Bandwagoning on Ice

Our friend Nick is up in Newport, Rhode Island, now (through next spring, at the Navy Surface Warfare College up there) and so I took the train up there on Friday evening at his invitation to watch game 7 of the Stanley Cup, along with Doug, who lives not far away elsewhere in Rhode Island. It's the first Penguins game I watched start to finish this year, or in the last two or three years at least, and shameless bandwagoning or not I know something like a good hockey game when I see one, and that one was fantastic. Although your team winning the Stanley Cup will effectively elevate the excitement level, too. I really should try to watch more hockey next year.

Nick cooked this amazing New England style soup (two kinds of Portuguese sausage, chicken, kale, minced potatoes) and we had beer and nachos and hung out till 2 in the morning talking around a fire pit in his back yard after the game. Nick is renting a small house so as to be out of the way of summer traffic; it's got a nice yard. He's exactly a mile from the head of the Cliff Walk trail in Newport and I ran up a decent sunburn walking that with him on Saturday afternoon.

If you want another item to file in the City of Champions file, the Economist magazine ranked Pittsburgh as the most liveable city in the USA this week, too.