6 posts tagged “hockey”

I feel like I've been gone forever. First I went down to DC with the fam, which was great but also very intense. I come from a family of type A overachievers. A lot of them. Thanksgiving is always a time for me when I re-evaluate what I'm doing and where I'm going with my life. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm not ambitious on my own, but these people would make Sarah Palin look unambitious.

Anyway, after that I came back to New York - Saturday was my one year anniversary with my boyfriend. We went to see the Nutcracker - which I have to admit, always makes me feel kind of classy when I see it... and then had dinner at his place. Next morning we were up early to go to Montreal. Montreal is amazing. People keep asking me why and the explanation always seems so simple to me that it feels like I'm leaving something out. The food is amazing, there are great microbreweries, and the entire city - well country really - is obsessed with hockey. We went to see a Canadiens game -which was 95% sold out on a Tuesday night playing the Thrashers - apparently a crap team or so I'm told, and the place freaked out every time the Canadiens got the puck across the blue line the entire stadium freaked out.

The highlight of the trip was a restaurant we went to - L'Inconnu that was fantastic. It was a chef owned little French/Quebequois place. The food was unreal. If you are ever in that city I would highly recommend it...

It was really hard to come back to the city, but one thing that made it easier was seeing two of my best friends the next day. Going away and coming back is such a freaking rollercoaster. You're sad to come home, then you're happy to be home.

But I got so much done for the business this weekend - first of all, I got my dog blog going - the blog that is for the dog shirts alone. Second, one of the people that is my role model for my business answered my email in which I wrote to her asking for advice. She was wonderful - really encouraging and helpful. I also got an order in for my business cards, wrote a first draft of my press release and sent it off to my friend the PR agent, and I came up with a new idea for a product - well two products actually, but the first one is more doable right now than the other one.

First of all, I have to gush about the boyfriend for a second. Last night I went out with a client for a work drink, then went to my guy's place for dinner - when I got there he had made me this fantastic dinner - flank steak, amazingly good mashed potatoes, and spicy broccoli rabe. It was one of those perfect, simple, delicious meals that makes you feel really loved. Then after dinner he pulled up my dog website - the person I've hired to design it sent me a preliminary home page to look at -  wohoo! and he showed me a few things that we could change with it and talked to me about how we could make it better. Oh, also he said one of the funniest things I've heard all week: I was looking at the page at work during the day and IM-ed him, "Is it too cutesy?" and he wrote back, "Um, you're selling tiny t-shirts for little dogs to wear..." or something along those lines. 

Just about the best thing ever happened yesterday. Well, a bunch of good things happened. Let's list them:

This is something my bikram yoga teacher said this morning in class. It's her philosophy regarding yoga practice - that she tries to be as disciplined as she can about the postures, but if she falls or whatever, she doesn't beat herself up. Discipline Lite. I like it. I feel like this applies to how I feel about my writing and exercise and things I want to do in general. Oh and also my overall attitude toward cookies... 

Work has been more nuts and fast paced than ever recently, hence not having any time to write here. So here's the update (this is as much for myself as anyone reading this, just to remind myself what's going on.)

This was a great weekend, Friday night before I left work I had a good talk with a coworker. I'm working at a really large company right now and still trying to navigate the politics of that and figuring out how to be successful there and how to do my job the best way I can. My coworker is a great ally, one of those people who will answer any question you have and go out of their way to talk you through things. He even offered to sit down with me on my next project and help me figure out how to really make it my own. It started the weekend off well, even though I was still panicking about the project that was happening on Saturday in London.

I didn't have too much time to dwell on the project, my boyfriend and I had to get up and head into the city - we were meeting two friends of his and driving upstate to go to the garlic festival. Holy crap. The garlic festival was amazing. I'm not usually one for festivals - I don't like the swarms of people eating and pushing and talking on their cell phones about guys named "Fred" or couches they plan on buying. But once I got past that the festival was great - we had deep fried roasted garlic which was more wonderful than I can even express. We had mushrooms with garlic, we even sampled raw garlic, which I've never had before. The only weird thing was that somehow I ended up spending a lot of money on Saturday. One might ask themselves how one spends $80 at a garlic festival... yeah, one might ask that...

Then hockey today. Ah, hockey. I haven't really written that much about hockey, it's one of those things that's really hard to explain. It's a large group of people, about 300, co-ed, none of whom you would peg as athletes. Mostly you would think they are hipsters. In fact a lot of them do wear terrycloth. Mostly you would think they are alcoholics. In fact this might be true, we usually tend to play hockey for an hour and then go out drinking for about 4 hours to celebrate our athleticism.  One way I've described it to someone is that it's like you're watching a movie that you didn't know was a musical and all of a sudden people start singing. That's the feeling when all of a sudden you see these hipsters in their American Apparel t-shirts with cute nicknames on the back put on hockey gloves and pick up their sticks and paly really competitive, intense, games of hockey.  We have this awesome team that we started three years ago and we play really well together, but we're still only about 5th ranked. This is not a bad ranking, especially when you consider there's 18 teams, but today we beat the number one team and it was really really sweet. It was a great game and a great day for upsets in general - another team, one of the lowest ranked teams almost beat one of the other high ranking teams - a team that is full of so many assholes that it's just pretty much evil, but like funny evil. Like if Darth Vader had a hockey team, THIS would be his team. Anyway, they didn't lose, but it was fun to watch them ALMOST lose.

I got a little writing done - I started the outline about the screenplay that I want to rough out before I confront the monumental task of revising and sending out my novel... This should be a pretty fun week, there's a lot I have planned, but in a good way... I'm definitely looking forward to watching the Palin/Biden debate. I'm going to a friend's house to see that insanity... I thought Obama totally kicked ass on Friday.  I loved when he said, "John, you like to pretend that the war started in 2007..." Amazing. Way to nail it, Obama!