Joanna Griggs- is there anything she cannot do?

There's not much family stuff to report, but as usual I will try and exaggerate enough...sorry, "poetically licence" some goings-on enough to make them appear interesting. First up, it's finally happened, and I'm not even 40 just yet. My eldest daughter Naomi is expecting. I am going to be one of those types privaleged enough to experience grandparenthood at a relatively young age. I hope that is more fun than being an actual parent.

Naomi is expecting a litter of guinea pigs some time next Sunday. It will be a proud day for her.

To celebrate the occasion Sharon went into Melbourne with old friends Libby and Brenda to indulge in excesses such as drinking, going out, buying shoes and playing with each other's hair. Like a good hubby I ran the household all weekend, and kept a very tight ship if I may say so myself. Dishes were done, meals were home cooked and an entire back yard of rubbish was cleared up.

I don't remember Sharon actually returning home, although I did go to the train station and pick up a similar looking woman with different clothes and reddish hair. I was assured this was actually Sharon after a makeover from her fellow nurses. If it wasn't, I have some serious infidelity issues to deal with after Sunday night.

I am still a little miserable since there is still no motorsport and Top Gear has stopped screening on SBS, the station where "multicultural" means "muslims and gays". I have nothing against Mythbusters, in fact I enjoy watching scientists throw pieces of buttered toast from tall buildings, but I sorely miss Clarkson, May and Hammond thrashing cars and making it all funny.

I have, however, found a surprisingly un-Patrick like TV replacement for all this; the Winter Olympics.

Okay, yes, I admit that I would eat broken glass just to hear Joanna Griggs commentate at a dwarf-throwing championship. But that's not the only reason. Some of the actual sports are enthralling. How about that Luge thing.

Who could not possibly be entranced by the sight of humans wearing little more than lycra and a horrified expression on their face, hurtling down a frozen chute sitting on a matchbox car at 100km/h or more?

And you must love the imagination and variety that goes into creating different Luge formats; 3 people in a bathtub-like contraption/ one person face down on one of those trolleys Grandpa once used to slide under the car and change the oil/ same again but face up feet first, etc...

If they ever run out of Luge ideas, they could always just shoot the lycra-clad Luge Competitor out of a cannon and whoever gets to the bottom with the least broken bones wins.

Or maybe that's already been thought of- the ski jumping. This is even better than the Luge by virtue of its simplicity. This merely requires a person, preferably one who has lost the will to live, to hurtle down a near- vertical slope at speeds more suitable for a snowmobile. All this with no brakes, therefore the point of no return is pretty much the moment they leave the starting gate. Channel 7's camerawork is so crisp you can see the skijumpers changing their minds. These masochists obviously like having those nightmares where you are falling and wake up just before you hit the ground.

Then there is the bi-athlon. Despite the skin-tight lycra it is not, as the name may suggest, a multicultural thing. It involves skiing around without the aid of gravity, for what seems like forever. Then, when the competitors feel like their thighs are about to explode, or they are about to drop dead from exhaustion and hypothermia, they unleash all of their anguish and pain by pulling out a whopping big gun and shooting something. Being a judge at a bi-athlon event is not a difficult job, but for some reason there are many vacancies.

The ice skating pairs; I'm not sure when this stopped being a beautiful and graceful form of expressive art and became sport, but I'm sure it's well received by loud, beer-swilling, sports-mad yobbos. I suppose in ice skating people can still crash and get hurt.

And, just in case you have overdosed on the near-sensuality of lycra-clad European atheletes or young Russian women in skimpy ice skating costumes, there is always the snowboarding. Snowboarders agreed to join the Olympic sports provided they could continue wearing grungy, loose-fitting, impractically dangerous parachute-pants in order to stay true to their roots. Their roots being the great unwashed who bum around after school, communicate only with "Whoa.... dude...like....y'know", and break out in spots at the first sign of any kind of achievement. There is nothing quite as un-erotic as that.

Having said that, I like snowboarding. Really. It IS pretty cool. I'd learn to do it, except there's no snow where I live, um, dude....

Soon this winter wonderland will all be over, and I'll be back to having nightmares about armies of guinea pigs. Except this time they'll all be wearing parchute pants and I'll be falling, falling falling, and I wake up just before I hit the ground...