The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

Holly turned 30 on Friday. I wanted to find something special to do for her, but with money being an issue, it would have to be something that didn’t cost a lot.

Fortunately, we had our favorite babysitter on call, and I knew who to email. So thanks to some great work by Jon Chase at the Carolina Hurricanes, I managed to snag Holly a seat for a ride on the Zamboni (or “Olympia”, to be accurate) as it cleaned the ice between warmups and the 1st Period of the Washington @ Carolina game on Saturday.

I was worried that she wouldn’t be too impressed by it, but she seemed really excited. We had to be at the top of Section 115 at 4:15pm (for the 5pm game). The babysitter ran a little late, so we got a late start out from Rolesville, and didn’t end up getting to the arena and parked at Cardinal Gibbons until around 4:05 or so. We ran from the car up to the arena (finding out how out of shape we are), and got there right at 4:15. In retrospect, we didn’t need to run, because the staffer we met waited another 10 minutes for the other rider to show up. It turns out he didn’t show, so I got to take the seat on the other Olympia!

We were escorted down into the bowels (or at least the duodenum) of the RBC Center, where we saw one of the refs chatting in the hallway. Then, into the parking area for the Olympias, where we saw legend Ron Francis chatting with some folks. We got to watch warmups from behind the glass at ice level!

At the end of warmups, it was time to get on the machines. Back in the tunnel, we saw injured forward Chad LaRose, on crutches and with a boot-brace, talking to another scratched/injured player (maybe Seidenberg or Eaves, I didn’t recognize him). LaRose must have seen my doubletake, because he said “Hey, how’s it going?” I told him “Get well soon” – we miss us some Rosey out there. Ron Francis had developed a bigger entourage, one of Glen Wesley’s kids was wandering around, and on-ice personality “Ron The Ref” came wandering by. Sightseeing aside, we were strapped in and ready to go.

Holly’s zam went out on the ice first, followed by mine. We had to wait a minute while the ice crew got the nets out of the way, then it was time to clean the ice! I spent most of my time goofing around for the guys up in Section 328, while Holly said she was paying more attention to how the ice-cleaning worked.

The ride was over pretty quickly (maybe 8-ish minutes all told), we parked, got off the machines, and were led back up to the main concourse. We went back up to our usual seats in 328, had some food, and watched the game. I had one more surprise in store for Holly.

The requisite Jumbotron birthday greeting! I even had a Tweet from the Alchemist waiting for me when I got home saying “Jumbotron says Happy Birthday Holly Minter – hope she’s here!” And, it didn’t hurt that we whipped the Caps 6-3, sending the couple hundred Caps fans who’d bussed down for the game home sad.

So even though it wasn’t big and fancy, I think Holly had a good time on a milestone birthday.

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Yes, the whole family has been in the blogging doldrums for a few months. Is it the winter months? The children? Work? Hockey? All of the above?

I finally got tired of dealing with Typo, since the software seems to be mostly unmaintained these days, I’m not hacking on the Rails part, and the server that it sits on at SkilTech could use the extra CPU cycles. So I punted in favor of a fairly standard Wordpress install. Thanks to some scripts on the interwebs, migration was mostly painless. Mostly. So maybe having a new toy will inspire me to get back into the groove.

I had a kickass improv show at ComedyWorx on Saturday. One of those where everything falls into place, aside from a couple of odd technical errors on my part in the show intro. Packed house, which always helps too. And speaking of improv, big congratulations to Ted Hobgood for producing his 50th Cagematch show over at DSI. Ted’s an extremely creative guy, and he’s done great things with that format.

The Hurricanes made a big trade today, sending Cory Stillman and Mike Commodore to Ottawa for Joe Corvo and Patrick Eaves. I’m really sad to see both players go, especially Commie, who was one of my favorites. But it’s probably a good thing. The Canes’ hockey doldrums have been even worse than my blogging ones, and both players were due to hit the free agent market this summer and probably command hefty pay raises. This move will either shake up the locker room and get the players back on track, or replace two players we may have lost with two who could stick around. And Corvo especially fills a need as an offensive defenseman who can score on the power play.

I’ll probably do a post soon recapping my Election 2008 predictions from a couple months back. The summary version: I did pretty well on the Democrats and not good at all on the Republicans. We’ll see if I can figure out why.

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