Sled hockey

"On the off-chance this ever becomes an issue ... which way are we shooting?"

Even for me, it was strange question to ask during a hockey game. This, though, was no ordinary match. This was sled hockey. Designed for disabled players, sled hockey is played --as the name suggests-- on sleds. These devices resemble metal stretchers supported on short twin blades with a plastic bucket seat on one end.

A member of my regular hockey team coaches in a sled hockey league and, finding her team had an hour of extra ice time at the end of their season, she suggested we come and try it out in an exhibition match. There is clearly no other answer to such a suggestion than 'hell yes!' and it was utterly awesome. The 'exhibition' naturally turned out to be us, rather than the game, but this was suspected well in advance of the reality.

The first obstacle I had to cross occurred in the changing room when I attempted to put my hockey gear on without my skates. The issue was not the emotional guilt from leaving my skates in my bag (although that was rather sad) but simply that my kit goes on in a certain order. Like Ikea furniture, forgetting one of the steps usually results in the end product falling to pieces. In this case, my shin pads felt dangerously slippy.

As it turned out, this wasn't a problem since my ankles got taped to the sled. What was more of an issue was getting my GIGANTIC BACKSIDE into the tiny plastic seat. If the proceeding game wasn't enough to wreak my ego, this would have sealed the deal. It transpired later that sled hockey players don't wear the same padded shorts as skaters in the traditional game (IT'S TRUE I TELL YOU!). They either wear lighter shorts similar to those used in roller hockey or just leggings. As a result, I had to be levered into my sled by the referee.

Then I was off!

.... if I could work out how to move. Instead of a single long stick for manoeuvring the puck, sled hockey players have two short sticks roughly a third of the length of a traditional hockey stick. The shooting blade on each is the same size and shape as a full-sized stick but the reverse end is equipped with metal teeth that are dug into the ice to propel you forwards. It was quite like rowing a boat on frozen water. When you wanted to hit the puck, you inverted the stick to put the blade against the ice and shot towards the goal. At least, that was the idea.

The sled blades were adjustable and could be set at different distances apart. Ours were separated by about half a foot rather like the training wheels on a bicycle. A few of the real team members had theirs mounted so close together they looked like a single blade. This forfeited stability in favour for manoeuvrability. Since I had a habit of tipping over, being unable to do handbreak turns on one stick was not overly upsetting. Normally when I fell to one side, I was able to righten myself with one hefty push. However, while guarding the goal (probably from nothing, I have no idea where the puck was at the time), I tipped over so fully that I partially came un-wedged from my seat. This meant that when I tilted back up, my centre-of-mass was off to one side and I just fell down in the opposite direction. Team members surrounded me like a bovine heard around a wounded animal. However, since we were all tied into our sleds, no one was able to provide the leverage and stability to correct the problem. In the end the referee (laughing hard) appeared to stuff me back into position. Time to go!

Never had the ice rink looked so big. None of us were used to working our arm muscles so much and we couldn't yet move at any great speed. Someone sped past me, guiding the puck with one stick and manoeuvring with the other. He approached the goal, lifted the entire sled up about an inch, and shot the puck underneath it to land in the net.

I waved my sticks a bit in stunned admiration.

When the whistle blew, I cut myself free of the tape round my ankles and tumbled unceremoniously onto the ice. Strangely, one of the sorest parts of me was not my arms but my unused legs. This is apparently not uncommon, since you do not normally sit with your legs absolutely still for an extended period of time.

I picked up the sled and carried it to the store room noting, with some surprise, that many of the regular players did the same. Upon inquiring, I discovered that to play in the sled hockey league, you have to have some form of disability, which need not be physical. This led to one very important question:

If you could walk, why on earth is sled hockey considered easier than the traditional sport?

Chocolate, traffic and visas

My car was full of chocolate aero bars. I'd stuffed three in the glove compartment, two in the cup holders and now I was trying to find homes for another five. Clearly, some rearranging was required.

I was parked at the duty free store by the US-Canada land border near Niagara. While this leg of the journey should have taken only an hour, I had left home at 9:30 am and it was now 2 pm. The heavy snow the night before had taken not only me by surprise, but caused a tractor trailer to jack-knife on the highway, blocking all three lanes and resulting in near-stationary traffic for hours. This had led to repeated texts to my friend providing ever longer estimated arrival times.

