The Steel City Legacy

Steel Mill at Work
http://www.prweb.com/

I received an email a couple of weeks back from someone I didn't know with the subject line Your Blog.  She was asking if I would use my forum here to help spread the word about mesothelioma, a form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.  I hesitated, didn't reply, but didn't delete the email either.  Because, I thought to myself at the time, I have a lot of causes that are important to me that I have touted over the years:  animal rights, women's issues, addiction and mental health issues and, of course, eating disorder awareness, because that's the one that ripped through my family like a buzz saw.  But, really, because of those very weighty issues, I started this blog to be a little more upbeat and give myself a separation from all of that, if I'm just being totally honest.  Plus, this is a new venture and my readership is tiny, I'm not sure what I could bring to the table for any cause right now anyway.  Besides, I can't spell mesothelioma without looking it up, and my tongue ties around it.  I thought to myself initially that if I can't even pronounce it, how can I advocate against it?  Yet, as we were at the St. Patrick's Day parade, and I glanced back at my daughter's boyfriend, engaged in an emotional conversation with his cousin, both life-long Pittsburghers, I realized that it is part of my world now, because these are my people and this disease is a large part of their world.

The reason the conversation between the two cousins was so emotional was because the boyfriend's uncle is in the late stages of the cancer.  He was in the hospital at the time and the odds were he was not going to be coming back home (he since has shown some improvement, I'm told, and actually is home at the moment).  That's hard for the family because Boyfriend's father passed away from the same disease only a couple of years before.  Boyfriend is still deeply mourning his dad, whom neither my daughter nor I ever met.  Facing his uncle's cancer is a really heart-wrenching struggle for him so soon after watching his father succumb to it.  The thing is:  Boyfriend's father worked in the steel mills.  Asbestos was used routinely to protect the workers and equipment from the high heat of the liquid steel. His uncle never even worked in the mills, but their father before them did.  And that's where he was exposed to it.  All those workers brought asbestos dust home on their clothing every night.  It coated their washing machines, their showers, anyplace or anyone they touched.  The boys were breathing it in every time they greeted their dad with a big hug at the door.  Boyfriend (he prefers we not use his name), in addition to mourning two men he loves who seem to have been doomed since childhood, has the shadow of doubt about his own fate as well because he also ran up to his dad every night as he came home from a long shift and hugged him.  He's breathed it in as well.

And that's just part of the legacy of steel in this area.  You may not realize it if you've never been here, but this town helped build your town by providing the steel for your buildings and infrastructure.  It helped win the wars that have kept us free with the steel for ships, tanks, planes and more.  This is a proud city with a proud history.  But it's a complicated one.  The thing I didn't tell you when I outlined why it was I moved here was why I didn't move here in the first place.  There are a couple of reasons:  a rebellious teenage desire to really piss my parents off by moving to Texas with my best friend, whom they didn't like, but also the memory of a morning several years before when we drove into the Pittsburgh metro area from the surrounding area where my aunt lived.  It was a beautiful morning in the rolling hills outside of the city.  The sun was rising in a crystal blue sky, tainting the clouds with pinks and yellows, the hills were green and lush, and then it was like a curtain fell as we neared the city.  It went black.  Literally.  You could see the blinking lights on the steel mill towers cutting through the darkness, but not much more.  I was just a girl, so I've often wondered what highway we were driving along, but I remember one of the rivers, so maybe Route 28?  I don't know, but hitting that sudden wall of air pollution left an impression on me.  A deep one.  And, as much as I loved the Steelers for all my life, I wasn't really looking forward to living in that level of dirt and grit to be near them.   Can you imagine what it was like living and working in that every day?

Coke mill in Hazelwood about the time of my Pittsburgh experience, but after the Clean Air Act of 1970

