Preparing for the Olympics

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver starting Feb. 12, in fact, Bob and I have scheduled some Olympic-watching time on our calendars so we can keep up with the happenings. This stems from a serendipitous vacation 4 years ago that brought together the Olympics, a week in a northern MN condo, and record-setting cold weather that encouraged us to find indoor entertainment. We discovered that tuning in to watch someone else excelling at both indoor and outdoor winter sports was a good substitute for actually doing it ourselves! So this year, even though we aren't going away on an official vacation, we are going to squeeze in some special time to watch these wonderful athletes. A couple weeks ago, our man Dan was involved with a big snowboarding event at Mammoth Mountain, so got to see a preview of the Team USA athletes. If you want to see a bit of what they are doing as they fly through the air, you can watch them by using this link, click on the tab for video galleries, then scroll down a bit to the early January videos on the Grand Prix events. But it sounds like a couple of their top picks are sidelined with injuries this year, so I am keeping my fingers crossed that they can still come through with some medal-winning performers.

Now, what does this have to do with my world of quilting? Well, I am clueing you in to an up-and-coming sport that won't be represented in the 2010 Games, but maybe we should create a lobby to get it accepted in 2014 because it is close to the hearts of all of us. What is it, you ask? Well, it's Extreme Ironing! Not familiar with this sport? Don't worry, neither was I before I saw their calendar. And take a look at this Extreme Ironing website for everything you never imagined you would see happen to an ironing board. Makes my own ironing look pretty tame! It just might make you look at your ironing board in a whole new light.