A week is a long time in football. Two weeks is an age. So it's nice to see that the once mighty Bantams are finally, it seems, heading in the right direction. They have managed to double their wins total in that period, after all. The first half of the season, cup competitions apart, has been painful. At more than one point on Saturday mornings this autumn, the team has been only a goal away from being right at the foot of the football league.
Parkinson has slowly recast the team from the collection of loanees and inexperienced kids he was left with after Jackson's sudden departure in August. Goals were preciously hard to come by, and it seemed with Matt Duke that they couldn't keep them out at the other end either. Slowly, with the acquisition of Marcel Seip and Andrew Davies, and McLaughlin's return in goal the goals against has been tightened dramatically (just two against in five games. A goalie that can stop shots. Goals against go down. Who knew?). And now the goals have begun to come, six in the two festive home games.
I can't imagine a collective support more desperate to cling onto
something than ours over the last ten years, there have been so many
false dawns and mistakes made, but it's been fun to be up early in the morning to listen to games and hear the crowd, supportive and engaged again. Or giving the referee a piece of their mind as they have in the last two games. Hopefully, 2012 is a better year than 2011 was.
So happy Christmas to everyone out there. Given the traffic statistics from my leg post last week it might be that I've got a new reader or three. Once the appearances on the webcam and the phone were done today, I went into town on public transport (free, it was. Can you imagine that in the UK? No, me neither) for a robust walk by the river. It actually ended up at close to five miles and the six million dollar leg was a bit stiff at the end. But there was nothing so typically Canadian as the scene that greeted the numerous walkers at the bridge onto Prince's Island.
Last night saw episode three of the Calgary Flames-Vancouver Canucks season series. In the last couple of years, the fixture hasn't been much of a contest, to the point that each meeting is met with a sense of dread from a Calgary point of view about how many goals they're going to concede. Last night's game was the second night of a back to back, having played Detroit the night before, a situation the Flames don't do well in historically. Oh, and they had a 23 year old goalie playing only his second game in the NHL. The two previous meetings this season ended 5-1 to Vancouver. All the omens pointed to another beating.
So imagine the collective surprise when this happened:
So after facing the Flames' first two goalies in their first two games, Vancouver fell to the third choice. It was Irving's first NHL win, after several years of service in the AHL, much of it in nearby Abbbotsford, learning his trade following his selection in the first round of the 2006 draft. Particularly nice when he had a successful battle with a rare form of cancer aged seven. But last night was a team performance. Every last one of them played very well, denied Vancouver space, and created chances; it was the first time the game was a contest for a couple of years maybe. The Flames' slow transition under the new general manager to a team with more speed, skill and puck-moving defencemen looks like it's beginning to bear fruit in the last two or three weeks. Having defencemen who can skate into the offensive zone to set up attacks instead of dumping-and-chasing makes the world of difference. You can't score when you don't have the puck after all. The Flames moved into tenth place in the western conference; still outside the playoffs, but six points ahead of where they were at the same point last season.
Back from Rockyview, armed with a final answer as to how many screws there are in the six million dollar ankle, after the cock-up with my request I made to them the other week. Way back when I was in hospital, and my boss and a labmate came to visit after the operation, they were told "five one side, two the other". Or at least that's my recollection. This tallied with - to be blunt - the ones I can feel when I rub my fingers up and down where the scars are on my ankle/shin. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the actual images recorded which meant having to make the trip down there one last time to collect them. Although it was worth it as getting every last image is good, since I can now see where exactly each bone broke and how long it took to heal. And I get the answer I've been waiting seven months to find out. And as I've said before, these are useful things to have when travelling through airports and metal detectors and so on.
Remembering that we're looking front on (the outside of my leg is on the right, the inside on the left), the image on the upper right is from September. That's not "five plus two", is it? I see why it elicited a "wow, that's a lot of stuff in there" from the radiographer the last time. So there is no way in the world I don't set off airport metal detectors now. None at all.
I put the other CD in to try and decide whether the immediately-post-break X-ray was fit for public viewing, and it looks like they haven't included it. Boo-urns. So you'll never get to see what it looked like; only the teammates present got that dubious prvilege. Viewing the various CT scans that I had taken at nearly 3am that were included is pretty cool though. Here's a negative of the post-surgery X-ray, showing where the breaks were, marked by the yellow lines. It's much more obvious on this one than the ones above and below. The tibia is on the left, fibula on the right. Given that I rolled my ankle as I did this, my foot was essentially dislocated to the left as you look, to an angle of 30+ degrees. In so doing, the heelbone moving caused the end of the tibia and fibula to break as shown. In addition to all the X-rays, I also now have a full set of the various radiographer's notes. The first one was written at 10:10pm on the night I did it, and it's pretty funny after the fact. Next to "Reason for exam" is simply written "trauma". That's one word for it, I suppose. It's also just as well, I suppose, that I chose to go under general anaesthetic rather than just from the waist down. Can you imagine being fully conscious while all this is going in?
So one last one: the X-ray from June 6th, short of three weeks from the operation, on the day when I went back for the bright red cast. This X-ray is obscured slightly because I still have the post-surgery cast on. That's the return on the X-ray outside of my actual leg. If you look closely, you can see that the breaks haven't healed at that point in time. The columns of little horizontal marks are, of course, the staples holding the incisions from surgery closed, which were removed about an hour later which was something less than fun.
The epilogue to the story: The football team I play in are currently in the process of ordering jerseys for the upcoming season(s). To save on the cost of having new shirts printed every time a new member joins, we have gone for Muppet names on the back, as well as numbers, so that shirts can be passed on from one person to another. Being of the traditionalist sort, I had plumped for number 1 (and Bunsen as my Muppet, which is highly appropriate), as every team should for a goalie. But I can't help but think I should now change it to number 13, one for each screw, as is common for the second goalie in pretty much every football team in England. It's apparently almost totally shunned as a number for hockey over here due to superstition. But I really can't be that much more unlucky. Can I?
Remember I said I'd made a request to get a copy of my x-rays for travel purposes? Well, today when I came back in I had a letter in my mailbox from Alberta Health. It was letter size, which struck me as odd since x-ray films are much larger. Inside was a letter and then a single page of printed out medical jargon which was essentially the radiographer's notes on my last visit. Not much use when you set off the metal detector in the airport. I left a message on their answerphone and they rang me back not more than two hours later, explaining that my request for 'a copy of my x-ray' in medical circles actually means the file and not the actual images.
Eh?
So the woman on the phone said they will waive the $25 fee for the request, which is just as well, I think, since you could probably buy five whole reams of paper for that much money, rather than just one sheet. She then transferred me to the right department where they took my details and told me they would burn a CD with every last image either this afternoon or on Monday and they'd then ring me to tell me I can pick it up. So in addition to finally having images of the finished, fixed leg, presumably I'll also get images of the straight-after-the-event leg. That'll be, er, nice to see. You want to see it?
