Spring and Fall Olympics?

So we've got Winter and Summer Olympics.  And we all know that each includes sports that entail lots of cold weather and warm weather clothing and paraphernalia, respectively.  You know, activities that make you think of those seasons (mostly).

In the Winter Olympics we have lots of skiing, both bumpy and jumpy.  We have ice skating and speed skating, both long distances and very short.  We have luge and skeleton and possibly other body part-sounding sports.  We have bobsleds and ice hockey.  Oh yeah, and we have curling.

In the Summer we have gymnastics, lots and lots of gymnastics.  And we have various -athlons (pent- and dec- that I know of, keeping in mind that tri- isn't part of the Olympics (or is it?)).  Lots of traditional jumping activities (high and long and triple and probably others) and pole vaulting and chucking stuff (hammers and javelins and shotputs and disc ... um, disci (??? what is the plural of discus?), among others).  And lots of running, from short dashes to long marathons.  Swimming?  We've got swimming, singles and teams.  Diving?  Uh huh.  Water polo?  Yup.  "All-American" sports like baseball and volleyball and basketball?  Yeah (for now).  Synchronized swimming.  Martial arts.  Wrestling and rowing and badminton and weightlifting and ping pong and sailing and lots and lots of others.  And I hear tell that chess may become an Olympic "sport".

So that covers half of our year.  But what about the other half, the pseudo-warm and pseudo-cool seasons of Spring and Fall?  Since we want to include sports that evoke memories of those seasons, I propose the following, at least as a start:

Spring Olympic Events:

• Yard saling
• House cleaning
• House painting
• Spring Break planning
• "What the hell to do with the kids during the upcoming Summer" planning
• "Oy it's already getting hot out and it isn't even Summer yet" bitching
• Planting
• Mowing
• Picnicking (does that really have a 'k' in it?)
• Sneezing and wheezing

Fall Olympic Events:

• Leaf blowing
• Gutter cleaning
• Wood chopping
• Fireplace cleaning
• Heavy coat buying
• "Oy it's already getting cold out and it isn't even Winter yet" bitching
• Getting a flu shot
• Getting another damned flu shot depending on what pain in the ass new flu strain is popular this year

Of course, this also begs the question of why other sports haven't made it to the current two seasonal Olympic events.  There are a few extras in this post from some very mysterious but absolutely hilarious person who is evidently an ardent Flash Gordon fan in New York (I particularly love the "freestyle insult hurling").

They all just "go dumb"

In my last post I explained, briefly, how we Maryland folk are not supposed to get a lot of snow at one time.  There is evidently a biological reason for this: the more snow there is on the ground, the worse Maryland drivers drive.  As my family and I were walking through our neighborhood today, trying to once again get out of our house for just a short time, we saw more of our neighbors doing stupid things.  I won't go into details (at least we did have some comic relief watching these people), but as we watched my wife, somewhat astonished, said that when the snow comes they all just "go dumb".  It is true.  We saw the "going dumb" over and over again.

And unfortunately it is in their genes, so it won't ever stop.

It's not supposed to be like this!

We are in Maryland.  We are supposed to get just a little bit of snow at a time.

This is what we first saw when we opened our garage, a good foot and a half of snow covering ... everything.  And we still had 6 inches of snow yet to fall.

This was after just a few minutes of shoveling, the beginning of about 8 hours of work to clear our driveway.

My body hurts from shoveling.  It's not supposed to be like this!