Canada Day 9 : Canucks @ Oilers

WARNING: this post is going to be a killer for anyone with dial up net access! Photos galore :)

I had a great day today - stash shopping and a hockey game, the perfect combination!

Anam took me to Treasured Memories, an Edmonton scrapbook store that she does DT work for. The place was a real Aladdin's Cave of goodies, and I might just have spent stupid amounts of money in there :) They were nice enough to give me a discount, though, so that softened the blow quite a bit.

After the shopping trip we came home to deliver Fay to her little pal's mum for a sleepover, and got all ready for the big hockey game. Canucks vs the Oilers at Rexall Place, a vitally important divisional battle, just a stone's throw from the end of the season.

We met up with Ian and had a bite to eat, and then got a cab out to the arena.


The atmosphere there was excellent, nobody gave us any stick for our Vancouver jerseys, well not bad natured stick anyway :) We were really lucky that tonight happened to be "Fan Appreciation Night", so there were loads of extra things going on - including free popcorn and inflatable bangy sticks all round and lots of signed jersey giveaways and so on - that seemed to put everyone in a great mood.


We had GREAT seats for the game - thanks to Anam's pal whose hubby is a very important honcho at Rexall. They were immediately behind the TV cameras at centre ice - and you just can't get a better view of the entire game than that - they put the cameras there for a reason :)


The game itself was great for me and Connor, not so for poor Anam and Ian, as we beat them 4-1. Anam says we only won because of Luongo, and to be honest I would struggle to disagree with her tonight. The Oilers were putting us under tremendous pressure, outshot us significantly, and really should have got more pucks in the net, but Lu pulled off some frankly superhuman saves. Thank GOD he's ours. Can someone PLEASE get him to sign a 20 year contract extension?


I love the showbiz of the games here, the way they lower the oil derrick did kind of bring to mind the Stonehenge set from Spinal Tap, but it really was cool the way they all skate out through it. I am going to suggest to Steve Nell that we have something similar for the Wildcats lol.


Thanks to very nice important honcho man, we had special stickers on our tickets that said "club access" - and that basically got us into the fancy bar downstairs, where I could actually get served (would you believe the woman at the public bar upstairs refused to serve me because I didn't have ID???? I was actually so flattered that I didn't care about having to drink water instead of Smirnoff Ice :) :) :) ).

The other advantage of the Club area, is that it is handily situated between the players' dressing room and the ice - so they walk right past you as they come back out to play - how cool is that???

Malc- I'm afraid I didn't get quite close enough to MacTavish to run my fingers through his hair for you, as requested :) But here is a photo, I hope that will do :D


It gets even more exciting - in the 2nd intermission, we got a tour of Oilers TV from aforementioned honcho, and Connor even got to don a headset and be a part of the team for a while! Pretty cool of them given they were directing a live TV broadcast going out across Canada and probably the US aswell, and he was worryingly close to very important looking buttons and dials :)


We had to take off our Vancouver jerseys for the tour ("you have a choice son, either you lose that jersey or your pants" lol), but luckily we had t shirts on underneath :)


(After the game the same fab man accidentally made Connor cry by beating up Furry for wearing a Vancouver hat, and even some nice policemen couldn't cheer him up - oops! But a reassurance that Furry was just fine and the promise of a ride home on the train did the trick)

As for the plethora of fab photos, I can't take credit for all of them as some of the in game shots and most of the "backstage" pics are Anam's, taken either with my camera or her whizzy new Nikon D80, bought earlier the same morning.


Sorry there are so many, but I just couldn't narrow down the selection any further.

All in all, a brilliant night

and sorry Oilers, but GO CANUCKS!!!!!!


Pics below are half from the warm up, half from the game, in no particular order:

The 2 Ryans....nice to see Ryan Shannon back on the ice





Ditto for Boom Boom Bieksa (on whom my mate Ellard has a very manly man crush :)), it seemed like he was gone forever after that nasty skate-blade-through-the-calf-muscle incident:





I love that race across the red line they do in warm up, those NHL boys sure can fly :) :

Luuuuuuuuuuuuu





Sexiest bottom in the NHL? :)



Another great save from our saviour :)


Naughty boy Willie

New job for Markus?


Best pic I could get of the new boy, Matt Pettinger, already producing very well for us, keep it up Matt!


Why is Anam's favourite Oiler flashing our goalie???

