Aaron’s view on things… Not always entertaining to others, but it is to himself.
Hi all,
The running store that i work at has updated it’s website. All the staff members have bio’s. My “bio” is written for everybody back home to have a chuckle about. It’s at www.forerunners.ca make sure you check out the about us page and then select meet the foreruners - west 4th staff. Scope it out…
Cheers…
ab
Last Tuesday i was heading to Karl’s to look after Amy and Molly while Leah and Karl headed off to the Canucks game. They were playing against Chicago and the game was only on pay-per-view that night so i would be unable to even watch the game while i was looking after the girls. I was a little jealous that Karl was going to be heading to see a Canucks game before me. Karl had bought tickets of Ebay so he could take Leah to a game. As Karl and I already had tickets to two games later in the season. The Canucks have basically sold out all their 41 home games for the season, so the only way to get a ticket is by luck or be prepared to pay a lot for them.
I was just about at Karl’s when my phone rang. I knew it would be Karl, i was expecting him to be checking on my arrival, even though i was running ahead of time. However, he said that plans had changed and Leah was unable to go to the hockey so it would have to me me stepping into the breach. I only had to think about that for a split second. However, i said i’d have to stop in at home first as i wanted to grab my Canucks Jersey to debut it at a game. I had set it aside for the November 2nd game which i was expecting to be my first.
Anyway we jumped on the bus and headed down town. Like Docklands Staduim the two Major Staduims in Vancouver are right on the edge of the city. General Motors Place is the hockey stadium and right next door is B.C. Staduim which is where the B.C. Lions play Canadian Football. As we did before we went to the Lions football a few weeks ago, Karl and I stopped at a street Hot Dog vendor to aviod paying twice the price for something in the staduim, so we threw down two hot dogs each, well i did at least, Karl had veggie dogs what ever is in those?? That’s more of a mystery then the “beef” hotdogs i was consuming.
So we headed down to GM Place and joined the other 18,500 Canucks fans for the game. After the teams leave the ice after the warm up the lights go down and the music goes up and then teams retake the ice in dark. Then it’s time for the national anthems. Firstly one of the worst renditions of the Star Spangled Banner i have ever heard and then a less then inspiring version of O Canada but i wasn’t there for the singing i was there to see the Hockey.
It was just as i’d imagined, fast and hard and energy packed. You pretty much sit on the edge of your seat for each of the three 20 minute period as the game moves so quickly and it does not take much for a goal to be scored. The place is deathly quiet when the away team scores, but explodes with pure passion when the Canucks put the puck into the back of the net.
Despite sitting in the nosebleeds you can see everything and you get a great view of the ice and the action as it unfolds.
The price of beer was marginally better then at the Lions football games, but at $7.25 each it’s still not conducive to consuming to many of them. Besides the pace of the game doesn’t lend itself to drinking to much anyway, unlike the football or i can only imagine how bad baseball must get.
Anyway i am becoming quite the fan of the Hockey and am impressing the boss at work with newly acquired knowledge of the game.
I also went to the Giants game again on Friday night too, just to keep the live hockey action coming. There i managed to get a seat sat right down the front a few rows back from the glass and it gives a completely different view of the games and how hard they hit, and that was just the junior WHL. You have to mortgage your house if you want to sit down the front at a Canucks game.
Well the listeners of Canberra radio station mix 106.3 voted and Karen listened to there opinions. (See earlier post) Luckily for me they advised karen to get herself over to Canada to see me. So on Boxing Day karen arrives into vancouver for a stay of just under 3 weeks. I can harldy wait and am counting down the days and trying to work out what we should do while Karen is in town. I am sure we will work something out.
Last night i went on a hot date to watch some hockey. Hockey (of the ice variety) is the national religion in Canada and i was ready to go church. My dates Amy and Leah picked me up and after a non-traditional sport dinner of sushi we headed off to the Pacific Coliseum to watch the Vancouver Giants take on the Price George Cougars.
The Vancouver Giants play in the WHL, which is one of three junior leagues run by Hockey Canada, where Hockey’s next big things show there stuff in the hope of being drafted into the NHL. The guys in the team are all under 20, with the majority of them being 17 or 18. Last year when the NHL Hockey season was a no show because of labour disputes the Giants were playing in front of sell out crowds in excess of 12,000 for the play offs. The giants are the family friendly option of going to watch hockey rather than trying to find tickets to the Canucks and paying inflated prices for second hand tickets.
We joined the other 5481 fans that went to the game last night and awaited the start of the game. You’d have to love playing hockey 2-3 times a week in front of 5,500 people as a 16 year old. Try to imagine 5,500 people going to watch two teams play Under 18’s footy. In some of the smaller towns that are in the comp like Kelowna there local teams in the WHL are THE team in town.
