Photo finish.

Okay, a post full of pictures, watch out! I had a blast at the Swim Trials this week and here's some tidbits from it:

Morning Session warm-ups. It's a lot like a koi pond at feeding time.

Pool + effects for the evening session. Dramatic!

I went to four sessions for the Olympic Swim Trials in Omaha. They were held in the CenturyLink convention center. There were two sessions in the morning and two in the evening. The morning ones were less attended, less showy in the pyrotechnics and theatrics, and made up of preliminaries and semi-final heats. The morning crowd is mostly friends and family of the swimmers that day. I heard a lot of stories about the swimmers from the proud families. It was sweet. The only annoyance I had during the morning sessions was how much of it was spent by people playing on their ipads and phones. It was kind of ridiculous. Two parents who were sitting in front of me had traveled across the country to surprise their son who was swimming that morning. And they spent the entire time messaging people on facebook rather than watching this huge event that their son was taking part in. I mean, they watched his race (er, actually they recorded it on their ipad in-between facebook messages), but they didn't really pay any attention to anything else. It kind of made me sick. And I swore to myself that if I ever have a kid who is in some event that means a lot to them (or me), I refuse to be like these parents and spend the entire time engaging with some machine instead of watching the event/kid/kid's friends. I did get to take a lot of pictures of notable swimmers in the morning sessions, though.

Michael Phelps in the preliminaries for the 200m butterfly

Dana Vollmer in the prelims for the 200m freestyle

Jason Lezak (left, waving) and Ryan Lochte in the 100m freestyle semifinals. Lochte and Grevers both plan to scratch the final, so maybe Lezak will make the team at 36 years old. I'm rooting for him.

Cullen Jones! Yay!

Brendan Hanson! He swam against some Mizzou guys in the breaststroke heats.

   

Sam Tierney, a Mizzou sophomore, won his heat in the
prelims of the 200m breaststroke this morning!

MIZ! (This finish time wasn't good enough to get into the semifinals,  but another Mizzou guy named Jack Brown did end up sqeaking into the semi-finals due to other guys dropping out.) It was exciting to cheer on Mizzou for a few minutes this morning.

Ryan Lochte (blue cap) and Michael Phelps (white cap, flapping arms)
on the blocks for the 200 freestyle final

The evening sessions are way more theatrical with light shows, pyrotechnics, music, interviews, medal ceremonies, etc. It was exciting and the crowd gets super into it. All the swimmers tend to show up and I was in the overflow swimmers section tonight. There's over 1500 swimmers at the Trials and less than 50 will make the team, so it's a huge swimmers' section. I saw two American Records set and those were some of the most exciting races. The 200m freestyle final between Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps was probably the most exciting. I was sitting next to a coach who was schooling me on a lot of what I was seeing and telling me the back stories of some of the swimmers. His son trains with Ryan Lochte and Conor Dwyer, so when both made the 200m freestyle team, it was exciting up in the row. 

Lochte's shoes he wore for the medal ceremony. Snazzy, no?

He said that that race will run basically the same next month at the Olympics because Phelps and Lochte are the best in the world and that 200m freestyle final will be another race between the two for the gold medal. But, like I mentioned in the last post, I don't think those two are bitter rivals. They seem to be friendly and happy to be around each other, joking and laughing with each other. I think they're just competitive with each other in the pool, but I saw the two together quite a bit and didn't see anything that looked like they were uneasy around each other at all. Matt Grevers, who won a place on the team last night, did mention both in his post-medals interview. He said that he wasn't like Ryan or Michael who are just like, 'Yeah, I'm going to the Olympics.', he said he didn't think he'd make the team and that's why he was ecstatic about it, despite having been to Beijing in '08. Grevers was probably the funniest dude to chat after his medal ceremony. He was on such a high and was still so ecstatic after his win. He made everybody laugh and feel good because of how excited he was to be on the team.

Matt Grevers during his awards ceremony.

New American Record!
(Not far from the World Record, either.)

Plus, I did see a couple of new records get set. The women are fast! Both Missy Franklin and Allison Schmitt set new records while I was at the trials. It was exciting. Everyone got really amped when someone would get close to breaking a record, but more often than not, they would fall off the pace and end up a few seconds over the record. When they stayed on pace the whole time and then broke it? Pandemonium in the convention center, like whoa.

Missy Franklin getting her medal! I think she cried non-stop through everything from when she broke the record to her post-medal interview. Happy tears.

  

And, as a final note: I finally recognized an athlete today without having to wait for the mobs to begin to shout her name. I looked over at someone who looked exactly like my cousin and it turned out to be, not my cousin, but Dara Torres. I was proud of myself for finally seeing a swimmer that I recognized pre-swimfan mobfest. If you are stuck in an area with enough crazed teenybopperish fans, eventually, you will begin to recognize people too, eh? Even a blind pig finds a truffle now and again. I refuse to mob anybody, though. It's not my style. I don't like them at all. The terrified look on the faces of the athletes being mobbed does not make for a pleasant photo opp. I think if I were them, I'd try to find another way to get to and fro. Although, props to them for braving the crowds, when they know that they're going to get mobbed. They probably make those people's days by simply shaking their hand or signing their shirt. Not a bad way to make someone's day better, I guess.

