5:20 p.m. - 2002-02-28
SALT LAKE 2002!!!!!
ALL OLD ENTRIES AT HTTP://JESSICA5787.DIARYAND.COM
Wow... I guess the last time I updated was the 8th. I'll try to catch up, but there's so much to say, it may take more than one entry.
The night of the 8th, Alexa went to a dance (her first- awwww!). (I remember my first dance. At Pathways. We had one on the first day of camp, so no one knew anyone and it sucked, and then on the last night and I was all excited because I slow-danced with seven guys. Heh heh.) Anyway, Lauren also was out, but once they got back, we were all together to watch the Opening Ceremonies, which was nice. I liked how the French came first. I kept translating it. :) We got to bed ver late.
Musical theater on Saturday the 9th sucked. Alexa got three parts, Kelsey and I got one, and I have to sing this awful song with this tiny short kid Elliott. I'm really pissed off. I have to say, I wish I had just ended last year, because I didn't like either of the plays this year (Seussical in the fall). Dad got the DVD of "Barnum" and we watched it in Utah. It was by far the worst movie/play/musical I have EVER seen (well, not as bad as "Contact" the play and "Galaxy Quest" the movie, but it was still up there). The plot is stupid and the songs suck. Grrrr. On Sunday we puppy-sat for Zip, and then Abena came over. I don't know if I've mentioned her, I'll find out. Anyway she's a friend of Mom's from Oxford, a writer and professor, daughter of the former prime minister of Ghana, her sister is an actress and scriptwriter who's good friends with Danny Glover, she's awesome. So she stayed here for a day or two.
That weekend was busy because I was doing another outline for chemistry, which ended up being nine and a half pages, about solutions. Ugh. I had to make up two French tests on Tuesday, I got 100 on one :), 91 on the other :|. I also had to write the article on America As A Super Power for journalism. It was a perfectly decent article, not great, not terrible, but I didn't want it in the paper, that's too big of a controversy and besides I don't particularly like having my stuff in the paper. (That SAT article which I wrote I have not yet seen -- that issue is STILL not out, even though it's from January!). Anyway, Ms. M thought it was like the BEST thing she'd ever read (uhhhh... suuuure) and she really wanted to put it in the paper, but instead I'm going to be listed as a contributing writer to Gary's article.
Had a fairly frantic Tuesday afternoon as I finished packing, cleaned my room and switched the closets, which Mom still insisted that I do. I couldn't have done it without Kelsey and Alexa. It was a pain in the ass though, I mean I'm just going to switch them back in two months. Grrr. Then we left for the airport (still Tuesday February 11th). Fortunately, Dad has Medallion status with Delta, so we didn't have to wait in the ridiculously insane lines. I am NEVER flying without him! The security was pretty tight, we had to take off our shoes to walk through the metal detectors. Once again, I did not have a boarding pass. I don't know what it is with me and Delta, but they NEVER issue me a boarding pass! Without fail, and it's always me!! Grr. Of course, everyone thinks it's hilarious. It is kind of funny, but still. Mom made us sandwiches on the flight, and we hung out at the Crown Room a little, which is like a club with Delta, it's nice. Plus, they were giving out Hershey's Kisses, and showing the Olympics on a big TV, so I was very happy. :) They showed "Hearts in Atlantis" on the plane, which I didn't watch. I listened to music, did some French, and did all of my global, which I was very proud of. (I had thirty pages of reading and multiple-choice questions. This was a LOT of photocopying.) Landing in SLC was very cool, they had a huge lit-up Olympic logo on one of the mountains. We got our luggage more or less quickly, Salt Lake is a pretty efficient airport. We stopped at Sage before going straight home and picked up some food. It's a great restaurant, and Mom became friends with the owner, so she buys all sorts of frozen dinners from them and then doesn't have to cook. (They are, however, not your usual frozen dinners. They are GOURMET frozen dinners, and they are GOOD. The best is their ice cream sandwiches. Real chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm.)
