the count and the new team

so there's good news and bad news. good news: the spring hockey season started yesterday!

bad news: yesterday was miserable.

i thought las cruces was supposed to be warm, but it was freezing yesterday. how ironic is that? it's been gorgeous in las cruces and socorro for months, and the first day that it actually feels like winter is the day that i have to be outside for ten and a half hours. yep, from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. usually i don't mind this. but it was cold!

it was fun seeing the hockey crowd again, though i hardly saw sunshine at all and i had to give sparky a lecture about the unattractiveness of a twelve-year-old using the f-word. that was lame. seeing chris and tom and hugo sr. was fun, but hugo jr. has that bug that makes you loose your voice, so he wasn't around, and neither was ray. boo.

then there was this whole business with the scoreboard.

we've been using the same scoreboard for years and years, a big heavy awkward clumsy thing named baby, who was powered by a car battery and a controller that had to be just right to actually work. baby and her controller frequently had to be sweet-talked into functioning properly ("come on, baby.... you're pretty!"). my brother in particular was very good at this. once, he even sweet-talked baby over the phone for me.

last semester, baby got a little too high-maintenance for the league, and the board decided to spend $2300 on a new scoreboard. and it's really nice. so nice, in fact, that it's completely devoid of personality and you don't really notice it. it's boring. it works exactly like it's supposed to. and it's small. at the end of the day, tom carried it into the shed by himself.

how am i supposed to figure out what the new scoreboard's name is? how do you name something that has no personality and does what it's supposed to? my dad thought that it should be named "the count". that's funny.

and when did i discuss this with my dad? well, the count has a remote control. so i went and sat in the bleachers with my dad during andy's game and controlled the board from there. it works great.

so now i will not be confined to the tower any longer. weird! that's my tower! and in the bleachers, i can't talk schmack about the little kids or laugh at them when they dive and pretend to be hurt because i might be sitting next to their parents.

and another thing! this new scoreboard is user-friendly and actually works, and has no little quirks that you learn after years of working with it, like that the home score takes a few seconds to work, so don't press it twice right away. or that the clock gets stuck at twenty minutes and that you have to add a second just before the ref starts the game and then start the clock. anyone can use this thing! it's easy! my job security over the years has been that no one else wants to put up with the cranky scoreboard, what am i going to do now?

sigh. i miss baby. i take less pride in being the score/stat keeper when it's so bloody easy.

this would be the part of the post where i tell you about my new team, but... ha! they didn't show up, isn't that funny? ha, ha, ha... wait. that's not funny.

yesterday, my team consisted of me, gabe sanchez our goalie, and matt the new guy. for a new guy, matt was pretty good, and surprisingly, wasn't weirded out by me at all. he used to work with my brother, so he sort of knows me. but he wasn't enough to make up for the rest of the team not being there, especially since i haven't been feeling well and both of us are out of shape. since junior was sick, senior took his place, and we played the first half with no subs.

it was rough. the other team had a bench full of subs and was doing fine, but i was tired ten minutes into the game. matt said he was tired before we started. this wouldn't have been so bad, except i was playing my brother's team, and he and i have been hyping this up all week. ouch. needless to say, we lost. it wasn't a blowout, but... let's just say that the outcome of the game was never in question. some of the older players helped us out in the second half, but it was too late by then.

but i did manage to stuff my brother twice. take that! and i knocked him over twice, too. with twelve seconds left in the game, he and collin attacked me in a two-on-one. collin's pretty good at those. well, he passed to nick, who scored. he rubbed my face in it, which i would have done to him. he said, "that was for you, holly!" thanks.

just kidding, i love him.

at the end of that long, cold day, i was sore, sunburned, humbled, freezing, coughing, and probably well on my way to that bug that makes you loose your voice. but i played well, and danny, nick, and pete dinger scored goals for me. yay hockey!

next week will be better.