I supposed I should count myself lucky. As I had sat there flicking through the radio stations and failing to find any traffic news, a car carrier truck had drawn up beside me loaded with three mashed-up vehicles. I suppressed the temptation that had been growing within me to start ramming the car in front.

Despite the fact I was anticipating spending at least another hour at the border office getting a tourist visa, I had pulled into the duty free to use the bathroom. Feeling that someone should benefit from this chaos, I had bought another US residing (a.k.a. the country without aeros) friend more of her favourite chocolate while in the store. Well, it was better than the other (rather tempting but probably regrettable) option of accepting the free samples of ice wine.

For reasons designed to vex me, the US air and land ports have different policies regarding entry visas. The airports have moved over to the electronic ESTA applications and consider these so shiny and superior that they confiscate the old green paper visas on sight. The land border, by contrast, has rejected this crazy modern technology and wants you to have the green slip in your passport. The upshot of this is that I am either sulking in the land border office waiting to be called to the counter or watching sadly as the airport guy destroys my paper visa like a mother weaning a child off a pacifier.

Before pulling onto the bridge, I called my friend and told her I should be in Buffalo in about two hours, depending on the queues and busyness of the border office. I hoped for once that I wouldn't have send the follow up text telling her to double that estimate. Then I stuffed the chocolate into my bag and slid onto the road.

"Reason for coming to the USA?" The border control guard took my passport and flicked through its pages.

"I'm meeting a friend."

"How to you know them?"

I'd long ago learned to outright lie to this question. The friend I normally met when driving over the border I knew from an internet fan group for Japanese anime. If that didn't sound like something for which I should be detained and questioned for 6 weeks, I don't know what does.

"College," I said, my face bland. I watched the guard examine my collection of visas and took a long shot. "I've entered the US recently," I explained. "Less than a month ago through Atlanta airport. There's a stamp in the back."

A visitor visa to the USA lasts three months before you have to renew it. Every other time I had passed through though, the lack of the green paper slip has meant that I have to get a new pass done. Still, I'd never explicitly tried pointing out that this should be unnecessary.

The guard examined the stamp. "Okay, carry on."

....Seriously? I was so surprised, I nearly forgot to put my car back in gear. It was a good job I'd stopped to use the bathroom at the duty free. I drove slowly through the gates, reaching for my phone to text:

"25 minutes."

Late night

As the zamboni rolled onto the ice, we pushed open the rink door and made our way over to the benches. We stopped in the 'away' team's area and started to deposit our sticks and water bottles.

"Guys, we're the home team tonight!" Our captain had arrived and was now waving us to the next bench over.

We all turned to stare at him for a moment. "But....that one's further...." someone protested.

Can you tell it was a late game? It was.

Apart from the fact that everyone looks dazedly confused when the puck is first dropped, the other problem with late games is that the outside temperature is prone to plummet. As Saturday night swung to Sunday morning, the heavy rain that had been dousing the city all day morphed into horizontal snow. I left the rink to find one half of my car covered with a dusting of white icing powder and the other half buried under 2 inches. It was kinda awesome. And difficult to shift.

After about half an hour of dedicatedly fighting against nature's desire to preserve my car in ice while the fans warmed the windscreen, I was able to trundle away out onto the road.

Hamilton city is divided into two halves by what is locally known as 'the mountain'. This is a wholly inaccurate description for what is actually an escarpment, the same one that runs south-east of Hamilton to form the cliff from which Niagara Falls plunges. The ice rink is located on the raised escarpment while my apartment sits in the downtown city area below. This meant I was looking at a steep and snowy decent to get home.

I rolled unenthusiastically along the road, trying to follow the path carved by the few other vehicles up and about at this hour.  I could mentally see myself turned upside down in a ditch, my car wheels turning like its upturned bug namesake. Sadness!

Then, I spotted a snowplough. Sneakily, I went twice round the roundabout and slid in behind it to follow it down to the city. It was a bit like tailing an ambulance to avoid red light except .... much .... slower.

I ditched my new best friend at the bottom of the hill and scooted off for home. When I arrived, my driveway was already thick with snow. Should I risk trying to pull into it? Images of angry old ladies lecturing me on the location of my broken-down car filled my mind. I scuttled off to park in the street. That woman seemed just the type to be out at 2 am.

Potato, potato

"Did you say, Buffalo?"

Finally! After 12756 tries (or there abouts), Continental Airlines automatic phone system had detected the airport I wanted to leave from. Now we just had to ...

