I have a great deal of respect for the women who skate at the Olympics. Not the figure skaters, about whom I think we've all heard too much relative to the actual competition they've had, but the speed skaters. In a race that was shown tonight, a woman went into the wall very, very hard at a speed that must have been around 25 miles per hour. It looked like it hurt. I do not know how they do it.
The men seem a little better able to withstand the impacts, though last week there was a skater who dislocated a shoulder after crashing and he was in a lot of very vocal pain. CBS replayed that way too much, almost like that German skier who landed on his head then won two gold medals.
One other thing about the women: it must be cold on that ice, because one speed skater looked like someone had stuck Hershey's Kisses inside the front of her sports bra. I almost expected CBS to edit her chest out, they were that... apparent. Must have been very cold, indeed.
I hit a tree once when I was out skiing. Remember, I ski cross-country (the "classic" style), so it wasn't much of a danger to hit the tree, which was more like a bush anyway. I was going down a small hill and got out of the track and couldn't stop, and ran into the thing. I was tremendously embarrassed and kind of scratched up, but that was about the extent of my injury.
It seems like a lot of the diaries I read online are in periods of transition. Gus is without an ISP (I think he borrows computers at a local college to upload his work) and several diaries have disappeared or moved and left no address. I do understand what people think when suddenly you stop hearing from someone through their diary online. I think some people are more upset by this than I am, but I also miss some of these people when I don't hear from them. They're talking about some sort of in-person meeting of the online diarists this summer in Kansas somewhere. I thought about going, and still may check it out to see if I should go.
I honestly don't know how I'd talk to some of these people in person.
When I got to work today, my chair was all damp. Everyone's was damp. The company hires some cleaning business to come in and do the tidying up (the engineering guys are incredible slobs, but we're all kind of slobs) and part of the deal, apparently, is that they shampoo the chairs and carpets once in a while. I guess the crew that did this last night didn't allow for enough drying time, so until lunchtime you saw a lot of people either standing around, sitting on their jackets, or walking around with big damp circles on their behinds. The only reason I wasn't obviously one of this last group was that I only sat down for a short time, and that the broomstick skirt I was wearing today is a pattern and material that hides everything. I once spilled most of a Coke on it and nobody seemed to notice. It's washable and seems to have nine lives.
For better or worse, I've decided to set up a guestbook in which you can leave your words. Tripod offers these things, and I've been thinking about setting one up for a while. Please don't put spam in it, or use it as a substitute for email. I do read mail, though lately I've tended to ignore nagging messages and I've gotten some spams.
Ten days to go.