Knowing Jack, Being Frank....
Dec. 15th, 2019 02:31 pmSettled back in at home after a whirlwind 40 hours away. I packed up and hit the road a bit after 8 on Friday and promptly headed the wrong way.... a court beckoned in Buffalo, and was then followed by a longer-than-liked stop in Rochester for a client who never showed, a check from another client that bounced, and a nice day that quickly turned rainy, as the remainder of my travels would be.
Between an unexpected bridge closing on the way to the 90 and an accident on it, I was delayed more than an hour getting to my sister's for the first night, but we shared stories about current friends and long-past family. She'd seen the Cumberbatch-Sheen movie about the (sometimes literal) battles Thomas Edison got into with competitors over the commercial development of electricity; making that especially relevant is that Edison's first wife (played in the film by Sense8's Tuppence Middleton) is a relatively close relative of ours. Our paternal great-grandfather Charles was the brother of the future Mary Edison; his son, our grandfather on that side, was born (near Hamilton, Ontario) in 1885, a year after Mary died in childbirth. That partially explains why we were never really in all that much on the history. I still need to figure out how and why my grandfather left Canada; maybe it explains all the hockey and Tim Horton's I go on aboot so much;)
----
Eleanor got a friend from work to come over and help with cat-medicating duty. She picked up the essential oil treatment, and is continuing the twice-a-day antibiotic squirts, which the kitty is now being much more cooperative with. They've also scheduled Zoey for a swab test of the growth for this coming Wednesday; it won't be as invasive (or expensive) as a biopsy would have been, but it will still give us a clearer idea of what she (and we) are facing.
Meanwhile, I was on the road by 7 yesterday morning, and made decent time to get to my former haunts slightly ahead of the friends I had coming from Jersey. Only problem, other than the rain, is that I barely recognized the place:
When I was last there in 2015 for what been billed as the Islanders' "last season at the Barn," the Coliseum was the cakebox of my youth it had always been. What strange alien ship was this? (Well, wherever they come from, they didn't bring charging stations with them. I took the hybrid for this trip, as I will from now on for the longer ones until JARVIS is out of my hair, and never got a place to plug her the whole time past my office.)
This is the deal: their move to Brooklyn was such a dud, the NBA Nets essentially kicked them out of the building long-term. They're getting their own new hockey-only arena on the Queens-Nassau border in a few years, but until then they're splitting their home games between Flatbush and the somewhat renovated Old Barn.
I never expected seats as good as I snagged in '15 for an Isles-Ottawa game I saw with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greenquotebook and her son- those were three rows behind the goal- but these weren't much further up-
That's a first-period battle for the puck in the Islander end right after they scored the game's first goal. The Sabres would tie it twice in a good back-and-forth contest, getting a point for the regulation tie and ultimately losing in the third minute of overtime on an Islander breakaway.
Number 9 on the ice for the Sabres was their star forward in his second year as captain, Jack Eichel. He's been having an excellent year and tied the game late in the third period with an unassisted power play goal that continued his league-longest streak of games with at least one goal or assist. Being that close to him, HEARING them smashing and even occasionally cursing, was quite the experience.
As for the fan experience: overall, very nice. I did find one bit of history hidden away that the space aliens didn't take:
That may be the only surviving evidence that Senator Al D'Amato (R-Pothole) worked in county government way back when.
I was semi-incognito; I wore my inaccurate hoodie from last time, but set out to top it with a Sabres hat so people would know my allegiance. No luck. Even though our local stores are full of them, once I drove even as close as Rochester, no Sabres merch was to be found. Halfway to New York, I stopped for gas and saw a Modell's. No longer the cheap department store of my past, it's now back to being just sporting goods. Yet even they had nothing other than local team merch. So here's me, outside their store as the latest member of Men Without Hats:
I figured I'd pick one up at the game. I figured wrong. I met my Jerseyites in the parking lot, we waited for the doors to open, and discovered they do not have a full-service Team Store. Even minor league teams do, and they make a ton off them. All these guys had were some small stands with just their own team logos. Strangely, they were still selling caps from the very unfortunate era where the Islanders changed from their Sticks-on-an-Island logo to one with an Angry Fisherman to channel Long Island's nautical culture. THAT died as soon as people recognized the resemblance to the Gorton's frozen fish mascot, and the hated/hating Rangers fans among those people started chanting "WE WANT FISHSTICKS!"
(Hey, we all make mistakes. The Sabres' recent history includes logos known as "the goat" and "the slug," and a use of their traditional crest that was put on a hideous yellow jersey that became known as the "turdburger." But the team doesn't sell those anymore.)
So here's me, my Devils fan friend Jason, and the loyal Kevin and Sharon, me rocking my Fishsticks:
The hat must've worked, because the Sabres scored their first goal not long after I put it on;) The Isle fans around me were fun and respectful of me rooting against them; I even offered to give one of them the Islanders Star Wars scarf they handed out (I've since found an East Meadow expat with a kid who will take it).
