Something else was also starting to bug me about this announcer/athlete pair. The announcer didn't pronounce the Cs in her name the same way. He said, phonetically, "Yanitsa Kostelich." I didn't have a good resource handy to verify whether this could be a reasonable pronunciation of her name, but I suspected it wasn't. And this suspicion combined with the repetition of her name was starting to bug me.

Actually, I had an okay resource available. Unbelievably, there was a pocket Croatian-English dictionary on top of the fridge in the kitchen. Matt had brought it back from his four month assignment in Sarajevo. I could have looked up a few words with C in them to check whether or not Cs had different pronunciation in different contexts. I could have, but... Okay, I suppose this depends on one's definition of "handy". The dictionary wasn't in my hands. It wasn't even within arm's reach. It was all the way down the hall in the kitchen! And as I said, the (mis?)pronunciation was bugging me, not making me hungry or thirsty. As far as I was concerned, that dictionary could have been in Croatia and been just as "handy". Okay, I'll admit that there were times when I went into the kitchen over the course of the day. (You know, to make sure I wasn't sneaking back on to Weight Watchers. Cheating on not-a-diet defeats the purpose, don't you think?) Anyway, I just didn't think of it. Maybe if the Croatian-English dictionary had been in the fridge, I might have answered my nagging question. Well, maybe if someone had stuck a slice of cheese in it, between pages with a bunch of words with C in them. But they didn't. So my nagging protest remained. Utterly unanswerable. But I just knew that Limey was butchering her name. (Later, it occurred to me that I had never been bothered by the pronunciation of "Ceausescu." Maybe I'm just fickle.)

Also this day, Britain's women's curling team won the gold medal, Britain's first winter gold since Torville and Dean's ice dancing gold in Sarajevo in '84. Along with bronzes in the men's slalom and women's skeleton, this marked Britain's best winter Olympics since 1936. In fact, Britain, one of the only countries to have participated in every winter Olympics, has a total medal count of 24. Over 19 Games. Germany lead the medal count at this Games (just this Games) with 34. Well, at least Britain is hanging in there. To paraphrase Churchill, "Never have so many tried so hard and won so little." While Germany kicked Britain's butt in the medal count, the British and American medal counts combined managed to beat the Germans, thanks to Britain kicking in a whole three medals. But isn't that the way it always is?

Skip Rhona "Mrs." Martin played superbly, along with all the other team members. Interesting nickname. I guess she is the oldest and perhaps the only married member on the team. In fact, she played better, I thought, than most of the men I watched. I'm not sure there should be separate men's and women's curling, unless the separation is so men can save face. There is Olympic precedent for an event in which men compete against women. Know what it is? (And no, not as pairs.)

I learned one more thing about curling. The sole of the left shoe is made of Teflon. I think Jackie Chan ought to have a fight in one of his movies in a pair of curling shoes.

Oh, and the capital of Slovenia is Ljubljana. Their deal is pretty much the same as Croatia's. They were a Yugoslav state until 1991. But since they don't have a star athlete to single-handedly push their medal count above Britain's, I hadn't heard about them as much. I gather, though, that they have pretty run of the mill stamps.

Come to think of it, I think Croatia has a decent basketball team, too. I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Countries in Europe split up, and the one that starts with a C gets all the Olympians. The one that starts with S, well, they get to participate, like Britain.

This was the Friday evening going into our last weekend together, and it had been made clear that Matt and Susan wouldn't cook the guinea fowl and pheasants, even though they hadn't been ripened. So, I cooked not one, not two, but three birds for dinner: the second guinea fowl (which Matt wanted to taste) and two of the four pheasants. (I also made a bunch of Pepperidge Farms stuffing and some spinach so Susan could have something.) The pheasants were really small, like Cornish Game Pheasant small, but there were still plenty of leftovers.

For dessert, Matt made peanut butter cookie sandwiches. The filling of the sandwiches was peanut butter, butter, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar. The Weight Watchers cookbook does not include this recipe, I am sure.

We had a family meeting to discuss what we ought to do over our last weekend together. We were in England. There was a visitable history that ranged over the past four thousand years. Calculus and the Law of Gravity had been formulated thirty minutes from the house. London, with sights ranging from Harrod's food court and Hyde Park Speakers to the Globe Theater, was only an hour and a half away. After a teeth-pullingly pleasant 15 minutes in which people were full of suggestions and digressions, but not decisions, we finally agreed. The consensus was to "relax at home." I come from a long line of driven super-achievers.