As posted earlier, we went to the Steelheads hockey game here in Boise last night. Michelle stayed home to do homework, but grandma went to see/hear Brianna sing, then Brianna and grandma left. However Andrew, Mark, Steven and I stayed for the game. Before moving to Boise, we weren't in to hockey at all. But with each game we attend, the boys and I love it more and more. These games are so fun! And there's so much "culture" in hockey.
Oh... and a really cool part about the game is that when Michelle called to order extra tickets so the boys and I could go (they normally only comp us two tickets), the coordinator at the Steelheads told us how wonderful Brianna has been in singing at so many games, that he comp'd ALL of our (fifth row from the floor, down at one of the corners) tickets last night. Mark and Steven eating Dippin' Dots on the left here, by the way. Saweet!!! But back to the culture part...
For example, in just about every hockey game we've been to, there's a pretty serious fight that breaks out. Or... as it's often been said, "I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out." Some of these fights have been pretty vicious, and one we saw even left blood on the ice (yikes!). For the most part, the zebras (officials) just let the fights go on, until the players fall to the ice. It's only then that the zebras break them up. In last night's game, though, the big fight near the end was totally staged. I guess for a while the ECHL (the NHL's premier "AA" league, as they call it) became the WWE. It was still an entertaining fight, though. The crowds go crazy when a fight breaks out. And YES... of course I took pictures! :-)
Another interesting cultural point is the "hat trick." It's when a player scores three goals in a game. This pic on the left is of a shot on a breakaway - we scored. Anyway, I'm not sure why they call scoring three goals a "hat trick" - maybe somebody could look that up for me. Last night when one of the Steelheadsplayers, John Swanson, scored his third goal, fans in the stands started throwing their hats on to the ice. Those hats are expensive!!! I don't know that I could sacrifice my hat like that!
We won the game versus the Victoria Salmon Kings, 5-0, and after every goal we scored, the normally nice, polite Boise crowd would shout out a nice little taunt: "He shoots! We score!! Hey goalie... YOU SUCK!!!" Naturally, I was appalled; what awful behavior! You can be sure that my boys and I participated in no such nonsense!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Oh... and at the Steelheads games, always in the third quarter they play this one song over the loudspeakers, and the whole crowd does this hand-bouncing movement. I'm not sure what that's all about. If you can figure it out from the video embedded below, please let me know!
I hope you've enjoyed the pics as much as we enjoyed the game. To see the 32 pics/videos posted, please check my Flickr page here.
No. Canada is not apparently needing glasses; I just mixed the two national anthems together in the blog entry title here. Oh great... I've probably just offended both Canadians and Americans! Oh well.
Last night my daughter Brianna and her friend Danielle Després sang to kick off last night's ECHL hockey game between the Idaho Steelheads (affiliate of the NHL's Dallas Stars) and the visiting Victoria Salmon Kings (affiliate of the NHL's Vancouver Canucks). Somebody help me out here... what, exactly, is a Canuck??? But I digress...
That's "Victoria" by the way, as in British Columbia. Therefore, they first sang the Canadian national anthem, and then the U.S. national anthem. They've done this a couple times before, and it's always fun. I wonder how many people from the U.S. have the Canadian national anthem memorized. Oh well... at least two in Boise do! :-)
Enjoy the videos embedded below. Just for your reference, Brianna is singing the soprano part. It's not in every performance that Brianna sings that really high note at the end, but she decided to last night. It was funny... where I was standing filming, everybody in the stands was facing ME. OK... so they weren't facing me; they were facing the U.S. and Canadian flags behind me. :-) When Brianna went up to that high note, though, about a third of the people I could see turned and looked at Brianna with an expression like, "Where did that come from?!"
Oh... and who is the guy that shouts after they sing, "I love you Brianna!!!"??? I'm gonna kill 'im! Oh wait a minute... that was ME! :-)
These still shots, by the way, were taken by Mark while I was filming with the other camera. Mark's getting pretty good with a camera!
Brianna and Danielle singing "Oh Canada"
Brianna and Danielle singing "The Star Spangled Banner"
This past Monday night (March 22, 2010) was Lowell Scott Middle School's 7th and 8th grade band concert. Lowell Scott's 7th grade band is actually bigger than their 8th grade band, and they've made a ton of improvement over the year - they sound pretty good!!! Mark played in the concert that night, despite having a nasty ear infection. His ear is totally plugged up and painful, but he played his trumpet with style! :-)
Lowell Scott has recently started doing all of their concerts at Centennial High School's new Performing Arts Center, and it's SUCH a better venue than the old middle school gym! We really enjoy the concerts.
