blood in the water.

Red Wings v Sharks. Since the mid-90s, this rivalry has blossomed into one of the better matchups in the NHL. Pitting two of the top three teams head-to-head at the Shark Tank, last night's game lived up to the hype. And I was there to see it in person.

I took my buddy, Mike, to the Tank. Mike's a good Canadian who happens to be a diehard Wings fan. He's adopted the Sharks for much of the rest of the season, but he was bleeding red and white last night.

The atmosphere in the Tank was electric. Like playoff-hockey-level electric. When the Sharks scored three minutes into the game, I thought the roof was going to cave-in.

It was a good ole high scoring seesaw of a game. 1-1. 2-2. 3-3. 4-4. And then the Sharks pulled away 6-4 before the Wings chipped in a late one to make it close.

I didn't grow up playing ice hockey. But I became a huge fan at Middlebury, one of the dominant schools in Division III. Last night had the feel of our mid-90s national championship run. A bit frantic, highly energetic, and very, very entertaining.

slumdog millionaire.

It's rare that Paige and I get a "date night" so when her parents offered to watch Hadley last night, we jumped at the chance to catch a flick and grab some sushi. We picked "Slumdog Millionaire", a topsy-turvy tale of a young man from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself one question away from winning 20M rupees. It's very well-done, one of the best movies I've seen in the theaters in a long time.

In particular, I enjoyed watching the transition of India ("from Bombay to Mumbai") through the eyes of the poorest members of society. Through the lens of authors like Tom Friedman, Americans tend to see the "rise of India" story, the offshoring/outsourcing story, the gleaming corporate campuses of Bangalore. And yet, with one-third of the world's poverty population living within it's borders, India still has a long, long way to go.



To see/read more, check out this article from today's Merc.

ano nuevo.

And here we are in 2009, a year that will be....interesting. We have a new President, a bottomless economic crisis, and major international clusterblanks festering away. I'm not one to try and predict the future, but I expect (hope?) that we'll be better off in 365 days than we are now.

It's been a great holiday season on Mossbrook Circle. Paige and I both had two weeks off and we celebrated with both sides of the family. The Johnson's spent Christmas Eve in Santa Cruz (25 years in a row) while the Budelsky's traveled to San Jose from Seattle and Cincinnati to enjoy Hadley's first visit from St. Nick. New Year's Eve was uneventful and quiet, just the way we like it.