Stephen King (final lit quote in the series)

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!

Greetings from Omaha!

Greetings from Omaha! This is not a city that I've spent any time in prior to this trip, but I tell ya: Omaha and I get along like a house afire! I haven't gotten lost once, all the people I've met have been super nice and friendly, the zoo here is awesome, and the Swim Trials have been pretty fantastic, too. I haven't been disappointed by anything thus far. I didn't have much in the way of expectations, so it's hard to disappoint, I guess. But Omaha? You're awesome.

I saw a little bit of color at the botanical garden. I'm not really into gardens, and the heat has taken much of the color out of the place. I found a few flowers to take pictures of, but mostly it was taking picture of non-planty things:

They have a model train garden with a number of trams and trains running through it. Coolest part of the whole place, I thought.

  

Some sort of Mt. Fuji replica? It was interesting.

One of the roses in the rose garden.

The zoo is really cool and full of babies!

  

 

 It was warm yesterday, but I knew it would be triple digit heat for today and tomorrow, so I visited the zoo and the botanical garden yesterday. The zoo was really great. The baby gorilla was especially adorable. He was very energetic and super excited to interact with the visitors. He'd run around and cheese it up for the people. He seriously enjoyed pounding on the glass when people's backs were turned. It was cute and made for a lot of laughs. The baby seal and the baby zebra were both busy most of the time with eating from their moms. The baby giraffe was pretty calm, just walking around. S/he eventually went over and laid down next to Mom in the shade. I haven't seen so many baby animals in one zoo before, I don't think. It was fun. Other animals?

They have a monkey island. The little one in front is a Peruvian monkey.

Babies aside, the gorillas are always the saddest animals to see in zoos, I think. They're too much like humans to really enjoy watching them stuck in glass boxes. This one would sit like this until you walked by one window and then he'd turn his head and look at you before going back to staring off into space again. It made me sad. But, I try to look like this when I do that one sitting pose in yoga. I'm going to remember how well he did it and try to emulate the gorilla next time I do yoga.

Young African Lion. I got several other pictures of this one, but there was a herd of young elementary kids looking through the glass and the cat couldn't stop licking its lips while looking at them.

I have more to tell. The Olympic Trials have been pretty neat so far, but I'll wait and do another post on it later in the week. I'm learning a lot about swimming, though. This is apparently a bigger swim meet for US swimmers than the Olympics because the majority of the best swimmers in the world are here in the USA and there are fewer than 26 slots on both the men and women's teams. So, inevitably, some of the best swimmers in the world are left off the team. I've gotten some good swim pictures in the pool. Not many photos outside of that, although, it turns out that I was standing near Ryan Lochte this evening, but I didn't recognize him. He looked like all the other male athletes walking around in over-sized headphones and track suits. I was kind of surprised when a flock of teenage girls suddenly formed and began rushing toward me screaming 'RYAN! RYAN!' The mob that engulfed the dude screaming for autographs and pictures tipped me off as to who this guy was. I didn't shove my camera in to get a photograph. I can't make myself become one of those people who are pushing and shoving for autographs and screaming at some poor athlete. I'm not able to tap into that part of me anymore. That girl died with my backstreet boys obsession over a decade ago. Here's one picture I'll share tonight from this evening's medal ceremonies when the four guys heading to London in the men's 200m freestyle were waiting in the pit. Of course, everybody getting medals are in a good mood. These guys were having a good time and I didn't see anything that looked like Phelps and Lochte aren't friendly toward each other. I think that's really just something the media want everyone to think to boost ratings. All four fellas seemed pretty cheerful to be together joking around during the wait:

(l-r): Ricky Berens, Coner Dwyer, Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte

More pictures to come later in the week! Ciao!

Henry James

Not a trace of doubt in my mind.

Today was my first day of vacation! Staycation for the first few days, actually.