"Please give the name of the airport you wish to travel to."

I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose with one hand.

"Sapporo."

"Did you say, South Korea?"

May I just point out that is a country and not an airport? I suppose I should be grateful that I would at least be heading in the right direction rather than starting in Russia and ending in Mexico. I wondered how many virtual airports I would have to tour before something approximating a flight to Japan was being considered by both parties.

"Did you say, Sapporo, Japan?"

Bullseye. Second try, no less. Still, we weren't out of the woods yet.

"Please give the date you wish to depart."

"March 21st."

"Did you say March 28th?"

"No."

"Sorry about that. Please give the date you wish to return."

... What? So we have unequivocally established that you did not record the correct date for my departure so you're going to apologise and just ... carry right on? Apparently, I was not the only one getting annoyed here. Continental's phone system had clearly decided I should be grateful for any flight at all.

Strangely, at this stage in the proceedings, I was pretty much in agreement. Just get me to Japan for some period of time; I'll sort out the rest from there.

... it was preferable to calling this whole thing off.

Tomato, tomato

"Please give the name of the airport you wish to travel from."

"Buffalo."

"Did you say, Finland?"

"No."

"Sorry about that. Please give the name of the airport you wish to travel from."

"Buffalo."

"Did you say, Barcelona, Spain?"

"...No."

I was attempting to communicate with the automatic telephone system for Continental Airlines. While the pleasant sounding male voice appeared to have an extensive knowledge of world cities, it was apparently rather less good on world accents. I pulled a face and tried to think of a different way of pronouncing 'Buffalo'. Buuuffalo, perhaps? Buffaaalo?

"Did you say, Boston?"

Well, at least we were in the right country this time. Perhaps I should just have said 'yes' and driven there. Indeed, I promptly regretted not doing exactly that when we moved onto:

"Did you say, Campeche, Mexico?"

How does one go from 'Buffalo' to 'Campeche, Mexico'? How is it that a voice recognition system can cope (presumably) with a southern drawl and not with a British accent? Could this plausible sounding recording actually be a particularly annoyed employee having a laugh? Maybe it was someone taking an extended lunch break by wiring up the phone system to keep the customer on hold until gone half-past two. If so, I had to hand it to them; it would be a hard crime to prove.

"Did you say, Perm, Russia?"

Then again, a tape of this conversation ought to nail the skiving bastard.

Breath

'Hotch, hotch, hotch."

There is a good moment to watch the movie 'Teeth' but right before a Pap (UK: smear) test is not one of them. Especially since the above verbal direction from the gynaecologist to shift my hips lower down on the exam table was the exact wording used in the film during the protagonist's own cervical examination. The outcome was the doctor loosing four of his fingers to the teeth in her vagina.

Well no, perhaps there is never truly a good moment to watch a film that involves the unexpected castration of almost every male character. I mulled this over and grimaced at the ceiling. Still, there was no denying that this test was a good idea and it'd been part of the lightening-quick orders issued to me in this post. Also yes, if you found that entry too-much-information, you're really not going to like this one!

Apart from her rather unfortunate instruction above, the doctor was a cheerful individual who did her best to set me at ease. A Pap test isn't usually painful, but it's not exactly dignified. I was sitting perched on the exam table with a blanket flung over my legs when she rapped on the door.

"Is it safe?" she enquired as she opened the door. "You'd be surprised about some of the things I see in this job! Oh yes!"

I watched nonplussed as she arranged containers on the counter. What exactly had she seen? I mean, I was about to show her basically everything I had. We did a brief run-through of my medical history and the doctor asked if I had any questions about the leaflets I'd been given to read. The one I'd worked through had informed me that I might unknowingly have HPV, that I would probably be upset to discover this but ... tough. It wasn't curable. I didn't feel there were any obvious questions one could have to this, so I shook my head. I did get big points from her for having had the Gardasil vaccine against a couple of different types of HPV. This started a mini-rant about people who refused to have vaccinations that ended abruptly with:

"... well, at least I don't need to tell you about their worth!"

At this point, all my questions were now directed at the sort of the people who came to this clinic. Apparently, they were annoying the medical staff.

"My aim is to make this as easy as possible for you," the doctor told me once I'd manoeuvred myself into the required position. "So this will be a test you won't fear coming back to."

"Sounds good," I replied through gritted teeth as I waited for the expected discomfort.

"Breath, Elizabeth. If you faint, this has not gone nearly as well as it might have."

