Sunday, February 21, 2010

Olympic Ventures

The last week and a half have been rather adventurous. I decided in November to finally have Lasik surgery. After getting a consultation and finding out I was a good candidate I had to wait about 2 months for the surgery. As of Thursday February 11th I am glasses free and now have 20/20 vision.

The surgery itself was quick I was in the procedure room for only about 10 minutes, each eye took no more than 1 minute. The longer process is the recovery. A week in and everything is healing nicely, I can see but things sometimes go blurry and my eyes have been getting very tired by around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. They say this will get better over the next 6 weeks, my next check up is 3 weeks from now.

My dad was kind enough to fly to Seattle to drive me and take care of me ( I didn't need much taking care of it was mostly driving as I was not allowed to drive for 24 hours). As a special treat for dad (and me) I was able to get tickets to the Vancouver Opening Ceremonies. Right after my 24 hour check up with the eye doctor we hit the road and drove to Vancouver - crazy. I was very worried about the traffic heading up to BC but thankfully there wasn't any.




The Opening Ceremonies were amazing, there is so much energy and action, a lot of this doesn't come across in the televised version and the parade of countries typically seems to drag on forever. In person this didn't seem to be the case, almost every country seemed to have people cheering for them. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.



Dad and I got to the arena early as I wanted to get some shots of BC Place before it got mobbed with people. We were required to be in our seats by 5 PM to rehearse for the audience participation portions of the program. While the effects of the lights probably look very interesting on television by watching the guides and the prompters you actually miss what is happening. I was more interested in watching the performances than waiting for my cue to turn a light on or off. What's more important everything looking good for 3.5 billion people or me?



I did record the ceremonies on Tivo so that we would be able to see what we missed there was so much that was happening on the stage and in the audience I wasn't sure where to look at times. I finally sat down on Thursday night and watched the recording. There are definitely things that are happening on the stage which are for the benefit of television as you can't see the effects from the seats. For example the stage the orchestra and performers were on was beautiful when seen from the front the large ice columns however completely blocked the view for us as well as everybody in probably 4 or 5 other sections. I was OK with not seeing as there was plenty of other stuff to look at.

One of the things that surprised me was leaving the ceremonies as well as walking around the next day, when you stopped a volunteer to ask for directions they had no idea. I could understand no knowing where some obscure things were but we were asking for directions to the cauldron and they didn't know where that was. I'm very glad I got the opportunity to go to Vancouver and that my surgery went well and I could see everything.