Travel day! All of the stress of getting stuff done at work for the past several days blends into the need to pack and try to forget as few items as possible. Since Rio is 4 time zones east of us, I get up at 3am local time. Sean, who has had a completely bizarre sleep schedule all summer is already awake when I go down stairs. Beth has decided to get up at our usual 5:30am. This gives me a couple hours to work on my pin project. For those that are new to these blogs, I have to explain about Olympic pins. Pin collecting and pin trading are the Olympic sport for the spectators. While I long ago decided to only collect team pins that are given to athletes of each of the 206 or so National Olympic Committees (NOCs), that does not mean that I don't trade for or buy other types of Olympic pins. While I now give away many more pins that I buy or trade for, I still have well more than 10,000 of these little metal buggers lying around.
Much more about pins later. But this obsession with NOC pins has led to an unusual spinoff. The board of directors of the Olympic memorabilia club that I belong to, called Olympin, figured out that I was both very anal (duh) and tech savvy. This made me the perfect candidate to keep track of all of the NOC pins that are produced for a particular Olympics. So after every Olympics, I produce a list for the members of all of the pins produced by each NOC. With no access to the Olympic Village and the athletes, I usually saw these pins on auction sites like eBay or was told about them by Olympin members who did have access to the Olympic Village. My conversations often seemed to go like this: "I just saw this pin on eBay that was not on my list." "Don't worry about that one, it is a fake". In fact, I came to see that there were certain Olympic fanatics who produced bunches of bogus Olympic pins and traded them for legitimate pins. Some of these pins went into their collection. The rest were sold off to pay for their Olympic trips. This really began to bug me and one day I uttered the fateful words "Someone should do something about this!" Olympin leadership are no fools and they were quick to thank me for volunteering and put me in charge of the project to try to reduce the number of phony NOC pins.
So here I am at 3am madly copying pictures from eBay of Rio NOC pins that I haven't seen previously. Once I have the raw pictures, I have to Photoshop them into the appropriate size. The final step is to contact the various NOCs and ask them if a particular pin was authorized by them. Then I load them onto the website in the hope that this will help collectors avoid being scammed. Head over to www.olympinclub.org/comnocpins_search.php to see what it looks like. As of this morning, I know of almost 430 pins and the numbers of new pins are still going up very fast. On top of this project, I also volunteered to do the image collection, Photoshop and data entry for another group that is trying to do the same with media pins. They have about 130 images as of this morning. The worst part is that the fraudsters will drop all of their fake pins in the next 2+ weeks so if we are going to stop them, it has to be soon. Add in actually attending Olympic events and seeing some of the city, I'm hoping that I'll get some time to sleep!
The flight from San Jose to Houston was uneventful,, except that I broke the watchband on my watch. I had this watch for a long time and would have thrown it out when Beth bought me an iWatch except that the battery had the audacity to keep going. I thought that this would make a perfect watch for my "who me, no, no way that I'm an American" look that I'm cultivating in Rio. I was all set to go the watchless Millennial route when we happened upon a Swatch store in Houston airport. This was our first trip through Houston and the airport looks a lot like a shopping mall disguised as an airport. Anyway, I knew that Swatch has been an Olympic sponsor for a long time and were sure to have an appropriate model. I bypassed the official Team USA watches and went with this one:
We have a three hour layover so I'm working on the blog. While I'm sitting here, a woman with a eastern European accent comes over and asks to look at the pins on my hat. This is, after all, why I started collecting pins in the first place. They are only little pieces of metal, but by wearing them, all sorts of people will come up and talk to me when I am far too shy to go up and talk to them. We have a nice conversation and she apologizes for not being able to trade because her pins are packed in her luggage. Sean looks at me, rolls his eyes and says "and so it begins".
Steps for the day - 3,563
Steps for the day - 3,563
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