Summer Hockey - Game 4

On Wednesday this week the Renegades played the fourth game of our summer season.  A half a dozen of our regular players were unable to make this game, for various reasons.  It was a scramble to pull together enough players to make a reasonable attempt.  In the end we had 11 skates and a goaltender.... a lot better than it looked like a day or so prior, when we only had seven or eight guys confirmed.  We played a late game at the Kinsmen Arena in south Edmonton, against the Shockers.

Fortunately these guys are not all that good, and despite our short bench we still managed a respectable effort.  A better team would have eaten us alive.  By the end of the second period we were ahead by three goals but they put on a big push late in the game.  We managed to hang on for a 4-3 victory.  This puts us in second place in our division as we look forward to an upcoming divisional realignment.

I played the entire game in my usual spot back on left defence.  I got a lot of ice time as we only had four defensemen for the game.  This meant that I was on the ice for half of the game.  On several occasions I got knocked down... not because the game was overly rough... but mostly because the Shockers were not particularly good skaters and most of the time were out of control.  I didn't think anything of it and just kept getting back up and into the play.

I hung around in the locker room after the game with the guys and had a couple of beers.  I felt fine and just enjoyed the time hanging out and relishing our victory.  Later when I got home I unpacked my gear.  Some time afterwards my knee began to swell up and within a short time I had a golf ball sized lump on my right knee cap.  As I write this a couple days later it remains tender and swollen and I really can't be sure exactly when it happened.  Hopefully the swelling goes down so that I can play in our next game on Tuesday...

To add insult to injury, when I got home and attempted to take a shower, I quickly learned that our plumbing was blocked up once again.  The downstairs toilet would not flush properly and the shower would not drain. I needed to forfeit my shower and get to bed and get some rest.  The next day I discovered that the upstairs plumbing had also backed up into the various sinks in my darkroom.  Fortunately nothing overflowed and there was no serious damage.  We called in a drain cleaning company to auger out our sewer lines... again... [this is the third time this spring].  Hopefully they will finally deal with this issue completely and life as we know it can return to normal.