Upside

There's an upside to gettin' up at oh-dark-thirty to watch hockey.  Today we watched the Swedes... our second favorite team in the tournament, after Team USA... beat a surprisingly tough Swiss team, 1-0.  The game was scoreless through two periods and was always in doubt, right up until the final seconds.  Daniel Alfredsson scored in the third to bring it on home for the Tre Kronor team.  And why are the Swedes our second-favorite team, you might ask?  Simply because of the number of Red Wings... five... on the roster, including captain Henrik Zetterberg, who is also the Red Wings' captain.  We heard this morning that Zetterberg will miss the rest of the Olympics due to a recurring back injury.  This does not bode well for the Swedes' gold medal hopes and most certainly will affect the Wings' playoff run.  Zetterberg is suffering from a herniated disc (or discs), a condition that rarely gets better with time*.  NOT good news.

But we digress.  We began by talkin' about an upside to gettin' up early, and that's this: we found ourselves with a strange amount o' energy after the game was over.  So we vacuumed and dusted the whole house, changed the bed, and did three loads o' laundry... for we were perilously close to dippin' into the emergency tee shirt supply, aka "vintage tees."  A further upside: the bed gets made when I change the sheets, like this:

Oh, well.  Once a week is enough to make the bed, eh?  And now it's back out to the verandah to continue to laze around in the sun, drink beer, and smoke cigars.  We've earned it today.

* I know from whence I speak.  I went through a year o' Hell back in 1998-99 with herniated discs, which resulted in surgery followed by six months of excruciating rehabilitation physical therapy.  Not fun, at all.