I was super impressed by my friends today. We had planned a luncheon/moral support party for a friend whose house was robbed a couple of weeks ago. The thieves took her jewelry, and this is someone who loves to coordinate her earrings and bracelets with her outfits each day. She's so put together. It's a sad situation, not only because it's scary/angering to have your house broken into, but they took all of her jewelry that she had inherited from her mom and grandmother, and all of the jewelry that she had ever gotten from her husband and children. Anyway, we told her that we were going to take her to lunch to cheer her up, but she thought that it would just be four of us for a little lunch. She was surprised when it was 12 people, all to eat lunch and support her while bringing gifts of new jewelry for her. I was so impressed that everyone had been able to keep the secret! I don't work with any of them anymore, so it was easy for me to not spill the beans, but they all kept it quiet for two weeks. Nice job, ladies! I think our cheering-up party worked pretty well. My friend was very touched by it. It doesn't erase what happened, but it makes a big difference to know that your friends are by your side and care about how you're doing and want to help. 

I made a new friend, too. It's name is Mod Podge. We're going to become better acquainted, I think. We're starting off slow by just trying to make some of the scrapbook stickers to stick on the canvases that I've been working on, but someday we might move forward to trying to decoupage tissue paper and whatnot to canvasses and other stuff. It's working pretty well so far. One thing I've come to really like about this canvas artwork is that I can use all the art and craft supplies that I've bought during all my other craft phases. So, the stamps and ink that I bought last year during the very brief 'I'll try stamping!' craft phase, and the fabric markers that I bought to customize a pair of Keds earlier this year, and all the stickers and papers that I've kept for years and years after my scrapbooking phase kind of faded away, and even the high gloss paint I recently bought for the furniture painting? All of those things I can use now to make into wall art! Hurrah! And now I have acrylic paint to add to the mix. I think purchasing Mod Podge has made me a hard-core crafter. I never knew exactly what it was before this; it was just something I had vaguely heard people talk about but, like the Monkees, I'm a believer. Plus, did you ever do that thing when you were younger with glue, where you put some on your palm, let it dry, and pull it off like it's skin? Gross, yes. Mod Podge lets you do that again! It was kind of nostalgic and fun to pull the dried glue-like substance off my palm. 

Speaking of being a believer in craftiness, here are my first three attempts at artsy fartsy canvasses for my house.

   

Plus, I'm the proud owner of three more canvasses that I hope to make pretty and put magnets on the back and stick them to my new desk at work to funkify the space a little. I'm not sure entirely what patterns or decorations to put on the ones for work. I'm leaning toward not putting words on them, but sticking with illustrations or patterns. Colorful, of course.

Oh, yeah...and too bad for the OKC Thunder losing to the Heat. I tried to watch all of Game 5 since I didn't have to go to work today. But with the Thunder losing by so much, I couldn't bear to watch.

Oh, boo. I just looked over at the end table and Bea is drinking out of my glass. Sigh. Another glass of water taken over by Miss Potter. Very few things in this house are mine anymore. At Hobby Lobby I was looking longingly at some of the colorful little glass vases that they had on clearance, thinking how lovely it would be to have a few of them in the windows with some flowers in them. And then I remembered Bea and thought of how much glass I'd be cleaning up if I dared to put anything like that in the windows of my home. I can't have nice things. 

Up in here, up in here.

This morning when everyone was heading to work on campus, there was a bit of excitement when a steer got loose and began running through campus and downtown. It had jumped the fence from a slaughterhouse and was trying to be free, I guess. It did get to run free for about an hour and see campus and some of downtown. Police, Vet School staff, and the owner were all running around trying to catch it, but when it ran over one of the people trying to catch it outside of a parking garage, I think they probably decided they had to kill it before it hurt anybody else. The animal actually got away for a while but it came back and they killed it in a backyard near campus. I decided to go into work early today and so I missed out on the entire thing. It would have been going on when I would have been normally trying to walk through campus to work. I was glad to miss it. As a general rule of life, I prefer to steer (ahaha, see what I did there?) clear of animals that weigh over a ton when they're scared and wandering around in unfamiliar places.

