Posts Tagged ‘Olympics’
Olympic Influence
The 2020 Olympic summer games are over but after having watched daily competitions for over two weeks, the residual influence is strong. Yesterday afternoon, I was cutting the grass beneath our fenceline using the power trimmer. Beneath ear-muff hearing protection that also has a metal mesh face shield, my world gets reduced to the ground immediately in front of me and little else.
While trimming away, there was a moment where I thought I might have heard an uncharacteristic sound. I took a quick glance over my shoulder to see if there was anyone in sight and was immediately reminded of Olympic marathoners doing the same turn of their heads as they tried to check the competition behind them.
In the split second of feeling a connection to the competing Olympic runners, I had a thought that power trimming could become one of the new sports they add in the future.
There could be categories separating light trimming around features in a front yard –similar to short distance races– and thick field grass trimming under a fence –similar to running a marathon.
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Performance can be timed or judged, or probably both.
Points taken off if you nick the fence post or leave uncut tufts around them. That would be like when divers make a splash as they enter the water.
Why stop with just power trimming? All the property management chores could become Olympic competitions. Kicking manure piles in the field can be rather sporting. Changing engine oil in a lawn tractor. Sharpening a chainsaw blade. Repairing a busted fence. Oh, pounding down frost-heaved fence posts would be a good one.
Might as well expand the focus to include a competition of commuting an hour to a day job. Fastest time without speeding more than 9MPH over posted speed limits takes the gold. Must be accident-free and can receive bonus points if no other drivers are made angry throughout the entire drive.
I’m sure televised broadcasts of the competitions would inspire kids to want to become farm chore professionals when they grow up.
I wish I could take this thought exercise of Olympic comparison all the way to the part where the hard work only lasts for two weeks and then there is a great big party with fireworks and drone-shaped patterns in the sky.
Lots of laughter and selfies, maybe a few hugs from strangers.
It’s a nice distraction from reality. My reality early yesterday morning involved a certain cat who apparently missed me over the weekend. Pequenita made a point of walking up my body to head-butt my face and knead my chest starting at 3:30 a.m. and repeated the exercise again at 4:30, 5:00, 5:30, & 6:00.
I foiled her annoying shenanigans this morning by getting out of bed at 4:30 to do my planking and stretching routine before work.
Come to think of it, maybe Pequenita just forgot that I now work from home on Mondays and she thought I needed to get up that early.
She probably thinks she’s in some cat Olympics, competing in the “Manage Your Human” event.
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Warm Reception
For the past four days, Delilah has been up at the lake with Cyndie. Yesterday, after work, Cyndie’s mom, Marie, met me at our house and I drove her car up to Wildwood. Based on the affection I received from Delilah upon our arrival, our dog must have really missed me.
I was a little surprised by how much she wanted to be in my space. When I got on the floor with her, she tried to sit on my lap. I may have to take back some of those mean things I’ve said about her now that she is showing me some love.
A little later in the evening, she showed she hasn’t lost her penchant for barking at the world around us. I can never tell if it is something she hears or something she smells that suddenly startles her up from a cozy curl-up on the floor with a flourish of energized barking toward whatever the trigger was.
Maybe her dog-shouting will dissuade the geese from perching and pooping on the floating platform in the water at our beach. Cyndie reports her experiment of a plastic owl perched on the raft already seems to be helping.
Some extra barking can’t hurt.
The geese don’t receive near the warmth of a reception I was awarded when we got here.
Speaking of awards, we polished off the evening with a viewing of the NBC prime-time feature of Olympic competitions. The USA women’s beach volleyball pair won gold just as we were all beginning to run on fumes, very ready to head for bed.
Delilah had already found her way to her “den” in a crate draped with a light blanket cover.
I would say that all of our beds offered us warm receptions when we finally got around to falling on them.
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Staying Up
It’s been difficult for me to shut off the prime-time coverage of the Olympic competition each night when my bedtime comes around. It is fascinating to witness humans executing athletic feats that are so far beyond what few others can match.
Imagine what it would be like to have a number of judges rating every single detail of our performance throughout our days. I wish I could pull off my tasks as well as the athletes from China are able to dive.
Maybe more pertinent would be to imagine if our daily activities had as many camera angles trained on us with the capability of providing super slow-motion replays. I do not want to see that from my activities. I wonder if they would judge my manure management harshly.
