Category Archives: true life 2008

follow your (dressage) bliss

The Olympics always irritates the hell out of me because I can’t ever watch the horsey events. And even when they show horsey events, dressage gets the short end of the stick because everyone likes to watch the thrills and possible spills of the cross-country phase. Well, I do, too, of course, although at my advanced age I’m afraid I’m losing my nerve for cross-country/3 day event competition. Whatever. The point is that if you like to watch equestrian events, or any other event, without annoying interruptions and commentary, there’s good news this year.

From the U.S. Equestrian Team website:

The 2008 Summer Olympics marks the first time equestrian enthusiasts will get to watch the competition in Dressage, Eventing and Show Jumping from start-to-finish, thanks to NBC’s decision to stream 2,200 hours of live coverage of 25 sports at www.NBCOlympics.com.

USET Foundation Executive Director Bonnie Jenkins stated, “This is wonderful news and will be a great way to give many of our supporters who are responsible for getting our U.S. equestrian teams to the Olympic Games the ability to watch the equestrian events live and cheer on our athletes, even if they cannot be there in person. I know that our staff in Gladstone who will not be in Hong Kong will be glued to their computers throughout the two weeks. It will be fantastic!”

Fans will have the option of accessing a live Internet stream of the global feed coming out of Hong Kong or viewing at their convenience by visiting NBCOlympics.com, where the material will be made available on an on-demand basis, along with hundreds of additional hours of background on the athletes, schedules and related material.

We caught a bit of dressage (which was surreal because we had the opening ceremonies playing on the TV and live equestrian competition on the computer screen). The best part really is that you get nothing but the ambient sound. The horses, the hoofbeats, the riders, the endless footage of the officials doing arcane paperwork with the riders when they get off the course, people wandering around looking for snacks, and, of course, cutaways to the heavily polluted Hong Kong skyline. It’s pretty cool, so far.

^ look up there! (not at the sky, at my blog header)

If you’ve spent time with me you may be aware that I am the first person ever in the entire history of humanity to ever get sick. Ever. Thus, I am slightly mildly hysterical about a doctor’s appointment today. I haven’t been to the doctor in almost 48 hours, and we certainly can’t have that, so off we go! In the event I can’t post for a bit, I moved my twitter update widget to the top of this page because that’s easily up-dateable. I know you wouldn’t want to go a day without my sparkling wit and magnetic personality. And because I signed up for blog365 and, damnit, it’s August, and I’m not giving up that easily.

Sorry I can’t give you a more poetic post to tide you over. 85% of my brain is tied up with worrying.* In honor of the Olympics, I am taking worrying to a higher level.

Speaking of the Olympics, I was going to have a hissy fit about the equestrian events being on Oxygen, a network we don’t get, but I’ve discovered we do get Oxygen. Of course, the onscreen line-up doesn’t match the schedule of televised events so I’m not sure trying to Tivo the dressage competition is going to be wildly successful. As soon as the Olympics are over I’m blocking that infernal network so Tivo doesn’t start recording Tori Spelling reality show marathons and colon cleansing infomercials. Have you ever actually watched the Oxygen network? I shudder just thinking about it.

*10% is prodding the other 85% to read a book or do something productive because worrying causes wrinkles and the remaining 5% is trying to recall the lyrics to a Fixx song.

Let's go to the videotape

You’re going to have to pardon me if I’m a bit off my game this week. I’ve decided to blame my high school graduation ceremony for this little disruption in brain function. Why? If you’ve been paying attention you know we went on a little vacation that included my 20th High School Reunion, which lasted for several days because many of us are apparently still over-achieving nerds and heaven forfend, we can’t do anything “normal.” Some, I would go so far to say, are super-geniuses. In actuality, not in the Wiley Coyote sense. (As an aside, I just learned from Wikipedia that our school was designated as one of Newsweek’s Top 21 Public Elite schools and 6th on U.S. News and World Report’s list of Gold Medal Schools. I’m too lazy to look into this information tonight, if it’s on wikipedia it must be true).

We went to happy hour. We had a cookout. We hung out on the beach. We had a lovely dinner with lots of lovely wine. We inadvertently started a rumor that one of our old classmates was obsessed with Princess Leia, rather than Princess Diana. We had a brunch at a classmate’s beautiful home. We all talked and talked and talked and talked while our long-suffering spouses calculated all of the ways that we were going to pay for putting them through this.

On the third day of the festivities, we watched our high school graduation video. All three hours of it. I’m reasonably certain my speech took up an entire hour. Geez. Even then, I never shut up. It was fun to watch the tape, and fun to see a couple dozen people I haven’t seen in years. Some of them, 20 years, in fact.

It was extra-fun to meet the wife of Junglepete, who we whole-heartedly approve of and completely adore. It was also extra-fun, and yet deeply disorienting, to see the classmates I’ve known since pre-school, who now have kids who look just like they did when back when we were in pre-school.

I have no dirt to dish or snark to share. There were no kerfluffles to report on. Not that I would, even if there had been, because, remember, many of these folks are super-geniuses and I bet they’re all pretty Internet-savvy. Hell, one of them contributed to the development of Second Life. (And we danced our first slow-dance together, which I believe makes me a super-genius by sweaty-palmed seventh grade association).

We were so busy that Husband and I didn’t care all that much that we were living in an aquarium for 5 days.

Yesterday I got an email that the next reunion is in…4 months. Like I said, over-achieving super-geniuses.

The Aquarium

You may be wondering why we called our hotel room on Siesta Key The Aquarium. Here’s a picture I took. In order to get even this much of the room in the picture, I had to climb up on the tiny counter that served as our “kitchen” – which consisted of a dorm fridge and a microwave. There wasn’t any room for a sink. We had to store our clothes in the bathroom because there wasn’t even room to live out of a suitcase unless one person left while the other opened the suitcase. The room wasn’t large enough for a dresser. At least the bed was just high enough off the ground that we could stash our shoes under it…

Life in the Aquarium

It might be more accurate to call it the Terrarium, but that isn’t as amusing to me for some reason. If we’d been in Tokyo, perhaps we would have considered this a spacious hotel suite; but we weren’t, and we didn’t.

On Sunday night we could have switched to a larger room, but at that point it wasn’t worth the effort to pack and move. Plus, we’d grown rather amused by the situation by that time.