Lauren and I were sharing the room downstairs, I'll come back to this and put in the link for a photo sometime. We woke up pretty much simultaneously at 10:30 (12:30 NY time). We went upstairs and heard voices... aaaaaahhh! It was funny. It was Steve and Kristin and their huge, beautiful, friendly, lovable dog Maddie. (She's named for Madaket, a beach in Nantucket. They have another dog named Cisco, also named for a beach in Nantucket, who we don't really like.) Anyway, they were very disappointed because they had been going to send Maddie downstairs to wake us up!!! Heh heh. Their son Bryon was one of the front-skiiers in one of the slalom events, he missed the team by one persun. :( It's so sad though, he's been skiing so hard, he's a junior at Dartmouth and has only about a year and a half of credit, and he is SO nice. Mom told him that if he makes the Italy Olympics, we'll come cheer him on. :) (Another of David's friends, Adam, fore-ran one of the slalom events. Speaking of which, Adam just won gold in the World Juniors!!! Yay!!!!!!!! We subscribe to the local newsletter in Park City, which of course gets here really late, but he got the front page cuz he's a local, which is pretty cool. He went to school with David, and Mom is good friends with his mom.) Steve was very involved with all the Olympic stuff, they both volunteered, and he actually ended up parking his car in our driveway and walking to the mountain, which saves him a few miles. You have to have all sorts of residency passes and stuff, and at the supermarkets you get towed if you're there longer than an hour, they don't want people parking there for events. We always had to try to plan our trips when there wouldn't be Olympic traffic. One time, we were going to go meet KRISTI YAMAGUCHI, but we COULDN'T, because we would have been gridlocked for hours for a ten-minute drive. No FAIR! We did, however, meet Kelly Clark (gold in snowboarding this year), and Phil Mahre (1984 gold in some slalom events; no American guy has won gold since). We also saw Hannah Hardaway (freestyle). And Lauren and Alexa saw Eric Bergoust and his younger sister, but I wasn't there. :(
Main Street is so awesome. It is so crowded!! All the restaurants set up little stands so you can get stuff to eat, and everyone is handing out free stuff. I got so many free pins. I got a free cowbell, free handwarmers, free packets of Olympic kleenex, free Three Musketeers, free gold, silver & bronze "medals" that say "Proud Sponsor of Budweiser"!!! Oh yeah, that's me! :Þ I also got a lot of free stuff handed out from religious people. One guy in SLC gave me a bag with kleenex, chapstick, band-aids, and breath mints, all with religious messages about Christ. So weird. No, not Christ, just that you'll put a message on a packet of breath mints about how we should all be saved... we had some good laughs out of that.
The Jamaican bobsled team set up a special store, and we went in there and Kelsey and Alexa and I sat in the bobsled, and we got photographed by a guy from the Jamaican delegation! We got a shirt for Alexis and David got an autographed shirt when we weren't there, no fair. :( Dad ran into a friend of his named Hans and his friend Peter, and Hans looked SO tacky. He was wearing this vest covered in pins. Pins were a huge thing there, everyone was selling them and trading them. I got a couple, but didn't go crazy, I mean they're $7 apiece mostly and I'm never going to WEAR them. I'll probably just pin them all to a piece of cardboard and make a pretty display. Anyway what else was on Main Street... Budweiser's Clydesdales parade down it, and Lauren had issues with some ENORMOUS parts of their, um, anatomy. They were HUGE. Disgusting. K&A thought they were beautiful (the horses, not the anatomy -- they're not THAT perverted). Budweiser also set up a special ski jump most nights, with a long ramp. We only got to see a few jumpers, but David went in one night when Dave Chappelle was doing the Tonight Show and watched, I'm very jealous. His friend Jeremy (competed in freestyle) and this other guy Jonny (freestyle 1998 gold) were jumping, and Jonny landed on the head of this girl Suzy, who David used to date... haha. David was all pissed at himself because his friend Dave tried to call him and invite him to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition party with Jeremy, and he didn't pick up his phone! Hahahahaha. Back to Main Street. They had fireworks every night at eight, and they played the "Light the Fire Within" song, and we could see them from our house, which was pretty cool.
I cannot think of an organized way to say everything I need to say, so I guess I'll try it by sport for now.