The kids play as hard as the gus in the NHL. From what i have seen of the NHL on TV the skills in the WHL are obviously not as polished as they are in the big leauges and the size of the body is a bit smaller, but they still go in at full pace crashing each other against the boards and hitting each other on the open ice. The hits against other players on the boards always sound big even if they don’t always connect as the sound of anyone hitting the boards echoes around the stadium. against The game is still lightning fast and extremely impressive and the skating had to be seen to be believed.
It was a good night and Leah, Amy and myself all enjoyed ourselves. I am going back next week when the Giants take on the Kelowna Rockets who I am led to believe are traditional rivals.
Also on November 2nd I am off to the Vancouver Canucks to see the BIG boys go about their business.
For the record the Giants went down 4-5 to the Cougars from Prince George
After umpiring the Grand Final here between Seattle and Burnaby, i needed some more football. The Vancouver Cougars had been invited at the last minute (four weeks prior) to play at the US National Football Tournament in Milwaukee. I decided that it could be fun to travel down there and do some umpiring. So i had made arrangements to travel with the Vancouver team to Milwaukee. However as the day drew closer the Vancouver Boys numbers were not looking to great so there focus changed to an attempt to get me to play. The last time i played i was about 16/17, apart from one or two friendlys between the Field Umpires and Boundary Umpires back in Canberra. So naturally i was somewhat heistant. As the trip would pan out the boys would have ample opportunity to convince me to pull on the boots.
It is important to point out from the football club’s point of view, that the actual weekend was a difficult organisational process. They did not get official confirmation of our attendance until 4 weeks prior to the event. First of all the Club had to find a travel schedule with enought tickets and at a price to suit a budget. Thus the first problem was solved by Catching a coach service from Vancouver from Seattle Airport on Friday evening, taking the redeye from Seattle to Chicago and then transferring to Milwaukee arriving at 7:40am Saturday.
So after meeting at a Irish pub in downtown Vancouver the trip had begun. The bus left at 6pm with a scheduled arrival at Seattle Airport at 10:30pm allowing enough time to catch the 11:55 red eye to Chicago. So at 6 as we rolled out of town spirits were high and everyone was getting excited about playing at the US Nationals.
Just before the Canadian/US Border we picked up the coach picked up its final passenger for the run down to Seattle. The Border crossing seemed to be going smoothly with no problems until we noticed that the guy that had got on last had been pulled aside by the US officials. However the US officials didn’t process him further until they had processed everyone else including another coach that had arrived just after us. According to the bus driver he is not allowed to leave until everyone is processed or the US officals have decided to detain people. Eventually they let the young guy with the try hard afro through. This had cost the trip 40 minutes. Needless to say that guy got a rousing reception from the football team once he got back on the bus.
Still not to bad. We were still likely to make the flight but with less time to spare. Crusing down the I-5 to seattle was going nicely until suddenly we hit road works. Three lanes of traffic merging into one had the traffic backed up for kilometers, or as we were in America - Miles. Here the bus successfully lost another 45 minutes and effectively we all knew now that we would likely miss our flight.
Finally arriving at the airport at 11:35 we raced up to the check in counter, only to be greeted by a Gentlemen who we all thought had great delight in informing us that we would not be taking our flight to Chicago. The next option would be taking a flight to Denver at 6am and then connecting to Milwaukee, arriving at 1:30pm. This would mean not making it on time for our first game against Minnesota and struggling to make our 3pm game against a combined New York/Atlanta team.
Now we had 4 hours to kill until check in opened at 4am. About half the group went to a dodgy local bar near the airport and sang kareoke, the rest of us found the local Denny’s (dodgy 24hr diner) and had some food and played cards. At 3am in the Terminal super coach Stu decided that we should split up the team kit amongst the carry on luggage so that if the checked bagged got lost at least we would be able to play. This led to the handing out of the gurneseys. I grabbed number 17. This led to an impromptu team practice session in the Seatac terminal as everyone got excited and pulled on the kit. I was taking marks amongst the empty check in lines complete down to the boots and socks up.
By 4:40am we were through security and ready to catch the subway out to the departure gate. We were able to get about 30 minutes sleep at the terminal before boarding begun. I think everyone slept on the flight to Denver and then again on the flight to Milwaukee. We eventually arrived at the Milwaukeee airport at 1:30pm Saturday afternoon and quickly got into rental vans to drive the 40 minutes to the field. Our second game had been rescheduled to 5pm so we were pretty pumped to be playing - albeit without any sleep for nearly 24 hrs! Minnesota were refusing to play us/reschedule the first game we missed and thus it was confimred - forfeit!