 That’s not the town we live in today.  Pittsburgh has reinvented itself and done wonders to clean itself up in a relatively short amount of time given where it came from.  As I look outside now, I see the blue of the sky, only marred by white wispy clouds floating by, and the green of the fir trees in my neighbor’s yard.  But downstairs I have a radon mitigation device quietly whirring away.  I didn’t even know what radon was until I started the process to buy this little house and the inspection showed a high level of it.  I’ve never before been in the “sensitive” groups to have to worry about air quality alerts, having only smoked once in my life, fueled by two Long Island ice teas (whereupon I went home and threw up in the bathroom sink and that was the end of my smoking and drinking that particular beverage), but I’m painfully aware of bad air quality days here because I struggle to breath on those days and climbing the stairs to my office is painful.  Steel is no longer the leading employer in the area, but its effects stay with us.  And so, I look at a young man who walks around not knowing what time bomb might be ticking away of inside of him just because he loved his dad so much he hugged him every night, and I think I should indeed ask that people be aware of mesothelioma.  And so, tipping my hat to the beautiful young woman who emailed and made me think about this, here is the link to her website:  http://www.mesothelioma.com/heather.  You may be surprised at some of the information she has on there.  I was.  She was asking now because next week is Mesothelioma Awareness Week and as she stated in her email, awareness may help save lives.  Maybe even yours.

 University of Pittsburgh Archives above, circa 1950

and my archives below, circa 2012

Sticks, Stones and Little Tweets

Rashard Mendenhall
Huffington Post

In my old blog, I would often begin my posts centered around sports by saying, "This one's not really about sports."  In this case, I'm not sure what this one is about.  Whether it's sports, the power and psychology of social media, or just that people can be real jerks if they think there are no consequences.  Maybe all of the above.  But, whatever it truly is about, I believe social media is at the heart of it.  And I'm not sure if I'm damning it or in awe of it.  Maybe you decide.

As you may have gathered, I love the people here.  They have a unique way about them.  It's a mix of extreme bluntness and kind heartedness.  You'd think the two don't go together, but, oddly, they do.  At first it was off-putting: having someone tell you exactly what they thought in such a forthright manner.  I thought of myself as a straight shooter for the most part, but I didn't lay it out there anywhere close to how Pittsburghers seem to.  But, at the same time, they generally seemed to mean it well.  That was confusing at first.  Finally, I just kind of got it:  this is a town built on the backs of hard workers who didn't have time for word games and intrigue, so they say what they mean and mean what they say.  But at the same time, they seem genuinely kind.  They just want you to know if you're doing something dumb, because that's really what's best for you.  And, trust me, at first I was doing lots of dumb stuff.  Of course, that's a gross generalization of a diverse population, but I've seen it over and over.  And it wasn't too long before I began to respect how people are here.  You know where you stand.  But, add sports and a computer or smartphone to the mix and it's a different story.

I've been thinking about how social media has changed all our lives a lot recently, ever since former Steeler running back Rashard Mendenhall retired at the ripe old age of 26.  My initial thought when the alert came across my phone was, "Well, there's a career brought down by Twitter."  I'm sure his ill-fated Tweet about the death of Osama bin Laden wasn't the only reason he threw in the towel, but I think it was the beginning of the end.  I remember it:

What kind of person celebrates death? It's amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We've only heard one side...
— Rashard Mendenhall (@R_Mendenhall) May 2, 2011

I was actually on Twitter when it came across, and I immediately thought he'd end up regretting sending it.  I also thought I knew what he was trying to say, but he was choosing the wrong format in which to try and say it.  He had Gandhi as his Twitter avatar at one point for crying out loud.  He is a thoughtful, intelligent young man, so I thought that he was just bothered by the collective blood lust we were all showing.  But you can't adequately express a complicated sentiment like that in 140 characters.  Granted, he would later go on and write some things that I am dubious about, including some conspiracy theory stuff about 9/11 that doesn't sit well with a city so close to where Flight 93 went down, but just because he's intelligent doesn't protect him from his own youth and maybe being overly impressionable and naive.  But, it was that Tweet in particular that created such a stir, even invoking a reaction from Dan Rooney that was clearly meant to distance the team from his player's unwise words.  Maybe had the Steelers and Mendenhall had a great next season, Steelers fans would have forgotten about it over time.  They've forgiven much in their elite athletes.  But, the simple fact is, they didn't, and so it just added to a festering wound and things got bad for him here.  I'm sorry for that, but I've often thought about that fateful quote and pondered that no one has ever been made by Twitter, but they sure have been brought down by it.