Right, it was Star Wars day, because what says "Evil Sith Lord" other than the commissioner of the NHL? Here's Lord Vader shooting t-shirts into the crowd; I think he's fake, because the real Darth wouldn't have needed the cannon;)
On the other hand, their Kylo Ren DID look a lot like Adam Driver; he laughed when I told him I loved him in The Dead Don't Die and then murmurred hockkkeyyyypuckkkkkssss in my best Zombie voice.
Got a couple more pictures I might add later, but the game then ended, and my day was barely half over.
----
I'd invited my friends for an early postgame dinner at Borrelli's, the pizza place across the Toinpike I've been going to since I was in single digits. It is NOT the first place I actually ate pizza; that was the long-gone Caruso's in Levittown (my mother didn't think I'd like it since I didn't like ripe tomatoes), but it was our go-to for many years and is usually the place I'll stop first if I'm there.
But the friends wanted to head home early, and I didn't want to crash a crowd of gloating Islander fans by myself with a Fishstick hat on, so I took a brief tour of the Old Neighborhood before heading back an hour or so later. Past another almost-as-historic pizza place next to the Methodist church (not serving), past the site of the annual Halloween desecration of the big sign on Ed's Glass Works (ironically, it's now a sign shop), and finally back around onto our old street. I'd been down it but did not stop in August when it was pouring even worse than this time, but I saw our longtime neighbors' 50-something kid working in the garage and decided to come over. Matt's parents are still hanging in, suffering from a ton of ailments but still having their hearts, minds and most importantly each other. They also filled me in on some of the troubles of the town; they were not original owners, getting there maybe when I was 5, but a lot of those homes go back to the original families, or at least very longtimers. Many of them have now been neglected to the point where they've been abandoned and taken over by various species of wildlife beginning with the letter "R." The crazy lady's house behind ours was torn down except for one wall, and Matt says it STILL smells of the decades of feral cats who'd infested it 40 years ago. And these homes are going for anywhere from 500K to a million- as is.
But our homestead was turned over before that, and the family who bought it 28 years ago next month is still there. They're the ones who very kindly contacted me when Mom started suddenly getting mail there last year, 20 years after her passing. It turned out to be a small insurance policy nobody knew about. I'd always thought to thank Mike for going out of his way to track me down about it, but I finally figured out how to do that....
Yup, back to the B. The crowd had thinned, so I was seated at a too-big table, ordered a personal pizza to go, said hi to Frank the owner (my age or close, been running it just the way his family always has since 1955), got my gift card, and didn't stop except for gas until I was home seven long hours later.
----
After a rare Sunday lie-in (until 9, wow!) and getting back in the dog's good graces, I've been updating stuff I usually do on Saturday, preparing for the Sunday Night Football watch tonight (on the telly- no more road trips for this guy), and getting ready to deal with the usual run of absent clients and bounced checks tomorrow.
Between an unexpected bridge closing on the way to the 90 and an accident on it, I was delayed more than an hour getting to my sister's for the first night, but we shared stories about current friends and long-past family. She'd seen the Cumberbatch-Sheen movie about the (sometimes literal) battles Thomas Edison got into with competitors over the commercial development of electricity; making that especially relevant is that Edison's first wife (played in the film by Sense8's Tuppence Middleton) is a relatively close relative of ours. Our paternal great-grandfather Charles was the brother of the future Mary Edison; his son, our grandfather on that side, was born (near Hamilton, Ontario) in 1885, a year after Mary died in childbirth. That partially explains why we were never really in all that much on the history. I still need to figure out how and why my grandfather left Canada; maybe it explains all the hockey and Tim Horton's I go on aboot so much;)
----
Eleanor got a friend from work to come over and help with cat-medicating duty. She picked up the essential oil treatment, and is continuing the twice-a-day antibiotic squirts, which the kitty is now being much more cooperative with. They've also scheduled Zoey for a swab test of the growth for this coming Wednesday; it won't be as invasive (or expensive) as a biopsy would have been, but it will still give us a clearer idea of what she (and we) are facing.
Meanwhile, I was on the road by 7 yesterday morning, and made decent time to get to my former haunts slightly ahead of the friends I had coming from Jersey. Only problem, other than the rain, is that I barely recognized the place:
When I was last there in 2015 for what been billed as the Islanders' "last season at the Barn," the Coliseum was the cakebox of my youth it had always been. What strange alien ship was this? (Well, wherever they come from, they didn't bring charging stations with them. I took the hybrid for this trip, as I will from now on for the longer ones until JARVIS is out of my hair, and never got a place to plug her the whole time past my office.)
This is the deal: their move to Brooklyn was such a dud, the NBA Nets essentially kicked them out of the building long-term. They're getting their own new hockey-only arena on the Queens-Nassau border in a few years, but until then they're splitting their home games between Flatbush and the somewhat renovated Old Barn.
I never expected seats as good as I snagged in '15 for an Isles-Ottawa game I saw with
greenquotebook and her son- those were three rows behind the goal- but these weren't much further up-
That's a first-period battle for the puck in the Islander end right after they scored the game's first goal. The Sabres would tie it twice in a good back-and-forth contest, getting a point for the regulation tie and ultimately losing in the third minute of overtime on an Islander breakaway.