The undeniable truth of this statement caused me to start laughing and the resulting few minutes were entirely painless. As a reward for showing up (apparently another uphill battle with the local populous), I got a year's prescription for the pill, rather than just a three-month batch, with instructions to take a few packets back-to-back if I was still experiencing a lot of pain menstruating.

"It won't do your body any harm to skip cycles," the doctor said. "A hundred years ago, you would have missed continuously because you would have been pregnant ALL THE TIME."

Pregnant all the time?! Now there was a concept even more scary than vagina dentata.

Gaskets and biddies

It was with some apprehension that I stepped off the plane in Toronto and headed towards border control. Three things were bothering me:

The first was that I wasn't at all convinced my luggage would have made the journey from Santiago. Since my flight involved a change in Atlanta, I had expected a brief, emotional reunion with my case where the tears would have been due to being dog tired after queueing through USA border control after a 9 hour flight, only to have to carry my three-week-trip backpack through customs to drop it back onto the checked luggage conveyor belt.

Instead I had been handed a small purple tag at Santiago, which I completely ignored until I was standing in line at the USA border and literally driven by boredom to read it. It stated that I was participating in an international to international (ITI) checked baggage transfer and that I wouldn't have access to my bag until my destination. Of course, there was absolutely no need to go through American customs if the bag wasn't staying in the country, so this sounded both convenient and entirely reasonable.

It therefore didn't sound remotely likely.

In all other countries, bags are always checked through to your final destination regardless of where you make your connections. The difference in the US came in the wake of 9/11 and perhaps, nearly ten years down the line, it was time to reconsider this time consuming process. However, the fact the tag phrasing suggested you were undergoing some type of clinical trial did not help my confidence level.

My second concern was that I wouldn't be able to find my car in the airport car park. I had received an email while I was away that had said the university had been closed, suggesting a snowpocalypse had struck Hamilton in my absence. Having a bright yellow car is only helpful if it isn't under a giant snow drift.

Lastly, I was worried that even if I found my car and dug it out, it would then fail to start. Since it had been decidedly reluctant to move on my way out to the airport, I couldn't see that three weeks parked outside would have improved its condition.

As it turned out, all my fears were for nothing. My bag was ready and waiting by the time I cleared Canadian border control, my car was free of snow and started first time. Why, it was great to be home!

Once I reached my house, I parked on the road so that I could dig my driveway clear of the accumulated snow. This was quite a job, especially since hard blocks of ice had formed between the sidewalk and road. I chipped away at them with my metal tipped shovel and scooped the driveway clear. It was pretty good exercise after spending all night on a plane. Pleased with that day's efforts, I left to collect my cat from the boarding cattery in the early evening.

As the sun set, the temperature dropped. The thin layer of snow and water left on my driveway turned to ice.

I tried to pull back up to my house ... and got stuck. My driveway is inclined and the ice on its surface caused my tyres to spin uselessly. Worse, the chunks of ice still on the edge of the road meant that I couldn't go backwards either. I was off the road, but blocking the sidewalk. After repeated tries I gave up, snapped my hazard lights on and took the cat inside. Then I called the CAA.

The CAA promised to send around a tow truck and told me they would be there within half an hour. Feeling I ought to stay with my car, I sat in the driver's seat and waited. After about fifteen minutes, a woman approached and rapped on my window. I rolled it down.

"You're blocking the sidewalk," she shot angrily at me. "and I'm a senior!"

I blinked. Did she honestly think this was my idea of a fun Monday night? To sit in a car with all the lights flashing?

"I'm very sorry," I said politely. "but as you can see my hazards are on." I gestured to the front and back of the car where all the lights were flashing widely. "I've broken down."

"What?!" the woman didn't seem to find this either acceptable or believable.

"My hazard lights," I explained patiently. "I can't move my car. I've had to call for a tow truck."

She gave me a look of total disbelieve and marched off without another word. I stared after her. The temptation to leap out of my car and confront her was rather high. I strongly desired to point out that the polite response in such a situation would be to ask if I needed help, especially since I was clearly by myself and she had no way of knowing the house in front of us was my own. I consoled myself with images of meeting her once I was back on the road and simply mowing her down.

Sadistic? No. She had totally asked for it.

The truck from the CAA rolled up with its unphased driver. A tow wasn't necessary; he just gave the car a push as I reversed, letting it drop back onto the road. I thanked him and scooted away.

Now, to find that woman....