It was a really cool experience all around. I learned a lot about the sport, in general. Like, those flags on the pool are there to help backstrokers understand when they're getting close to the wall; the US Olympic Trials are tougher for US swimmers than the actual Olympics; those Michael Phelps arm flaps are really loud; and judging by the screams and loyalty of the swimmers and supporters of certain swim clubs, swimming is more of a team sport than I had realized. It's been a really good experience, all around. People were really nice and friendly to me. When they found out that I came alone to the trials because nobody else wanted to go or could get off work for it, they were excited to include me in their experiences and fill me in on their stories of why they were there. I got a lot of compliments too from older women who told me that they were really impressed by me and that they would never have had the courage to go on a vacation alone at my age. It was fun, and not lonely at all. I think traveling solo could be lonely if you let it, and I do like to travel with other people, but for my first time going on vacation by myself, I have to say that it was nice to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted without having to get a group consensus of an activity or wait around for other people to be ready to go. It was pretty sweet, actually. 

Happy spectator at the Olympic Swim Trials 2012!

Less than a month from the London Games! Bring it!

It's been 1 year!

Happy 1 year blogiversary to Morsels of Mumblings!

Work is uber-quiet. Most people are gone today for one reason or another. Me and my supervisor are holding down our corner of the office today. We got our new cart though for our field work, so we can now push/pull our scanner and equipment through the wilds of Central Missouri instead of carrying/nearly dropping things all the time. It gives a more professional air to your entrance when you aren't huffing and puffing and nearly dropping everything upon meeting the people who are willing to entrust their valuable historical collections to you. On our first trip, I was laughing so hard at our exit of the office, I barely made it to the car. I tend to begin laughing uncontrollably when I have to carry heavy things. It's why I'm completely useless during moves. Or, not useless, I can carry boxes and lamps and things. But don't ask me to help you carry heavy furniture because i start laughing so hard I can hardly move and end up dropping my side of the furniture. It just takes a long time and if you're in a moving hurry, it's easier to bypass the Jill-train altogether as far asking for my assistance with any heavy-lifting. Also, I'm a relative weakling when it comes to arm strength. I'm working on that though at the health plex!

Speaking of, I haven't been to the health plex since Peru. I figured showing up to the Health Plex coughing and all sick with a cold wouldn't do anybody any good. I hope to get back to it next week. I enjoy it. Truth.

I found out that my favorite photo editing site, Picnik, is closing down. It's apparently going to be shifting over to Google for Google+ purposes or somesuch thing like that. Not sure. Only know that come, mid-April, my photo editing site will be kaput. At least as I know it now. BUT, the good news is that from now til closing time, they've opened up all their fantastic editing schemes and tools to all users, not just those who shelled out the money for a premium subscription. I always thought about doing the premium thing, but never got around to it. Well now, I can use all the cool stuff for a couple of months. So, I've been going back through pictures and messing with them to see what I can get the software to do. You can get the software to do much. And, looking back through travel pictures always makes me happy. I don't think I've had a bad trip. Ever. I've had rough days on trips, but never has anything ever ruined an entire travel experience.

You can never really travel alone.

Today at work I happened upon a book from the Luxembourg Museum of Art. And I was cataloging it and remembering meeting a touring choir from Luxembourg when I was 16 on a train trip through Western Canada. It was a multi-day train trip and they were very very nice. And we said our goodbyes and went on our merry ways. And then, at the end of the vacation, my family and I once again ran into the choir in the middle of a pier in Victoria, British Columbia. All of us just walking through at the same time and suddenly all going 'Hey! Hi! How is the trip going! Nice to see you again!' and it was like a meeting of travelers. And I always think about them when I hear about Luxembourg and I wonder how they're all doing. It was kind of an unusual experience. That's one of the awesome things about traveling by train: the people you meet. I've never gone on a train trip and not met someone fascinating. It's a great way to travel because you realize how many people are traveling at the same time. When you go on family vacations and you drive and it's really just you going someplace, you don't get the same feeling as you do on an extended travel excursion with other people like trains or cruises or tours, etc. Some people don't like to travel with strangers but, the thing is, those people aren't strangers at the end of the trip. It's worth the awkward getting-to-know-people phase, I think. And you never really travel alone, do you? I mean, you remember people that you meet along the way. And sometimes I wonder if anybody remembers me and my family from that train trip a decade ago? If they ever wonder where the little family from Missouri ended up?

Many years ago a friend of mine said something when we were traveling around Italy and it's stayed with me: Do you ever wonder how many strangers' photo albums you're in? I had never wondered it. I'd never even thought of it, but it's amazing to think about. How many touristy places have you been? How many pictures have you inadvertently ended up in from tourists all over the world? It's something to think about. You could be in a photo album in Prague. Or in Rome. Or in Mexico City. Or in Tokyo. You are in the albums of strangers who happened to be in the same spot as you for a moment in time:

[A picture of mine from Milan last summer.]

Join me on a photo journey, won't you?

So, there was a White House breaking news conference pretty late last night. And there was buzz among social media outlets about what it might be regarding, so people were like this:


And then the news came and it was good:


And we were all like, "Wooot!":


And we are also super proud of our military and President for what they've accomplished after nearly 10 years of trying to catch the dastardly fella, so we partied a little:

And our President, in his insanely cool way, is all "Justice has been served.":


And we move forward now and maybe we'll be able to put the people that we lost to rest for good, with the relief that the man behind the 9/11 attacks is no longer a concern:


And that's how the month of May arrived in the U.S.A. in the year 2011.