What A Dump

Hello World,

Happy October! Now we're really starting to move into that crisp fall season when the frost is on the pumpkin in earnest, and we'll soon be looking for wool mittens and hot apple cider to chase the chills away. Well, that is, except for Sunday, when it's expected to be over 80 degrees, after last week when it was 50 degrees - so I guess you could say that it's just like the whole rest of the year, which was all over the place, day in and day out, so you just didn't know what to expect next, without carrying a suitcase full of extra clothes to suit every possible climate contingency, including on planets in far distant galaxies. I guess it's plain to see that nothing has changed, so thank you, Comrade Mischka, and may I just say, "I love Mother Russia."

Besides the weather, these are interesting times in sports nowadays, with the anguished cries of "Wait until next year!" being heard in baseball cities ranging from Boston to Atlanta, Cincinnati to Anaheim, Seattle to Houston and beyond. The first round of the playoffs has already found the Yankees being eliminated by the Tigers, while Texas made short work of Tampa Bay in their series. The other contests should be decided on Friday, with the winners of the Philadelphia-St. Louis and Milwaukee-Arizona match-ups facing each other in the next round. There's even bigger news in hockey, at least for those dozens of us ardent fans who follow the sport, because the time has finally come to lace up those skates and hit the ice. The season officially started on Thursday, with the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins losing to the Philadelphia Flyers, which is certainly not the result that the Bean-town faithful would have been hoping for, that's for sure. Meanwhile, the Rangers opened up their season against the LA Kings with a game in Stockholm, Sweden, in an effort to spotlight the international nature of this world-class sport, where most NHL rosters read like a roll call at the United Nations, with players from all over the globe. It's also coincidentally the home of their elite goaltender, Henrik Lundqvist, and a fan favorite everywhere he goes ("Sorry, girls, he's married!" as they used to say in the old movie star magazines) so this was an extraordinary event that was special in many different ways, and a signal honor for the pride of Broadway. But that's not all, or even the half of it, as surprising as it may seem.

Ordinarily, the Rangers' visibility is on a par with the hospital where I work, which is to say that nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to them, and like Cinna-Mooch next door, if they had two different colored ears, no one would notice. But not this season, and not by a long shot, or even a long slap-shot, for some reason. For one thing, they have been tapped to play in the "Super Bowl" of hockey, the outdoor Winter Classic on January 2nd, against the Flyers - which somehow has become wildly popular way beyond its actual importance as just another game in an 82-game schedule, as well as a media darling that gets more attention than the rest of the season combined, including the Stanley Cup playoffs themselves. But somewhat inexplicably, they will also be the stars of the HBO reality series "24/7" where film crews follow the players through their daily routines, and provide an unflinching look at the behind-the-scenes lives of professional athletes. (Although actually, thanks to shows like this, there isn't anything left to be "behind the scenes" anymore, as it's all wide out in the open and on every cable channel, morning, noon and night.) The show itself has been on since 2007, but this is only the second time it has featured a hockey team, so once again, our very own Blueshirts have been singled out for special attention, and as far as I can tell, didn't even need to have two different colored ears to do it, by golly.

Around the old homestead, the porch project has moved into a new phase, where much of the structural framing is already in place, so they've called in the roofers to do their part before finishing up with the floors and windows. We didn't hire the roofing company, they were sub-contracted by our general contractor, so we basically knew nothing about them, and if we thought of them at all, would have probably assumed they would be just like our regular contractors, who are neat, quiet and respectable. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on their choice of roofers, but I will say that by the time I leave for work in the morning, they're already entertaining the neighbors with their raucous Mariachi music played at full-throttle, which is not a sound that you hear much of in our pricey neighborhood, believe me. In fact, if this keeps up much longer, I wouldn't be surprised to find the neighbors voluntarily pitching in to help speed the roof replacement along its merry way, for no other reason than to reclaim the peaceful sanctity of their well-ordered existence. Yet another rarely seen interloper in our secluded enclave is the recent arrival of a Dumpster, which turns out to be a word that you have to capitalize, because apparently like Kleenex or Jello, it's a trademarked name of a particular refuse container, and not just a generic name for any old dumpy dumper type of thing. So now between the port-a-potty on the front lawn, and the Dumpster in the driveway, I really do expect the neighbors to either help make the project go a whole lot faster, or to somehow erect an enormous curtain in front of our property, to prevent the more unsightly elements of the project from being an eyesore foisted upon the population at large. Normally, I would say that I'm as much in favor of maintaining the neighborhood's pristine gentility as the next fellow, but I can't be bothered with that now, because I have to go find my castanets and practice the Mexican Hat Dance before the roofers get back.

Elle