...picking up and reading The Organometallic Chemistry of the Transition Metals by R. H. Crabtree for the first time in a good few years. It's pretty much required reading for both undergraduates and graduate students. I've met the author a couple of times, and he's as mad as brush. What prompted it was having gone back into the university the last couple of days for two talks; yesterday by one of the PhD students in the lab I used to work in and then today by one of the MSc candidates. It was nice to sit and think chemistry for the first time in several months, rather than the usual diet of daytime TV or sports talk radio. Both their talks went well, with nice results; it was nice to see the end of the story as it were, since I've not seen or heard what they've been up to all that much since the Great Broken Ankle Drama got me out of the lab a couple of weeks earlier than planned.
It was nice to feel interested in the subject again. I came to be very bored with the daily grind of being in a lab. The amount of time doing interesting experiments and having eureka moments is a small fraction of the amount of the time consumed by washing up, cleaning apparatus, making starting materials for the seemingly thousandth time, making sure materials are pure and so on. I like results. Of course, if life had panned out with me as an academic by now, that would be the gig; me in the office, poring over results while the students have to do the ugly stuff I've spent 12 years doing. The 'what if' thoughts started rattling around the other week when I saw a couple of papers which were essentially a vindication of a research proposal I wrote almost five years ago for various research fellowships which I was rejected for, almost certainly because it wasn't 'sexy' enough. It was a good idea.
Still no news on the immigration front. It's now got to the point where a trip home for Christmas is beginning to look unlikely since the time required to get my passport to LA and back will probably be a couple of weeks. That's if I got a request pretty quick.As has been mentioned before, quick is seemingly not a word in the lexicon of an immigration official. Unless you happened to apply after November 2010.
To see what on earth's going on, under freedom of information laws I've requested a printout of my electronic immigration file (essentially a screengrab of my file) this afternoon. I want to know all manner of things including a) have they received my medical results and the permanent residence fee, b) have they completed the background/security check, and c) what on earth else it is they are waiting for. I suspect I'm going to find something like they requested an RCMP police check or similar months ago and Canada Post lost it or something. It's typical of the sclerotic immigration system in this country that while my case is in LA, I have to submit this request to Ottawa. This is pretty much my only recourse at the moment since my enqiury to them last week has been met with stony silence, emails bounce off them and there is no telephone number to ring. Also, there appears to be no way of making complaints either.
I just find it beyond unfair that this week, there have been applicants who applied eight, nine, and more than ten months after I did had their passport requests, while I sit here, savings whittling away, career in the bin. The sum of money that I saved to live off while in this situation will probably run out at the end of January and I'm not willing to spend any more of my savings after that; that sum was once upon a time earmarked for a deposit on a house/flat, a car and so on. You know, the sort of things you can do when you have a life.
So there's still no news on my immigration case. To say that I'm now hacked off with the whole thing is the understatement of the year. I didn't for a moment think, when I was saving a sum to live off while jobless, that I'd be almost into December and still not be sorted. "Six months is a worst case scenario", I said. So I finally gave up last Thursday on day 398 and tried to contact them. My emails to the address listed on their letterhead and website bounced back immediately as undeliverable. That's taking "do not contact us" to extremes, I think.
I re-read the last communication they sent me in August, and it stated my case would be reviewed in 120 days, which would be next Wednesday. Again, I snapped this evening and found the 'Case Specific Enquiry' function on the main immigration website. What prompted my snapping is the observation that, following another passport request yesterday, pretty much every other case in the tracker of September/October 2010 has now had their passport request. Two other cases aren't updated, a British citizen and someone who I think was rejected in September and hasn't updated their status. So it could be that if CIC have had someone in their UK office do the security check, it might be sat on someone's desk in London, a noted black hole in these sort of things.
Or it could be that my hotmail account has been aggressively blocking any emails they've tried to send me; numerous ones from my parents also never made it through. I had a promotional email from the hotmail PR team today, proclaiming only 2% of spam gets through. Very pleased with themselves, they were. It's one thing to block spam entirely, but important communications from government agencies? FFS. And wouldn't you know, not five minutes since I sent my request, I've just had a confirmation to my gmail that "we have received your request and will review it shortly". Again, not from an email address listed on their website or letters. We'll see what their definition of 'shortly' is.........
To describe Bradford City's season thus far as a bit of a roller-coaster is something of an understatement. Just when you thought that they might slowly be piecing it together on the field after being onto their third manager by October, along comes another bolt from the blue. Up until today, we were confident, following a quite superb setofarticles on one of the leading independent BCFC sites, BoyFromBrazil, that the club had a long term plan. The fans have been, on the whole, quite patient given the team was at one stage only a Plymouth goal away from being 92nd of 92 in the professional game. The man to oversee the long term plan was the head of development, Archie Christie.
So imagine my puzzlement this morning, when an email from my brother - partly in reply to my rant about HSBC secure keys below - signs off with "I see the BCFC fun bus has been driven into the ditch again". Eh? A quick look at twitter made the heart sink. Archie Christie had left the club. Due to "ill health". Later in the day, BoyFromBrazil published this article. If the allegations (for want of a better word) are true, then this is the latest in a series of very spectacular PR own goals. The club, of course, denied it within a couple of hours through Derm Tanner of BBC Radio Leeds. I'm not sure what I find more depressing: that there was another in a long line of PR fiascos brewing; that a second member of the football staff had walked out with zero notice or explanation inside three months; or that barely anybody out there believes a word the club says anymore. I mean, "ill health"? Do the Christie articles above read like a man who's about to bail out? He was, according to various people "in the know" offered the job of Chief Executive very recently. Ill health?
There's a part of me that's also a little bit annoyed with the local media (Radio Leeds, The Pulse, The Telegraph and Argus) who, it seems, walk on eggshells so as to not antagonise the club into withdrawing media access to their players and staff, and it's left to fans with day jobs to provide the objective coverage.
I don't know what happens to the development squad approach in the future. The cynic might suggest that, since the club appears to be overspending the budget again (how can it not be, given the turnover in playing staff this year and the huge size of the squad?), the development squad might well be jettisoned to make the books balance. And then, not for the first time, the club will be back at square one again.
Edit: the whole BfB website has been pulled this morning after 12 years. The club wheeled out John Hendrie to deny everything. What a mess. An absolute mess.
So here's the end to one long-running saga on these pages. I would have hoped the other one would have been concluded first, but that's Immigration Minister Kenney and his cavalcade of clowns for you. I digress. Remember my post about the doctor at the hospital saying that "November" was an OK time to see whether my gimpy leg was up to the rigours of sport again? Well, last night I decided that since it was barely November I'd give it a whirl and take my place between the posts for indoor football. I found out four things: 1) I can just about run. 2) diving sideways is harder, 3), blocking shots with the 64 million dollar ankle hurts, and 4) I'm very much not used to the speed of the ball indoors. Hopefully that will come, because for three of the goals in a 5-4 defeat, I'm afraid the commentator would be saying "he'll be disappointed with that"
Still, I'm still in one piece, since a) I was bothered I'd suffer some agonising relapse, and b) the game was at Forest Lawn High School, which if you don't know is Vietnamese drug gang central. Just the usual stiffness from my antique back to report, which is no different to usual.
