Anders’ flight was cancelled and he was already coming in late to Copenhagen, which pushes his arrival home tonight into the wee hours. I am wiped out from a long week of work and single-parenting, but am determined to stay up and make sure my mindpowers bring him safely home. If I fell asleep who knows what would happen?
The kids and I watched (nearly) the entire opening ceremonies of the 20th Olympic Games. I don’t even know what you call the thing they did to make the ski jumper figure out of people on the stage, and then the white dove made of people in the air, but those were the parts that impressed me the most. The ladies who carried the country signs made me laugh with their wonderfully kitschy humongous alpine skirts complete with snow-covered peaks, pine trees, tiny skiers and little lit-up mountain chalets!
I surfed the web while the countries paraded, because I could not manage to sit still in front of the TV for that long just to watch smiling waving people walk past the cameras. The kids called me just before the U.S. and Sweden came in, and we cheered for them and Martin and I want to get some of those funky fun Swedish flag mittens.
I’ve always liked the winter olympics, because of the hockey and the ice skating. I can remember watching ice skating as a kid with my parents and siblings. O! Beautiful Peggy Fleming! O! Darling Dorothy! O! Perfect and Heartbreaking Katja & Sergei! I’m so out of it now that I’m clueless as to who is competing and hope I will at least catch some of the skating…is Michele Kwan still at it? I won’t understand a thing, I’m sure, since there’s a new scoring system as well.
The first year that Anders and Mats took the kids on their week-long ski trip coincided with the European Figure Skating Championships being held here in Malmö, which Anders had given me tickets to for Christmas. The tickets were for ALL the events, a full pass, even to watch training sessions, and included the Gala Exhibition. I was in heaven! I ditched work early each day and went to my seat high up on toward the end of the arena and watched ice skating to my heart’s content. When we first met, Anders was baffled by my devotion to figure skating, since I can’t skate worth a damn (my center of gravity shifted dramatically when I gained weight as an adult), and he had always thought of it as a “sissy” sport, being the hockey-playing viking that he is.
Soon after we met, we went to see one of the ice revues that featured several gold medalists and long-time world champions whose careers I had been avidly and devotedly following for years. We had excellent seats, close to the ice, although on the far end, and Anders was blown away and VERY impressed by how FAST they went and how HIGH they jumped. You don’t get that sensation at all when you watch skating on television because the cameras follow the skaters so tightly. It’s almost as if they are skating in place on TV. But when you see it live, it makes a huge difference (just like basketball or any other sport, I’m sure).
Nowadays, I don’t have time to sit down and watch all the skating, but I’ll at least try to make time for, or tape, the pairs and the ice dancing and the final competitions, and definitely the gala at the end. I intend to try and get the kids to watch it with me, too. Maybe I can get Martin interested in it that way, at least!
Really, Really Cool: Nosepilot (click on each image and then click again on the last one on each page!)