Last week I got sick. One minute I had a mildly sore throat and the next I was down for the count, lying in bed with a raging headache, severe congestion and general aches and pains. I ended up taking a sick day Friday, because even though I was scheduled to work from home that day, I couldn't imagine keeping my head upright for enough hours to actually write a story on the computer. To actually write a sentence, one that would have made sense, anyway. Luckily my cold was of the intense, but short, variety, and I pretty much recovered within three days, with only a few annoying symptoms--stuffy nose, the occasional cough--lingering this week.

The sick day was kind of nice, though, besides feeling horrible. I've been talking for the past few months about how I'd really enjoy getting up one morning, staying in bed, and just watching TV all day, I guess because that just seems like something I never have the time to do since there are always three million other things going on.

Of course, the thing about wanting to do things like stay in bed all day and watch TV, however, is that you always end up getting to do it in these not-so-great circumstances. Like you get to do it...but you use up an entire box of Kleenex while doing so because your nose is running that much. Whatever, I was willing to take what I could get and settled in for a marathon television/nap session that I honestly believe helped me recover more quickly.

The other great thing about being sick and therefore feeling no guilt about watching a ton of TV is that I'm sort of addicted to the Olympics and it meant extending my primetime viewing (J and I have been rushing home at night to make dinner and obsessively watch whatever Olympic competition is going on, even fighting falling asleep for the night when things get really exciting) to all-the-time viewing.

And when you get to watch the Olympics all the time, you get to watch stuff besides gymnastics and swimming and running, because let's face it, that's the good stuff and they save it for the biggest audience. You get to watch stuff that's, you know, more ridiculous.

I mean, if you really think about it, a lot of Olympic sports are ridiculous. I know others share this view, because I've had this conversation many times. Like diving, for instance. Like jumping off a springboard and doing a few somersaults and a half-twist or whatever and then trying to enter the water splash-free. That's weird. But we love it. And award good divers gold medals.

And water polo. Water polo. Competitors wear little helmets and play, like, some kind of soccer in the pool.

Anyway, I continued my TV watching into Saturday. I was feeling better, but didn't want to push it, and so took a few opportunities to lie down on the couch and see what was going on over in Beijing. During one of these sessions I turned on the TV (permanently tuned to NBC) to discover an athlete jumping up and down on a trampoline, doing flips in the air. The trampolining competition. TRAMPOLINING. It's one of those things where if someone had asked me to make up a funny, but not overly far-fetched, fake Olympic sport, this is what I might have come up with. "The competitors jump up and down on, like, your normal, backyard, trampoline, but are graded on the height of their jumps and the precision of their backflips!"

I know I shouldn't make fun. There is no way I could perform Olympic level feats on a trampoline, I'd fall on my face, but I swear, in addition to the moments that make your heart race, when Michael Phelps is going for his eighth gold or Usain Bolt is totally kicking everyones asses, perhaps stumbling upon trampolining, an actual Olympic event, is another thing I love so much about the games. Finding perfection in the normally mundane. Realizing that, seriously, there really is something out there for everyone.