical sketches): 25
Nonfiction diaries: 15
Psychology/psychiatry: 22
Books concerning the Tudor dynasty (that is, Henry VIII and his wives and relations): 13
Books on language: 9
Verse novels: 6
Science: 6
Missing people (both fiction and non-fiction): 5
Graphic novels: 4
Plays: 3

Happy New Year, everyone!

Last night I partied with my boyfriend and two of his roommates and the guy from the apartment downstairs, who came up for awhile. I had five shots of vodka and became quite drunk. (I’m so small and scrawny that it really doesn’t take much.) But woke up with NO hangover.

I wish love and peace and happiness for everyone in this coming year and hope many, many missing people get found.