So, did anybody go to the Old 97's Thursday in the Square thing besides (e:carolinian) ? He posted a pic for me, so I am doing the requisite writhing in jealousy... ::writhe writhe::

Anyway, my brother-in-law ( (e:jbeatty) ) has finally moved to Buffalo and settled in, and he met a bunch of you guys a few days ago, so now he knows way more of you than I do (since I know a grand total of exactly one of you, besides him). As of right now, my husband & I are planning to come up and visit him for Thanksgiving. Flying into & out of WNY in late November is always a dicey proposition, and flying around T-giving is always a gigantic cluster-fuck, but we've decided to give it a shot, anyway. If anyone is going to be around then and is up for a non-traditional T-giving (one year my husband & jb cooked up an Asian feast - we were eating for four hours straight and we didn't come close to eating everything they'd prepared), drop us a line.

The New Pornographers
OCT 20 - The Riviera Theatre - North Tonawanda, NY

Tix here:

I saw them in March at Langerado, and they were great. My husband hadn't really heard much of their stuff before that show, and he walked away raving.

Their new album, Challengers, is coming out on August 21st (same day as the new Rilo Kiley album! I'm excited!). The closest they'll come to South Florida on this tour is Atlanta, which is 10 hours away. :( So, once again, I am begging y'all - go to this show. As a personal favor to me. Please. Do it. Assuming the new album is good (and I have no reason to suspect otherwise), it'll be a blast. (e:jbeatty) (aka my brother-in-law, who finally stopped lurking here and posted some journals) will be going, even if I have to buy his ticket myself. :D

And don't forget! Old 97's, July 26th, Thursday at the Square! That's just a couple days away!

Guess who else is playing in Buffalo soon?

The Old 97's!!!

They're playing on July 26th at Thursday at the Square:



I'm trying to send at least one of my friends from Syracuse. But you all live in Buffalo - you have absolutely zero excuse not to go to this show. The Old 97's are so, so good, and so much fun to see live. I missed them once when they played Buffalo (back in like, 2003 or 4 or something), and now I am going to miss them there again. You must go in my stead, then post about it here and make me all jealous.

Actually, looking down the schedule for that Thursday at the Square thing, I'm like, "Why, exactly, is it that I don't live in Buffalo?" :/

On September 24th, Andrew Bird will be playing at some place called "Asbury Hall at The Church" (I have never heard of this place, but then again, I don't actually live in Buffalo).

You must go to this show. If I were still living in Syracuse, I would be there, 100%. I waited for ages for Andrew Bird to play somewhere in New York besides NYC, and now that I am not living there anymore, he is finally going to do it. Because I cannot go to this show, you people must go in my stead. Do it. Don't let me down.

Pre-sale tix allegedly can be found here:


If you're not familiar with the musical wonder that is Andrew Bird, run-do-not-walk:

...I don't think this is your year to win the Stanley Cup. That said...



Go, Sens!!!

(That's a pic from my recent trip to Ottawa - and yes, that is a blow-up doll from the window of a gay sex shop cheering on the Sens. I tell ya, everybody in that town is excited about their hockey team.)

Just FYI... I'm going to be in the central NY area the last weekend in June if any of you (*ahem* (e:carolinian) *cough* (e:bugmuncher) *ahem*) wanted to maybe meet up in Ithaca for a day or something.

I'm going up there with my mom and we're renting a big vehicle to ferry all the stuff I've still got in storage up in Syracuse down here to FL. After I clear that storage area out, I'll have no more physical ties to NY (tho' of course I'll still have lots of people up there I'll want to visit).

Oh, and since I named the category for this post "travel" - my husband & I just got back from a trip to Ottawa. You B'lo folks aren't as close to Ottawa as people in Syracuse, but you're still not that far away - and if you've never been there, you should go! Ottawa's a pretty cool town. I know Ottawa is not exactly a happy place for Sabres fans right now, but maybe in the fall or something, when all the cup hoopla has cooled a bit, it could be a nice destination for a cross-border road trip. Keep it in mind, anyway.

Speaking of Ottawa, I have a picture to share with you from my trip, but I'll have to crop it first... gimme a min...

...not to have a post-season to worry about. Then, after losing your last game of the season, you can go out to a South Beach nightclub, get really hammered, then get arrested for either smashing up an emergency vehicle, or for being a drunken ass who refuses to leave a club when asked and then charges at the cop who's doing the asking.

Way to go, Ville Peltonen and Eddie Belfour.

If that link doesn't work, try these:
The Miami Herald's coverage:
Yahoo Sports' coverage:

They had PDFs of the arrest reports up on the Miami Herald site - kind of amusing reading.

In other hockey news, I won my fantasy league (the Lake Effect League) for the second year in a row. That wasn't such a big deal last year, when there were only four of us in the league - but this year, we were a real 12-team league, complete with people I didn't even know! I wouldn't have minded losing to a friend, but when it came down to the final weeks, it was me against a stranger, so I felt honor-bound to win (if not exactly stomp his ass into the ground). My friend Meg, the Preds fan who lives in Nashville, came in 3rd. Next year, tho', I am totally going to come in in the middle of the pack, or else 1) people are going to start accusing me of rigging the thing somehow, and b) my husband is going to start up again with his theme of how I'm so competitive and how I can't stand to lose, which is not really the case.