I'm trying my hand at making my own artwork. I found some canvases on sale at Joann's Fabrics and bought some cheapo acrylic paint. It's not worked out quite as I had hoped, but it's going to be okay. I've got only one canvas mostly done right now. It's got the final line from an e. e. cummings poem on it. It just reads "I carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)" and it should add some nice color to whichever room it ends up in. It's not too large. I have one larger canvas and one that's the same size as this first one. I'm debating the next verses or lines to put on the other canvases. A proverb? Another line from a poem? A song lyric? A quote? Not too sure yet. When I get all three finished, I might share them on here. It's not been as easy as I had hoped it would be because I thought that scrapbook stickers of the alphabet would stick to the canvas rather easily. Then I'd just paint it, let it dry, and peel the stickers off and voila! The words would be perfectly visible and beautiful and what not. Oh, silly Jill. It didn't work like that at all. The stickers didn't stick very well and kept moving when I'd paint over them. Then when I would get the paint on them, they wouldn't peel off after the paint dried. So, the first one is actually okay-looking, but not exactly crisp and perfect. It's sort of crooked and stuff. It really wouldn't be a craft by me if it had come out all perfect, though. Everything looks so easy on Pinterest, you know? All those super crafty people making super duper crafts all the time.

I only have a couple of days left of my job. I've been slowly moving things around and cleaning up this and that. I'm only moving across the building, but I hadn't realized how much stuff I had put all over my cubicle in just the 18 months that I've been working at this position. This morning, when cleaning out a drawer, I found 4 mix cds that I brought in the first month that I worked there. I had completely forgotten about them. After listening to a couple of them, I was reminded of some of the songs I was digging 18 months ago. Lots of cheery, upbeat songs that were great for cubicle cleaning and chair dancing this morning. So, thanks to my past self of a year or so ago when I dumped those cds in that drawer and promptly forgot about them until my present day self re-discovered them!

I'm waiting for the fourth game of the NBA Finals to come on tv tonight. I'm not a fan of the tv scheduling that they're doing. I don't like that the weekday games begin at 8. I can't stay up til 10 to see the end of the games. I'm an early-to-bed person now. I usually just make it to halftime and then find out the result the next morning. I'd really like the Thunder to win. It's kind of frustrating to go to bed at halftime with them ahead and then wake up in the morning and hear that they lost it. Boo.

C'mon Durant and fellow Thundery people! I need to keep my mind for a wee bit longer.

Cassandra Clare

Let's gather for family history time.

Happy Friday! The weekend is nearly here. This is my last full week in my current job and I've been running low on tasks left to clean up the grant work. Waiting on aged servers to upload things, etc. Lots of downtime. I've been watching a variety of things this week. Our office is home to the statewide coordinator for National History Day, which is a national program promoting the study of history in middle and high schools. Students make exhibits, documentaries, websites, write papers, and create performances around a central yearly theme and then they are judged on them in three rounds of competition. The statewide competition here was several months ago but the national competition was this week in D. C. The final awards ceremony on the last day is broadcast on The History Channel, so we were all watching it yesterday morning to cheer for the Missouri kids who won. It was a long ceremony, but really kind of nice to see these kids winning and being recognized on this kind of a stage. There were several winners from Missouri, including a surprise win by a middle-schooler from Joplin who created a website on Iran and it won the overall best website! Woooooot! It was really fun to watch and I wish more schools took part in the competition. These kids can win full ride scholarships to universities, several of them (including the girl from Joplin who won best website) won $5,000 dollars for their winning entries. There are a lot of home-school programs that take part, but sometimes the public schools don't participate. It's a shame, I think. I would have liked to have taken part in this if it were offered at my school when I was growing up. Creating an exhibit on a historical theme? Hello? I would have loved that! I've done that as part of my job now! Nobody ever mentioned this program to any class I was ever in, and it's been going on for 30+ years now. Still, NHD is growing and there were schools from every state + D. C., American Samoa, Singapore, and China this year. This was the first year that some of the International Schools took part in the competition and they won some awards for their entries, plus one of the teachers of the International School in Shanghai won an award for outstanding teacher. It was very cool. I've assisted with NDH at the state level in Missouri and Texas, but I'd never seen their broadcast at Nationals before. It was nice.