Number 9 on the ice for the Sabres was their star forward in his second year as captain, Jack Eichel. He's been having an excellent year and tied the game late in the third period with an unassisted power play goal that continued his league-longest streak of games with at least one goal or assist. Being that close to him, HEARING them smashing and even occasionally cursing, was quite the experience.
As for the fan experience: overall, very nice. I did find one bit of history hidden away that the space aliens didn't take:
That may be the only surviving evidence that Senator Al D'Amato (R-Pothole) worked in county government way back when.
I was semi-incognito; I wore my inaccurate hoodie from last time, but set out to top it with a Sabres hat so people would know my allegiance. No luck. Even though our local stores are full of them, once I drove even as close as Rochester, no Sabres merch was to be found. Halfway to New York, I stopped for gas and saw a Modell's. No longer the cheap department store of my past, it's now back to being just sporting goods. Yet even they had nothing other than local team merch. So here's me, outside their store as the latest member of Men Without Hats:
I figured I'd pick one up at the game. I figured wrong. I met my Jerseyites in the parking lot, we waited for the doors to open, and discovered they do not have a full-service Team Store. Even minor league teams do, and they make a ton off them. All these guys had were some small stands with just their own team logos. Strangely, they were still selling caps from the very unfortunate era where the Islanders changed from their Sticks-on-an-Island logo to one with an Angry Fisherman to channel Long Island's nautical culture. THAT died as soon as people recognized the resemblance to the Gorton's frozen fish mascot, and the hated/hating Rangers fans among those people started chanting "WE WANT FISHSTICKS!"
(Hey, we all make mistakes. The Sabres' recent history includes logos known as "the goat" and "the slug," and a use of their traditional crest that was put on a hideous yellow jersey that became known as the "turdburger." But the team doesn't sell those anymore.)
So here's me, my Devils fan friend Jason, and the loyal Kevin and Sharon, me rocking my Fishsticks:
The hat must've worked, because the Sabres scored their first goal not long after I put it on;) The Isle fans around me were fun and respectful of me rooting against them; I even offered to give one of them the Islanders Star Wars scarf they handed out (I've since found an East Meadow expat with a kid who will take it).
Right, it was Star Wars day, because what says "Evil Sith Lord" other than the commissioner of the NHL? Here's Lord Vader shooting t-shirts into the crowd; I think he's fake, because the real Darth wouldn't have needed the cannon;)
On the other hand, their Kylo Ren DID look a lot like Adam Driver; he laughed when I told him I loved him in The Dead Don't Die and then murmurred hockkkeyyyypuckkkkkssss in my best Zombie voice.
Got a couple more pictures I might add later, but the game then ended, and my day was barely half over.
----
I'd invited my friends for an early postgame dinner at Borrelli's, the pizza place across the Toinpike I've been going to since I was in single digits. It is NOT the first place I actually ate pizza; that was the long-gone Caruso's in Levittown (my mother didn't think I'd like it since I didn't like ripe tomatoes), but it was our go-to for many years and is usually the place I'll stop first if I'm there.
But the friends wanted to head home early, and I didn't want to crash a crowd of gloating Islander fans by myself with a Fishstick hat on, so I took a brief tour of the Old Neighborhood before heading back an hour or so later. Past another almost-as-historic pizza place next to the Methodist church (not serving), past the site of the annual Halloween desecration of the big sign on Ed's Glass Works (ironically, it's now a sign shop), and finally back around onto our old street. I'd been down it but did not stop in August when it was pouring even worse than this time, but I saw our longtime neighbors' 50-something kid working in the garage and decided to come over. Matt's parents are still hanging in, suffering from a ton of ailments but still having their hearts, minds and most importantly each other. They also filled me in on some of the troubles of the town; they were not original owners, getting there maybe when I was 5, but a lot of those homes go back to the original families, or at least very longtimers. Many of them have now been neglected to the point where they've been abandoned and taken over by various species of wildlife beginning with the letter "R." The crazy lady's house behind ours was torn down except for one wall, and Matt says it STILL smells of the decades of feral cats who'd infested it 40 years ago. And these homes are going for anywhere from 500K to a million- as is.
But our homestead was turned over before that, and the family who bought it 28 years ago next month is still there. They're the ones who very kindly contacted me when Mom started suddenly getting mail there last year, 20 years after her passing. It turned out to be a small insurance policy nobody knew about. I'd always thought to thank Mike for going out of his way to track me down about it, but I finally figured out how to do that....
Yup, back to the B. The crowd had thinned, so I was seated at a too-big table, ordered a personal pizza to go, said hi to Frank the owner (my age or close, been running it just the way his family always has since 1955), got my gift card, and didn't stop except for gas until I was home seven long hours later.
----
After a rare Sunday lie-in (until 9, wow!) and getting back in the dog's good graces, I've been updating stuff I usually do on Saturday, preparing for the Sunday Night Football watch tonight (on the telly- no more road trips for this guy), and getting ready to deal with the usual run of absent clients and bounced checks tomorrow.