Meanwhile, in the field next door, the corn is staying up, and then some. Despite the drought, the corn has reached a mind-boggling height.
For some reason, it makes me tired just looking at it.
I suppose that could be a function of staying up too late again last night.
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Describe Feeling
The winter Olympic Games are underway again. Skaters and skiers, sledders, curlers, and boarders will be competing for that pinnacle moment when a broadcast journalist points a microphone at their face in search of the next version of what it feels like to win.
Before we even get to that, during last night’s US taped broadcast of the opening ceremony, NBC provided appetizers in the form of athletes trying to describe their feelings before stepping into the stadium for the parade of nations.
I love watching athletic competition. Seeing people struggle for words to describe how they feel isn’t as entertaining for me.
Sometimes I wonder more about the broadcast journalist who is popping the question. Think of the effort they put in to reach the subject of greatest interest, battling camera-yielding athletes in their own right who are jostling for position with all the other microphone-holding reporters eager to ask.
What must the journalists be feeling at the moment they try to concisely summarize what just happened for the athlete, setting up the big question? How did the journalist train for this? How long have they wanted to be the person to ask an athlete how it feels in the seconds after victory? What is the journalist feeling right after they hear the answer and offer a closing tidbit to send the broadcast back to the booth?
The NFL Super Bowl just happened in the Twin Cities, and of course, the de rigueur post game athlete interviews were right on schedule. With team sports, the journalists have multiple chances to mine for that elusive articulation of the winning feeling.
While that was happening, the fans in the stands were breaking the seats.
I want to hear the vandal-fans put their feelings into words.
“Your team just won the championship and you are destroying property. Describe how it feels to break things when you are this happy.”
Last night, I would have been happy to watch the struggle for feeling-descriptors from the person who was piloting the world-record 1,218 Shooting Star drones that were electronically added to the ceremony. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t able to do it live during the cold and windy opening event, the feelings were probably still awesome.
Amazing. Probably hard to put into words. Unbelievable.
The biggest question in life isn’t, “Will you marry me?” More important than that is, “How does it feel?”
Maybe there should be college courses where athletes can enhance their perception of what winning feels like and hone the art of assembling mere words to convey the ethereal essence of unspeakable emotions.
Competitions could be created where the interview to describe how winning feels is the event.
Imagine trying to describe what it would feel like to win that medal.
Enjoy the PyeongChang winter games and winning athlete interviews.
I will. It will be amazing.
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Winter Olympics
Among the too-many-to-count moments of my life thus far when I have found myself in the midst of something that my wildest dreams never imagined possible, attending the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, was off the charts.
That Fred & Marie were able to consider this a viable option for a family vacation, and then pull it off with such incredible results, is enough to leave me at a loss for words to adequately describe.
I love sports. Olympic competitions are some of the best. Winter is my favorite. A trip to Lillehammer, Norway? A bonus on top of a bonus and a bonus, and another bonus.
This trip was spectacular! To be able to do this with family was wonderful (although we left our young children at home with a nanny). The other family (Friswold friends) traveling with us were precious. The authentic accommodations were priceless. Obviously, the Winter Games were world-class. And Norway did a fantastic job as host country.
We were able to stay in the home of a farm family. The boys gave up their rooms and slept somewhere else, but they still had to come home to do chores, so we saw them at breakfast.
Through the Friswold connections, we ended up attending a black-tie dinner event heavily themed with Norwegian culture. We had an opportunity to do some nordic skiing in a gorgeous mountain forested landscape blanketed with deep snow. We attended a hockey game, a downhill skiing event, saw the luge up close –nothing like it with the roar of speeding blades grinding against ice as sleds rocketed past our heads– and watched moguls freestyle skiing.
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This trip was so much fun that the experience lingered for a long, long time as one of the best things I had ever done.
Other than the week Cyndie and I spent learning winter survival skills from Will Steger at his homestead property in Ely, Minnesota, and the lodge-to-lodge dogsledding adventure vacation we took our kids on with Sue and Paul Schurke, the trip to Norway for the Winter Olympic Games fulfilled my snow-season passions better than I thought possible.
The success of this family trip went a long way toward showing me how much fun was possible, traveling with this clan.
Even if the next excursions weren’t likely to be headed to a cold weather climate zone, it was pretty easy to talk me into going along with whatever wild idea the family was plotting next.
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Relative Something 