About two months ago, I had a letter delivered to Mum and Dad's from HSBC about their new security key and how it would make things more, erm, secure. It's an incredibly incovenient size: "put it on your keyring" - er no, thanks - and looks like it's been knocked out of some factory in the far east [looks on back] "made in China". Go figure. Without it, you can't access your interweb banking. So Mum and Dad sent it to me and Canada Post somehow managed - in some sort of miracle - to get it here inside five days. I think I've used it three times in the month/six weeks that I've had it (once to set up and twice to use) and now, when I want to transfer some money across, the thing has died.
There was no need for it in the first place, and now I can't access my accounts at all! I suppose I'll have to apply for another, and have all the same palaver. I'll be thinking pretty hard about closing all my accounts with them on the other side of the pond when I'm next over there (since becoming a permanent resident would mean me transferring all my money over here anyway). What a shower.
Edit. After pressing and holding the button repeatedly over the course of an hour-and-a-half, it has suddenly spluttered back into life. All the vented spleen above stands, though. It's a pointless, crappy thing.
I hope I'm not going to jinx myself here by speaking out of turn, but the immigration saga might be nearly there. There's another update from an LA applicant on the website I seem to spend most of the day looking at, even though most of the day there's nothing directly relevant to my case.
The topmost candidate on the list was transferred at roughly the same time as I was, did the medicals at the same time, and so got his/her passport request today. Since this applicant was a September applicant, it's only fair that he/she gets a request before I do. Hopefully, it'll be my turn soon. Edit: and another request for someone the morning after. Looks like they've woken up again!
Winter is just around the corner now. Two years ago we were under snow cover at this time of year, and it's become noticeably cooler in the last couple of weeks when I've been out on my daily constitutional. Last night, returning from friends after a day of watching NFL and an evening of halloween themed films, it was positively frigid. That'll teach me to go out in a fleece and a t-shirt only. I'm a bit slow in learning lessons like that if it's still happening after more than three-and-a-half years out here.
So today, in advance of the snow, I've finally got around to buying a pair of proper winter boots to replace the ones that were pretty much ruined in Snowmageddon last March. They weren't really winter boots anyway. A bit of research on the internet yielded lots of information on what to get and so I went out for them this afternoon.
A walk to the nearest mall and I came home with these monsters. I'm having to break them in inside the flat since there is a bit of a problem with, er, rubbing against the recently installed screws in my ankle, and I can't wear them outside if I want to return them. I've managed to jerry-rig some protection for said screws and it feels pretty good overall. They're as heavy as they look. They are supposedly rated to -40C, and I'll need every last degree of that in the winter out here.
If there's one thing we don't like here at Beige Towers, it's brown governmental envelopes sitting in the mailbox unannounced while you've been out shopping for new underwear. Especially when they're from immigration.
For the last six weeks since my work permit expired, I've been on 'implied status' which means I made an application to the government immigration centre and was allowed to wait on their reply. The application itself was submitted back in early May, back when I still had two properly functioning legs. Their website led me to believe my case was still three weeks away from being dealt with, but here is their response; pretty much exactly what I asked, another six months as a visitor while my permanent residence is hopefully done. The wise sages at British Expats.com had said that it was a formality and it was; the mind boggles at the task of trying to leave the country at short notice if they'd declined it.
As of right now, there is no news on the permanent residence application. I am hoping that as they seem to do things in units of three months, it's coming up to that time since they asked me to do my medicals Hopefully a passport request is just around the corner. My entry a couple of posts down about another applicant at Los Angeles looks to have been a false alarm since he has since altered his profile to remove the passport request. It's looking like my trip to land might well involve a trip home at Christmas, if they'd ever get their finger out!
The NHL season starts today (it now being Thursday morning). Two hockey pools this year; the one I ran as comissioner of the When Saturday Comes Forum which I ran on Sunday lunchtime, and the one I entered at my now former place of work this evening. Tonight was the first one I have ever done in auction style; I had an imaginary $200 to spend and allocate as I saw fit. Here's what I saw fit to spend (see below left). I had a plan to fairly evenly allocate my $200 among my 18 players but it became fairly clear fairy early that I would have to abandon that, given the amount of money that went on the first six or seven picks. $60 for Corey Perry? Seriously? After watching some people blow half their budget on their first two players (the Bangkok Chuzillas went for the Sedin Twins at ruinous cost), I played my way in and I can honestly say that of the 18 picks above left there is only one I'm unsure about. For the record, here's the money spent on each: Iginla $40, Rinne $15, Zetterberg $26, Getzlaf $32, Kovalchuk $11, Lecavalier $5, Backes $6, Thornton $12, Visnovsky $8, Pavelski $5, Kessel $5, Lidstrom $9, Burns $6, Crawford $3, Subban $2, Hossa $5, Grabovski $5, Selanne $5. PK SUBBAN FOR TWO DOLLARS? SELANNE FOR FIVE? I'LL HAVE TWO!
Sunday saw my debut as commissioner. I think the When Saturday Comes forum is brilliant; a rare island of thought and knowledge in a vast ocean of complete nonsense. Given the number of fantasy sports there are on that forum, I though a fantasy hockey pool was in order and so I volunteered to take the reins. Nine entrants were interested and Sunday saw a traditional 'snake' draft, in which the order of picking is constantly reversed (i.e. 1st through 9th then 9th through 1st and so on). Here's how I did:
Pretty darned good, I think, on both counts. My plan was 'forwards forwards forwards' and so ignored some of the shiny defencemen on offer. Certainly more in the latter pool than the former, though. That's where I fell down last year, so hopefully I've learned my lesson. In the auction, I'll have to hope that going for depth was worth foregoing most of the star forwards, who were well out of reach very early.
Tomorrow: also on a hockey bent, the return of the Winnipeg Jets.
Jewish mayor of Edmonton. Muslim mayor of Calgary. And now a female Premier of Alberta. Are we still redneck central? According to the Globe And Mail, probably so, given their print edition for this story read "Alberta Moves Into Present".
There's no way to dress it up; being unemployed whilst in government immigation limbo isn't much fun. There's only so much daytime TV a man can stand, and while walks outside are nice enough, there are only so many different permutations of walks in the local area. And of course, in a few weeks it could very well be snowing outside. Ugh. Any news, anything at all of the cases at the Los Angeles consulate will get my immediate attention.
So as a follow up to doing my immigration medicals in mid-August, I emailed the medical practice yesterday to enquire what date my results were sent to Ottawa. I'd read a couple of scare stories on the discussion forum from people whose results had been mislaid by their doctors. That's the last thing that I'd want. A reply came fairly quickly this morning that they got my results on September 1st which was 4 weeks yesterday. The immigration website that I follow to gauge how much longer it'll take had been remarkably quiet in the last 24 hours, until I checked back in just now and saw the lower of the two highlighted cases was a case from LA. That person had their results sent on August 29th and had a passport request yesterday. His/her medical results arrived in Ottawa two days before mine were. Hopefully, my case will be resolved very soon. Because I'll go pretty mad if there's another couple of months wait.
I'm slightly annoyed today, since I went to physio under the impression that it was going to be the last time. The last-but-one time she said she was happy for me to only come once more, and that it wasn't really necessary However, my various attempts to convince her that I was able to stand/balance/crouch/squat on my left leg unaided didn't seem to pass muster, and she came to the conclusion that my hip muscles are not what they should be.