Curtis Sanford:



Poor Willie still has to wear the full face shield:

Kes got a nasty sting from a puck to the foot late in the 3rd and hobbled back to the bench in obvious pain :(

Canada Day 8 : a change of scenery

Well, here we are in Edmonton, having taken a short flight over the Rockies into Alberta.

I was prepared for it to be like Siberia here, and yes there is some snow on the ground, but it's 5 above, gloriously sunny, and you could walk around in a t shirt :)

Might not need the thermals and snow suits and fleece lined sherpa hats after all, eh? :)



We are staying for 4 days with Anam and Ian and their gorgeous daughter Fay, who has kindly donated her bedroom to the cause - thank you Fay!!

Anam's house is the coolest shade of blue ever, I want to paint mine now :)

And the delivery pizza round here is the best I have ever tasted, yum.

Canada Day 7: last full day in Vancouver, sob

Well, we were blessed with GLORIOUS weather for our last day in BC, and so I thought we should do a spot of geocaching, after our obligatory daily visit to the fair and polite hassle from the local beggars - all of whom could tell I was a soft touch from a thousand paces :)

So off down Granville Street we trotted, blindly following the little arrow on my GPS, only to come to a slight dead end when we reached False Creek :)

Turned out the cache was on the other bank of a very wide body of water, oops!

And we didn't have our swimming gear, so we took a ferry over to Granville Island - which was nowhere near where we needed to go, but at least it was on the right side of the creek.

We had the boat all to ourselves, so I did a bit of filming (Steven Spielberg eat your heart out):

(isn't Vancouver beautiful)



We had lunch on Granville Island, and then Cons played for a couple of hours in the kids market, while I talked to a lovely little old lady who has lived in Vancouver all her life, and who gave me a potted history of the last 60 odd years, with particular emphasis on the various waves of immigration which she had endless opinions on....

Then it was a lovely walk along the waterfront for a mile or so to the cache. Connor found another playground near a lovely little residential area, where I am retiring to if I get half a chance....check out this panorama....this is 3 minutes walk from the houses.....


What a wonderful place to live!

We found the cache just a little past here, and then walked on another mile to the Stamps Landing ferry dock, where we flukily just caught the last ferry of the day.



Then it was back to Yaletown, and another long walk home, via the fair again.

We were EXHAUSTED by the time we got back to the hotel. I was supposed to pack, but I chose sleep instead :)

Canada Day 6: GO CANUCKS GO!!!!

We went back over to Granville Island today on the the ferry, and had a lovely meal, and then came back to BC Place for an hour at the fair, but none of that is really all that exciting - you want to read about the GAME, right??? :)

Oh it was so so so so so so good!!!!



We had all our Canucks gear on by 4pm, ("we" being me, Connor, Furry and Fin the puppet :)) and were raring to go, but the doors don't open till 6 so we tapped our feet impatiently for a while....


Eventually it was time to walk on up there. It was a great atmosphere with loads of other walking Canucks jerseys descending upon the stadium. Even all the staff in our hotel had their jerseys on - from the concierge to the ultra smart girls behind the reception desk.



I got my camera through security on the promise that I would use it in the game, just during the warm up skate, which suited me just fine as during the game I want to watch the game :)



Connor met up with Fin, had a little punch up with him (which he assures me Fin started), and got his puppet signed. Fin also popped by to see Cons in his seat later and handed him a signed pic, "to Connor love from Fin", which was cool :)


I got tons of really cool pics in the warm up, which I was really pleased with. I especially love the ones of Burr, Lui and Nazzy.



The game itself was everything you could want to see (unless you were a Coyotes fan lol). We won it. 3-1. But it was so much more than the scoreline (although I won't deny those 2 points came in mighty handy)



For a start we saw the first points from the twins for some time, hopefully getting the proverbial monkeys off their identical backs. And it was also the end of a fair old drought for Taylor Pyatt.

We showed some toughness too, and stood up for ourselves well. Rick Rypien took down Daniel Carcillo with surprising ease given the weight differential and Carcillo's rep. And even Henrik had a bit of a set to (with Carcillo again) and didn't look like a little kid being bullied.



The only downside was that young Mason Raymond took a nasty bump on his knee, I saw him down on the ice for a while, but he then got up and skated off under his own steam, so I was hopeful it wasn't serious. Word is, though, that he will be out for 4 weeks :(


All in all, it was an entertaining game, which addressed a lot of common complaints about the team - that we are soft, and can't score, and rely too much on Luongo. Let's just hope we can keep it up!



