For the first time since Wednesday, I'm home. What happened in between?

Finger - I spent part of Wednesday morning having the final couple of stitches removed, as things had closed up well enough to allow the job to finish. Much less painful than the first destitching, though I still have to keep things covered as there's still some closing up that needs to happen.

This is expected to happen over the next couple of weeks, which will be just in time to have the finger cut open again to fix the nerve. Surgery is scheduled for December 7, and I'm a little concerned because it appears I'll be knocked out in some fashion for it. Seems like overkill for working on a finger.

Turkey - went down to my sister in law's and stuffed myself with the requisite amount of holiday food (a quick plug here for Spinelli's, a function hall and baker in East Boston and Lynnfield, from whom we got a blueberry pie, a pumpkin pie, and a Black Forest cake). I also watched about 30 hours of football, although none in person, which was too bad given the nice weather (another quick plug here for the high school alma mater, who won their conference with a Turkey Day win over dreaded rival Georgetown, and will play Brighton High School in the first round of the playoffs on Tuesday).

Gotham - Yesterday we drove down to NYC to attend the BU-Cornell hockey game at Madison Square Garden. Traffic was awful (everyone in Connecticut was on Route 95 at some point yesterday afternoon), so we got to the hotel later than hoped.

We wound up staying at the Millenium Hilton, which is most notable for overlooking Ground Zero. We got a very good look into the construction site from our room on the 29th floor, but didn't have much of a chance to walk around the site (to the extent that one can).

We took the subway uptown and got off so we could walk over to Rockefeller Center. The tree wasn't lit, but there was skating and at least half of the people who were on Route 95 in Connecticut earlier in the day were there doing the same thing that we were doing.

After extricating ourselves we walked back down to MSG, met up with Chris (i.e. the Grim Reaper of occasional comment fame) and got to our seats... eventually. It's a odd system they use, as there are four "towers" with escalators, which you get off of when you get a floor with your "gate" number on it. It actually didn't work too badly going up (initial confusion notwithstanding), but going down there was a bit of congestion.

MSG bills itself as the World's Most Famous Arena, which is about the best thing you can say for it. It is on the old side, has a very interesting odor (left over from the years of circuses and boxing, I'd imagine), and the seating is done up in a very unappealing purple and teal upholstery which is made out of some sort of rubberized burlap. The sound works very well, at least in terms of volume, though I think at one point someone from JFK called and complained that they couldn't hear the jets take off.

The game went surprisingly well, as the Icedogs scored three in the first en route to a 6-3 win in front of a partisan Cornell crowd. Out of the 18,200 there for the game, I'd say about 16,500 of them were rooting for Cornell. We also heard the Cornell alma mater about 40 times, which is more than I've heard the BU song in 20 years (which is fine, as I'm not a big "Clarissima" fan). They even had Cornell folks locking arms and swaying while singing the song, which I don't think you'd see BU folks do without getting paid.

Not much else to tell of our time, as we went back to the hotel after the game. We did nose around the neighborhood a little in search of a convenience store, and saw St. Paul's Church, which looked interesting, but didn't think that sightseeing at midnight was such a good idea. I'd have liked to have had an extra day, but between the holiday, work for the wife, and the expense of staying down there it wasn't going to happen.