There should be gold medals for speed watching the Olympics

Meryl Davis and Charlie White win Ice Dancing Gold!

Are you  watching the Olympics? I am. Lots of it. I blame my recent exhaustion on watching the Olympics every night. I will fully admit that I can watch maybe three luge runs before they all look the same. Without the excitement in the announcer's voice, I would never be able to tell you that this luge run is .087 of a second faster than the last luger.

I'll watch a couple of Skeleton runs and think about who these crazy  people are who decide to slide head first at nearly 80 miles an hour! I watch speed skating and slope style snow boarding! I do a lot of speed watching, but I always stop and settle in for the figure skating. All of it.

I used to hate ice dancing. It was weird, over-the-top, theatrical, and there were no jumps. I wanted to see Axels not Twizzles. I mean, seriously. Twizzles? This year, I liked the ice dancing the best. I hadn't realized that ice dancing had changed over the last decade. (The last Winter Games I watched were the 2002 Salt Lake Games where figure skating was fraught with cheating and scandal. Remember the double gold medal in pairs figure skating? The French judge?)

I think the reason that I'm watching so much of the Olympics is that I missed everything from both Torino and Vancouver.This was the period where we didn't have network TV. We watched everything via Netflix streaming and movies from the library. I didn't feel deprived, but it turns out that I've missed a lot. So, when Paul added Aereo  this year giving us the opportunity to watch TV online, I was enthusiastic. Very enthusiastic!

My husband did not anticipate my enormous enthusiasm for the return of network TV to my house. I've never been a TV person and I'm still not, but I'm happy to be back to engage the culture in real time.

Next up? The Oscars!!!