A couple of tests on the bed (oo er missus) solidified that in her mind so I had to go back into the 'gym' for more exercises to learn. So it was that 'hipster physio' who I'd seen around the place most of the times I was there (so called because of his comedically tight jeans) had me laid on either side, lifting my legs in the air. Hard enough, but then he had me laid flat on my back trying to raise my hips as fair off the ground as possible. Also hard. Even harder: trying to balance one legged on a piece of foam while bouncing a ball off the wall. My legs were done in at that point, and it didn't help from a deja vu point of view seeing a ball hurtling in at head height, since that was how I managed to knacker everything in the first place.
Today was the final visit to the hospital for checking up on the bionic ankle, and it's nice to report a happy ending. The routine was the same; a set of preliminary x-rays which was taken by a different technician to the last two visits, prompting a "whoa, that's a lot of metalwork in there!", followed by a lengthy wait for a no-more-than-ten-minute date with the surgeon who had the misfortune to have to put me back together. He had me walking about in various different manners, and pronounced himself "really really pleased, given the state it was in". On questioning him on when I could run/play sport again, he actually surprised me, by saying that once I get to six months away, I could see how it went.
So be warned, members of Hungover United: I am ten weeks from being activated from the disabled list. Ready yourself for my eccentricities again!
(though since it'll be indoor season by then, there'll be less of the flapping at crosses than there might otherwise have been....)
Today is fifteen weeks exactly since my season-ending football injury. After two days of weather more akin to November than August, it was nice to get outside and get back into the rehab regime of walking again.
Today is the first time that I've done the four mile walk you see on the left in under an hour. I've used it as a benchmark once a week to see how I'm doing in the recovery (mile 1-to-2 is very much uphill). I think that all things considered, I'll consider that I'm pretty much back to normal, speed wise. It also felt pretty good, unlike previous times where it was a bit of a struggle in the final few minutes. All that remains is to visit the hospital next Tuesday to see the operating doctor one last time. I shall have to ask him when I can get back on the field again...
Well, it's been three days beyond the limit of two weeks the immigration doctor said it would take to collate my medical test results. On that basis, I've got to presume everything was OK. Today, I've been to the bank to get the Right of Permanent Residence Fee, and have stuck it in an envelope with copies of my medical receipts and a (probably unnecessary) copy of my 2010 tax return final notice. It's now winging its way to Los Angeles as fast as the esteemed Canada Post can get it there......
By the time it gets there and is looked at, it might be 3-4 weeks from the date of my medicals and they might be in the system by then. They say "don't contact us", but I'd like to give them a friendly poke to get their attention and see if they'll look online to see if my medical results have been received/approved; I don't want there to be another three month delay before I hear from them again. All being well, I might get my passport request in a month to six weeks. Maybe it might come faster, but if I've learned anything throughout this whole thing, is that pigs might fly.
A week is a long time in football, they say. Certainly, from last week to this the mood around Valley Parade has changed appreciably, but it's funny what a couple of wins will do to lighten the mood of the supporters. Saturday saw an apparently very good performance against Barnet, coming from a goal down to win 4-2, and there were more happy faces making their way home from BD8 tonight. The first round of the much-maligned Johnstone's Paint Trophy saw the Bantams at home to Sheffield Wednesday, and televised to boot. Being in immigration limbo meant that I could spend a leisurely lunchtime watching it over the internet.
Quite often when we end up playing a side from a higher division, there's a school of thought that says "just don't get beaten heavily". That certainly applied to the game against Leeds three weeks ago. However it would be fair to say Sheffield Wednesday weren't taking things quite so seriously as Leeds did, when they took their keeper off after just 80 seconds, without looking too injured. The conspiratorial smirks on the bench suggested this was entirely expected; it was quickly speculated both online and in the commentary box that this was a way of Wednesday circumventing the "6 man' rule which states that teams must start six men from their last league game. This was pretty much confirmed a little over ten minutes later when two more subs came on, again to amusement from the visiting dugout. It didn't go down well with their supporters on twitter, and I can't blame them. What a slap in the face to the 700 or so travelling supporters that had to brave the M1 and M62 on a Tuesday night to get there.
I really wouldn't expect anything less of a team coached by Gary Megson, purveyor of numerous artless, route-one sides down the years. I often think back to his West Brom side in 2002, who blindly hoofed the ball long for 90 minutes, couldn't create a chance worthy of the name, and then had to resort to one of the most blatant bits of cheating I've ever seen to get them promoted into the Premier League. The Owls side had more of the ball in the first half, but created almost nothing of note, chance wise and the home side should have opened the scoring on the stroke of half time when Hanson headed wide with the keeper all at sea. City improved in the second half. The second showed more of the same from the visitors, but a bit more cutting edge from the home side; Compton should have scored in the opening seconds of the half after a slip from a debutant central defender who had played in the Owls infamous 14-0 preseason defeat to the mighty Alfreton Town.
City had the ball in the net in the 66th minute as giant defender Luke Oliver headed Chris Mitchell's free-kick goalwards and a defender headed the ball out from inside the back of the net. A clear goal, but as per usual, the standard of FL officiating left a lot to be desired. Ritchie Jones was denied a goal late on by a fine save from the visiting sub keeper O'Donnell, and then Oliver hit the crossbar in injury time. The home side deserved to win on the balance of chances created, but the deadlock meant straight to the lottery of penalties. City had won two shootouts two seasons ago and we were hoping another loanee keeper might make a name for himself. Swedish keeper Oscar Jansson, on loan from Spurs saw the first attempt from the useless Clinton Morrison balloon over the bar, before saving from Chris Palmer. Jones and Michael Flynn buried theirs, Wednesday's Giles Coke scored his, boyhood Wednesday fan Ross Hannah netted, before Jansson saved a really very poor effort from Chris Sedgwick to win the game and get his reward of a giant pile-on. An ultra-cynical reading of the shootout and the level of spot-kick taken would lead you to speculate they were trying to miss those as well. Maybe that's a bit harsh. Maybe.
Ultimately, Megson got his wish. I would hope there's a disrepute charge or something winging his way somewhere pretty soon. For many lower division players (and fans), the chance of a Wembley day out is pretty much limited to the Play-Off final; if he feels he can in clear conscience deny the supporters a chance at that, as well as the significant financial boost that comes with it, then he's even more of a pillock than he showed himself to be tonight. As for BCFC, I was impressed with the work-rate (just as I was in the Leeds game), but tonight, there was a much greater solidity to the team. Luke Oliver was something of a figure of fun last season, but he has apparently been very good this season and was commanding tonight. Jones in the midfield was also very good I thought. Two good performances under Colin Cooper make me hope that the club will keep him on in his coaching capacity, he gave a very impressive interview on the radio after Saturday's game about the length of time he has taken since his playing career to get his UEFA coaching qualifications. Given the new approach of trying to find diamonds-in-the-rough, the club needs coaches of his calibre.