SKATING: We went to the men's long program! It was so cool! We hung out in the Olympics Square first. We got our pictures taken with the torch (it's with Chevy, and I'd include a link, except it turned out badly for everyone but Lauren, big surprise), and we were going to go do a virtual ski jump but after waiting in line for an hour we had to go. I got checked at the security :) (Well, everyone got checked, but I was the only one of us who had to get extra checking from a soldier guy. Wohoo.) We took lots of photos, which I'm actually getting tonight, I'm so excited. Dad gets them developed at this place at Grand Central, and it usually takes months to get them back. But yeah. Random tangent. Back to that day. There was a big parade around the square with the puppet thingies from the Opening Ceremonies, which was pretty cool. Then the skating. We had four level-A tickets and two in level-B, we were going to switch off, but after a while we realized that no one was going to sit behind us so we just called Lauren and Alexa back from level B. The funny thing was, there was a huge price difference (I think B was $210, A was $375), and little difference in the seating!!! Stupid. There were a lot of skaters, which you don't realize on TV when they only show four or five. So by the time it got to the top group, we were all pretty tired -- still on NY time -- but oh well. Todd Eldredge skated to music from "Lord of the Rings," which made us very happy, but he placed sixth. Yagudin placed first, which he did deserve, but we don't think he deserved the 6.0's, his program was excellent, but not inspiring. Goebel, however, definitely deserved silver, and I am shocked that there was not a fuss about that. He made a mistake, but so did Plushenko! Goebel was the only one who landed quads, and those are most difficult. I'm pissed. Grrr. Plus, my own persunal dislike of Plushenko -- I think he's a very arrogant skater. Grrr. Plus he NEEDS a haircut and different clothes. Not that that matters THAT much :)
We had two tickets to the ladies' short program, but we sold them to Andrew and his girlfriend Carol. (I'll find the entry where I mentioned them too, don't feel like going into it.) But we did have tickets to the long program!!!!! They were all scattered. Mom and Dad had two AMAZING box tickets -- their box had its own persunal bathroom and television and they had a great view. They were one box over from Robert Redford, who they know from Sundance, but they weren't able to go over and talk to tem. And they saw their friend Alexei Kovalek, or something, NO idea how it's spelled. He's playing for the Russian hockey team. He goes to the same Japanese restaurant as them a lot, it's very funny. And apparently he was sitting next to Yagudin, but there were no good breaks for Mom and Dad to go say hi. Anyway, my sisters and I didn't have as good seats as the men's, we were pretty high up. Dale and Allison also had two seats somewhere, I don't know how good they were.
Well, first off, I'll have to say that of course we were looking for strange things because of the whole debate with the pairs skating (unfortunately, I have no opinion, because I only saw their short program), but there should NOT be a difference of nine-tenths. Granted, it was in presentation, which is largely subjective, but it SHOULDN'T be so subjective, and there were some big discrepancies in the technical merit marks too. The marks with a difference of .9 no one knows about, because again, they only show the top five skaters or so. A lot of people don't show up until two hours into it to watch the very top.
I had wanted Michelle Kwan to win, because she's a beautiful and graceful skater and she had deserved the gold at Nagano, not that little bitch Tara Lipinski. (Speaking of which, she's on the cover of "Figure Skating" magazine, trying to look all sexy like Britney Spears -- ugh, it's disgusting.) But no, she placed third. I do think she might have deserved silver rather than Slutskaya, but I don't have as big of an issue with it as I did with the men's. I mean, they both messed up; Michelle fell and Slutskaya made 3+ errors. Butyrskaya made a ton of errors, but I still think it was in very bad taste when she stalked off before getting her presentation marks. Sarah Hughes did deserve the gold for that evening. She skated beautifully. I'm happy Sasha Cohen didn't get a medal (though an American sweep would have been nice), because apparently he kept trying to psyche Michelle Kwan out on the ice. Not good.
GIANT SLALOM: This is the event that my cousin Scott is trying to compete in, so he and David went to see the men's. Go Bode Miller! :) We went to see the women's, and it was great because it was really really really sunny weather. Hot, even!! It was at Park City, a run which we had skiied, which was pretty cool. We had to walk more than a mile mostly uphill, which was not cool. No controversy there, but I wish we had a stronger American alpine team!!!
