The Olympics... and beyond

The term "the new normal" has been thrown out a lot in the past few months as people make adjustments to the conditions presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, including social distancing and the wearing of masks. In my case, there was a pretty large shakeup in life, with the temporary layoff taking place on April 1, which I have to admit was completely unexpected. Two days later, I applied for unemployment through the New Hampshire state web site. The good news was that I was paid for the week I was laid off and also received a week of pay for the personal time I had accrued through the first three months of the year. Each week, I went back to the unemployment web site and filed my claim, but the weeks went on with no money deposited in my account. Eventually, as it went out to more than a month without anything coming in, it became obvious I was either going to have to find a job or move out of my apartment if I wanted to keep paying my health insurance bill (Affordable Care ...

Over the last few weeks, living without sports has been an interesting experience. Networks have done a good job of bringing back old sporting events to our televisions and I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks watching old Olympic events from the Summer Games in Beijing in 2008, London in 2012 and Rio in 2016 along with a few highlights from Games even further back, including Sydney in 2000, Athens in 2004, Atlanta in 1996 and even the gold medal game for the original Dream Team in Barcelona in 1992. That was a lot of fun, and usually, in a normal world, I'd be writing about sports all the time, covering the local high school teams and other events going on throughout the community. Of course, I'd probably also be complaining about all this rain that would certainly be wreaking havoc on our spring schedule. But, with no high school sports or community activities and with no longer being employed, I have had a lack of sports interaction (or really, interaction in gene...