Strength

Yes, I'm studying. In between watching the Olympics' various things: opening ceremonies! whoa! and Phelps! whoa! Also women's sabre, where the US swept, including a bronze medal won by a young woman who's a gifted homeschooler, whose mom posts on one of the lists I'm on - yay, Becca!

The bestest fun so far for this (closet) (sort of) basketball fan was US men against China this morning. 101-70. It wasn't a total whupping from the get-go, Yao played well, and actually the whole Chinese team had periods of really good play, but the US team were stronger, faster, were working together beautifully, and I think it helped that the game started with the US behind for a while - it seemed to kick the players into "killer" mode.

It looked like street ball. China had amazing accuracy from the 3-point line, whereas the US was something like 2 for 15, but the real story there was that the Chinese were forced to take those outside shots because the US defense overwhelmed them. They couldn't get inside to score for practically the whole game. By half-time, the Chinese players weren't getting back for defense at all, and the US guys were hanging on the hoop over, and over, and over again. The Chinese just looked exhausted; the US players looked like they could have gone on all night. They were having *fun*. What a pleasure to watch. It sort of looked like China trained to play 48 minutes, and the Americans trained to play 176. The US guys were just in *such* amazing shape, so, so strong physically - they had the stamina to keep running flat out like it was nothing.

It was nice to see Kobe Bryant playing so well, too - the Celtics kicked his ass, there; it was probably good for him to get in a winning groove again.

In school-ish news, I had my last lectures this week; finals on Tuesday and Thursday, plus one last problem set due for biochem. It took me friggin' forever to finish the second lab problem set - I was fine with analyzing the gel results, I can tell you all kinds of things about what LELY mutations in spectrin produce, but god's teeth, I could not wrap my head around the damn molar concentration calculations that were the easy part. Hours, it took me, to figure out ax = by, where a, x, and b are known. Sheesh. I'm trying to get over the sensation I keep having that when I feel really solidly in command of the material, I must be misunderstanding it in some fundamental way. I really do get this stuff. Honest.

Physically, I'm feeling pretty good - I've taken off 10 of the 15 pounds I managed to gain (while middle child was in her "baking a batch of brownies every other day" phase), and I'm getting reasonably good exercise, so the reduced stress on my knees + maintaining muscle tone means my knees are working really, really well without pain. Yay! Absence of pain = good.

The guitar-as-procrastination technique continues: I printed off some tabulature for Metallica and keep plonking away at it, most notably while also watching Olympic fun. The fun, the fun - it just goes on.

Speaking of which, better get back to studying - have a lovely day, all!