Oh, and I saw Ryan Kesler, for REAL :D

Bloody hell that boy can skate!!! It'd take more than Chris Pronger trying to chop his foot off to slow my man down :D



I met some other Kes nuts too - and somewhat drunkenly insisted on a group photo. They didn't seem to mind though :)



I walked back to the hotel after the game, hoarse from shouting, happy as can be, and making Fin the puppet fart to make Connor giggle.

It's moments like that that make life worth living :)

(and guess who has been having fun playing with renders in Photoshop lol)

Eight games for Pronger

Hmmm, I'm not going to pass too much comment on this one (barely controlling the urge to rant...), other than to say he certainly deserved a suspension, and I am relieved Kes wasn't badly hurt

Pronger: Eight games for Kesler stomp

Duck will be out until Anaheim's final regular-season game

By Jason Botchford, The Province

Published: Saturday, March 15, 2008

DALLAS -- He has become public enemy No. 1 among the Lower Mainland's hockey fans, which is why there will be plenty of people in Vancouver who believe Chris Pronger's eight-game suspension is not nearly enough.

There will be some who are outraged. And maybe they should be.

Only three months ago, Chris Simon, now with the Minnesota Wild, received a 30-game suspension for stomping on Jarkko Ruutu's ankle.

In announcing Pronger's suspension Saturday, Colin Campbell, the NHL's director of hockey operations, seemed to give Pronger the benefit of the doubt.

"In attempting to free himself, Pronger carelessly and recklessly brought his foot down," Campbell said in a statement.

The other possibility is that Pronger wasn't careless at all, that he intended to injure in an act of frustration.

"He got caught up in the moment and acted wrongly," Kesler said. "I know he doesn't like to get hit. I know me and someone else hit him pretty good. He took it out in the wrong way.

"Obviously, the skate blade is the most dangerous part of the equipment. You shouldn't use it on someone like that."

There is a sense in the hockey community -- some who say it publicly, others privately -- that Kesler deserves what he gets.

His style of play, an aggravating, frustrating, punishing mix of forechecking and smack talking, is said to sometimes approach the line of what's acceptable, what's legal. Although he's not a heavily penalized player (only 22 minors this year), he can draw out the worst in his opponents. Several of them, like Pronger, have been driven over the edge in appalling fashion.

"People are going to say what they're going to say but when someone steps on you with a skate, I don't think anyone deserves that, especially in a hockey game," Kesler said. "I guess you can say guys are getting frustrated. Sometimes guys act in a wrong way and they probably regret it later."

Kesler has been the victim of two sickening acts this season which resulted in suspensions. The first came in October when Jesse Boulerice cross checked him across the face. The latest, Stompgate, was only fully revealed late Thursday, a day after Pronger slammed down his skated on Kesler's calf.

Credit goes to eagle-eyed TEAM 1040 colour analyst Tom Larscheid, who brought the incident to light. He was one of the only people to clearly see the stomp, which happened behind the flow of play in Wednesday's 4-1 Canucks loss to Anaheim.

Initially, the NHL decided against suspending Pronger because of the poor video evidence they had to work with. But when new video appeared Thursday night, the NHL re-assessed the issue.

Pronger is considered by many to be one of the league's dirtier players, one who sometimes chooses to hurt instead of check. He has now been suspended eight times.

Watching the video, it's difficult to determine what is harder to believe.

That Pronger would be so reckless just a week after his teammate Corey Perry was inadvertently lacerated by Jose Theodore's skate. Or that Kesler's leg remains intact, uncut.

"I'm just fortunate nothing happened to me and I'm able to keep playing," Kesler said.Ksler said he sees some similarities with Chris Simon's stomp on Jarkko Ruutu earlier this season. Back in December, Simon earned a 30-game suspension for his similarly vicious stomp.

"It doesn't matter to me, the league is going to make the decision," Kesler said.

It's not the first run-in Kesler has had with Pronger this season. In November, Pronger cross-checked Kesler's lower back when the checking-line centre had his arms up after scoring a goal to put the Canucks up 2-0.

Kesler said he won't let incidents like the Pronger stomp influence the way he plays.

"My job is the same night-in, night-out and that's to shut down the other team's best players," Kesler said. "If they're going to act out like that, that's what they're going to do. The league will take care of it."

Pronger is not eligible to come back until the Ducks' final regular season game.