Being a gentleman of leisure at present - dictated by the whims of the Canadian government's immigration system - means I can get up fashionably late in the morning. So it was something of a shock to turn the computer on today to find that the Bantams are yet again without a manager. It all seems very odd; Jackson spends all day yesterday trying to sign new players, watches our next league opponents last night, takes training this morning and gave interviews to the local media ahead of the weekend. The actions of a man about to resign? Hardly.
Whatever was said, and by whom, in the board meeting this afternoon has turned the place upside down again. Just when you thought that the club had found the right path, and had a plan and were going to stick to it, it gets thrown out of the window three weeks into the season. I'll be very interested to see what happens tomorrow regarding any statements the club makes. Let's be clear: I believe today's statement about the goings on about as much as those emails from Nigerian princes who want to give me twenty million dollars. The club's PR is catastrophic sometimes and it seems virtually none of the fans buys the club's line, and Radio Leeds don't seem to buy it either.
The more things like this carry on, the more my belief is retrenched that this club won't progress one inch until every last member of the front office has cleared their desk.
As I mentioned two posts down, I'd been getting very annoyed with the lack of general progress from the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles. That said, I'm sure I wasn't the only one. And it's nice to see that they have finally got cracking with lots of people's cases who had heard nothing for months. All of the highlighted cases (in grey or dark green) have had contact in the last couple of weeks, whether medical requests or passport requests.
All will have different tales to tell, and have different personal circumstances, but each applicant and their families will have had the same distraction/paranoia for the last 18 months or so, and so it's nicer for all of them to be closer to the end than the beginning. The most recently updated case is at the very top, one of the early November applicants. Cases from November onwards were processed differently, with medical requests coming long before their letters of acknowledgement, and it seems to result in much faster processing. There were, according to the tracker (only the cases sent to LA are shown here) an outlandish number of cases submitted in March/April 2010, causing a huge backlog. It's Sod's Law writ large that I should end up getting stuck behind the backlog, and then them changing the rules for cases submitted a month after I applied to speed things up!
Last night we had the latest in a series of thunderstorms. We must get one or two a week, always in the early evening after a warm day. Even so, last night's one was an odd one, with bright sunshine shining in from the west and some utterly weird clouds. Here's a photo taken by a reader of the Calgary Herald. It reminds me of the scenes in Independence Day when the alien spaceships appear. Except, in this case, there is no need for Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid and Mister President.
I'd been threatening to write a fairly bad-tempered entry about the lack of activity in my permanent residence case, which had seen nothing happen since mid-May, while others who applied weeks and months after me were at the point of passport requests. Last week, however, my address disappeared in my online status login, which was supposedly a sign of something happening. But after three whole months of nothing happening, and nearly five months since my last contact from them, the trip to the mailbox was done on autopilot, expecting nothing but bills, magazineas and junk mail. So you can well imagine my shock when I went downstairs this morning to find a plain white envelope marked "Canadian Consulate General: Los Angeles" addressed to me. A very nervous trip back upstairs followed; it felt too thick to be a single rejection letter, and so it proved.
Instead, it was a request for me to take an immigration medical as soon as possible. There was no sign of a letter saying "you pass the eligibilty criteria" so I have to assume that I have done. There is the form (with the photo of me taken across the road 10 months ago) which I must present to the doctor, in addition to his forms which I have to take with me. I will arrange my medical exam with an approved doctor in the morning now I have found out which is the nearest to me. The form on his website shows a very fairly long list of questions to answer. Then follow a chest x-ray and blood and urine tests. If I can get them all done in one day, then the delay in collating the results will be minimised. If everything goes well, hopefully the last step, the Canadian security check and passport request will get here in the coming weeks.
There is possibly some light at the end of this tunnel.
Tomorrow will be eleven weeks since I hospitalised myself in the name of the beautiful game, and four since I had the cast removed. Time flies when you're, er, sitting immobile on the sofa for weeks on end watching daytime TV. Things are now coming together a little bit. I've now had five sessions with the physiotherapist; she says things are going very well, and makes lots of positive noises each time I go. My ankle now looks like an ankle again, with the features gradually re-appearing from under all the swollenness and scar tissue and so on. It still turns bright red and swells when I'm on my feet for more than 15 minutes. I can walk reasonably well (I would put it at about 70%) when I walk slowly (far more slowly than I would normally), but it looks a little bit more silly when I try and walk faster. I'm now more understanding of what I can do in a day, and what is overdoing it. But there has been definite progress in the time that mum and dad were here, from limping pronouncedly when I met them in the airport three Fridays ago, to being able to move freely when I saw them off on Sunday.
The number of exercises that I get to do increases with every trip to physio, and by my count I now have to do fourteen different ones three times a day, and have to sit and make circles with my foot (or spell the alphabet) when I'm not doing that. There's also the evening drill of putting my foot/ankle into a bucket of hot water for a minute, then a cold one for a minute, and repeating for 10 minutes which often gets forgotten about. I'm also learning other new tricks to do with apparatus/props at physio that I can't take home. There's still a long way to go, another seven or eight weeks, but I can see the progress from one week to the next. And possibly only eight more times to be hooked up to the machine that passes a current through my ankle via two electrodes. That's really not a fun way to finish each session. But today the therapist said that I can swim again. That'll be fun to get back into.
Talking of getting back into things, I went on in a post below about fitting into old suits and so on. I really couldn't commend the 'breaking your ankle while living off savings' diet to anyone, but less activity = less eating, as well as better eating, and less in the booze column too. So it went that the weight fell off, and I would hope it will carry on in the same fashion. I finally managed to buy a cheap set of weighing scales this afternoon on the way back from physio. This time last year, if mum and dad's bathroom scales are to be believed, I weighed 15st 5lb. I was thinking that I might be somewhere around the weight that I came over here at (bizarrely, it's one of the things you are asked by immigration in the airport when you arrive to get your work permit). It was a very pleasant surprise to find out that today, I am apparently 34lb lighter than last year, at a much better 12st 13lb. Hopefully the swimming will see some more weight come off.
Updates have been a bit sparse of late, since mum and dad got here a week last Friday. Today was a trip to the baseball. In the latest in a continuing series of photos of my legs, guess who forgot to put sunscreen on them?
So the cast is off. This was so much of an event in my little world that I was wide awake at 5:50am this morning. Bus negotiated the rush-hour traffic fairly well. On arrival, the usual checks and five minutes later it was x-ray time, then another wait and a date with a circular saw. That's a very odd sensation. Some more cleaning up of the wounds and then inspection by the doctor. Over his shoulder, I could see my x-rays and that the number of screws in my ankle looks to be more than the advertised seven. Still, he thinks a) it is all going to plan and b) is OK for me to carry on without air cast. His command to me is to be off the crutches within two weeks, fitting physio in where possible. It was a pleasant surprise to find out I get five or six free physio appointments, for which I was expecting to pay.
So for the record, here's what it looks like.
Outside
Inside:
And if you're trying to count the staple wounds, I'll save you the bother. There are forty-two of them (!)
Come on, you thought BCFC might have turned over a new leaf, hadn't you? No more PR own-goals, a new manager, new players, new facilities, coaching structure, scouting structure, and fitness coach. After all that, all that was left in the off season was to unveil the kits they'd wear this year.
