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Well, the AMP Energy NHL Winter Classic game between the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins is over. The Penguins won their second straight against the Sabres with a 2-1 shootout victory.

Rewinding a bit, the Sabres were doing really well before Christmas, with two really exciting games against Philadelphia and a nice win streak. The icing on the cake was the shootout win when Miller stuffed Briere. As much as I like Danny, hey, I’ll still root for the home team so it was great to see Miller stop that shot.

Now, the up-and-down Sabres have dropped several games straight, including the home-and-home series against Pittsburgh which culminated today in the Winter Classic. They also lost against the New Jersey Devils during this current streak.

The Winter Classic lived up to the billing in at least one sense: the wintry weather. While we’ve had some mild weather in Western New York of late, it did turn cold with some snowfall today. That was sort-of ideal if you want to televise the first outdoor NHL game in the United States, and have an obvious topic for your telecast. It resulted in some interesting camera views of the game, and a lot — I might say too much — of Zamboni work and ice repair. It certainly didn’t help the flow of the game on television.

On the plus side, the game was carried by NBC in high definition. We went over to Aaron and Missy’s house to watch it on their big set and it really does make a difference. (I’m sure it would have been much harder to figure out which was a puck and which was a snowflake here at home. Although my answer that is that the pucks are all the same and the snowflakes are all unique.) I call it ridiculous that Time Warner Rochester doesn’t carry the HD feed of the Sabres games, given that the team is all of an hour away and has been so popular of late.

Also rating up there on the ridiculousity scale:

• The maddening frequency that the NBC crew started questions to players and coaches with some variation of: “I know you spent a lot of time playing on frozen ponds, so …”
• The sheer number of references to how great Sidney Crosby is. Guys — whether you’re at NBC or the NHL — please get off this. There are lots of other players on the ice who are interesting and at least as deserving of air time. I’d hate your national broadcasts less if you brought out the character of the league and the game. Plus, the Penguins will play the West Coast teams what, maybe once every seven years? Most of the North American continent, even if they have an NHL franchise, will never see this guy again. Maybe you should prop up all of your players, coaches, teams, and cities. Oh, I forgot, no one but hockey fans are even watching these games anyway because the NHL is so broken, so it doesn’t really matter.
• The stoppages of play when the Zambonis rolled out. Can we go ten minutes without them, pleasethankyoubye?

All in all, it would have been more satisfying if the Sabres had just won. Sigh.

The cold snap we’ve been experiencing, which has kept us below freezing continuously for several weeks, has me concerned.

Our new sump pump normally pushes water out into the storm drain channels on our side of the street. Under ideal conditions, this results in water flowing down the channels across the entire width of our front yard, to the storm drain grate on the far side of our driveway.

Since then end of January, this channel has been pretty much a solid block of ice, around four inches thick.

The water has, in the last week, spilled out more into the street. It is pushing a few feet across — maybe a quarter of road’s width. I did some bailing to keep the water from pooling at a high level and backflowing into the bubble pot. Eventually, I surmised, that could lead to the whole pipe from the basement getting frozen. The only thing saving it from backing up into the basement would be the emergency release that would let water spill out all over the ground near the house.

So, I decided to attack this problem in earnest. I bought my first pickaxe and tried to chip away with it. I’m out of shape, and it was tough to break through that much ice. Over the weekend, I finally made the breakthrough, and had a complete channel dug between the sump pump pipe’s bubble pot in our yard, and the storm sewer grate.

Now our neighbors know us for my pickaxe. Grin.

I was hoping this ice channel would last a few days. Since it was narrow and relatively free of slushy debris, I hoped the water would flow freely and more quickly than it did in the wider channel normally provided by the concrete underneath. As the sump pump did its job, though, I could see water moving, but new thin layers of ice were also forming.

Sadly, the free flow was not to be. By Monday morning, the ice had refrozen almost up to the previous level I’d chipped away. By Monday evening, it was overflowing even that — somewhat of a blessing, since that meant that it was still flowing, somehow.

While chatting with one of my neighbors, I found out that we probably have a spring behind our house. This makes sense, but it’s not comforting. We probably have the lowest basement on our side of the street, so we depend upon the entire system for our sump pump to be working. Thank goodness for the new battery backup, which we needed during a power outage caused the recent ice storm in January.

Well, I better get back to bailing out our little pond, and perhaps some chipping.