Getting back to real hockey for a sec - who's psyched for the playoffs? I know I am. Y'all are so lucky up there - you can go see real, live playoff games! (If, y'know, you're willing to pay the arm, leg, and firstborn child to get tickets.) We don't even have a television set, let alone the cable subscription that would let us see the playoffs. We need to find a good, hockey-friendly sports bar in our neighborhood.

sigh. It was 88 degrees here today. Y'all might get snow before the week is out. I really miss living in NY. (<---100% not sarcasm at all)

So, living in a warmer place now has not spared me from my semi-annual sinus-infection/ chest-cold/ my-head-is-exploding-and-my-chest-is-on-fire,-whatever-this-is thing. I usually got something heinous like this every spring (and sometimes in the fall, too) when I lived in NY - it was always a combination of the obnoxious spring weather (50's one day, below-freezing again the next) and it being that time in the semester when I was super-stressed-out and exhausted and I was just ready to quit school and go live as a hermit in the mountains somewhere. I got a wretched sinus infection (think: extreme vertigo for weeks) which knocked me on my ass the first spring I lived in Syracuse, and ever since then, feeling miserable all through spring has been a constant of my existance.

I was expecting I'd manage to skip all the usual mess this spring, though - less because now I live somewhere warm (tho' I thought the consistency of the weather here might help - 80 degrees and sunny every damn day, whether I like it or not), and more because I am not in school right now, and not at all stressed out. I am totally housewife-ing it right now. I don't have to leave the house all day if I don't want to. I don't even have to put on underwear if I don't want to! I never see another living soul all day long. It. is. great!

Except somehow I managed to get sick anyway. It's been like, two and a half weeks now, and I can't seem to shake this. I have been trying to rest a lot, but when you don't really do anything all day long to begin with, it's hard to chill out more. I finally went to a doc this week, and he prescribed some awful thing for me... which I'm not taking (with the blessing of my doctor mom, who thinks I can beat this on my own). I don't think I am that sick right now, really. I go through these periods like that running gag in Monty Python's Holy Grail: "I'm not dead yet... I'm getting better..." But then the thing comes along and clubs me again, and I feel terrible again the next day. Why can't I just have a nice, steady progression toward wellness? What's with this two-steps-forward, one-step-back thing? I am getting a little tired of it.

Speaking of tired, I'm off to bed now. Just three more posts to go and that <10 blogs thing will be off my pic! Yay!

So (in a completely non-hockey-related post, for a change) my brother-in-law is going to be attending UB starting in the fall.

He's got the same thing going that I have: late twenties, still in school, still trying to figure out what the heck to do with your life.

Anyway, I'm going to tell him to get on this site, so he can meet some ((e:))peeps before he moves to town. Who knows if he will listen to me, but he oughta! I know what's good for him!

(e:metalpeter) said, in the comments to my last post:
That brings up another Point Where do the Carolina Huricanes and Carolina Panthers play cause there is no such state as Carolina. There is North Carolina and South Carolina. but isn't carolina as one state or area pre civil war. I really know the reason they name them that is so that fans in both states will like them, just busting balls a little bit.

Well, a lot of the reason teams would choose a name like that, aside from trying to rope in as many fans as possible, is that they don't actually play in a big city, but rather in the outlying suburbs of a big city, because that's where there was room to build a big new sports arena.

Take the Florida Panthers, for instance. If they were to be named after the biggest city in the area, they'd be called the Miami Panthers. But they don't play in Miami. They don't even play in the same county as Miami - their arena is in Sunrise, FL, which is a far-flung suburb of Ft. Lauderdale. But Ft. Lauderdale is definitely not a big enough city to support a hockey team, and besides, they don't really play in Ft. Lauderdale, either. So what do you call them? The Sunrise Panthers? No one outside this area knows where Sunrise is. The Greater Miami-Ft. Lauderdale Metropolitan Area Panthers? That's a bit wordy. Naming them after an entire state is kind of dumb, I agree, but given the situation, it was probably the best option.

If you look at the other teams not named after cities, you'll see the same sort of thing. The Newark Devils? Ehh, no. The St. Paul Wild? Not so much. The Raleigh Hurricanes? Well, Raleigh is not really the part of the state known for facing hurricanes...

The two that kind of surprise me are the Colorado Avalanche (they play in Denver, which is a big enough city) - but didn't they try to have a hockey team in Denver once before the Avs and it failed? So that's why they went with "Colorado" for the name there, I think... But the San Jose Sharks? It's not like San Jose is really a big, well-known city, at least not relative to nearby San Francisco and Oakland. That's one place where I would've figured they'd go for a more regional name.

Ehh, whatever. Team naming is weird.