So, do you ever work?

I was reading over my blog and realized that if all you had to go by was this blog, you would never know that I actually am working while I'm here!
This picture is of my co-worker Lance in a corner of our video room. We tape every minute of every event so that our teams can review performances before and after they compete. It's not a hard job, but you have to be diligent so you don't miss any coverage. It's Murphy's law. . . the 3 minutes you miss will be an American, gold-medal winning performance or the critical play we need to scout an opponent. For those of you who saw the pictures of our set-up in Athens, these recorders should look familiar. When we packed out of Athens for the Summer 2004 Olympics, we shipped all this equipment straight to Torino for these Games.

The electrical grids in Greece and Spain seem to be much more fragile than those in the U.S. After the first few days, we got our power draw fined-tuned enough that we weren't causing outages anymore. In Athens, we kept blowing power from a whole college campus, at least here we're only blowing power from our own work areas! Power-surges aren't unusual, but we seem to be well-adjusted now to the ebb and flow of the Italian grid! Our set-up isn't quite the nightmare of EP-3s, but it can be almost as frustrating at times.

On the nutrition side of the house, a few of our teams travel with their own RDs. The food in the Athlete Villages has been quite disappointing. The food is great for the average person on the street, but not great for elite athletes about to compete in the Games of their lives. At this point, it's all about providing the athletes with some alternatives to Village eating (which the team RDs are doing), and helping them make healthy choices when the Village is what they've got. And of course, there's always McDonalds in the Athlete Villages (read my sarcasm here).

So, I just wanted to mention work once in a while so yall will know that I'm not really out here just for a vacation!