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Superstitious

Yesterday’s prompt asked if I’m superstitious, but I didn’t notice the prompt until after I had already finished my blog about our torturous allergy season here. The answer is that I am absolutely superstitious. It comes along with the hockey mom and hockey culture. Show me a hockey mom that’s not superstitious and I’ll show you snow in Miami (real meteorological snow, not the stuff referenced in Miami Vice.)

Are you superstitious?

So let me recount some of the superstitious ridiculousness that comes with being a hockey mom and/or player

  • Thou shall not utter the word shutout until the final buzzer has sounded. If you utter it before, it will be your fault when the goalie gives up a goal. This is one of the cardinal rules of being a goalie parent.
  • I wore this jacket and they won; ergo, I must wear this jacket to all future games, so the trend can continue. God forbid we wear another jacket and they lose, oh the regret that would spark.
  • Pregame rituals: for me, it was always grabbing a coffee before game time. Each player and parent has their own pregame routine.
  • Always tell my player or goalie good luck and have fun before they hit the ice
  • The goalie hits the goalposts in a certain order before every face-off.
  • The playoff beard. No shaving for the guys until they’ve won or been knocked out of the playoffs
  • Favorite shirt or piece of equipment. This item will be repaired until it can’t be repaired anymore because the player has to wear it.
  • Not washing equipment during the season. This one is a killer. You’d only have to walk near my garage during the season to know why.
  • The taping of the stick. Every player has a ritual for when and how they tape their stick before a game.
  • Pregame meal or drink (i.e Celsius.). We’ve definitely hit some gas stations before games to make sure they had their Celsius in hand.

What are some of your superstitions? Hockey folks, did I miss any?


Today’s accountability tracker:

  • Workout: 45-minute spin class, plus 15-minute cooldown courtesy of Apple Fitness+
  • Book: I finished Marcel Proust’s Finding Lost Time last time. Five years and seven volumes later, I’ve completed his masterpiece. Tonight I’m starting Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley by Alison Weir.
  • Word of the day is chiton. A chiton is a mollusk often found in tide pools.
  • Blog: done
  • Today’s song is Outta Our Heads by Dropkick Murphy’s
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Long Day

It’s been a long day that started far too early for me on a Saturday. The Mayor had a game in West Palm at 9:20 am, which meant we had to be there by 8:20. Consequently, I was up before 7:00, which is a bummer on a Saturday. Also, it was for a game we knew we weren’t going to win against a team we’ve already played a dozen times this season. I was FB Live for that game. If you enjoy train wrecks with no filter then my FB live feed is for you.

After the game, we headed to PDQ for lunch after Nick’s Diner was too busy and Anthony’s Coal Fire Pizza was closed. I’m not sure I liked the chicken sandwich I had. It was oddly salty like the chicken breast itself had been injected with saline. The fries, however, were pretty damn good albeit they don’t leave me foaming at the mouth. Nonetheless, I’d definitely eat them again.

Between games, we chilled at home and watched The Office. We’ve watched the series all the way through several times, but it never gets old. I did some grocery shopping for Goalielocks as well since he’d have a tough time managing it due to his shoulder. I love that I can shop from home and have groceries delivered to my injured child two hundred miles away. Goalielocks sent me a list, but of course, I added some goodies like his favorite ice cream to the order. He was very appreciative of the groceries and happily surprised with the icecream.

Speaking of train wrecks, I’d describe the Mayor’s game this evening as an absolute disaster. It wasn’t fun to watch. They’re down several defensemen and it showed. It just wasn’t a very good game. Thankfully, they have two more games to show they can actually play hockey. Perhaps the best part of tonight’s game was learning that the opposing team’s penalty box dad thought I was one of the player’s girlfriends. He thought I looked too young to be a parent. He is now officially my favorite person at the rink. Now, I’m no Mrs. Robinson, but as a woman about to turn 43, I’ll take the compliment.

And now here’s your weekly recap in photos and memes, you’re welcome.

The Chiefs won the Super Bowl in a great game. Rihanna also made a historic pregnancy announcement during the halftime show.

Unidentified flying objects and balloons continue to be in the news. If you’re planning a balloon ride, you might want to put it off for now.

I got back to working out by doing spin classes on our new back. It’s been fun, but the seat definitely hurts your ass.

Goalielocks dislocated his shoulder on Valentine’s Day evening at Volleyball. He took himself to urgent care and his follow-up appointment with an orthopedic surgeon Wednesday afternoon. Unfortunately, he’ll be in a long for 4-6 weeks. Fortunately, the doctor told him he won’t need surgery.

The Mayor’s playing his last youth hockey tournament this weekend, which is bittersweet.

