Between a Ruck and a Hard Place...

The good news about being here in the Dallas area is that it is a WHOLE lot warmer than Minneapolis.

Any thought about playing some rugby down here in Big D has to be weighed very carefully. There are pros and cons to working as a travel nurse-and I won't bore you with the details. One quirk of this 3 month posting in Texas is that I won't be accruing any sick leave hours. (I do, at least, have health insurance)

So what does all of this mean to a middle-aged prop who would not mind getting a run in an Old Boys game here? I have never been  badly injured playing rugby-a few cuts, scrapes and the odd sore neck. When I had my pulmonary embolism almost two years ago, that had nothing to do with playing rugby-it's just one of those odd things that just happened. That said, it is a physical game. People do get hurt. (All you have to do is read some of the rugby-centric message boards out there) A significant injury could cost me more than a couple of days working, which could cost me anywhere from a couple of hundred to over a thousand bucks, depending on how many days I miss. That's money I can use not just for paying bills, but also putting into my "Kiwi Fund" for going to the RWC in New Zealand later this year.

What can I say? I miss the well-educated, diverse and interesting people who seem to be drawn to Rugby...


It's a tough call. If I was really that concerned about my health, I never would have started playing 5 years ago at the age of 45.  I know I had a great time playing last fall with the Metropolis Old Boys against the East Side Banshees and playing at the Ruggerfest in Aspen. It's something that I have not totally decided on, but I have been giving it a great deal of thought.

Fly Like An Eagle

It's been a very hectic last couple of weeks. In an attempt to get away from our brutal winters in Minnesota, I took a job with the VA Travel Nurse Corps. It was a tough decision to go on the road, but I think it's a good point in my life as well as my wife's life to try spreading our wings and checking out other parts of the country.

Through all of this air  travel and some of  the sights I have seen in Phoenix and Dallas, I cannot help but to think of the Steve Miller song "Fly Like an Eagle"(A Dallas native, by the way).

Last week, I was in Phoenix, Arizona doing some training at the VA Medical Center. It was my first time in The Valley of the Sun. Phoenix is a very spread out metropolitan area with an interesting mix of Mexicans, Native Americans, retirees, yuppies, and Military people. The Medical Center was about a 40 minute walk from my hotel, so when classes were done, I enjoyed exploring the neighborhoods around Indian School Road to 20th street. On one of my walkabouts, I stumbled onto some cool murals with some Segauro cacti near them. The Seguaro Cactus is native to the Desert Southwest, and they are huge. The well in this shot is about 4 feet tall, and you can see how the cactus towers over it. I really liked the painting of the eagle shadow on the wall....

After a week in Phoenix,  where I had a chance to enjoy some great Southwestern style cuisine and take in some other downtown sites,
I am now here in Dallas, Texas; where I am going to be working at the VA Medical Center in South Dallas until mid April on their Spinal Cord Unit. Normally, they don't get much snow in North Texas, but this past weekend, my sister's neighborhood got about 3-4 inches of the white stuff. The kids in her neighborhood took advantage of this rare snowfall and I was able to watch them playing and frolicking like deranged ferrets in the snow having a good time building snowmen and having snow fights with the wet snow.

You don't appreciate how spread out the Dallas/Fort Worth area is until you get down here and either drive in it, or use the DART system(Dallas Area Rapid Transit). It's an almost 1 hour ride (with transfer) from my hotel in North Dallas to the VA Medical Center in South Dallas. I would have liked to be able to bike to and from work with the public transport system like I did up in Minneapolis, but the VA Medical Center is what can be called a "Great hospital-BAD neighborhood". I start work there next Tuesday. This week I have been going around Dallas and getting a feel for where things are located and how long it will take me to get from point A to point B. I have enjoyed taking in the sites in downtown Dallas. 

My wife will be joining me down here in a couple of weeks. I am hoping that she can find some work down here, but I do know that she will be a lot happier to get out of that bitter cold in Minnesota.

