I can't help it. Several people whose opinions I value highly can't stand ice skating (or the Olympics in general), but it gets me every time.

Every time I watch it, that is. And to be fair the last ice skating competition I actually watched before these Olympics was the Lillehammer 1994 games when Oksana Baiul won. I think it was then that the youthening (yeah, that's a word) of the sport turned me off. It's one thing to have the bronze medalist be a 16 or a 15-year old, but for the gold medalist for the last few Olympics to consistently be so young...I just miss the days of real women skaters like Katerina Witt. And the deliciously evil mind games she played with her competitors. Now there was a skating superstar.

But I did watch a fair amount of the skating this last time around, and that leads me to the second thing that irks me. I've almost gotten used to how young the girls are, and I'm genuinely stoked by the fact that they are attempting more difficult jumps and combinations than the last time I followed skating (and, on a sidebar, that the men are expected to do quadruples routinely), but what surprises me is the dearth of 6.0s. Maybe I was spoiled growing up watching Scott Hamilton and Brian Boitano and all the faboo Russian skaters (pardon me, U.S.S.R. skaters), but I keep expecting someone this time to get a row of perfect 6.0s. I swear it used to happen. And as great as Sarah Hughes' marks were (duh, they helped her win), I could see them being at least 5.9s. All the scores just seem so low and unimpressive. And everyone keeps falling.

I'm so back into skating now that I dug up my copy of Noel Streatfeild's Skating Shoes to reread. More than the Olympics, it was this book that had me planning routines in my head and telling myself gamely as each year of my childhood passed that it wasn't really too late yet to start taking skating lessons. Such a lovely book, even though it is very dated by the mention of figures, which skaters don't do for competition anymore.

For those of you peeps who think skating is sissy or capitalist pig or who read this for the slice-of-life tidbits, this evening as I was changing out of my work clothes I thought for a moment that I had developed a horrible skin condition because I had this odd, puckered patch on my leg. Then I remembered that this morning I found a hole in my hose, and being a slattern I went ahead and wore them after painting around the hole with nail polish to keep the hole from running further. So thumbs up! I'll be just fine so long as topical exposure to nail polish doesn't turn out to be fatal.