I've been watching the Euro Cup, too! It's been cool to see the teams playing and the fans cheering and the cities that they're playing in, as well. The Irish fans have made headlines for being awesome, while their actual soccer team has made headlines for being terrible. But, I was impressed by the Irish fans who sang during the entire second half of yesterday's match against Spain. They lost the game 4-0, and it probably could have been worse than that, but the fans were singing and cheering like they were winning. It was really kind of inspiring and beautiful. They were singing an Irish folk song called "Fields of Athenry"; it was really beautiful to hear it in the stadium yesterday. While the English commentators did not stop talking during the match, I heard that on the German and French broadcasts, the commentators did stop and just let the television viewers hear the Irish fans sing for several minutes. This is just a video from someone who was in the press box at the game in Gdansk, Poland.




Interesting personal sidenote about Gdansk: My family hails from there. Along one side, my family comes from the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland (County Kerry), but mostly, we're Prussian, and came from Danzig/Gdansk. My college roommate went home to Ukraine once and made a point to go to to Poland and see Gdansk and take pictures to bring back and show me. I knew it was a pretty city, but I've enjoyed seeing it on tv through this Euro Cup, too! Both Ireland and Poland are on my short list of places to visit.

Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland. Yay for color!

Gdansk at night. Pretty!

Sometimes, when you see the cities and regions that your family comes from, you wonder how bad it really had to be for them to leave there and come to wherever you've ended up, you know? Like, why would someone leave a place like Gdansk that's beautiful  and has a beach and seaport, and come to the USA and go to the middle of the country where there's no seaport within hundreds of miles? In my family's case, like a lot of others, it had to do with religion. So, boom. Next thing you know, the family has moved to Protestant-friendly middle America. I recently learned that Omaha is where my family first settled because there was a big Bohemian settlement in Omaha back in the day, so they were able to keep ties to their home culture and community (but practice Luther's teachings without being chased about and killed). I only really learned this because I decided to go to Omaha for the London Olympics Swim Trials and when I mentioned it to my Dad, he said that Omaha was where the family initially settled. I had no idea Nebraska was a part of anything in my family. I don't know if I just didn't pay attention when people talked about it or what, but anyway, while it's not the reason I'm going, I'm going to snoop around and see what I can find about the old part of the city and see what's what. The vacation bug has gotten me pretty badly lately and I'm getting antsy to get going. I've been looking forward to the Trials for months now. I love all things Olympics and this is the closest I've ever gotten to actually going to the Olympics. There are swim trials in the morning (mostly the prelims and some semi-finals) and then they do the prime time stuff in the evening like you would see on tv. So, I have the middle of the day between sessions to explore Omaha and see what's what.

Ireland is a different story. The family didn't have to leave Ireland because of religion, but rather because they couldn't behave themselves. They managed to piss off everyone by fighting a lot. You can only be kicked out of various places so many times before your reputation precedes you and people start to not want you around. They managed to get themselves kicked out of Ireland and then Scotland and then Ireland again, and finally just had to come to America. The family has enough of a reputation still that when my cousin went to the British Isles a few years ago and was visiting a family in Scotland, and he mentioned the family that we come from, the older woman took his knife away and said nobody who came from that family was allowed to have a knife in her house. I don't think she gave it back, either. He had to eat knife-less. From what I've heard, I gather they were still kind of into the rough stuff here and were involved in the Irish gangs in St. Louis in the early 1900s. Somehow, somewhere along the line one of those Bohemian Lutherans took a liking to an Irish Hooligan (or Hooliganess?) and here my family is today! But, still, I think both Gdansk and the Dingle Peninsula are much more picturesque than central Missouri... I would go back and happily live in either place, I think.