Welcome to Friday, kids! Welcome to that coveted "last day of the workweek," the "gateway to the weekend" and, of course, the day best suited for displaying phrickin' photoblogs...The subject of today's exhibition is one that I don't believe I've had the occasion to tackle visually in this forum: your humble host flopping around in a seemingly uncontrollable fashion while on a flat, frozen surface...

Simply put: me "playing hockey."

As I've mentioned countless times in the past month, we had a number of different people in town for my wife's graduation and these "people" had enough foresight to bring "digital cameras" with them...In a stroke of good fortune, my father-in-law, along with Big Al, saw fit to use some of the space on said digital cameras to capture a number of images while watching me get my ass whipped deftly deflecting pucks during a recent game at the mall...I am prepared to share some of these aforementioned photographs with you...now...Click 'em, see 'em bigger, yadda yadda yadda...


Here is a shot of me taking...well, "shots" before the game during "warmup." The fact that it's warmup is obvious for two reasons: number 1: I'm on my feet and number 2: there are no members of the opposing team visible in the shot. As you will soon find out, both of those occurrences are quite rare during actual gameplay...


Ok, so I say all of that and here I am, in an upright position, (hopefully) tracking the puck somewhere to my left...I appear to be cheating back toward my right for some reason...That, or I'm just terribly ineffective at covering the post there...Damn, I'll have to work on that...Stupid post...


Aaaaand from this point on, you'd be hard pressed to find a shot of me in any way shape or form "on my feet"...In this picture, I assume that I'm in the process of making a stick save and deflecting the puck to the corner there. At the very least, I appear to be cutting down the angle alright...Power of positive thinking, man...


This here is a pretty good depiction of your standard "aww shit scramble moment." I can tell by the position of my legs that I had already split to my left and am in the process of trying to "recover" and cut down an angle...As a bonus in this shot, you get a "blurry Andy" in the background. This is neither the Andy who has a blog, nor my buddy Andy from PA...No, kids, "blurry Andy" happens to be the Andy that tends to break people's legs...and stuff...


Continuing with the same theme as the last photo, we have ourselves a classic "oh crap" pose...Obviously, something went awry here, since I'm mostly "bunched up," but am reaching back with the glove to try and stave off a shot...Or something..Maybe I'm just "stretching." Yeah, that could be it...Sure...


HEY, this shot actually doesn't make me look too terrible...For one thing, I appear to be in a decent butterfly position, my torso is uprght, my head is up...Well, holy crap...My only hope is that I've already deflected the puck to the corner, or the position of my stick is gonna give me some problems in a second or two...Dammit, GET IT TOGETHER, KNIGHT! C'mon...


And here we have a familiar position for your humble host: on my ass...At least it appears that I have the puck trapped between my pads, so this scene isn't a total loss...I will say that there are times during games where it really is nice to be able to just sit and relax, if only for a few short, precious seconds on the oh-so-cold ice surface...ahhhh....Anyway...


Now HERE'S a familiar sight...Me staring at a puck that somehow found it's way into the net...According to the most recent "stats" posted for our league, I end up facing an average of nearly 60 shots per game, which is the highest in the league...Now, I'm not complaining, but when you see pucks at that rate, scenes like this are bound to happen...Understand, though, that there's nothing I hate worse than not stopping the puck...Stupid puck...Screw you!...Screw you to Hell!..Anyway...

So there you have it, kids, yet another completely narcissistic photoblog for your viewing pleasure...You all have a fine weekend, now...

Labels: hockey stuff, Phrickin' Photoblogs, sports