I also have on my to-do list looking up the Dallas Harlequins to see if I can catch some games and some socials. That is on my to-do list for the next week.

Leaving Minneapolis....

The Holiday season is not always an easy time to blog. There's work, parties, and in my case packing-but more on that later.

Adam Dilley has been a hooker on the Metropolis Rugby Club even before I joined the club in 2006. Along with being a helluva rugby player, Adam is just a really, really nice guy. We were a little sad to hear that he is leaving Minneapolis to move to the Los Angeles area, where he plans on continuing to play rugby out west. As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade out of it. So we had a huge pub crawl through northeast Minneapolis (or the Nord East, as we say here) for him. It was a good excuse for Metropolis guys to get together and have a good time. One of our favorites is a place called Nye's Polonaise Room. The Polish bar and restaurant is one of the more fun places in Minneapolis to hang out.-and not too many places left that do live polka music in the Twin Cities...

Adam is not the only one leaving the Twin Cities.

I write this blog from Phoenix, Arizona, where I am doing some training for the VA Travel Nurse Corps. I am going to be here for a week, and then I will head to the VA in Dallas, where I will work on the Spinal Cord Unit there for about 3 months.

Minneapolis is, and always will be home for me; but the long cold winters do kind of get to you...

The great thing about rugby, is that even when you move some place, there is always another rugby club  where you can meet new friends and socialize. As luck would have it, the Dallas Harlequins Rugby club is a couple of stops away on the DART(Dallas Area Rapid Transit) line from where I will be staying in North Dallas, near Richardson. I don't know if I can get in on some old boy games with the Harlequins, but just to find a rugby crowd with whom to party will be fine for me.

I am really going to miss the patients and my co-workers at the VA in Minneapolis...

I am really going to miss my kids and my grandson...

But I think getting out of Minneapolis for the winter will do both my wife and me, a world of good.

Out of the Dome and Into the Snow...

Living in Minnesota, people may not always know where we are in the USA, but as of last week, they know Minneapolis as being the home of the collapsed dome stadium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuxNLf87_Y

Believe it or not, once upon a time, The Minnesota Vikings played American Football at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington-a suburb south of Minneapolis. Today, the Mall of America sits on the former site of "The Met".

Since 1982, the Minnesota Vikings have called the Metrodome home. It's a sterile, unappealing white mushroom in downtown Minneapolis. When it's full of 65,000 purple-clad, intoxicated fans, it is one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL, but it's a different experience than what I experienced growing up and going to games at the Met. It was an era where the bitterly cold conditions meant that you dressed for the cold-fashion be damned. (The snowmobilie suit worked the best)

I found the above clip which does a nice job of showing how football used to be here in Minneapolis for the Vikings from 1961-81.

Tonight's Vikings-Bears game will be outside at the University of Minnesota's new TCF Stadium(Also called "The Bank" here in the Twin Cities)http://stadium.gophersports.com/ Already, there has been a lot of whining about playing outside by the players. The temperatures should be well into the single-digits Farenheit, about -12 Celsius at kickoff time. Oh yeah, we are in the midst of another snowstorm which stands to drop 8 more inches of the fluffy white stuff on Minneapolis-this on the heels of last weeks 18 inch (43 cm)

snowfall. This clip shows the job of removing all of this snow from the stadium.... http://www.minnpost.com/minnclips/2010/12/20/24375/timelapse_of_tcf_bank_stadium_snow_removal

My favorite Met Stadium memory was my brother Bill and I watching with thermometer just above zero Farenheit, as the Vikings beat the Los Angeles (now St. Louis) Rams for the NFC title in 1976. The ended up losing to the Oakland Raiders in that Super Bowl...the last time the men in purple have been the Super Bowl.