Today’s accountability tracker:

  • Workout: Rest day
  • Book: Book: Marcel Proust’s Finding Lost Time.
  • Blog: done
  • Today’s song: Mrs. Robinson performed by the Lemonheads
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Last Tournament Weekend

It’s our last tournament weekend for the Mayor’s u16aa team. Unfortunately, they were knocked out of states last night when the Everblades beat the flames. Heartbreakingly, they lost on tiebreakers. At any rate, I guess now those teams can spend a nice chunk of change to get their asses kicked by the Panthers and Crunch. Nonetheless, this is the first year the Mayor’s been on a team that didn’t qualify for states, so it is a bit sad.

We’ve been on this travel hockey quest for well over a decade now. It’s odd that it’s starting to wind down. We don’t know what the Mayor is going to do next year. His options are juniors or u18. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with ourselves when the hockey is truly over. Maybe we’ll start going to the beach again or plan trips that don’t revolve around hockey rinks. Who knows what the future brings? Actually, that’s not entirely true.

Once the hockey is done for us, I’m going to write a book about our experience. Over the past decade, we’ve seen some interesting stuff. Honestly, I can’t wait to put pen to paper and spill the tea on Florida hockey. The best part of the travel hockey experience for me has been our hockey family. We’ve met so many incredible folks over the heads that have become not just friends, but family. Anyway, I’m resting up for our last tournament weekend, so I’ll be in bed early tonight. Toodle-oo!

Today’s accountability tracker:

  • Workout: Spin Class through the Apple Fitness App app
  • Book: I finished The Seven Husbands Of Eleanor Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid last night. It was so good. Tonight I’m starting volume seven of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time entitled Finding Lost Time. I have been waiting two years for Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition’s translation of Proust’s final volume.
  • Blog: done
  • Today’s song: Whatever It Takes by the Imagine Dragons
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Super Bowl Sunday

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and for once we don’t have any hockey games today. It’s a miracle! Consequently, we spent the day relaxing at home with the dogs. I finally got a chance to put our spin bike to use and it properly kicked my ass. It did, however, feel good to work out again. I haven’t worked out since being diagnosed with shingles several weeks ago. Let’s hope I’m able to continue working out.

Before hockey, we’d likely spend Super Bowl Sunday at the beach with our toes in the sand. Since we started hockey, we rarely make it to the beach anymore. Unfortunately, there was no beach this morning either. A cold front came through last night and brought with it a howling wind. I love the beach, but it’s never fun to get sandblasted the wind-blown sand. Nevertheless, it would still be beautiful.

As we roll into the afternoon and towards the start of the Super Bowl, I’d like to preemptively extend my condolences to the losing team and their fan base. Let’s hope this year’s Super Bowl is entertaining with great commercials. There have been way too many boring super bowls over the last several years. Lastly, I hope Rihanna’s halftime show is incredible. I like her music, so I’m excited to see what songs made the setlist.

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Night One

So how did night one of reclaiming my sleep go? It went okay. I definitely had less trouble falling asleep than on previous nights. Last night, however, was not the perfect gauge as my lower back and sciatic nerve weren’t playing nice. I don’t think my lower back enjoyed all the work it was given during my yoga practice. It was a relatively rigorous practice for a Hatha class that featured a difficult series of transitions from standing, to warrior one, to warrior three, to revolved half-moon pose and back again. I think the movement may have irritated my sciatic nerve and the muscles around it. Fortunately, some meds and salonpas patches put paid to the pain at least temporarily. Hopefully, I will sleep well tonight because if there’s one thing that brings me joy it is a good night’s sleep.

Nonetheless, I’m going to continue blogging during the day for the foreseeable future. One it’s a much better use of my time. One can only read the internet so many times during a slow work day. Secondly, it frees up my time in the evening. Since it’s OEP (open enrollment period for Medicare folks), we’re back to working 10-11 hour days. Consequently, it is a bit more difficult to fit in all the commitments I have made for 2023. This, of course, includes daily running, yoga, blogging, reading, and regular strength workouts done through the Sweat App. Moreover, I’m doing the 21-day yoga challenge through Everyday yoga, which features a pre-selected class of varying lengths. Normally, I would choose a practice length that best suits my day.

Today’s yoga class is another Hatha practice, but it looks to be more gentle than yesterday’s practice. Gentle is exactly what my body needs today. Thankfully, today’s practice also focuses on opening the hamstrings, which will be super beneficial. My hamstrings are ridiculously tight whether I stretch, work out, or do nothing. In fact, I need to work on my hamstrings daily to keep them healthy. Otherwise, they’re a complete mess. One of my favorite ways to stretch them out is the legs up-the-wall pose, which also happens to be super relaxing.

