A Time For Everything

Yup...baseball terminology to describe the next two and half weeks for the Stars.



My Dallas Stars currently sit in the first wild card slot for the Western Conference. They are 2 points behind the team in front of them and 4 points ahead of the team right behind them. Not a bad place to be considering this time last year, our goalie got injured and we went on a ten-game losing streak.

Every game they play is important. Every game those other teams play is also important. It's going be nail-bite-city (if I did such a thing, which I don't) for the next couple of weeks.

Three teams have clinched their spots in the playoffs. That means if they lose every single game they have left, they will still be included in the playoffs. I think it's going to come down to the wire for the Stars because they just aren't consistent enough and are partially dependent on other teams losing.

But they are still in the hunt, so bear with me for the next couple of weeks...

Because of the tight race the Stars are in, DD has an interest in other teams' games now. She was never been very interested before, and is only interested in them now as to how their win or loss affects the Stars, but I'll take it as a step in the right direction. I've also encouraged her to find a secondary team to root for. I have two of them.

Speaking of which...my second favorite team is coming to town and, for the first time ever, I'm taking a poster to the arena. I will be standing at the glass during warmup, hoping against hope that Sidney Crosby sees my sign, gets a warm fuzzy, and tosses me a puck.



In writing news, the words for the anthology have been flowing pretty well. I'm ahead of the writing curve in terms of how many days and how many words per day I'm supposed to write, but the universe threw a monkey wrench in writers spoke when a whole chapter's worth of text disappeared.

I use Scrivener and it's been acting rather persnickety as it syncs the file between two PCs. I encounter error messages every day but up until this morning I haven't had any real trouble with words appearing or not appearing so far, but today was my unlucky day.

So I copy/pasted all chapter and other information out of Scrivener and into Word or Notepad files. I really love working in Scrivener and am waiting anxiously for the new Windows version. Hopefully, I can rewrite that chapter and have be just as good.

Anyway, have a great rest of your week.

My office is an ode to my various interests and obsessions as well as to my odd sense of interior design.

Hard to see with the light glaring at the camera, but you can probably see the fairy lights. And on the right side of the left window is a Stars car window flag. :)


My Charles Wysocki collectors plates (one set of three, actually) that I've had for over 20 years. Just to the right of those is...

My BBC Sherlock wall. Note the sampler there on the left... That was a blog post subject many many moons ago.


My desk and the wall above, chock full of random goodies that make me smile or were gifts.

Now this is the piece de resistance... my shelves full of more randomness, suck as my rubber duckie collection, my dala horse collection, my Matchbox NASCAR collection, along with keepsakes from my trips to Nashville. Draped around the top is a Fourth of July garland, because I love that too.


I have a little section of wall between the window and the corner that has been designated the hockey wall--the back of the door and the wall space next to it is also hockey wall, now that I'm thinking about it...



But this particular space only had a Tyler Seguin pennant along with a couple of "posters" -- a.k.a. expired calendar images of Tyler and his teammate Jamie Benn.

Remember those little baby samplers I shared a couple of weeks ago? Well, one got framed and is now on the hockey wall. :0) Of course, Jamie Benn had to come down. He's not a favorite of mine so I passed him along to a friend.

And now the hockey wall looks like this:


And the sampler itself...


The wall still needs a little work, but I have a few plans.

Stay tuned...

As of Wednesday night, they made it to the Eastern Conference Final-- There's a Western Conference Final too, and the winners of each play each other for penultimate hockey award: the Stanley Cup.


So this last series the Pens played against the Washington Capitals was a tough one and it took all seven games to result in a winner. (All playoff rounds are best of seven.)

During the regular season, I watched only Stars games. They didn't do so great and every game was a nail biter, hoping one of two things would occur: they could hold onto the lead they had or they could rally enough in the time left in the game and win it.

Since the Stars didn't make it to the playoffs and my second and third favorite teams did, I've continued to watch hockey. In the first round, said second and third favorite teams played one another, so it didn't matter much who won. I did have a preference, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Watching the games wasn't stressful. It was just fun to watch.

Once the Pens won that series and took on the Washington Capitals...well...it was a whole new ball game and every minute of play seemed to take three times as long. The last half of every third period felt like half an hour instead of ten minutes. This time for similar reasons to Stars games.

These two teams are long-time rivals. Last year, the Pens beat the Caps in the second round in six games. This year, the Capitals wanted redemption, the Penguins want a repeat.

I know that one minute takes sixty seconds, one hour takes sixty minutes and so one, no matter what's going on in life or on TV. It's just interesting how it seems to bend depending on what's going on...

Time expands when (maybe) you're watching an important game of some random sport. Alternately, time contacts when you're spending time with a cherished guest or family member. Like when Sonshine comes home on leave. His ten days go by in a flash.

Is there a point to this post? Maybe to cherish every moment, because you can't get back time.

Have a great weekend.

Miracle is a great sports movie--the greatest in my opinion. You know, the story of the 1980 Men's Olympic Hockey Team that beat the great Russian machine that had won Olympic gold in the previous three Olympics?


So I watched a documentary about the 1980 Russian team, and, you know, you really have to feel for those guys. You do.

We Americans generally tend to think of "the Russians" as the bad guys, but the people are pretty much at the mercy of a very controlling system of government. I won't pretend to understand how it all works, but they don't have the freedoms we do. Not now and certainly not back then. Also, Russia had just invaded Afghanistan and political tensions were running very high.

Anyway, these men, these hockey players, were all in the Russian Army--25 or 30 year conscriptions. Their original coach, dubbed the father of Russian hockey, Anatoli Tarasov, was forced to retire after the Russian team took home silver in the 1972 Olympics. Despite his very harsh training regimen, the players loved him and skated their hearts out for him. The new coach, Viktor Tikhonov, was equally strict in training, but was apparently ruled by the time clock and by numbers. The coach was no longer their father/uncle/counselor. He was the boss. The men lived in barracks eleven months out of the year. Losing was not an option, and the team continued to be very successful.


The film had interviews with several of the Russian players and their stories were very compelling. At that time, there were no Russians in the NHL, but one of those Russian players, Slava Fetisov, was destined to pave the way and become the first, playing for the New Jersey Devils.


That 1980's Olympic loss? Other than maybe being so overconfident--but that was definitely a result of the system they were in--they did nothing wrong. They played their game and they played it well in an effort to bring pride and honor to their country. They returned to Russia and were greeted by silence and shame for bringing home silver.

The film I watched was ESPN's 30 for 30: Miracles of Ice and Men and there's apparently another called Red Army that could be interesting too. Here's a link to the NPR article.

I don't know that I'll ever watch Miracle with the same mindset ever again.