Now that I’ve got this up and running again, time to recap Friday.

  • Work. Half day.
  • Went to lunch at Rasputin (Russian cuisine) with Jess, Julia and Rick.
  • Off to LS Micro to get a new HD for the laptop. The one in it crashed (AGAIN) while I was on vacation. When I called to find out about getting it repaired (AGAIN), they said that it would be $150, just for the diagnostic, plus then the cost of parts and labor to replace it. Doing it myself for less than the diagnostic cost seems the better option… and I get instant gratification on two fronts:
    • I’ll know that I did it myself.
    • I don’t have to wait for it to ship there, get repaired and get sent back.
  • Went to the comic shop.
  • Home.
  • Jess went to work and I went downtown with Katherine, Land and Bob. We soaked up a little more of the Olympic atmosphere. And, I had the best part of my Olympic experience there. More on that below.
  • Came home.

I decided to join K,L, and B downtown on a lark. I was originally planning on just having a quiet evening of drawing at Borders and coming home. That would have been a mistake. After finding a place to park, made easier by parking at Adrian’s and asking him to drop me off downtown, we met up and went to Bud World. First stop: Starbucks’®. It wasn’t blood-chillingly cold, but it is Salt Lake City in mid-winter. And there’s nothing wrong with having a nice Cafè Mocha to keep the chill at bay. That’s also where we had our Olympic experience…

We met Dr. Tenley Albright. She was the first American woman to win the Figure Skating gold medal (1956 Winter Games). We met her because Land was asking her about an Olympic program that she had; she showed it to him and introduced herself. She was a very gracious woman. She was also kind enough to take pictures with us and talk with us for a while. I even managed to get her autograph; unfortunately, the only thing that I had available to sign was my Palm Pilot… but she signed it. Thank Heaven for drawing programs!

For more information on Dr. Albright, see the following:

I’ve gotten to meet/see some of the Olympians from the 2002 Games, while doing Olympic postmark cancelations, but this was much more memorable and impressive: How often do you get to meet the first American Gold Medalist in a given event? Impressive, indeed.

Pictures of the evening can be seen here.

Peace.