So Mr. Mendenhall, at the tender age of 23 learned the hard lesson that free speech isn't really free.  Unfortunately, some of the same people that were so quick to condemn him aren't in the limelight and don't have the same stakes, so they are a little more at liberty to say hateful, mean spirited things out on the Internet with impunity.  Generally about our sports teams.  The Pirates organization better buckle up.  They've gotten a pass for the last two decades by being perennial losers.  Now that they've broken that streak, the expectations are higher and the critiques will be too.  Face it, Pittsburgh Nation, we're spoiled.  We're so used to winning that any time we don't, we go a little nuts.  But it gets out of hand and becomes ugly, personal and, frankly, wrong.

Take last weekend for example.  It was a rough one for the Penguins.  And I get that we all hated that.  Not only did they lose back-to-back games, and look pretty rough doing it, but they lost to the hated Flyers.  I mean we HATE that team.  And they always seem to have our number.  But the Twitter-sphere made it seem like we were on the Titanic without a life boat.  The cries to fire the coach and the goalie were flying!  I know, I know:  all sports fan get that way.  I used to sit in the student section at UT games and marvel at all the little frat boys trying to out coach Mack Brown because they used to play high school ball.  "Really?" I would always think to myself, "If you're so spectacular of a football mind, then why are you sitting up here with me?"  I know we pay the money and support the advertisers that make big sports go round.  We've got a right to demand a good product.  But we've got one.  And that's what kills me.

You can't have it both ways.  You can't call where we live the City of Champions to the rest of the world, but then tell the goalie with the highest number of wins in the NHL that he sucks and that we should get rid of him. (Which he doesn't, by the way - if your defense let's enough shots through, he can't stop them all.  Ask Marty Brodeur about that, and he'll probably tell you, if it was just about the goalie stopping the puck the Devils would win the Stanley Cup every year, but it's a team sport.  And sometimes the team has a rough night.)

The chatter got so bad that my husband, all the way down there in Texas, emailed to ask me why the Pens were doing so badly the following Monday, confessing he hadn't seen any hockey, he was just hearing things.  I shut that opinion down in no uncertain terms and haven't really spoken to him since.

I think it's a combination of the ease of spewing whatever comes to your mind when it comes on Twitter and Facebook, fueled by adrenaline and alcohol that has caused people like Rashard Mendenhall to hate what they are doing so much they literally walk away from it in the prime of their life.  He said it was because he didn't want to put his body at risk anymore, but then he also wrote, "Imagine having a job where you're always on duty, and can never fully relax or you just may drown.  Having to fight through waves and currents of praise and criticism, but most hate.  I can't even count how many times I've been called a 'dumb n-----.'"  

That's just sad.  And it's beneath us.  We all want to win.  But we're better than this.  So, think before you Tweet.  It's such a powerful tool with the ability to cut.  Use it wisely.

Irish Eyes

A little over three years ago now I packed up my car and headed East with just my 10-year Husky mix Cheyenne.  The intent was for the two of us to be on our own for a few weeks, get the house set up while the husband stayed behind in Texas and got the old house ready to sell without a lifetime worth of collective stuff in the way.  My daughter would be the last to leave, by the original plan, after she finished the spring semester.  In the end, Cheyenne and I were up here on our own for over four months, with some visits from friends and family here and there to break the routine.  I think at the time that was the longest I'd ever lived by myself.  I had short periods of time between roommates when I was young, but even then my future husband was usually around.  Now in Pittsburgh, I knew no one really and was truly on my own.  My mother's family lives in the area, but most of them are about 50 miles south of me in Washington, PA.  They invited me to everything they could and treated like one of their own, but it's an hour each way, so the time I could go down there was limited.  And my Lovely Philly Friend made the trek across the state several times to show me the city she had grown up in, helping me discover such wonders as Trader Joe's (granted, it's not local, but it was new to me), Lawrenceville, and Vento's Pizza, which was where we met Pittsburgh legend Al Vento, co-founder of Franco's Italian Army (who is one of the nicest men I think I've ever bumped into casually on a Sunday afternoon in my life).  But, for a lot of the time, it was Cheyenne and me being strangers in a strange land.  I am uniquely suited to being alone, however, despite not having a lot of practice at it.  Raised an only child by older parents in a sparsely populated state, I learned early on how to amuse myself, and I was busy unpacking, getting lost, and watching hockey.  There wasn't a whole lot of time to worry about who was or wasn't around.  Really I was only truly, achingly lonely one time, and that was over St. Patrick's Day weekend because there was the sense of community and celebration happening all around me, that sense of camaraderie and family that I was excluded from.  But one of the best things about Pittsburgh is that, if you put your own foot out the door, the city will rise up and greet you.  I didn't really know that then, but I've been fortunate to learn it since.

