Lost in Lualand

mother nature clearly felt bad that i missed two snowstorms while i was in florida because we got snow today. :D it wasn't particularly heavy but it came down all morning and into the afternoon and blew around a lot. i went into harvard square to get my comics only to discover a sign on the door that said "opening late due to car trouble" so i got back on the bus and came home and sat on my ass and watched olympics. i saw the end of the 3000m women's speedskating which italy won, making it the first speedskating gold for an italian woman. her extremely cute two year old son was of course in the arena. she was also extremely cute bouncing around the floor wearing the italian flag after her win. i also caught some of the us-finland women's qualifying hockey, the end of the men's big air snowboarding (japan won gold and silver), and of course two games of mixed doubles curling. (we beat chechia and lost to great britain. but after that loss we were still 4-1, so.) i may or may not have watched us-chechia at work yesterday morning. ahem. look, it was friday, it was slow, the game started at 8:35a, i had some time.  also one of the curlers used to play at my curling club altho now he trains in minnesota.  we're very proud.

i get a digital subscription to the new york times through work, so i get nyt email newsletters, and the one on monday had some words about the olympics, a lot of them about curling. the writer says the winter games are "more about artistry. They have athletes clad in spandex sliding down ice tubes. They have curling."  he mentions that there's curling on wednesday and snowboarding on thursday before the opening ceremonies.  and then this:

And it will be home to some of the most exciting events of the Games. It has the Sliding Center, which hosts bobsled, luge and skeleton. And it has the Curling Stadium, where, naturally, curling happens.

Why do you keep bringing up curling?
It’s just the best. There is no sport that more quickly converts a person from “this looks silly” to “I am extremely invested.” It helps that the competitors are entirely ordinary-looking — that could be you or me out there, if only we had been better at sweeping in our youth — and that the rules are easy to understand.

It’s like a game you might play on a lawn or in a pub. Competitors try to slide heavy stones (they call them rocks, and they weigh around 40 pounds) closer to the target than the other team’s. There’s shouting and bumping and, of course, the aforementioned sweeping. Here’s a guide.

it's true that curlers look like regular people more than do most olympians.  the us men who won gold in 2018 (and wasn't that a surprise) looked like a bunch of suburban dads who ambled down to their local club to throw rocks on weekends.  i'm a little surprised the nyt writer didn't mention team norway's funkypants but maybe it's because the news about norway was all about how they were busted for trying to basically embiggen the crotches of the ski jumpers' suits to try and catch a little more air.

on tuesday i met one of the admins m for dinner so she could tell me why she briefly ended up dating two steves at the same time (she's absolutely a chaos magnet but didn't want to share this particular episode of her love life at work but i wanted to know and she clearly wanted to share). also on tuesday one of my pi's locked himself out of his office. heh. fortunately i have a key.

and then thursday i took a nice long walk at work with another admin m and one of the admins a because it was SO NICE outside (sunny and not super cold!) and we wanted to check out the dunkin donuts popup on campus.  my guess is they were there in advance of the super bowl and whatever tv ad they're going to premiere - it was a very 90s themed popup with 90s style swag but sadly no actual doughnuts.  that admin m is going to hawaii in i think july and i am SO JEALOUS.  i sent her a bunch of suggestions including "eat the poi bread.  it's purple".  she's a vegetarian tho so i can't in good conscience recommend the spam musubi.

on saturday (so, a week ago) my sister came back from florida - she stayed an extra week to work remote - and i picked her up at the airport, took her home, helped her shovel off her car, went to the grocery store with her, ordered chinese food, and watched red notice which was kind of fun and kind of silly and i think for the first time i found ryan reynolds exceptionally annoying.  usually i enjoy his schtick, or at least i do for most of the movie, but this time he was just grating the entire time.  mostly liked the rock tho, and gal gadot was fun.