Note To Self

Note To Self: Next time you have a 7pm slot at the Oasis, check the Shoreline Amphitheatre schedule. I'd gone to McCarthy to get feral food, an iPod toy, and check for a book at Borders (buying a swimsuit along the way), and was running marginally late for my Oasis game -- in hockey terms, that's "shoot, I'll only have 10 minutes to dress". No problem, at least where I was was closer to the Oasis than home. Get onto 237...and traffic grinds to a crawl. All. The. Way. To. Shoreline. Atwhichpointitspedupnicely, but it's a loooong way from McCarthy to Shoreline at snail speed. I could see miles and miles of cars backed up on 101 south, eventually plugging up the entire freeway like the section I'd been on, of people just waiting for the Shoreline exit.

By the time I got to the Oasis, my team had already been playing for 15 minutes. By the time I got dressed, the third period had just started. We were ahead 3-0, and my teammates were all happy and confident. Two id^H^Hteammates told me to rotate through the forward lines (I was the 11th player), despite me pointing out that just having a 3rd center would probably be easier on everyone. No, one said, rotating is really easy, and I was wrong about the centers getting tired the fastest, and besides, we didn't want to deprive them of their ice time, did we? The speaker was one center, with Peter the other -- and Peter certainly didn't care about ice time (he was asking the same Q as I was), so the translation of that was fairly plain. From that point the team fizzled, our opponents put on some speed, and we lost 4-3. In the locker room afterwards, some of my teammates asked why we'd rotated the extra player around instead of just having a third center. I mentioned what 'one of our centers' had said about rotating the ice time so centers don't 'miss out'. They said if the centers are NOT appreciating a third player, they're probably not skating hard enough, because they certainly should be working the hardest, and could we agree that if an 11th player shows up again, that they just become a 3rd center? Ha, I thought. I stayed quiet for the most part, as did the previously-noisy center. It's not the first time that person and I have disagreed about team policy; the other time was when they said subs should go where we tell them to go because regulars should play what they want to play, and I was pointing out that if a sub stinks at D and we put them on D because everybody else wants to be a forward that day, and it causes us to get scored on, then our team would suffer as a whole, and nobody would have as much fun.

The next game's teams didn't need any extra subs and G was staying late at work, so at his suggestion I drove up and had dinner with him at MOuntain Mike's instead of sticking around to wait to see if the third timeslot needed subs in an hour. Watched Bonds and 2 other Giants get back-to-back-to-back HRs on the big-screen TV, had a nice mini pizza, cheese sticks and an OJ, chatted, drove G back to his building, went home, pottered around (dealing with hockey gear, feeding the ladies, etc.), and went to bed.

Not the best hockey day, with only a third of a game played, and that game lost so suddenly after I showed up, but...I remind myself that it's a team sport, and I was on wing when we were scored against. And I had a nice dinner. And a new iPod gadget (an FM transmitter) to supplement my one-CD car stereo. And I have a practice tonight and 1-2 games tomorrow.

Time to try and grind out some work and tend to my parched garden, which has been mostly without me for a long, hot 3 days!