Let’s see if this will work for you.

Some pics for your amusement…

8:15 am – the trees begin arriving. Ron Neff had provided some tents in case of rain, but things were looking pretty good so far.

8:45 am – the crowd gathers at the corner of 28th and 28th. Everyone was pretty excited to get their new trees, which the city was providing for free.

Re-e-a-ally looking forward to that new tree.

Trees get carted away by the usual methods. In some cases, trees were delivered by the city workers, which was very nice of them.

A little creativity helps, too.

Thom, Liz and Ronay (sp?) kept the line moving.

The Community Centre got its share of trees as well.

We managed to get it all done before the rain and the communities of Killarney and Glengarry just got a little greener.

Facebook notes are currently set to import a feed identified by a url, tag parameter and feed type.

Cross your fingers. Here we go…

This is the logo of my online hockey team. Pretty spiffy, eh?

Fleury scores shoot-out winner

In a game where Dion Phaneuf laid a signature open ice hit that nearly knocked Kyle Okposo unconscious and led to a full line scrum, where Olli Jokinen responded to persistent questions of character by delivering a Gordie Howe Hat-trick, it was Theo Fleury’s return and game winning shoot-out goal that was the story. The Saddledome reverberated with the crowd’s welcome of “Theo Theo Theo…” when he hit the ice for his first shift in a Flames Jersey since the ’99 trade that sent him to Colorado.

He will likely spend time with the Abbotsford Heat (what will that do for ticket sales for the first-year team?) but it would be great to see him contribute in a meaningful game in Calgary.

So I am away from a decent broadband connection for the first time in probably five years and the internet implodes. Or more accurately the WordPress driven parts of it. By now you know (and if you don’t, it hopefully didn’t affect you) that a big ol’ worm has been wreaking havoc with older WordPress installations. The community was abuzz and atizzy for the past few days, but the short of it is that it was no big deal and everyone is up and running as usual.

Making Lemonade

Some nice side effects of this whole affair:

• People were compelled to bring their WordPress installations up to date
• People were motivated to install back-up plugins
• Prompted me to investigate other blogging systems which led to the discovery of some quite interesting tools such as Posterous which may be the simplest blog I’ve ever seen. There is no interface. You email your posts and it sorts out all your stuff and presents it nicely. Nobody will confuse it with a feature-rich blog, but if you just want to put stuff on the internet it is fantastically easy to use.

In the end it took more time to read up on things than to apply the fixes. I guess people like to panic.

Sidney Crosby was handed his first Stanley Cup on Friday and can now be considered the Hayley Wickenheiser of the NHL. Congratulations, Sid!

Yes. I know.

This is my messy balcony.

We are up on the fifteenth floor with a very nice sunset view, but we rarely spend time out there and prefer to enjoy the view from the air-conditioned side of the windows. The nearby downtown core has crop-dusted an amazing accumulation of exhaust and greasy street grime on everything, and the overhang from the balcony above prevents the rain from making an impact. The result is a layer of ickiness that nobody wants to sit on or in. The deserted balcony has become, to our shame, kind of a dumping spot. Here you can see an old arm-chair, some wood and an old bucket.

Fortunately none of this is viewable from the street. It is fifteen floors up after all. This means, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, we figured we wouldn’t have to worry about that stuff for a very long time.

You would think geese would shy away from the noise and bustle of downtown, but they are all over the place in the spring. You can even see them walking on the sidewalk and they don't fly away when you come near.

During the spring and early summer geese and pigeons often stop for a breather on our balcony railing, and it’s kind of cool hearing them honk or coo in the morning before a fluttering of wings announces their departures. The geese move on fairly quickly, but sometimes the pigeons will outstay their welcome, so we keep a little squirt bottle handy. The water doesn’t seem to hurt them, in fact some pigeons kind of like it and will stand there and get sprayed a bit before taking off.

Today a nice looking speckled pigeon did just that. I sprayed and sprayed and she didn’t leave. In fact she hopped down off the railing and strutted across the carpeting. I thought, “man that is one tough pigeon.” It turns out she had made a home under our armchair.

You lookin' at me?

This would not be a big deal except that pigeons process a lot of bugs into fertilizer during the summer and they are not terribly picky what gets fertilized. As you can see, this pigeon had been hard at work for quite some time. It’s funny because I should have been thinking, “wow, that is a lot of poop.” Instead I thought, “boy, that is a nice green.”

But beauty is a limited currency, so I sprayed some water under there. You can see the evidence of my bombardment on the little plant pot. The brave pigeon refused to budge. When I adjusted my position to get a better angle on the water, I saw why there was little chance of her leaving any time soon.

There was the beginnings of a nest and two tiny eggs under the armchair. It was very cute, but also very sad. Those eggs were sitting on some very thin carpeting which covers the balcony concrete which drops to nearly zero at night. Those eggs would have very little chance of hatching. I imagined they were probably already toast. Who knows how long they’d already been there?

That is one pathetic looking nest.

Not wanting to shoo away a pigeon who is hanging in there against all hope, I have decided to leave her alone and let her have a go. Who knows? Maybe those eggs will turn out after all. I don’t know how long it takes pigeon eggs to hatch, but until then it looks like we have a summer guest.

Warming the eggs.

Once she is gone and I have a chance to get out there, I guess it will be time to clean things up. I will probably put a plastic owl out there, too. It supposedly works like a scarecrow. Hopefully it will be for the best. If this pigeon hopes to ever hatch an egg, it will have to be on a more insulated surface than our concrete balcony.

There are lots more images to go into the Showcase. Tidied up some legacy links on the mini-sites and verified all the pages. Fingers crossed.

Flames dropped in six to the Blackhawks. I think they had a good season, but there will be the usual wailing from the usual quarters. Some will call for Mike Keenan’s head. I wonder if he will be cycled up to an assistant manager/executive head coach role with the remaining coaching staff taking on more responsibility. In the cap era, the trend of coaching staffs getting larger and more specialized will continue.

Predictions for this summer:

• Bertuzzi will sign cheap if Jokinen is still with the team.
• Bourque will get an early extension.
• Aucoin will sign short and cheap or move on.
• Pardy might get an offer sheet from someone trying to torpedo the Flames’ cap number. Probably Mike Gillis or Brian Burke.
• If Cammalleri moves on, he will be joining Marc Savard and Martin St.Louis as small fast elite players let go for nothing
• Leopold will sign cheap and short or be allowed to go.
• Warrener will move on.
• Dave Lowry will receive an assistant coaching offer.
• Some of the other staff may not get an offer.

Predictions for next season:

• Backlund will make the team.
• McElhinney will get more games.
• Iginla will break 40 goals.
• Phaneuf will improve mentally.
• Giordano will have the best year of his career to date.
• Reported US viewership will be initially down and rise again toward the playoffs

The Flames will do well in a season interrupted by the Olympics. This is a good group that should have a shot to go deep.