SLALOM: We went to women's slalom, which was at Deer Valley. It was FREEZING COLD. We saw 63 skiiers before we gave up and left. It was a long walk, too. Gah. And the security, again, was pretty tight. You get checked before you're allowed to enter the vicinity, and you're not allowed to leave. You have to show your tickets to practically every persun in an official jacket along the way. You get stamped, "APPROVED" -- I got double-stamped, one on each hand, from special request. Heh heh. I'm so strange. I also got double-"PAID" at the giant slalom.
SKELETON: Uncle Jon and Scott went to the men's and women's skeleton. David knows the girl who won, Tristan. He's friends with her younger sister Amber, who went to high school with him. Now he teases Lauren because Tristan's really short, and Lauren's 5'4", and he thinks it's the *perfect* sport for her. Haha.
AERIALS: David's friend Speedy was in it, but he didn't place very well. David's friend Dave got him tickets (no faiiiiiiirrrrrr!) to see it. We were skiing in Deer Valley that day, and we knew of this run where we'd have a great view... but there were cops like every twenty feet! It SUCKED, they wouldn't let you stop! We all returned to snow plows (reaaaallly slow skiing) for that run. :) Then at the bottom, you have to go through serious security before you can ski behind the grandstand. I'm sad Bergoust fell, because he was pretty cool, but Joe Pack got silver, yay! Every year in Park City there's a huge July 4th parade down Main Street with a bazillion floats, it's so awesome and so much fun to watch. Last year I was in France but the year before I was there, our condo (which we're trying to sell; anyone have $625,000?) looks right over it, and we had a party with all our friends stopping in for snacks and the view. It was so much fun! Anyway they also have a bunch of people jumping on a trampoline, and we saw Joe Pack, and I got his autograph, which makes me very happy now. :) Plus, I have some photos of him.
We went to three dance performances: Alvin Ailey (of course), Pilobolus, and Savion Glover. We didn't really like the Ailey piece that was commissioned especially for the Olympics, but we liked the other pieces, especially "Revelations," which we never get tired of. We had never seen Pilobolus before; they're a sort of combination of dance and gymnastics. At first, it was a little strange at seeing the way that these people (4 men, 2 women) twined themselves around each other, but by the end, they had succeeded in making you completely forget about gender, which was pretty neat. Plus, one of the dances was very funny. Before Pilobolus, we went out to dinner at this great Japanese restaurant which used to be in PC but then moved to SLC. (Park City, Salt Lake City) We went with Mary, who was our ski instructor when we were very young, and her boyfriend, Phil (he was, by the way, not invited, but came anyway). Phil annoyed me, for some reason. Then Kelsey, Alexa, and I all went downstairs to go to the bathroom -- we always go in groups -- and there was this little girl in there with a Beanie Babie bunny (BBB, like Bastian Balthazar Bux! sorry... that was random). She was SO strange. She kept stroking the kitty and saying, "Oh, you cute little kitty!" and then she'd attack us with it and make her eyes go big and bare her teeth, and then when we'd pretend to be scared she'd say, "It's just a little kitty!" The three of us were laughing so hard that we fell up the stairs, and got some pretty strange looks from the people who were waiting. Heh heh. Anyway. Savion Glover was awesome, as always. He was great with the crowd. He's a tap dancer, by the way. :) We had some issues when we first got there. We had been going to take Allison, but by then she had sort of become non-functional again, and we convinced Scott to come with us. When we got there, we found that we were short one ticket... argh. So Scott got to sit by himself, which was what he wanted in the first place, and we had great seats four rows from the front, which he would have hated. We all ended up happy. :)
We went to a Chihuly exhibit in SLC, which was great. We had seen him in Jerusalem when we went for my Bat Mitzvah. He works with glass, and he had created these amazing beautiful colorful glass sculptures and placed them in the ruins of the ancient Tower of David. It was incredible. This exhibit didn't have as many sculptures, but it was more about the process of what he did. For example, they had a bunch of Plexiglas (sp.?) paintings which looked like studies for the final pieces, and you could hold little pieces of blown glass, which were surprisingly heavy. You can see pictures of some of his work at www.chihuly.com
