Which of These Things is Not Like the Other?

Take a look and see if you can figure it out...



I know! Who's that totally tall dude who is, we estimate, a foot taller than any of us!?

That's Bigfoot! I'm not going to put his real name on here because his mom, M, has been so careful to protect her family's identities on the Internet all these years (unlike me).

Anyway, M's daughter and Finn had the same type of cancer and we "met," as often happens, through various and sundry Caringbridge pages oh so many years ago. And Postcard Cindy (who we called Cindy from Sonoma) also played a role :). Crazy how the Internet works, isn't it?

So, M's son, who is known on M's blog as Bigfoot, goes to college in Colorado and came to meet us because we are near his school at a hockey tournament this weekend.

Finn couldn't get over how tall Bigfoot is. I couldn't get over how tall he is. Funny story: I told Bigfoot to call me when he got to the rink so he wouldn't have to pay. He called, I couldn't get signal. So I ran down one set of steps while he walked up a different set of steps. I got to the entrance area and he wasn't there. I asked the guy at the front, "Did a really tall guy just come through here?" The guy laughed. "He went that way," and motioned up the other steps. M had said, "You can't miss him," and she was right.

Thank you M and Bigfoot! Truly, what a great kid. Now we just need to meet M...

So we've been at this tournament since Thursday. We drove here in a snowstorm, of course. Thursday was Eamonn's birthday. He left the house and ended up in a ditch in his work van. He couldn't even get to the house he was supposed to be working at, so he came home early, ready to head out of town. I was there, still in my sweats, trying to finish work and discovering that the dryer didn't work. We had to take a load over to our neighbor's. And of course, it was a load that included my underwear. Nice. They're great friends and neighbors, but I feel we may have breached some sort of ettiquette by putting my undies in their dryer. I may have to gift them with something spectacular to get past this.

This tournament is long. The boys played twice on Friday and then once each day since. They have won all of their games, so we will stay for the final tomorrow. I enjoy eating out every once in awhile, but this is a long time. To make up for it, I have been going to exercise to my DVDs in a hotel conference room set aside for all of the hockey teams to hang out and play knee hockey. This morning, even though I was in there by 5am, I was discovered by some hotel workers who were coming in to clean. Maybe it's just me, but I don't really dig having other people watch me leap around while I'm exercising. Fortunately, I was almost finished, but had they been 5 minutes earlier, they would have seen me jab, cross, hook, upper cutting my way through Chalene Johnson's TurboFire. I've seen my reflection in the windows at home. I'm not exactly coordinated looking.

Whatever.

So the fact that the hockey games have been really spread out have allowed us to do some siteseeing around Colorado Springs. Yesterday, we toured the Olympic Training Center here. Eamonn and I were blubbering our way through one of the videos they show featuring the para-Olympians. Very inspiring and touching.

Today we toured the Air Force Academy. I can pretty much rest assured that the boys don't have that school in their sights after watching the video about what the cadets go through!

A few pics of our weekend so far...





Eamonn's friend, Craig, who is on the wall of Olympic athletes. We were talking about how we'd never find his picture (they're not alphabetical or anything) and we were standing right in front of him.


Bobsledding on a slightly slower surface.


Declan in front of a goalie cut out on the Olympic Training Center tour.




Air Force Academy Chapel.


Inside the chapel.

I think the most exciting thing for the boys at the Air Force Academy was discovering there is a Subway in the visitor's center.