I guess it’s going to get a bit cooler tomorrow evening, which will be nice. It won’t be cold enough for sleet or snow, but it will be fantastic sleeping weather. And we all know how I love good sleeping weather. Speaking of weather, I’m now stalking Chicago’s weather as the Mayor and I head there next week for hockey. I really hope it’s not too cold. While I do enjoy a depauperate winter wonderland as much as the next person, I don’t like driving in snow. Moreover, I hate driving in Chicago during snowfall. At least back some in Minny, a respectable effort is made to quickly clear the interstate. In Chicago, there is no such effort. It really sucks driving on 90 during a snowstorm.

Today’s accountability tracker:

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The Season is Over

The season is over after the boys lost a hard fought semi final game to the Makos Sunday morning. It’s hard to put into words how hard each of them played during that game. Obviously, it would have been nice to win, but I’m so proud of their efforts. I’m also proud that our coaches didn’t resort to petty shenanigans in an effort to gain an advantage.

Now I’m sure you’re intrigued by that last sentence, so let me elaborate. The league requires that all players, including goalies, have stop patches on the back of their jerseys. Unfortunately, one of our player’s stop patches fell off during an earlier game in the tournament. The opposing coach approached the referee several times asking him to penalize our team for a missing patch.

When the referee basically told the coach to pound sand and take it up with the league, he sent his team manager up to the league director’s office to plead their case to the director. I mean, can you imagine anything so ridiculous?!! Who is that freaking petty? Literally, the other coach was trying to get the league to suspend our coach over a patch that had clearly just fallen off.

While the Makos manager was up there pleading the case, I ran off the bench to get a stop patch and tape. Once back on the bench, we affixed the stop patch as best we could to the back of his jersey. The league didn’t suspend or remove our coach from the game, so obviously they were less than impressed with their pettiness. Fortunately, karma was served rather quickly as the Makos lost their first game of the weekend in the championship game. You just can’t put that kind of energy into the universe and not expect any repercussions.

At any rate, outside of the kids’ first game Friday night. They had a good weekend. In fact, Saturday they beat the Flames for the first time this season. The boys lost to the Wolves, but it took four periods for them to beat the Hawks. My Mayor had a great weekend and I couldn’t be prouder. He always grinds and plays his hardest every shift. This weekend he blocked a ton of shots and had the bruises to prove it. Now that the season is over, it’s fun to look back and see how far he and his teammates have come since August.

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Long Drive

It was a long drive back from South Carolina to Florida last night, but we made it home safely. Fortunately, our drive was a happy one. The Mayor and his team won the championship Monday morning. Excitingly, the Mayor had a hat-trick in the championship game. He was on fire, to put it mildly. Speaking of fire, his goalies had an awesome weekend and earned the team the number one seed.

The problem with most tournaments is that the skill level in the brackets is all over the place. There’s usually a team that gets blown out every game and a team that blows everyone else out. Thankfully, this was not the case this weekend. There was a lot of parity in the U16 bracket. In fact, at the end of the round robin all four teams were tied in points. We had the lowest goals allowed, so we got the number one seed.

After the game we headed back to the hotel, so the Mayor could shower before we started our drive. Obviously, we didn’t want to hit the road with a stinky hockey player. Once he showered, we headed to Ihop for a quick lunch. Ihop definitely hit the spot. We finally hit the road just before 2:00 pm. As we headed out of Charleston, I uploaded and edited the pictures I had taken over the weekend. Thanks to my hotspot, I was able to upload the pics to Shutterfly and share with the team before we left South Carolina.

The drive home was pretty uneventful except for a major accident of the north side I95 in Georgia. Traffic on the southbound side didn’t slow too much despite the helicopter landing on the other side of the interstate. Its never gold to see the helicopter. Hopefully, everyone involved will be okay.

We broke up our long drive with a stop at Buc-ees in St. Augustine. For the uninitiated, Buc-ees is a chain of gas stations and convenience stores that are very large in scale. The chain is from Texas and it lives up to the reputation that everything is bigger in Texas. At the Saint Augustine location, there are 104 had pumps. The amount of food, drinks and random things sold at the store was overwhelming. However, I would highly recommend the chopped brisket sandwich. It was really good.

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Frequent Flyer

If urgent care had a frequent flyer program like airlines, we would be a Diamond member after these last six weeks. To be fair, the first part of 2021 was pretty quiet on the illness and injury front. Consequently, we have over compensated during the last quarter of the year.

It started off with Covid tests and a broken toe. a couple weeks ago it elevated from a school physical to EKGs and a kid under the care if an amazing cardiologist. In fact, we visited three urgent care centers before we found one that was open and could do an ekg. We literally drove all over trying to find one that could see Goalielocks because we didn’t want to head to the ER.