The time for the first game had arrived. To make it fair there is a strict 50/50 ruling for players on the field at all times. that is there can not be more Australians than Non Australians on the field at any one time. I was a little apprehensive as my return to playing was to be at centre half back. I decided two things, to model my game on Chad Cornes, the second to make sure i could get a touch asap. I didn’t have to wait long to get a touch as New York won the opening bounce and had it moving their way. I successfully dispossed a player and gave off a handball to one of our players. This settled me and i was able to relax a bit. However i was not able to play quite like Chad Cornes would and given i was wearing 17 probably looked more like Stewie Dew trying to play like Chad Cornes, especially as both Dew and I have such a raking left foot. Anyway we ran out winners by just under 3 goals in game one, a historic moment as Vancouver was the first Canadian team to play at the US Nationals and here we were winning out first game.
Most of the team was pretty trashed following the adventures that proceeded and given that we had an 8am game the next morning most people were pretty keen for dinner and bed. The team skipped the offical banquet and instead went to dinner at a local steak house.
We awoke very early Sunday (6:15am) and headed out to the fields. Memories of junior footy games came flooding back to a lot of the team as the morning dew was still rising from the grass fields! I suggested it felt like the University Games back home where usually the team with the lesser hangovers usually won the games in the early mornings. We had turned up to play though as with the forfeit the previous day we needed to win big and hope that New York beat Atlanta so as to move through to the Div 3 grand final on percentage. Fired up we went on to win by 14 goals, but alas it wasn’t to be enough as although NY beat Minnesota, Minnesota went through by a narrow percentage margain to the final against Baton Rouge. Minnesota took a hollow Div 3 championship victory, with probably the two best teams in Div 3 being ourselves and NY.
Anyway it was 10am in the morning when the result was confirmed that we would not be playing in the grand final so it was time to hit the Coopers. That was one of the best things of the weekend. Coopers in all the colours of the rainbow. Hmmmm Coopers. Pales, Sparklings, Dark and Stout. Take your pick. Oh and the packet of 12 Caramello Koalas that i bought went down a treat. They had it all even down to the fruit tingles. More coopers and some time spent helping work the scoreboard on field one. It is hard to hold it up against the wind, change the score, watch the match, timekeep and eat Caramello’s all while holding a Coopers at the same time in the other hand. Lucky a native of Wisconsin, Kristy, who was there supporting her boy play for Milwaukee did most of the work.
It was then time to travel home to Vancouver (via Phoenix!). After suffering a bit of a largish hit in the second game i struggled to walk around as i had a corked thigh and bruised hip on the other side. It made for a long trip home.
A whirlwind trip, but one that was full of lighter moments and had a bit of everything. Cheers to the other Vancouver boys for a great weekend. Same time again next year??
Scores:
10/1/2005
Vancouver 4.10-34 defeated Atlanta/New York B 2.5-17
10/2/2005
Vancouver 14.6-90 defeated Golden Gate B/Mojave Greens 0.3-3
Goals Kicked by Aaron: 0
Goals Kicked by Aaron’s direct opponent: 0
**Not a bad net result**
The other afternoon i had spoken to the family on the phone, hoping to catch them before they went about their day. After talking to Mum i thought i’d call Karen before she went to work for the day. While i was on the phone to Karen my mobile phone started to ring. It was Alice.
Now as some background Karen’s flatmate Lisa is the morning DJ on Canberra radio station Mix 106.3. One segment on their show is called Moral Dilemma. People write in with there problems, and then the Canberra public discusses it over the air. So you’ll get things like Fred has just met Jane but Jane has two kids and Fred doesn’t know whether he is a kids person but he really feels that things may develop further but he wants to know what to do. Then listeners call in and give their opinion.
Karen must have been talking to Lisa because as i put Karen on hold to talk to Alice, Alice just blurted out, “you’re famous”. Alice informed me that on Mix 106.3 at that very moment they were discussing the Moral dilemma of “Kim”. Kim’s boyfriend Dave was living in Canada, and Kim would really like to go and see him, but the only time she had to see him was after christmas. However this meant that she would have to bail on a trip she had been planning for a while now with her girlfriends to New Zealand. This is the exact situation that Karen was in. I left Alice with the instructions turn on your radio.
I told Karen what was happening and she said she was going to kill Lisa. I told her to turn on her radio and with that i hung up on Karen. I then dialed the number for the Mix 106.3 studio. Lisa answered the phone off air, i think she nearly died when she realised that it was me and that i knew that she had been discussing Karen’s dilemma on the radio. They then put me to air and i discussed the dilemma from “Dave’s” side. I said that i was somewhat biased and thought that “Kim” should come and visit Vancouver as it had lots to offer.
I think it may have worked in convincing Karen that she should come here. Later i found out that practically all my family was listening to the radio at that moment. Later Mum emailed Karen and told her to let them know what she decides, but not necessarily by doing so over the radio.
For the record my understanding is that the majority of callers said that Kim should head over to see Dave, so i must thank Canberra listeners for their support!