Some of you noticed that the NorthEast was very wintery this weekend.
You from New England may also have heard of the 50+ car pileup on I-93.

That was our route to get to Amy & Ron in Massachusetts.
We squeaked by that one about a half-hour before it happened.
Good thing too — saw the footage on the news; that was one ugly road mess.

We went to visit Amy & Ron this weekend and watch Clarkson vs. Harvard men’s Hockey in Cambridge. This was Rob & my first trip to their arena, so we were all set & ready to go. This was the last regular season hockey game for the men, and its outcome would help seal who-played-who next week in the 1st round of playoffs. So the excitement was on.

First stop: Hoffa’s Swiss Alps, where Ron, and other folks from his alumni e-board pulled off a great dinner.

Everyone had a great time, got some great Clarkson loot, and Rob & I took back some ideas for how to improve Burlington events. It left us very psyched for the game too.

Here’s a photo of Rob & Ron, getting ready for some pre-game festivities… and yes, you are right.

That is tequila…Cuervo 1800.
And yes; the bartender served it in a white wine glass.

Your eyes are not playing tricks on you.

Afterwards…onto Hahvahd’s Bright Hockey Center. You are right; they don’t call it an arena.
For good reason.

We get there, its the last regular season game. They have a winning team. There’s no one there. NO one. We have center ice tickets, right above George Roll & the Golden Knights. And we got them on SUNDAY. Crazy.

So we play, and the game is great. The Clarkson fans are always awesome & loud. And the game was a great 3rd period. We lost 2-1, but the 3rd made up for it. You can find photos of the game in my photo gallery, here.

Side commentary…

• There were some real freak shows at this place. One guy was painted up all in red. With his own crash helmet.
• We got to sit about 10 feet away from these real tools. I think they were students; we’re not really sure. Realize, I am a nerd. I am. I do math-type things; I like to generate graphs, and tables. BUT that doesn’t make me a tool. They were bizarre. Their fave chant was “Clarkson SUCKS” and when we’d say “Let’s Go Tech” they’d try to drown us out with “You’re not Tech”. WHATEVER. The girl with the 2 tools was rather weird. And they sung along with the awful Hahvahd band — when the band played Britney Spears & Madonna. They had dragons on their shirts. Not Trogdor. And appeared to be addicted to Warcraft. Same type of kids that got picked last for dodgeball…and liked it. Same type of kids that would call the “crease” the “circle”. I got photos of both the crash-test-dummy & the toolbars here…worst part about it, was the chick with them, with 1 minute remaining, takes OFF her Harvard shirt, and underneath is a Rensselaer shirt….as one of the bandies put it…”SHE’S A TROYLET!”

• Coach Roll is the man. He’s done a great job in the last 2 years of rebuilding our hockey program. Due to sitting directly behind Coach Roll, we began to learn some of the secrets behind building a solid, competitive D-I hockey team. We determined the most important item was taking good notes — with a built-in spell checker. BTW — Coach Roll has exceptional penmanship. Writes mostly in cursive.

That’s right — it’s a Mead Spell-Write Steno Book, found at Walgreens.com for $1.99.

Sooo…by now you know we lost to Sweden & Finland, and Team USA is out of medal contention. Both those teams ended up playing for the gold medal.

Clarkson’s alumni didn’t do half bad. Conroy had 1 goal, 4 assists, for 5 points (tied for 1st in team for points). Cole had 1 goal & 2 assists, for 3 points (tied with 3 others for 5th).

If both stay healthy and continue to play well, they both still have a shot in 2010 for Vancouver.

Rob has been exercising too.

He got a new hoodie this weekend.

Makes him look like Doc Louis from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.

It’s cute.

Now, Gobe & Ayers have called this the “Quest for the Expensive Donut” but I liken the Torino Medals to more of an Oversized washer. Anyways…

**Note** If you want a real recap, go visit Gobe & Ayers’s site, or the USA Hockey site. I’m biased towards Craig Conroy & Erik Cole, so that’s what I’m gonna chat about here. Because they’re great. And I met Conroy once. He’s a nice guy.

Game 1: USA vs Latvia.

With names like “ANKIPANS”, “PANTELEJEVS”, and “CIPULIS” it made our at-home-in-jammies taunting easy. And I swear, their fans looked like crazy Haahvahd fans. But more rabid. Kind of like what you’d expect if Cornell fans were wearing (*gasp*) Harvard sweaters.

