5d 5h 38m 02s

For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth.
-Mary Lou Retton

With 33% of the total available Olympic time remaining, the Team College Hill athletes were frantically knitting away, and our crack reporter had difficulty getting a complete sentence. The official Team College Hill spokesperson did note some objection to the second-by-second Olympic timer countdown. This countdown is counting every second, and not just available knitting seconds. It fails to take into account that there will be much knitting time available at the end of the week when the planets align and good things happen:

• Katja will be done with Step 2 of her US Medical Licensing Exam in 7h 35m and 06s - wish her luck!
• Leah will have finished all her shifts in the ED and move onto the important things in life - like knitting
• Rachel will have actually done some work at work this week instead of playing with photoshop and making team buttons . . . unless she makes good on her talk of iron-on transfers and matching T-shirts
  
• Theresa will have finished (after starting) her paper on narrating nationhood in the 1820s, because she's currently blaming her fickle row gauge on that
  

The Team College Hill spokesperson remains optimistic about the available knitting time remaining, noting that Leah was heard to mumble things about "zwie sleepover" and Katja might have uttered the phrase "all knitting, all the time" in between counting stitches. Furious bouts of knitting over the weekend resulted in great progress.

• Check out Rachel's progress on Tubey on her blog - it fits! And don't forget to wish her a happy birthday while you're over there.
  
• Katja had a moment of heart-stopping panic when she realized that her center stitch was not, in fact, the center stitch. Turns out she miscounted very early on and had 10 diamonds on one side and 12 on the other. Rather than "open it all up" and face defeat, she has a clever plan to progressively decrease the extra stitches on the one side. No one will ever notice, and she is flying along, having completed 52 rows, or approximately 50.5%, according to the handy-dandy shawl progress calculator.
• Leah made some progress on in upstate New York this weekend, where she tried to explain the Knitting Olympics to her 5 and 7 year old cousins. Their response? "But you always knit." True enough - she was at row 36 (36.2%) before her ER shift last night.
• Theresa alternates between hope and despair. She finished the sleeves (both together) of Am Kamin, cursing the row gauge that made her knit more and more the entire time, and started the fronts. With the realization that 76 (left front stitch count) is less than 120 (sleeve stitch count), she is back on a hopeful upswing, estimating herself to be about 65-70% done.
  

Shortly before heading off to take her boards, Katja raised her head from her knitting and spoke clearly to articulate the sentiment held deep within the hearts of all Olympians: "What are we going to do with ourselves after the Knitting Olympics?"