My In-Laws Went to the Olympics

and all I got were some pretty amazing pictures!

I Was Wrong about Phelps

I've been really into the Olympics this time around, unlike the last Winter ones which kind of snuck by me. I'm loving the excitement of these young athletes, who've trained so hard over the last four years, and are finally fulfilling their dreams. NBC has toned down the nauseatingly sappy background reporting they were doing in previous Olympics, and is giving us so much more coverage than we've ever had before.

The one thing I haven't been loving is the Michael Phelps mania. I get that America is in bad need of a positive story right now. The economy is in the dumps, every trip to the gas station requires a new mortgage, our currency is so weak that we can't afford to travel anywhere, and the housing market is collapsing. We could definitely use an American hero to cheer us up. But does it really have to be Michael Phelps all the time? First of all, the pressure on this poor kid is so intense that if he loses just one race, he's going to come out looking like a failure. Second of all, the intense focus is stealing attention from his teammates. There were more shots of him cheering after they won the relay than of Lissak who actually won that last leg! Third of all, it just gets tedious after a while - don't we have hundreds of athletes over there?

I was channeling all of this frustration into a growing dislike of Phelps, thinking that he must be a stuck-up brat, when I came across this great story by Alison from the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. This mother and her son went to a swim meet a few months ago where Phelps was racing and his actions convinced me that he is as great a guy as he seems to be.