USA tied Latvia 3-3.

Conroy scored his 1st goal of the Olympics, the 2nd for Team USA.

Here’s a photo from the bench — Craig & Erik both in the same photo.

Game 2: USA vs Kazakhstan
We won, 4-1. Cole assisted Modano in the 3rd, on the 4th goal of the game. Cole’s first Olympic point.

Next game, tonight; Saturday — 9:05 Italy time.

So I’ve now been going to the gym for 4 weeks. I finally am seeing some results. That’s a good thing. I’d been saying that if I didn’t, I’d start calling myself the Incredible Hulk.

Speaking of which, Lou Ferrigno was recently appointed a sheriff’s deputy in LA.

The weekend recap:

• Clarkson beats LLENROC (aka Cornell Big Red What) 3-1 on Friday. Prognosticators assumed a Knights loss all the way around.

• Clarkson ties Colgate for a 3-pt weekend

• Rob gets a visit from the cops. He’s served with a subpoena. Needs to appear in court versus the drunken redneck, for smashing our car in October. We’ve been getting notices in the mail that he’s needed to appear in court, and yadda-yadda-yadda, but expected nothing, because it was a hit & run and never saw the guy who hit us (seeing he ran away). Which is kind of a bummer, we are enjoying the new Honda, and really got over the whole issue, but now it pops up at an inconvenient time for Rob (during a critical project time at work). So not only did the guy decide to go ahead & smash our elderly Passat, and cause us to get a new car about 2 years ahead of schedule, and deal with the car payments, and the hassle of driving a rental, test driving, and financing a vehicle, he now comes in, 4 months later and needs us to go to court. Stupid.

In better news, we are sooo looking forward to Olympic Hockey. We’ll watch the women’s hockey when its on & we’re home, but we’re DVR’ing the men. Go Craiger & Erik!
The Schedule:

Date Game Time (EST) Network
Feb. 15 vs. LAT 3:00 p.m. USA
Feb. 16 vs. KAZ 3:00 p.m. USA
Feb. 18 vs. SVK 2:00 p.m. NBC
Feb. 19 vs. SWE 11:00 a.m. NBC
Feb. 21 vs. RUS 2:30 p.m. NBC
Feb. 22 Quarterfinal TBD USA
Feb. 24 Semifinals 10:00 a.m. MSNBC
reshown @ 3:00 p.m. USA
Feb. 25 Bronze-Medal 2:30 p.m. NBC
Feb. 26 Gold-Medal 9:00 a.m. NBC

So I fell in love with the guys who made movies in MSPaint, trying to decode the lyrics to Fall Out Boy songs.
The first one I found: Sugar, We’re Goin Down.
Now, there’s a bunch: Dance Dance, and this one.
I don’t hate EMO, but they are pretty funny.

And, while we’re in a similar vein:
Insane DDR versus Mario DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, for those unaware of the acronym)
And a great version of the Mario Themesong, played by what looks like a Winter Carnival/Talent Show.

Bernie Sanders, our sole Congressman from VT was up attending a funeral today — for a VT National Guard soldier killed in Iraq earlier this year.  Whereupon, he collapsed, had the ambulance called, and went to the hospital.

I respect him for taking time out of his busy Senate campaign to pay homage to one of our state’s fallen heroes.  But not for much more than that…
Granted, the AP reports he had the flu.  However, it may just be that he was outside of the People’s Republic of Chittenden County, and made his way to the more Conservative northwest.  All that non-Independent (read = non-Socialist) population density may have given him the heebie-jeebies.  I suspect this, if directly observed, would appear similar to the behavior of the BudLight guy who goes “Shopping with his Girlfriend”.
I guess we’ll never know the real reason for the illness… however–at least this way he didn’t make any type of controversial moonbat comments, so overall we could consider it a blessing…

Friday night we had dinner with Rob’s cousin Brian, his wife Kim, and their 1yr old son, William.
(This is William’s photo from a few months ago.)

We went to the Sirloin Saloon, in Shelburne. Very tasty meal, and everyone had a good time. William ate his whole cheeseburger, some broccoli, mashed potatoes, a few arrowroot biscuits, and had his first vanilla ice cream.

The play by play was, “This looks like potatoes. Its mushy & white. But WAIT! It’s COLD. But sweet. And yummy. VANILLA ice cream! Yeah! More! What? It’s all gone? NOOOOOO. Lemme lick the bowl! Puh-leeze!!”

We had a lot of fun.