Maybe it's strange that on a day which, for most of the country, is no more than an excuse to let your hair down a bit and drink green colored beer, I would be made to feel the most alone, but it's because you have to understand how big a thing St. Patrick's Day is here.  For one thing, there is a large Irish-American population in Pittsburgh.  My neighborhood is predominantly Irish Catholic, centered as it is around a large Catholic church and school.  And, you may remember me telling you how rooted people are here?  The unintended consequence of that is the city is strangely non-integrated.  It's not that I've found a lot of rampant prejudice (more than any where else, that is), but it's just a way of life that people are born, live and die in the same little areas  Therefore, the Irish population of a given neighborhood not only all know one another, they all tend to hang onto that sense of ethnicity and pride because it's never diluted by a transient population.  I began to get a sense of it even before the "holiday" when I would walk Cheyenne around the neighborhood and notice the Irish-themed bumper stickers on people's cars, or notice the Irish colors flying, including one house where they've got a huge Irish flag dwarfing their American flag (they display them in the proper hierarchy, it's just that the Irish one is noticeably larger).  And then there's the parade.  I didn't know anything about it until I was watching the news the night before and they spent a notably large part of the broadcast giving people reports not only just about the parade itself, but how the weather was supposed to be, how to park, when spectators should get there and so on.  They touted it as the second largest in the country.  I had a hair appointment the next morning and asked my hair newly found hair dresser about it.  I could tell it was when the few years when she wasn't going herself, but she explained that by the time I was done with the appointment, there'd be no shot at getting down there, as there would literally be thousands of people there.   So I realized, sitting at home alone on what was a beautiful early spring day, that I had really blown a great chance to see a big part of what makes Pittsburgh tick.  I vowed not to miss it again.  And maybe that would have been the end of it, but for the fact that the neighborhood was alive with celebrations that made it clear this was no small holiday.  As I took Cheyenne for a walk that afternoon, house after house had multiple cars parked around it.  I could hear the sounds of revelers coming from backyards and suddenly our little house with just the two of us seemed awful small and lonely.  I remember sitting in my basement that night watching The Boondock Saints painfully aware of how isolated I truly was.

Only in Pittsburgh do you tailgate for a parade!

Now, with a couple of parades under my belt, what I can tell you is this:  Pittsburghers may tend to keep to their own comfort zones, but they will welcome you in like you're one of their own if you meet them half way.  The downside to growing up an only child of older parents is that you miss that big sense of family and of belonging that others take for granted.  I've looked for it and envied it in a variety of venues, both consciously and sub-consciously, all my life:  when I go to pow-wows, when I would go with friends to their church, at ballparks and hockey arenas, and at festivals and concerts.  Where you find it the most is when you're with a group of people who are all passionate about the same thing.  I occasionally bemoan the convenience of buying concert tickets online because some of the best conversations I've ever had was standing inline for hours waiting for Rush or U2 tickets to go on sale with other fans.  We shared a common bond that gave us a built in topic of conversation.  Well Pittsburgh is much the same way.  Whether you're talking Steelers, Penguins, Pirates, or the state of potholes along Fifth Avenue, there's lots of people willing to talk with you about it.  And at a huge city-wide party like the Saturday before St. Patrick's Day, with a little Guinness loosening the tongues, means that we're all one big, happy Irish family, no matter what part of world you truly hail from.  I don't feel alone anymore on St. Patrick's Day.  I have the biggest family in the world.

Joe Biden stopped by in 2012

And don't forget the after party!

Don't Tread on My City

One of the problems I have is that once I decide I like something, I tend toward blind loyalty.  Great example is that I saw Star Wars Episode I five times in the theater.  Five times.  And I own two copies of it on DVD, one for upstairs on the regular TV and one Blu-Ray copy as part of the set.  I can tell myself all day long that it has some redeeming qualities in the pod race and light saber duel between Obi-Wan, Qui Gon and Darth Maul that make it worthwhile, but let's face it, that movie just plain sucks.  Yet it's a Star Wars film, so I jumped all in.  And some non-Star Wars fan better not ever say to me that it sucks or I'll go all Dark Side on them.