Well here they are. Despite being assured by the powers-that-be that the the new deal with Nike would give us a home kit that would be bespoke, we've ended up with a standard Nike template zig-zag-edged design currently also worn by Crystal Palace and sunday league teams the length of the country. It doesn't look so bad I suppose, at least from the front. The blank back for numbering looks a touch daft. At least they look to have got the colours right, unlike asics' infamous 'rhubarb and custard' of our Premier League days. Black trim on the end of the sleeves and a black collar I think would look better. But the away strip........goodness me. A quick canvas of twitter is overwhelmingly negative.
The club's justification in the Telegraph and Argus is "other teams do it, so so should we". I wonder if the players had any say in it; they're the ones that'll have to wear it while being ridiculed by opposition players and fans alike. I wonder if the players could stage some sort of insurrection over it?
Remember that mystery weight loss I was talking about a couple of posts down? Well, this won't explain all of it, but have a look at the difference between my healthy and crocked legs. The doctor had made some offhand remark about 'having to get you learning to walk again since there will be muscle wastage', but I didn't think it would be quite this pronounced after just 44 days.
Funny thing is, it had completely escaped my notice until it was pointed out to me by my ex-boss yesterday afternoon. Amazing sometimes how things under your nose get overlooked.
More than once in the last six weeks I've made some remark, more befitting of an old-age pensioner, of "I haven't been outside in four days". Fortunately, Wednesdays are a good excuse to get out and about to watch the football team I played in before broken bones got in the way. Last night was the grand final of the "CSSC: Wednesday Recreational A" league, on the very same field that I became a cripple on, six weeks earlier. The goalmouth in question is on the right. Had I a better graphics program, I might have put a white outline on it as a bit of a joke, but I don't have Photoshop. I was even tempted to have some Phoenix-from-the-Flames type reconstruction made.
All of which is distracting from the serious business of the evening: the glittering prize of a winners t-shirt. I occupied my usual role of moral supporter, dog minder, and provider of pithy remarks. The opponents had seven substitutes to go with their six on the field, whereas team Hangover had the bare minimum two female players, with no subs. Three cheers for Julia and Alexis who played the whole game without a rest. Follow the twitter commentary here. The game swung back and forth, 1-0 down, 2-1 down, and 3-2 up before it finished 3-3, with the last ten minutes essentially the two goalies hitting it long to one another because no-one else could really move. So it was that penalties would decide the game. Fortunately, the opposition seemed to think the goal was actually a couple of streets away, so far over the bar were three of their attempts. Captain-ess (for the evening) MacGregor buried her attempt, which ended up as the winner. Yes, ten penalties, one goal. And we're all now a t-shirt better off.
The lady who lives in the flat across the hallway from me has a dog that incessantly barks whenever it hears anyone in the hall, or when it goes outside. Or when you're coming home from work, it barks at you from the balcony above the door. That's not to say I am anti-dog; friends have a golden retriever puppy that is very cute, and someone at work has one that is older and is equally fun. I am only anti-dog if they are irritants, and comes as no surprise than my bane is some pampered midget furball like the one in The Kipper and the Corpse episode of Fawlty Towers which got its comeuppance via bangers a la bang
It is annoying beyond words, and was so loud the other day that it was clearly audible to my parents thousands of miles away when they were on the webcam, despite it being behind two doors. I would like to forcibly introduce it to my crutches; despite it having lived there 18+ months, I don't think I've ever seen the owner, or what it looked like. Today, however, I heard it being taken outside, and then a few minutes later heard it barking outside. Here it is. Target acquired......
Yes, it's a suit. Not just any suit, but my 'lucky' one, having seen and successfully negotiated two succesful job interviews, a PhD defence, and a final PhD talk. The thing is, it's the better part of ten years old, bought when I was a much more streamline figure than I am now; so much so that I haven't been able to fit in the trousers for years. This meant all manner of carrying on last summer when I had to go back to Yorkshire for two friends' wedding. Couldn't find a suit here after a long search - try finding a suit in a menswear shop here that isn't blue or black - and eventually found one in the Next at the White Rose Centre which is not all that different a colour.
I'd noticed in the last few weeks of being sat on the sofa doing nothing following busting my ankle that numerous pairs of shorts and jeans were getting beyond the point of loose. I'm a lot less active, aside from what you can do on crutches, and so eating much less. I guess the body finally had find an alternative fuel source and decided to burn all those years worth of beer and bacon baguettes from the library cafe in Warwick. This afternoon I tried the suit on, and hey presto, a comfortable(ish) fit. I'm pleased, since I like this suit a lot, but blimey, knackering your ankle is an uncomfortable and dull way to go about it!
Postscript: the suit I bought in Ottawa in 2007 is now so poorly fitting it needs to be altered quite substantially, and the one I bought last year will probably need similar treatment if the rate of loss continues.
In the lull before the apparent new investor/takeover, there's one snippet of Bantams news today, in that David Wetherall left the club today after 12 seasons to take a job as the head of youth development at the Football League. Signed from L***s U****d in the summer of 1999 following promotion to the Premier League for what was a club record fee at the time of £1,300,000. Unarguably, his headline moment came at the end of that season:
I was sat right in line with the trajectory of the ball and it was a goal from the second he made contact. That moment, just 12 minutes into the win-or-else game with Liverpool was sporting theatre of the highest degree; the small club with a team full of ageing journeymen defying one of the giants of English football, with a novice coach let go by Liverpool as a teenager. But in that moment, along with Gunnar Halle's goalline clearance as Michael Owen rounded Matt Clarke and rolled the ball toward an unguarded net was the beginning of the end for the five or six years of progress the club had made. The 1-0 win, after hanging on for the next 80+ by their very fingernails (though Isaiah Rankin could have made that last five minutes far easier had he not missed a very presentable chance), assured Premier League survival at the expense of Wimbledon (who lost at Southampton). The result set in motion the infamous "six weeks of madness" which pretty much bankrupted the club two years later after relegation in 2001, from which the club has been struggling to recover ever since.
Following two spells in administration, Wetherall was offered more than once chance to leave to play at a higher level as the club slid down the divisions, but it was his choice to defer wages and renegotiate his contract over a longer term. As the years passed, what little pace he had evaporated, but his reading of the game and his dominance in the air were second to none, and you could lay very little blame at his door playing-wise for the two further relegations the club suffered in 2004 and 2007, though in the latter case he had been put into a near impossible situation as caretaker manager following the dismissal of Colin Todd. Latterly, he worked as youth team coach, helping the club survive by selling on talented youngsters to Premier League academies, and for which work he has been recognised by promotion into his new job.
He appeared in 304 games from Bradford City, and another 202 for L***s U****d. Best wishes to him in his new position.
Last night saw the final game of the 2011 Stanley Cup final. After nine long months we finally found out who would win the best looking trophy in sport; for so much of the season it looked like it would be Vancouver that would win, given their dominant performance in the regular season. But the playoffs themselves are another two months long, and it's an arduous course to get to the sixteen wins required to hoist the trophy. Vancouver narrowly won the first two games, thanks largely to the resistance of Boston goalie Tim Thomas. Boston had to therefore win four of the five remaining games. The series pretty much turned on one incident: the head injury to Boston forward Nathan Horton in the early stages of game three, leaving him with a concussion and Vancouver defenceman Aaron Rome with a four game ban, the longest in finals history. Vancouver had no answer to Boston's aggression and hitting, losing 8-1 and 4-0 in successive games in Boston, thus planting the seeds of doubt in the mind of notoriously flaky-when-the-chips-are-down Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo.