The 7th grade band played three songs at the concert, which they will also play again at the district's Spring Festival during school hours tomorrow. Wish them luck!
The videos are embedded from YouTube, below. And a great big THANK YOU to their great director, Sarah Frazier. Enjoy.
For those of you whom have been following Andrew's Eagle Scout project (previous posting from October 2009 here), we had another Eagle Scout project work session yesterday. Andrew has sold, built, and installed four benches at Lake Lowell out in Nampa. The day we went to install them last Fall, we were told that the arms on the benches did not meet ADA requirements. So we installed the benches, but removed the arms so that we could take them and make them ADA-compliant. The problem was that they were too wide. They were very VERY solid and could support an elephant standing on them, but they were too wide. So we had to make them narrower.
That wasn't so easy, because these arms were secured to the benches with custom-made cast iron brackets. We literally had to have those cut in half lengthwise - no small task when it comes to cast iron! We got those back, and of course they now had VERY rough edges. So we had a bunch of guys come over from church and from scouts to use grinders to smooth these down and to repaint them (before and after shots on the right).
As you can see from this pic here, the penalty for NOT working hard enough on the project was pretty high. No... kidding... they're just playing around. Really. As you can see, they have a lot of fun at these Eagle Scout projects. Nothing beats Scott Ableman's air guitar poses, though!
For all 40 pics from yesterday, you can go here on Flickr.
Ahhh... thank goodness for Spring temps and beautiful weather! Though I'm sad we had a "warm" winter and very little snow this year, I don't miss BBQ'ing in January, dressed to the gills (the rumor is true - I have gills) in heavy clothing trying to keep warm while BBQ'ing in temps in the teens. These California natives BBQ in Boise year-round, but it was nice to BBQ yesterday in temps near 60! And thank goodness for frozen steaks out in the freezer, from when we bought that near-side-of-cow several months back. :-) In the pic here, do Andrew and Mark look like they're happy they're gonna get a steak dinner, or what?! In steak land, there's well-done, medium-well, medium, medium-rare, rare, and "with some tender loving care the cow would recover." Our propane tank ran out of fuel midway during the BBQ, and our backup tank was also empty, as well, so the thicker of these steaks were the TLC-recovery variety - Andrew and Mark loved it!
Another year-round activity around here is Rock Band on Wii. You see Andrew, Mark and Steven jamming here. Apparently, Steven is going to be a guitar-smasher, and Andrew will make silly faces while drumming!
We had a VERY fun Wheeler Family Reunion in Wyoming in July 2004 and I'm finally getting around to putting up the pics from that great event.
Of course we ate, we played games, we had a program, we sang, we sat around and talked... We really had a GREAT time!!!
One of my favorite parts of the program was when Mike and Jennifer Dillon and their kids "dressed up" (or did they???) and performed, "I Am My Own Grandpa." Enjoy the photo here on the left, plus the short snippet I caught on my digital camera, below. Michelle actually recorded the ENTIRE song on our VHS-C camcorder, so the whole thing exists on magnetic tape. Does anybody have the equipment for us to convert that to digital format? It would be AWESOME to have up on YouTube! :-)
I have posted 150 photos and videos online; the photos can be found here on Facebook, and all can be found here on Flickr. Enjoy.
Brianna and her friend Danielle continue to make the circuit singing the National Anthem at our local sporting events. They regularly sing at BSU games, Idaho Steelheads (ECHL affiliate of the NHL's Dallas Stars team) games, Boise Burn (Arena Football League) games, and so on. Normally they sing it as a duet, but back on January 13th, Dani was unavailable and Brianna sang it as a solo. They sang it as a duet this past Wednesday (March 3rd), but that was the last good thing that happened that night. After they sang, the Steelheads lost 3-1 to the Bakersfield Condors, and I was rear-ended on the way home from the game. You'll see both the solo video and the duet video embedded below.
The next time they're scheduled to sing is on Wednesday, March 24th, when the Steelheads play the visiting Victoria Salmon Kings. That's right... from Canada! So Brianna and Dani will be singing both the U.S. and Canadian national anthems that night. Buy your tickets now! :-)
Today was the Treasure Valley regional prelims for the middle school "National History Day" competition. Each year, middle school students have the chance to write an essay, build a website, or prepare a documentary honoring some great event in history. This year's theme was Innovation and how it impacted history, and Mark did a video documentary on the evolution of the transistor. The transistor certainly is something that people just take advantage of today, and don't even realize how it impacts their lives. Mark's video documentary is embedded below, and I particularly like the part that says that if cell phones used vacuum tubes a cell phone today would be ten-and-a-half feet tall. :-) Watch and enjoy.