So it is in other areas of my life, and as a result one of the stresses we experienced when my husband came home for a visit occurred when I felt he was criticizing it.  Since moving to Pittsburgh was wholly my choice, I take it personally, like it's really a criticism of me.  Truthfully, sub-consciously it might be, but that's another situation altogether.  Maintaining a relationship under the difficult circumstances my husband finds himself is complex.  Therefore, I should be more forgiving of his sharp complaints about no right turn on red, but in the moment, it just upset me way beyond reason.  But, truth be told, I know this is not a perfect place.  No place is.  You put a bunch of humans together, and you will get mixed results.  You will have poverty, crime and tragedy.  You will have prejudice and haves v. have-nots.   Pittsburgh is not immune to any of that, but it also has lots of less weighty issues that just make it a quirky, imperfect place.  And, as such, just to prove to myself that I can keep an objective viewpoint, I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Pittsburgh is known as the City of Bridges.  And it is.  An official count done by a University of Pittsburgh professor tallied 446, three more than another famous city with lots of water, Venice.  And they come in all shapes and sizes.  We lack just one kind of bridge:  a suspension bridge.  But that means the city has to maintain all those bridges.  That's expensive.  Therefore, you'll be driving along and look up as you pass one of those many, many bridges and see netting wrapped around it.  My daughter and I were here visiting when the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis.  Naturally that event raised a lot of local concern, so the news channels did a lot of coverage about the condition of local bridges over the next several days. That's when I learned that the protective netting we were seeing was to keep debris from the aging structures from falling on the cars below.  I saw that news story in 2007.  I drove under one of the bridges they talked about last week, protective netting and all still in place.

Greenfield Ave Bridge
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks2/towns/pgh_bridges2.htm

Then there are the infamous potholes.  Maybe not as dangerous as aging bridges, but, ask some of the locals and they might beg to differ.  Pot holes are big news here right now.  Even in my area, which seems to be well funded and well maintained, pot holes are a big issue.  We've got to understand why that is after the rough winter we all experienced, but the controversy is over how many, how big and how long it takes to fix them, which leads to another issue that I found is prevalent here:  it all depends on where you live as to how well and how quickly you are served.  The Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran an article just yesterday illustrating pot hole complaints by political district.  I am pretty sure it'll add fuel to an already smoldering fire.  Of all the issues the new mayor thought he would be wrestling with in the early days of his administration, this probably wasn't one, but it is.  And, to his credit, he is working on it.  In the meantime, we bump along and have to pay attention not only to the cars on the road around us, but the very road we drive on so we don't blow a tire or risk falling down to the center of the earth.

Of course, that's even harder if you're lost.  And getting lost here is like a vocation, even for those of us who have lived here much longer than I have.  I was warned when I was making plans on moving here that GPS is unreliable.  I can tell you now that never a truer statement has been made.  Downtown, the buildings block it.  Outside of downtown, the hills sometimes do.  And then, not all that long ago, I learned that some of the many winding stairs the city sports are actually considered roadways and have names assigned to them, so some of those times my Garmin was telling me to turn on a road I swore up and down wasn't there, that was the reason why.  I can take some comfort that I'm not alone in my frustration with finding things.  I used to see a t-shirt for sale in one of my favorite little shops that had a parody of a local roadway sign that showed a labyrinth of confusing arrows snaking around in a tangle.  Given the constant frustration I had initially to find just about any where, I thought it was perfect, but they never had my size.  It is a big point of pride that I have at long last found preferred routes to the areas of the city I frequent, but if you take me out of my comfort zone even a little, and I get anxious again because getting lost is a way of life here.

http://www.communitywalk.com

I could go on.  But you get the point.  No city is an utopia.  But, I've always maintained that if a place is worth it, then it's worth fighting for.  Those of us who live in it and love it are duty bound to try and help fix those deficiencies.  And it's a bigger challenge here, granted, because everything costs, and money is part of the issue.  Pittsburgh's true population is 306,211 according to Wikipedia.  That number does not include me actually.  I am one of the combined statistical population of over 2.5 million that live in the surrounding area.  But I spend much of my spare time in it.  I just don't help pay for it much, other than the taxes I pay to the county. Therefore, I've been struck since moving here that this grand old city that so many of us rely on is funding itself really on a shoestring.  For all of that, it's been named in various publications as one of the nations' most livable cities.  And I agree.  So for all of the things that might be wrong with it, there's a whole lot more that is right about it.  And I can stand to wait an extra half minute or so to make a right turn to be able to call this my home.

