Some Thanksgiving leftovers

First of all, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!  I can't say I had the best meal I ever had (courtesy Stouffers, who did their best), but I got good'n'full, thought the goal of "eat yourself skinny" remained elusive.  Football was great- I can't remember the last time the two day games were that good.   However, the night matchup was the Patriots (who everyone around here, especially Laurie, is sick of) and the Jets (whom I cannot stand, being a Dolphin fan).  At a certain point, I had said, "The only thing that will make this game entertaining to me is if the Pats really humiliate the Jets."  Within seconds of saying this:

- The Pats scored on a pass to the sideline which the receiver went 52 yards for a TD with;
- On about the second play after the Jets got the ball, Pat lineman Vince Wilfork pushed the Jet lineman INTO QB Mark Sanchez, causing him to fumble, and another Pat picked it up and scored;
-On the ensuing kickoff, the returner was hit and the ball shot straight up to another Pat who also scored.

Three TDs in 52 seconds- two of them on what announcer Chris Collinsworth called "two of the oddest plays I've ever seen"- yup, that's humiliation.  Chris was satisfied.

"Man, what the hell else can happen?  Seriously!"

But before football, Scrappy and I took a little walk.  In the woods, we decided to go look at a section just beyond the deer trails, where it is usually separated from the main woods by tall grass.

This patch is a triangle bordered by the main woods, the housing addition to the north, and the medical buildings to the west.  And there is, for most of the way, an additional reason to stay out of it:

A thick row of briars that cuts the patch off from the main woods most of the way.  There are ways through, but they are tricky, and Scrappy actually got a scratch on his inner leg  (the inside of his back leg, get out of the gutter!) making it through.

The rest of the woods trip was uneventful in the extreme.  All God's creatures were off visiting relatives for the holiday- the only living things we saw in the entire woods was a family taking a walk.  The grandpa asked if we'd seen any deer, and I answered that we hadn't even seen birds or squirrels!

Stony Run from the Plex road bridge.

So we cut over the canal and along the back of the IPFW soccer pitch to the river.  Here at least we saw three small birds (two of them were Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal) and a heron when we got to Scrappy's favorite spot.  We clambered down to the beach and walked along the river for a long while.

The river had a lot of waves today!

Now, getting off the beach at the other end can be a challenge.  Along the north side of the main IPFW pitch is an inlet that leads to a swamp.  Above that below the next field is a thick wood, made thicker because when they cut out the trees for that field, they left the debris lie right at the edge- so there is no way to cross out.  You have to follow as close to the edge as you can...

...going through stuff like this, until you get to the point where the edge of the woods and the top of the swamp meet.

Fortunately, at this point, a hard right gets you to the soccer field and solid ground.  After that, we saw a lone squirrel in the distance, and that was all we saw in a three-mile walk.


Next up, it's time for a Lokomotiv update.  The boys won that rematch with CSKA Wednesday 4-0 behind another great game from Semyon Varlamov.  Sergei Plotnikov continued hot with his 6th and 7th goals, and my boy Emil Galimov added his 3rd and the equally hot Artym Anisimov picked up his 5th.  Despite several good chances, Varlamov stopped all 34 shots.  It was a rough game, and after Mikhail Grabowsky knocked the Lokomotiv goalie down with an elbow (and some good acting on Varlamov's part), he became a target for the boys the rest of the night, with the referees just keeping Niklaus Hagman from beating him on the spot.

Yesterday it was a trip to Prague to play Lev.  This was not a good game for us, and after Curtis Sanford was peppered for 20-some shots and 3 goals in 27 1/2 minutes, he left the game trailing 3-0 for Vitaly Kolesnik, who gave up a 4th goal less than 4 minutes later.  That ignited a flurry that saw both teams score twice in a a six minute span, with Alexi Kalyuzhny getting #7 and Plotnikov getting his eighth to end the flurry at 17 minutes of the second with us trailing now 5-2.

Sanford came back in in the third, after Kolesnik had given up 2 goals on 5 shots in his stint.  Yuri Petrov tallied his 2nd at 3:10, but Lev pushed it to 6-3 at the 9 minute mark, and they hit an empty net for a 7-3 lead with less than 3 minutes to go to finish off the butt-whupping.

That leaves us 14-6-8, tied with SKA for second overall and 3 points back of Dynamo Moscow.  Tomorrow it's a trip to Bratislava to take on Slovan.

In other news, the Dynamo team masseur was fined the equivalent of $3200 and suspended 2 games.  How does a masseur get suspended in fined?  Well, the team had just given up a penalty shot goal to Minsk's Tim Stapleton, and as Stapleton skated by, this happened:

This, I do not believe was a one finger massage offer.  The disciplinary board didn't either.


Finally, a story about last night at work.  An incident- if you want to call it that- occured just before lunch that pissed me off.  I tiny little thing that I'm not going to go into- though I was planning on it.  Boy, was I planning on it!  But as I calmed down a little I began looking around.  First off, I'm reading the story of Nazi Germany's defeat right now, and got thinking about all the crap "the greatest generation" went through to defeat Hitler and saw how small a thing it was.  Then, I began watching this one little Burmese guy.  He was sent over to cut open our boxes when it was really busy (which it no longer was) and thought about how he was being treated like a servant.  Then a voice (no, not God's) seemed to say, "We're all servants around here!"  Which got me thinking about the "servant's heart" we are supposed to have- which I don't.  I have a bitcher's heart at work, always have.  And I got thinking about the long way I have to go to change that.

Shortly thereafter, a series of equally insignificant incidents showed me how stupid I would have felt if I had said something about the first incident.  I've always known that in situations as this, I end up better off keeping my mouth shut.  But I never really look into the why of that.  When I manage to keep quiet, it is generally out of, "it just doesn't pay if I say something," rather than trying to show that servant's heart.  It is more important to me to say, "I'm right, and I don't have to say it to be right."  I guess because I haven't had to live in a foxhole, or spend time in a concentration camp, or be run out of my homeland by greedy dictators.

So there's one last thing to be thankful for- the ability to learn such lessons without going through such conditions.  And thus, be thankful for the thing last night that made me mad.

Or at least work on that.