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Welcome to Opening Night for Season XIV of the MCHL Ironclad hockey season!

Normally I’d have come up with a clever theme or two prior to turning up at the rink and 07 Jul certainly provided some real good inspiration to choose from:

• Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd passed away at 60 in 2006
• Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” goes number 1 on the Billboard Top 200 chart in 1984
• Live Earth concert in 2007 featured such acts as the Foo Fighters, Duran Duran, Beastie Boys, Crowded House, Madonna, The Police, and Genesis

I could have made a pig’s breakfast of any of those choice but those of you who skip to the sordid and juicy details can tell straightaway that none of them ultimately got used.

In fairness, the last couple of days have been far more exciting than is usual in the realm of The Nerdery of Greater Metropolitan East Raleigh and today has been a mad dash such that I had no time to pull together the playlists before arriving at the rink.

Welcome to the wonderful world of winging it!

As it turned out, these two sets worked much better for the vibe than I imagined… 🙂

Game 1 Warm-Ups

The first track lasts nine minutes.

When you’re delivering two roster signup sheet clipboards to the locker room and then schlepping pucks from the cupboard clear across two rinks, “Trilogy” was the perfect track as it was literally finishing when I got to the booth to start up “Karn Evil 9”! 🙂

A happy bonus is that one of the teams in the Bendis division that normally plays Fridays is the Manticore… 😉

Zamboni and Game 2 Warm-Ups

This set might look a bit random but there is actually an underlying theme that rather describes how I’ve been feeling the past 48 hours when my Traverse has very likely become an ex-Traverse by the left-front CV joint/axle finally failing to the point that the wheels are just not going to turn anymore when you hit the accelerator.

I’ll give her credit…she picked her place well. Everything started failing at the drive through at the Burger King on Poole Road (the one that was torpedoed by cars on two different occasions) and by the time I’d made the turn onto my street for the run down to my end of the cul-de-sac, she was limping the rest of the way and made it to the top of the driveway through sheer cussedness and momentum.

There are many worse scenarios I could have imagined.

If this is truly it for her, we’ve had 12 long and hard years and just under 299,000 miles on the clock with the only really major repairs being a couple of coolant hoses and having to replace the transmission.

My head and my gut have voted on which way this is likely to go and I wouldn’t be surprised if my mate Miguel who is the only person both skilled and mad enough to try to mend her in the driveway agrees that it’s full-time but I’ve got to hear it from him and then I can resign myself to doing what needs being done.

But my heart will take a lot longer to heal because that Traverse is family that I’ve spent a very long time with and it’ll take a while to come to grips with that reality once she’s gone. 🙁

So you might be wondering about the title to the post… 😉

In all of the mad dashing hither and yon to work round the Traverse’s misfortunes all afternoon, I had forgotten something rather important.

About halfway through the second period of the second game, all of a sudden I started hearing a tone that sounded an awful lot like the door chimes of the trains that run between the concourses at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International airport.

Hmmm…that’s kind of weird.

But I didn’t really think it through until I heard the robotic girl voice that the Bluetooth adapter to the rink’s small mixer board had disconnected from the iPad.

I’d forgotten to charge it in all of the madness.

The announcement during the second intermission went something like this after I’d dispensed with the parish notices of the score and shots on goal…

WFOX hopes you’ve enjoyed this extended set of Marcel Marceau’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” during the stoppages in play thanks to your DJ being an apocalyptic dingleberry that forgot to charge the Bluetooth adapter to the speaker system. We appreciate your patience and kind understanding and we hope to have normal service restored presently.

About five minutes into the third period, it’d recharged enough that I could make it the rest of the way through the session.

But besides the embarrassment of such a rookie mistake, I’d suggest that the penance paid whilst the music was off the air was a bit of a slog thanks to being used to cuing up tracks, firing them off and shutting them down when the puck hits the deck, flip the fader bar, and then cuing up the next one and hitting the set point to have it ready to go.

That on top of manning the scoreboard and keeping an eye on things to see what’s happening and keeping the stats.

If you do it for a while, you get used to the four or five different things you’re doing in the span of seconds…and when one big part of those tasks suddenly goes away, it throws you off for all of the others.

That drove me right out of my mind for about ten minutes (as if the last 48 hours hadn’t already done that in spades).

I can laugh about it now but you can imagine how irritated I was that I’d rather biffed that checklist item.

Fortunately, my audience and the gent who allows me to have my fun playing tunes in the scorer’s booth are far more forgiving of me than I’ll ever be. 🙂

Post-Game