Finding a decent urgent care center that can see you urgently has become absolutely impossible here. I mean isn’t that why you go to an urgent care. One had no more appointments available the same day. In fact, they couldn’t get me in for three days for my broken toe. I’m pretty sure that defeats the purpose of an urgent care. Another one is only open six days a week from 9:00-6:00 pm. This is less hours than my normal doctor’s office.

Last week, the hubby upped the ante with his injury. The Mayor, however, did not want to be left out. Apparently, he fell during the early Saturday game (damn blue line trips me everytime too) and landed awkwardly on his shoulder. He was in a ton of pain yesterday, which was worrying. This is a kid who has an incredible tolerance for pain and never complains about it.

Alas, it triggered nightmare visions of yet another trip to urgent care. Fortunately, we have a good friend who is in the business. He was able to examine his shoulder tonight. Thankfully, it’s a mild sprain of the rotator cuff. He gave the Mayor some stretches to do every night before bed. We’ll also be taking him over there for ultrasound therapy, which will help the healing process. Thank God we’re not adding to our frequent flyer status with this injury.

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It’s Back

It’s back!!! The NHL regular season kicked off tonight as the Lightning take on the Penguins. I had signed up for Sling to watch the games on ESPN, but it’s still not working. To be honest, I’m less than impressed with Sling so far. It seems to have latency issues and is often very slow to load. Additionally, the orange circle in the middle of screen gets old quick.

My MN Wild and the Florida Panthers will stay their season Friday and Thursday respectively. Hopefully, the Sling debacle will be straightened out by then. Both teams should do well this year and should be fun to watch. The operative word here, of course, is should. Albeit, I learned this weekend that the difference between could and should is confusing for some people.

Friday is all the start of AEP season, which means I’ll be working a 14 hour shift Friday followed by eight mote days of consecutive work. But hey, at least I won’t be bored. Thankfully, it’s only seven weeks long and there’s ton of opportunity to make money. Nevertheless, I’m tired just thinking about it. Fortunately, my puppies will be there every step of the way to keep my company. Anyway, did I mention it’s back!!!

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Aircraft Spotting

Yesterday morning we set off aircraft spotting just south of base in hopes of seeing the F-35s takeoff. We had narrowed it down to a window of time they usually take off, so we knew approximately when we needed to be there. Turns out we were there earlier than we needed to be, but that was okay as we ended up seeing an A-10 flying. This was the first time I’ve seen an A-10 flying out here.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful morning for aircraft spotting. The skies were clear and the temperatures were cool yet comfortable. As we waited for the aircraft to take off there was plenty of scenery to take in. To the east, we had the beautiful mountains of the Wasatch Front. To the south and west we had the Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and the Lakeside Mountains. The mountains of the Wasatch front were covered with beautiful, fall colors.

Before we saw the F35s takeoff, we saw the A-10 come back in for landing. It was pretty far away, but I still managed to get some semi decent pictures of the bird. Finally, after waiting for a couple hours, the F35s began to take off. They’re incredibly loud even for fighter jets. It’s an impressive sound as the takeoff over you with the afterburners on.

I brought my camera and new lens as I wanted to see how it would perform taking pictures of fast moving aircraft. The camera performed way better than I did when I tried to take a video of one taking off. Overall, I was pleased with the way photos turned out with the exception of the straight on pictures. For some reason, the straight on pictures look like shadows and lack definition. I’m not sure if it was the sun or the angle of the picture. Nevertheless, it’s something I’m going to try to figure out for next time.

After aircraft spotting, we went back to the AirBnB for brunch. The Hubby made French toast, scrambled eggs and some awesome bacon. To celebrate Jake’s accomplishment we had a mimosa toast, which was fabulous. Afterwards, we played some Phase 10 and just hung out. Jake and Mel went to the mall to pick up a couple items. Once they returned, we headed to North Ogden Park for some volleyball. Spoiler alert, I’m not great at volleyball. Nonetheless, we had a great time and worked up a nice appetite.

For dinner, we made chili on Jake’s request. While I cooked, they played another rousing game of Phase 10. Meanwhile, the Hubby ran back to Smith’s to pick up the kidney beans we had forgotten the first time we were there. Speaking of that, Goalielocks dropped his Apple Watch in the parking lot when he got out of th me car. Fortunately, we’re here in Utah and someone turned it in to customer service. Thank god this happened in Utah and not back home in Florida where people are opportunistic vultures.

We called it a night early as Mel had to get to the airport around 4:30 this morning for her flight back to Florida. We had hoped that she could push it back a day, but it simply wasn’t affordable. Today we’re going to finish packing up Jake’s apartment and hopefully go for a hike. As for our meals, it will be leftovers and anything we can eat to clear the fridge.