Vancouver won game five 1-0 very late on through a goal from the generally objectionable Maxim Lapierre, before Boston once again routed the Canucks in game six by a 5-2 scoreline. Look at the scorelines: in Vancouver, the Canucks played 3 won 3, 5 goals for, 2 against. In Boston, the Bruins played 3, won 3, scored 17, conceded 3. All six games won by the home side. Would that pattern continue in game seven? In a word, no. A frantic opening period saw clear-cut scoring chances at a premium, but Boston scored late in the period and thereafter looked in little danger of losing; the truly back-breaking moment would come via a freak ricochet off the glass, an almost exact replica of the decisive moment in the Canucks favour in the conference final against San Jose. Instead of a defensive clearance along the boards, the puck cannoned out sideways to Patrice Bergeron who broke away short-handed to grab his second and make it 3-0 on the Canuck powerplay, crashing into the net with goalie, checker, and puck. Just over a year ago, he'd been relegated to pretty much the bit-part role of face-off specialist in the same building in the Olympic gold medal game, but was critically involved this time. Vancouver tried to rally in the third, but a team missing players - some more important than others - through injury, and other key players playing injured had no answer. The Sedin twins, so dominant for most of the regular season, and who were expected to carry the team, were brutally shut down by the Bruins second line of Marchand, Bergeron and Recchi and both ended -4 on the evening. Recchi had announced before the series that he would retire, aged 43, after 1,652 regular season games, another 189 in the playoffs, and three Stanley Cups. He made his debut for the Pittsburgh Penguins when I was still in primary school. What a way to retire.
This series was all about the Boston goalie Thomas. In seven games, he conceded just eight goals. That's a level of performance Superman might feel envious of. Hard to believe it took him till his thirties to get a regular game in the NHL. Look at his career history on the right, taking in the ECHL in Alabama, the IHL, three spells in Finland, one in Sweden, and then, finally the AHL affiliate of the Bruins. That's a very, very long road to the top. From Flint, Michigan, a small town fallen on hard times, having to claw his way up by his fingernails. Thirty-seven years old and he hasn't played 350 NHL games, and lost his place in the team to Tuukka Rask last season. He's unorthodox, to be sure, and it sometimes costs him goals (such as the game winning goals in games two and five), but he's generally hugely effective. He will be a certainty to win his second Vezina Trophy in three seasons, on the back of a modern-day record save percentage. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy for playoff MVP which was pretty much a given, probably even if the Bruins had lost the game. In hindsight, Team Canada should be very glad that he didn't line up for the Americans in the Olympic gold medal game in the same building in 2010.
As for the Canucks, the team as a whole just ran out of steam and fit players at just the wrong moment. I can't help but think sometimes that in the last year or two the team's numbers are artificially inflated somewhat. They play in a division in which the other teams finished 10th, 12th, 14th and 15th of 15, which was the knock on the Washington Capitals for the last couple of years. Shut down the Sedins and a lot of the offence disappears. Kesler did a fine job in the first couple of rounds of carrying the team almost on his own, but eventually he wore down under the strain. It comes to something when a third line of Hansen-Lapierre-Torres is your most effective line in seven games of a Stanley Cup final.
So that's all done with until mid September when the exhibition games start again. Just time for CBC to sign the season off in the usual way. It contorts my mind that they can be so good at things like this when they continue to employ a certain completely tone-deaf oaf in loud suits.
You go weeks without a football related post and then two appear in the same day, though the last one was actually written yesterday. It's been superceded by the news today that there is a would-be buyer for the club. Logistics magnate Steve Parkin, who once tried to buy his hometown Leeds United has made an offer to the football club, and is making overtures to the Bradford Bulls to become a sporting club with pooled facilities in a similar manner to Wigan and, once upon a time, Huddersfield Town.
The owners of the club have turned down the initial offer as too low, which is their prerogative given the amount of money they have poured into the pit in the last few years, but doesn't really reconcile with their remarks of (to paraphrase) "we'd like to go back to being fans only; if someone makes an offer we'll gladly step aside". The really puzzling thing about the whole thing is the proposal to build a new, shared stadium. There's a perfectly serviceable stadium in BD8, which has almost been rebuilt in its entirety since it reopened in 1986. Why spent tens of millions on a new stadium, land purchase, infrastructure costs and so on, when the main stand could be extended to run the full length of the pitch and the Bradford End redeveloped?
I haven't posted about the travails of the once-mighty Bantams for a while. The problem with the off-season in an odd-numbered year is that there's no meaningful football to get you through the summer; a problem magnified when you have to sit here all day with a broken ankle not able to do anything. Baseball and hockey (and latterly the NBA basketball final) help to pass the time but there's nothing like some news out of BD8. So a bit of a roundup.
Firstly, Peter Jackson did get the permanent job after acting as interim manager from February. Fourth Division survival was assured in the end, but far too close to the end of the season for comfort. The 1-5 home drubbing by Crewe on the last day of the season seemed to spell out just what a tough job any manager would have for the 2011/12 season. Jackson's response was all you would hope it would be; ten players out of contract players released and an admission that offers would be entertained for any of the others. This was the club's worst finish for 45 years after all. I hope Jackson does well; he has an affection for the club given his captaincy of the 1984/85 Third Division title-winning team, and then leading the team in 'exile' as Valley Parade was rebuilt following the fire. He's not just another failed-somewhere-else manager turning up for the pay.
On the subject of Valley Parade, the club announced that they would indeed be staying at Valley Parade and not moving to Odsal. In early May they managed to purchase back the block containing the ticket offices, club shop and so on. Evidently the money borrowed to do this has to be repaid at a lower amount than the £370,000 it supposedly cost to rent from the company it was sold to in the early 2000s. In hindsight, paying the rent for that block was a far harder thing to understand than it was to pay the same rent for the stadium. The cost of staying at Valley Parade was therefore cut by a considerable margin, and presumably the money saved can now be spent on the team; essentially the fifth separate team the club has fielded since relegation in 2007. As was also expected, stadium landlord Gordon Gibb and the trustees of the Flamingoland Pension Fund didn't budge in the face of the club's requests to renegotiate the rent. You can't help but wonder if the whole thing was just some huge smokescreen while they negotiated with the owners of the office block. I do hope that some of the people involved have reflected on their catastrophically bad PR and the effect it had on the morale of the supporters, and more importantly, the playing staff.