Then there was the thief. Yup, a thief. We're not sure who, but somehow, someone got into Mom and Dad's locked closet upstairs. Dad went up one weekend, and there were people staying in the house (it was the Sundance Film Festival), and he found the closet unlocked, which was strange, so he locked it. Then on Tuesday -- this was in January, by the way -- he gets a call saying that the resort property management found the door unlocked... five days ago. What idiots! So yeah, a lot of stuff is missing, at least $1000 worth, and Mom and Dad are filing an insurance claim. They don't know if it was the people renting it, or the cleaners, or what, but it's really strange stuff missing. They didn't touch the expensive ski coats or ski sweaters, but they took Dad's prescription sunglasses and nice bathrobe. They went through pretty much all of Mom's cosmetics and toiletries. And some of this stuff was used! But it was all good stuff, expensive stuff, Aveda, Clinique, etc. And we left out huge bottles of shampoo, conditioner, lotion, stuff like that so we wouldn't have to lug it back and forth. Mom even made a list of everything we left, and it's all gone. Plus, the cleaners stole Lauren's SHIRT. You know how Roots made such a big hit over the Olympics? (Those berets that everyone was wearing? I don't see why those sold 50,000 a day, but that's just my opinion. We had to get one for Dr. Joan. Anyway.) Well, Lauren found a really cute Roots shirt that actually fit her, like a normal shirt would fit, not like a usual tee-shirt. Hard to describe, but yeah. So then one day she gets home from skiing (she skiied four times, I skiied twice) and it's not where she put it... a few days later she finds the tag on the shelf. She didn't clip the tag. Everyone searched everything a zillion times, and we concluded that they must have taken it. There was also one incident when I thought someone stole one battery from my Discman. It was, of course, David. However, I forgave him because he let me listen to his MP3 player, which has 12 songs on it, all rap and hiphop, and in his terminology, they were pretty damn "sick." I also listened to Scott's MP3 player, which made me very nostalgic, because it had some of our CTY songs -- "Love Shack," "American Pie," "Time of Your Life"...
We didn't have very much downtime. Oh, sure, we had SOME. We played about a four-hour long game of Monopoly and I learned what it's like to be in eternal debt, but then to FINALLY convince Alexa to trade properties and to get the MOST money of ANYONE! Yahhhhh! (We also learned what it's like when the bank runs out of money and you have to start using houses for $500 bills. Heh heh.) We played cards -- Egyptian Ratscrew (PIG), Asshole, BS, Spit, Uno, fun stuff. We watched "Barnum," which SUCKED, I have no idea why we're doing it for musical theater! We also watched part of "Center Stage" but we didn't have time to finish it. :( I had a ton of homework to do. I wrote a story for the writing tutorial. It was the assignment where you had to imitate the tone of another story. My story was about a depressed, insecure writer. It was interesting for me because it was my first character who hadn't really been a total stereotype. I mean, I had the ditzy girl twice, and the artiste, and the crabby old lady, and the overbearing mom with her daughter, and the overbearing girl with her rebellious friend who won't ever say anything. Yeah. Nothing terribly, well, no real character development there. Dad thinks I should revise some of my stories and send them off to magazines, like "Cicada." I sent one story off to one magazine once and never heard back, which kind of turned me off to the whole idea, but we'll see. I got my critiques back on the story with Roxanne and Ethel (the artiste and cranky old lady), and she really liked it, especially the cat, so I'm happy about that. Plus, though this happened obviously when I got back, I got my critique on the story about the writer, which was also good. I guess I've only really had one bad critique, on the second assignment, when I messed up the points of view. Her critique on my critical paper wasn't really bad, she liked the paper and thought it was well-done, but she disagreed with most of my points. Oh well. Back to the idea of magazines, I'd like to revise my story with the unreliable narrator. That was such a neat assignment and I love that idea. We're all really unreliable narrators, just some to more extent than others. Take my aunt Jill's book, for example! More on that later. I think, actually, I'm going to make one entry just dedicated to the Olympics and then another about what I've been up to since then. I'm determined to finish this before I go away again on March 23rd. We'll see. Back to not having much downtime. I had an insane amount of work to do. Besides the story, I had to read thirty pages and do questions on them for global (which I did on the plane, go me!), read sixty pages about French culture in French, do two practice tests for the National French Exam, do four pages of math problems, do ten chemistry worksheets, go over the PSAT, take notes for the article I needed to write on the Olympics, make a scrapbook, and Spanish homework. I did most of it. I had to do some of hte math when I got home, I only did one practice test (but it didn't matter because no one else did), I didn't get to go over the PSAT, and I never made the scrapbook. I still want to do that. I saved all my tickets and everything, they're very pretty, I also have all my programs. Maybe I'll bring the stuff to Utah later this month and do it there? Yeah, but all in all I was pretty efficient. I'm sad I didn't get to write any letters :( (and Missy wrote me a letter to the P.O. Box, which I didn't get!!! ack! I'll get it later this month, haha). I did, however, read two books, "The Blue Sword" and "The Hero and the Crown," both by Robin McKinley. She is a great writer, but she definitely over-uses the idea of her characters drifting in and out of consciousness. "The Hero and the Crown," "Deerskin," "Spindles' End," for example, all use this theme, and it's a great idea but after a while it's like ENOUGH already, just keep them in consciousness, damnit! Eh. I still like her a lot.
