it's already 2014 and the Winter Games are on? where does the time go?

The media, both print and electronic, are full of news of the impending start of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games.  NBC has the Opening Ceremony tonight.  Which actually already happened 7 or 8 hours ago.  Ho hum.

Once again, I've been skipped over for a spot, any spot, on the U.S. Olympic team.  I guess I could still be asked to fly in as a replacement if one of our athletes gets thrown into a modern-day gulag for over-enthusiastically hugging up on one of their like-sexed teammates.  Apparently the Russians frown on that sort of behavior on a par with the Texas legislature.

I shouldn't be all that surprised to have been ignored since I have absolutely no talent or skill for any of the games or sports that turn this event into one mongo marketing and advertising (ka-CHING!!!) extravaganza.  If any of the scouts had been watching me round the clock (talk about a boring assignment), they might have seen me take two spills on the ice and pop up unhurt.  But falling down and not killing myself or tearing up my knee again probably doesn't count as much of a qualification to compete in one of the luge events.  But boy oh boy, I could really do some damage on one of those little speed-racer death traps.

I have to take the good with the bad.  The good was worth waiting for.  Football season is finally over and I won't have to figure out ways to avoid football again until August.  Please don't anyone mention spring practice at the U of M.  I said a year ago that the amount of football I watched during the '12-'13 season didn't add up to a whole game's worth.  I think I pared it down to a half this year, maybe as little as a quarter.  That was a hell of an effort and I need a rest.

The bad will be that the Olympics will be clogging up NBC's airwaves for weeks (it'll seem longer).  As if  I'm interested in slope snowboarding or team figure skating.  Synchronized swimming, anyone?

I suggested some new events for the Winter Olympics when I first started writing this collection of random stupid back in 2010.  I'm too lazy to go back and read my old post to be reminded of my suggestions.  I think that they were somewhere along the lines of side-by-side tandem bobsled races with a marksmanship component tossed in for added spice. No more of that lighthearted nonsense for this year's Games.

I've decided instead to come up with a list of alternate activities to occupy myself with when I might otherwise be tempted to hang out in the kitchen watching the junk sports on TV and eating potato chips.  In no particular order:

   1) Check the air in the tires on the Tahoe.  Our fancy-ass big Chevy SUV has tire pressure sensors which display on the dashboard if we could only remember which buttons to push and in what order.  Both Miz Susan and I suspect that those sensors somehow become escape routes for the tires' air when the temperatures plunge.  Or maybe it's just 9th grade science at work along with 20th-century digital technology.  Cold temps reduce the volume that the air takes up and the tire pressures drop, regardless of the vintage of the car.  The fancy sensors call it to our attention in the semi-late model Tahoe though we were blithely unaware of the same phenomenon in something older, say my brown 1970 Buick LeSabre.  I've always been a sucker for GM products.

   2) Restack the shovels out by the front steps.  Winter here is shaping up to linger well past Easter and the arsenal of snow removal hardware needs to be scientifically arranged for maximum effectiveness.

   3) Clean up the house a little bit.  Pick a room, any room.  Start in any corner and work my way outwards.  Like the west side front bedroom.  I could iron shirts from the mountain of shirts that has built up there, casually strewn across the easy chair.  Perhaps then Miz Susan would stop asking me every other day what I was planning on doing with all those f---ing shirts.  I could put a new set of mounting clips on the picture that fell off the wall a few weeks (months?) back when the old set of mounting clips succumbed to a severe case of plastic fatigue and busted.  Don't you think that the manufacturer should put a warning on the box that those clips might not last more than 10 or 12 years?  I could clean up and organize the dozens of CDs that are stacked in piles all over the turntable and the CD player and the floor and...well...you get the picture.  Miz Susan snarled at me awhile ago that I couldn't hang any more junk on the walls in that room.  Shelves for all those CDs wouldn't qualify as junk, would they?  And that's just the one room.  Let's not even consider the basement.

   4) Take a quick spin up and own University Avenue.  I hear the bank and Menard's and the Goodwill and Cub and Target calling my name.  I might even be able to find a CD storage rack of some kind at the Goodwill to help me make some sense of the west side front bedroom.  I've almost talked Susan into going to the Goodwill with me next weekend; it would be her first trip ever.  She says she's going to look for costumes for the 4th Grade Opera but I know she's gonna love it.

   5) Talk Susan into watching an episode of Homeland or Foyle's War or, if it's Sunday night, Downton Abbey (note to self: pretend to be interested).  Those have been our TV entertainments lately but we're down to just four episodes of Homeland, Season 2 which we haven't watched and the Foyle's War shows run nearly two hours each.  That's alot of TV for two oldsters to stay awake thru on a school night.

Having just put this all to paper (digitally speaking), I wandered upstairs to see what Miz Susan was up to.  We'd planned on watching the first of the four remaining Homelands.  I'll be damned if she wasn't watching the Opening Ceremonies.  Sigh.