Today's first signing of the off-season proper (if we discount Ross Hannah's signing at the end of last season) shows that Jackson has at least some understanding of the team's problems. Guy Branston might not be most people's cup of tea, especially after seeing him play against us in the past, but he might be what the team has missed for years. A physical, imposing, vocal, no-nonsense central defender of the very old school, his early career seemed to be blighted by red cards galore (or at least that's my recollection). The constant recurring theme over the last five years is that the team is just too 'nice', and frequently a shambles, defensively. If he can make us less agreeable to play against, that's a good start. In recent years, perhaps the hot-headedness of Branston's early years seems to have mellowed to some degree, and was selected in the Fourth Division Select XI at the PFA awards in April following a fine season for Torquay United, in which they set a team record ten consecutive shutouts (and blanking BCAFC twice). If he can begin to knock those rough edges off Steve Williams and get him to concentrate through the game for 90 minutes, then even better.
(As an aside, if you'd said to me 10 years ago that signing him from Torquay would even happen, let alone be broadly welcomed amongst the support, I'd have laughed you out of the room. But such has been the last 10 years to end up in this position.)
The letter on the right is my ambulance bill for my trip to hospital nearly four weeks ago. I think, all things considered, it'd have been cheaper to get one of my teammates to drive me to hospital. The only drawback would have been a lack of morphine in the glove compartment.
I'm more annoyed that until I get a receipt back, I can't claim the sum back on my work insurance. Which, given the current postal strikes in these parts and their three-day weeks, will take even longer to get here.
So after nearly three weeks since my mangling of my left leg/ankle, today was a return to the hospital. On the agenda today was removal of the temporary cast, inspection by the surgeon and replacement with a new lightweight cast. Along the way was the previously unexpected removal of about 40 staples that were holding the scars together which was a bit ticklish to say the least. I now sport a two-inch scar behind the knobbly bit of my left ankle and a four inch one down the right hand side of my shin. Two plates and seven screws hide beneath, presumably for good. The surgeon said that everything seemed to be going OK, the new x-rays that I had taken were OK, and that I should be in a cast for another four weeks before I can begin to learn how to go about things two-legged again.
All that remained was to choose what colour I wanted my new fibreglass cast. It's much lighter than the giant leaden thing I had been wearing for the previous three weeks. White, black, purple, blue, bright orange and neon green were all eschewed for the bright red you see on the left. My date with two legs: Wednesday, July 6th, 8:30 am (!). Twenty-nine days and counting.....
There's not really any way to dress it up; sitting on your arse all day is really quite boring. So here's to the one bit of good news this week. I checked my electronic immigration log-in yesterday just out of routine and lo, an update (see left)! I never received an email notifying me of this, but others in the same situation apparently had the same thing happen.
I have been selected for faster processing, meaning that I should now hear from Los Angeles in a month to six weeks. Provided I meet their selection criteria (I do, I just worry sometimes about their own interpretation of their own rules), I would then have a medical request. Suddenly, the end of all this is becoming visible on the horizon.
So that post two or three entries down about how excited I was to be playing football again? Well, there'll be no more football this summer, as you can see on the right.
I have broken my ankle (I will spare you all the gory details, those who were there at the time know what it looked like before I got to hospital). Safe to say, there is now no more work, no more sport, and the plan of waiting for permanent residence by swimming/running and so on has also been scuppered.
Six weeks of sitting on the sofa in the position shown. Sigh
Time flies when you're having fun, or so they say. Quite how much fun my project is at present - and life in a lab in general - is open to debate, but it has slowly crept up to nearly two months since I had my last bit of immigration-related news.
A check of the tracking website today offers a bit more good cheer; there seems to be another round of transferring cases from Buffalo to local consulates. They are now at applications somewhere up to three weeks before my application landed. A general trend seems to be that transfer occurs three months after the first acknowledgement letter, so if my case was selected to be transferred (I am hoping an August-exipiring work permit prompts them into doing this) a month from now, I could conceivably be done by late summer/early autumn. Everything crossed!
Carrying on from the post below, I was reading a BCFC forum which turned up a little snippet today. I had no idea this was the case, but it appears Walsall football club pay a rent of £460,000 a year on the stadium on gates of 3,500. I don't hear them pleading poverty via their local press.
Missed those rambling, football-related rants? Read on...
The latest drama to befall Bradford City in this season from hell was an announcement this week in the Yorkshire Post that the club cannot afford to carry on at Valley Parade. To recap the tale of woe: in 2003, the club sold the stadium to the Pension Fund of the Flamingo Land theme park, owned by then City co-owner Gordon Gibb in a bid to make post-2002-administration ends meet. Fine in theory, until the co-owners clashed in 2004, resulting in Gibb's resignation, and a second adminstration in 18 months. The club has to pay a rent of some £300,000 per year. Manageable in the higher divisions, but as the club has slid, so the rent became more onerous. A similar situation arose with the office block containing the club offices and shop. Add the bills, rates and so on, and it costs the club more than a million pounds before a ball is kicked.
The club has tried the 'we might leave Valley Parade, we can't afford it' line before in the Telegraph and Argus. This time, the club went to the Yorkshire Post, presumably so that the employees of Flamingo Land in the York area could read the news for themselves, and presumably be worried at the news and press the trustees of the pension fund into action. Personally speaking, it's an entirely transparent tactic, and, frankly, disappointing that we should have to resort to moves such as this. We've had numerous reports in the past three years that the club is in the black, financially, and the stadium overheads are paid via off-field activities, and the future won't be gambled with. All of a sudden we can't afford to play there, and won't play Lewis Hunt any more because it will trigger another year's contract. The complete disappearance of Tommy Doherty has lead a few people to suspect he is in the same situation.
Further, it entirely undermines the 'we can't afford to play at Valley Parade' argument when in the very same week, it's announced that general admission for Tuesday night's game with Burton Albion will be £1. Either we can afford to lose roughly 1,000 people's £20 for two or three thousand paying £1 (because, from experience, they won't spend the other £19 on beer, bovril or pies), or we can't. Which is it?
The club have floated playing at Odsal as an alternative; but to break the lease with Gibb would probably result in administration for the third time in nine years (and fourth since 1983). The Football League will undoubtedly impose a punitively harsh points penalty (think Luton's -30 as a ballpark figure) which would pretty much result in relegation to the Blue Square Premier. Who, of course, don't accept members in administration and so it's not a completely wild doomsday scenario that we'd find ourselves in the Northern Premier League. It happened to Boston United, after all.
In and among all of the doom and gloom of the last few days, the team got absolutely shellacked at Southend tonight, with a whole raft of players out of position: a left back at right back, a midfielder at centre back, a midfielder up front, and a centre forward on the left wing, as an example of the utter shambles of a squad that Taylor assembled. Despite what players say, off-field business like this does affect the team. Hopefully, as many players as possible are on the way out in the summer, as they have shown themselves, time and again, to be just not good enough. The budget will be cut as it is for next season, and it needs some sort of miracle worker to not have the team in the same position this time next year.
It's been said so many times by so many people over the last ten years, but 'it can't possibly get any worse' has been shown to be so very frequently wrong. At what point does it start moving in the other direction?
Thirty-something former research chemist pondering important matters, including (but not limited to) Bradford City FC, the Calgary Flames, chemistry, immigration, films, Canada Post, beer, movies, gin, broken ankles, running, beer league goalkeeping, the obscene price of cheese in Canada, how crap Peter Taylor was, crashes in the price of oil, and other iniquities of life, the universe and everything.