Allison did ok for most of the trip. She still said things that had a slightly malicious edge. (Example: The day before we left, Kelsey and I were hanging out downstairs reading, and she turned to us and said, "Oh, you're just trying to avoid helping, are you?" Uhhh... no. We had been helping all day, she hadn't done a thing. Actually, no one in that family really did a thing besides Aunt Dale. She tried to make up for everything that Scott, Allison, and Uncle Jon didn't do. I feel so badly for her.) Toward the end of the trip, Allison started complaining of a knee or ankle pain, now I don't remember, and she spent the last two days in bed reading and not going to the events. It wasn't as bad as we had thought it would be, which was good... I was sharing a room with her and Lauren, Lauren and she, whatever. Here's a picture, I hope it works: http://www.parkcityski.com/call_propertyimage.cfm?propertygroupid=29590&imageid=108135&Operatingcompanyid=2 and you can see more pictures of la casa at http://www.parkcityski.com/call_PropertyDisplay.cfm if you want. Anyways.
I actually didn't wind up spending too much money there, so I'm proud of myself. I bought a stuffed animal bear with the Olympic logo on it for Katie's birthday, which I keep forgetting to bring in to school, oh well. I bought two pins (and have many others, some from Mom and most that I got free from Main Street) and $1 worth of fudge. But I really think that's it. I still have the entire $100 from Gramie and Grumps from Chanukah, and I think I'm going to spend it when we go back this month. See, the lines for Roots were SO long that we decided we'd just hope they still carried the merchandise next month. Alexa managed to get a sweatshirt at a department store in Salt Lake City, where Lauren got that shirt which was stolen. Then at the airport, they had a Roots store, and Lauren, Kelsey, and I all got sweatshirts, and Alexa got a tee-shirt. My sweatshirt is way too big, grrrr, Lauren told me it fit. Agh. (Mom paid for all of those... was I the only one who noticed that she promised she'd buy each of us *ONE* special piece of clothing, and she bought Alexa two? How interesting. Lauren doesn't count because hers was stolen. She also bought Alexa a new ski jacket, but Gramie and Grumps will probably reimburse her and use it as a birthday present for Lex. I desperately need a new ski jacket. Mine fits so badly, it barely zips but then it is absolutely huge in the back! Mom completely denies it! It's awful. Grrrr. I love the colors, but I hate how it fits.
I really think that's pretty much it, I may come back and revise this another time, adding in details, but hey, I'm only human, right? :) The flight back home seemed a lot shorter, they showed "Bandits," which I didn't watch, and I just did homework and started "The White Mercedes," by Philip Pullman, which I intend on finishing reading sometime soon. It did, however, take us an hour and a half for our baggage, which was annoying. Grrr. And when we got back, we had a disaster... But wait, now for the entry about what's been happening since Salt Lake 2002!
If you've gotten this far, you're a pretty damn determined persun. Or maybe you're just really bored. Sorries!
-Jessica