This past Wednesday night (March 3rd), my Acura MDX decided to put its manliness on display and mix it up with two other cars. My car won, but at a bit of my expense. I was sitting at the red light in the left-hand turn lane on Chinden, waiting to turn left on to Five Mile, when I heard a horrific BANG!!! And literally in the middle of the thought, "What the heck was that???" there was a second BANG, and my MDX jerked violently forward and upward.
A car two cars behind me, which I'm guessing was doing about 45mph, hit the car immediately behind me, and that car ricocheted in to me. The first car was an older-model minivan, I think something like a Dodge Caravan. The second car was an older-model sedan, I think something like a Honda Accord. The first car was about two feet shorter, its front end all smashed in and steam flowing from the smashed radiator. The poor car in the middle was significantly shorter on both ends, totally sandwiched. Because they were both older-model cars, my guess is that the insurance company will total both vehicles.
My back bumper was kind of scratched and dented, but nothing awful. Just enough so that the texturing cannot be fixed, and they'll replace the entire bumper and bumper insert (more of a dent there). But as you can see from this picture on the right, my dual exhaust was definitely messed up. The muffler on the right has been pushed in by about six inches. That in turn bent all the exhaust piping, normally shug and cozy up in the chassis, so that it dropped and wasn't too far away from the ground (see picture below). Fortunately, the driver who caused the whole thing is taking responsibility for it, and his insurance company is being great. They got my car in for repair early Thursday and it should be fixed by Monday afternoon. They've arranged for a rental in the meantime, and all is well there. :-)
Fortunately, at the time of the accident, we all appeared to be fine. The guy who caused it was 18, the guy in the middle car was 17, and those young whipper-snappers are probably still OK (I have not spoken to either of them). But I'm sort of a wreck. Maybe it's because my car didn't give at all (I still can't believe how little damage it sustained!), but I've got whiplash really bad, with my neck and back really aching, and that in turn giving me a wicked headache. I've spent most of the last three days in bed with a heating pad and/or ice.
We've got a chiropractor that we like, and on Friday I finally gave up and went to see him. Hopefully he'll be able to help me recover a bit more quickly, and I can get back to normal. So that being taken care of, now I just hope that the auto body shop doesn't actually CLEAN my car when they fix it. As you can tell, I'm undergoing a bit of a scientific dirt test with my MDX. :-)
Brianna and her friend Danielle continue to make the circuit singing the National Anthem at our local sporting events. They regularly sing at BSU games, Idaho Steelheads (ECHL affiliate of the NHL's Dallas Stars team) games, Boise Burn (Arena Football League) games, and so on. Normally they sing it as a duet, but back on January 13th, Dani was unavailable and Brianna sang it as a solo. They sang it as a duet this past Wednesday (March 3rd), but that was the last good thing that happened that night. After they sang, the Steelheads lost 3-1 to the Bakersfield Condors, and I was rear-ended on the way home from the game. You'll see both the solo video and the duet video embedded below.
My back bumper was kind of scratched and dented, but nothing awful. Just enough so that the texturing cannot be fixed, and they'll replace the entire bumper and bumper insert (more of a dent there). But as you can see from this picture on the right, my dual exhaust was definitely messed up. The muffler on the right has been pushed in by about six inches. That in turn bent all the exhaust piping, normally shug and cozy up in the chassis, so that it dropped and wasn't too far away from the ground (see picture below). Fortunately, the driver who caused the whole thing is taking responsibility for it, and his insurance company is being great. They got my car in for repair early Thursday and it should be fixed by Monday afternoon. They've arranged for a rental in the meantime, and all is well there. :-)
Fortunately, at the time of the accident, we all appeared to be fine. The guy who caused it was 18, the guy in the middle car was 17, and those young whipper-snappers are probably still OK (I have not spoken to either of them). But I'm sort of a wreck. Maybe it's because my car didn't give at all (I still can't believe how little damage it sustained!), but I've got whiplash really bad, with my neck and back really aching, and that in turn giving me a wicked headache. I've spent most of the last three days in bed with a heating pad and/or ice.
