08/19/08

RED ALERT RED ALERT - among the many misspellings or bad grammar in the past, I had the unmitigated gaul to misspell Kris Deetracks name. It's actually spelled Chris Detrick (k not h) and he's from the Salt Lake Tribune. Sorry dude! So Detrick and I are two of three photographers here representing our respective newspapers and our parent company MediaNews. Helen Richardson is the third photographer from the Denver Post. We're all basically chasing our local athletes and sometimes we run into each other at the same events. Though most of the time were not at the same events. There are a total (I think) of 20 of us here - 3 photographers and the rest are reporters or columnists and our bureau chief Rachel. The Mercury News has two columnists (Mark and Ann) and one reporter (Elliott).

Couldn't believe I was still in China in August - the cart dudes were wearing jackets! And the dude last night was saying "so cold" in English.

Um, I thought now that swimming was over that getting 3-4 hours of sleep was also over with - damn I was wrong on that one - went to bed at 3:30 last night after getting back from the Women's soccer game against Japan and got up at 7 a.m. to make it to the 9 a.m. beach volleyball match. It seemed a little bit early to have music blasting and girls in bikinis prancing around and I'm not talking about the athletes, during the time-outs girls in bikinis come out and dance around. But I survived. David Eulitt said I had to mention that.

Had lunch with David Eulitt at the MPC again and had pizza which is a pretty safe dish. That and their meat on a stick - grilled - I had the chicken, but beef and lame is also available.

Afterwards I headed over to Women's water polo, i'd shot water polo a couple of times already because we have several locals on the team and their superstar Brenda Villa is local - went to Stanford. There hadn't been too many photographers but today there were about three times as many. But that was cool. The US won, so that was good - they advance to the gold medal round on Thursday. But they are guaranteed at least a silver. For some dumb reason they put a bunch of Women's team medal events on the same day and even overlap the times. So Women's beach volleyball, softball, Women's water polo and Women's soccer are all on the same day (Thursday two days from today). Why is that?

After water polo I headed to gymnastics where they had the parallel bars, balance beam and high bar, in that order, going for the apparatus finals. it was a lot busier than i thought it was going to be. So since I didn't need to shoot it I decided to shoot up in the photo positions in the stands to keep out of the way.

Rachel then instructed me head back to the media village and grab some shut-eye :) so I did.