Home Sweet Home

While this is what we came to see, it was not the highlight of the trip!

 Ahhh, home again, trying to regain the routine.  Last week was a bit dramatic, all revolving around getting ready for and then going to see the Penguins in Chicago.  I was both excited but stressed by the experience, and it's been rough returning back to work, getting caught up on all the domestic stuff, like laundry and cleaning the cat box, to seeing the husband back off to Texas early early this morning.  All of it would have been unquestionably worth it had the Penguins won, and we were the fans who were cheering through the 15 degrees and snow.  But, as it happens, we were the ones sitting sullenly in the stands, trying to decide if we still had any feeling in our fingers and toes, as the home fans bounced up out of their seats to sing along to their annoying celebration song not once, not twice, but five times.  I was lucky to get out of there without frostbite; my luck didn't extend to a win sadly.  Yet, I can't really complain, for all of that, because it is an experience I'll always remember, and I did see some amazing things in the short time we were there.  But the experience got me thinking about all the native Chicagoans my daughter and I met and talked to in the short time we were there, and thinking about what we sometimes miss out living in our own cities.

One thing I was really struck by is how friendly and talkative these big city dwellers were.  I chatted up several people, which is unusual for me because I'm naturally a bit shy, but they were so open and friendly that they invited comfortable conversation, and I found myself asking lots of questions.  Additionally, I have a dear friend who lives in an outlying suburb and works downtown now, so she took off early on Friday and met us at the Art Institute for the afternoon and then her son met all of us for some of that legendary deep dish pizza at dinner, so we got an interesting viewpoint on life in the Second City.  Maybe it's not wholly accurate, certainly not scientific, and I fully accept there are exceptions to every rule, but I got a strong sense that I saw and experienced more of the city in the short few days I was there than many people who have lived in the region for years get to see.  And that's regrettable, because it is a city jammed full of amazing things.   But it's not a cheap place to live.  So, that's one impediment.  We were struck by the lots around our hotel - open air lots that no one bothered to shovel, charging on average $18.00 a day, and from everything I heard, that was rock bottom.  For big events, the price jacks up to twice that.  One can commute in, of course.  Chicago, unlike Pittsburgh, has great mass transit, but it's not free, takes a lot of time, and, I was told more than once, isn't particularly safe after dark.  Then there is the price of admission to whatever you're trying to do, whether it's visiting a world class museum or a sports team.  You think Penguins tickets are expensive?  Apparently not.  So, a large percentage of the community is culled out from many of the things their own city has to offer just because they can't afford it.

Standing out on a glass platform looking down at the street from 108 floors up.  Both beautiful and really scary.

Then there's the time.  Who has time to do much of anything besides work and live?  I mean, I get it.  I'm totally freaked by how far behind I am after just a few days!  If you live an hour away and have to catch a train in and out of the city, you leave work at 5:00 like you're loaded on a spring, run to catch your train, take the long trip home, only to be faced with fixing dinner, helping kids with homework or whatever, trying to catch some sleep and then getting up and doing it all over again.  Who has time to do more during the week?  So, they spend their weekends like I do:  running errands.  And, as a result, many of these good, hard working people miss out on some of the most amazing things in the world:  some of the very few things I got to see and do because I'm a tourist.

Cloud Gate in AT&T Plaza

Outside the Art Institute of Chicago

I wrote once in my other blog that we ought to live our lives like we're tourists.  I believe that now more than ever.  I get how hard it is for all those reasons I heard from those friendly Chicagoans, but I also know that in years to come it's the encounter I had with a beluga whale at the Shedd Aquarium that I will remember, not the extra work hours I had to pull during the days before and after.  And for those of us who live in cities like Pittsburgh where the cost of entry is far more modest, we need to take advantage of our own city, because it's full of many wonders as well, maybe a bit smaller than the nation's third largest city's facilities, but pretty amazing nonetheless.  I came home feeling like maybe I lost a hockey game, but won a sense of just how lucky I am to live here.  I plan on taking lots of my own advice.