Tonight's game with the woeful Vikings(Huge disappointment after the team made it to the NFC title game last year before losing to eventual Super Bowl Champs, the New Orleans Saints) and the Chicago Bears will be a throwback to a bygone era. I know I have been feeling very nostalgic. For younger fans, this game will show younger fans how the game was meant to be played-outdoors, conditions be damned.

Rugby Making Better Fathers

On a very snowy Saturday here in Minneapolis, I had a little time before trying to evacuate the foot of drifting snow on my driveway. While catching up on some rugby news, I followed this link from a blogger's guest writer, who wrote about how rugby gave him a lot of practical application to be a better father. (By the way, I think the applications work well for mom's too) Here is the link for the article: http://artofmanliness.com/2010/12/09/5-lessons-rugby-taught-me-about-fatherhood/ .

My kids were older when I started to play rugby. My son was 18, my daughter was 15. My parenting was formed a lot of what NOT to do from my parent's divorce and also lessons I learned from wrestling, American Football and my maternal grandfather-a man who had a great deal of impact in my life when I did not get to see my own father on a regular basis. That said, I think the author of the above article makes some very valid comparisons on how rugby lessons learned are valid ones for anybody who calls themselves "Dad".

Got My RWC Tickets for USA-Italy!

Knowing that the folks in charge of selling tickets for the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand were going to release more tickets today for purchase, I just had to try to get tickets to see a USA Eagles Match.

I already had purchased tickets for Australia-Russia to be played in Christchurch on 10/1, so I had my eyes on either Australia-USA in Wellington, or USA-Italy in Nelson. The few tickets left for the match against the Wallabies were just a bit more expensive than I wanted to spend, whereas there were some General Admission tickets left for the Italy game, so I just pulled the trigger and bought two tickets for the match to be played on Tuesday, September 27th at Trafalgar Park.

My wife is looking forward to the trip. Now I really have to start saving money and planning in earnest..but like Romania from this past weekend, I just punched my ticket for RWC 2011.

Last Ticket for RWC 2011: Uruguay, or Romania?

Like the proverbial Golden Ticket from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there is one last ticket left for the Rugby World Cup to be held in New Zealand next year.

It will all come down to Romania or Uruguay to figure out who will join the 19 other teams in New Zealand. The winner of this playoff will be in the same group as England, Argentina, Scotland and The Republic of Georgia.

A couple of weeks ago, they played out a tense, 20-20 draw in sunny Montevideo(highlights above). This means that today's match in Bucharest will amount to a winner-take-all affair. Both teams have had to play a lot of rugby to get to this point-particularly the Romanians, who at first did not look like they would be able to get out of qualifying out of Europe, but qualify they did, and then they beat Tunisia to have a shot at Uruguay, who dispatched Kazakhstan to get to this point.

Romania has been to every Rugby World Cup since 1987.  They are bigger and more physical than Uruguay, and also have more players playing professionally in Europe-Uruguay only has one, all of the rest of the Teros play on clubs in Argentina. Like Georgia, the Romanians play is dominated by their forwards. Uruguay is going to have to depend on pace and kicking to have a shot at upsetting Romania today. The Romanians probably were hoping for poor weather conditions that would favor their big pack, but the forecast for today is for  12 degrees Celsius, or 54 degrees with partly cloudy skies and minimal wind at kickoff time.

Romania has to be the favorite, but you have to admire the plucky Uruguayans. Can their rugby team shock the rugby world like Diego Forlan and his Uruguayan team mates did at this past summer's FIFA World Cup in South Africa? Much to the shock of everyone, Uruguay won it's group, then made it to the semi-finals-the ONLY South American team to make it to the final four (Much to the chagrin of one Diego Maradona) Romania had plenty of chances to put the Teros away in Montevideo, but Uruguay was able to hang on for the draw. Will Uruguay make the Romanian's pay for a lack of killer instinct? A final, Golden Ticket awaits the winner that will allow them join the party at Rugby World Cup 2011 in New Zealand.