d i n a n e . n e t 

My birthday was supposed to go something like this:

1. Work on mindless reviews all day.
2. Leave quietly at 4:15.
3. Pick up my employee-discounted product from the warehouse.
4. Go over to a bar local to work.
5. Meet up with coworkers.
6. Wait for departing manager (not mine) to show up.
7. Yell, “Surprise!”
8. Thank her for being awesome.
9. Wish her luck in her new position in another division of the company.
10. Leave the party early.
11. Go to church choir.
12. Sing.
13. Go home.
14. Spend maybe an hour or so with Mike.
15. Collapse.

Well, item 1 happened.

Around 4:00 or so, Kate calls me. “Bruins tickets? Box seats? Company pays? I’m so there.” Organizational things go on, and we decide to meet up at Riverside at 5:30. I calculated that it would take me 45 minutes to get the T station, and decided that left me with barely a half hour to learn everything there is to know about hockey. I failed at that, but did learn that in a fit of irony, I was headed to watch the Bruins take on the Toronto Maple Leafs.

4:30 quickly arrived, and I bolted out the door while putting on my jacket and juggling my purse and other various bits. No time to put on my jacket first! Just like I had done on Monday, I didn’t turn right to leave the industrial complex, but continued straight on to the warehouse to pick up my product. Just like Monday, they didn’t have it. On another day, I might have been frustrated about the situation (seriously – they kept calling me to beg me to get my order out of the warehouse, but it wasn’t ever actually there), but on Thursday, I was flying high.

I waited some obscene number of light cycles to leave the complex, and was finally barreling along the Pike. People who aren’t from New England really don’t have any idea what it is like to drive around Boston. For that matter, many people from New England don’t have any idea because they avoid driving around Boston like the plague that it is. The Mass Pike isn’t even the most insane part of the system – it’s just the part I have more cause to take. If you can’t manage stress while driving, don’t drive around here. Just don’t do it.

Soon, I was paying my toll via the airways and the magic of Fast Lane. I merged slowly, ever so slowly, onto 128 (this is, in fact, the most insane part of the system). I quickly got off at the next exit and within a moment or two I was parking at the Riverside T station. At 5:05. So much for the 45 minutes theory. I always, always, always overestimate the time it will take me to get there from work.

I sat in my car for a while, and eventually decided to call Kate and let her know I had arrived. Turns out she was also obscenely early! So I walked on over to her car and we called Mike. He was not insanely early. He would likely be a couple minutes late due to the insane traffic. But he did come, and we did get our handfuls of quarters from the change machines, and we did board the trolley car, and we were on our way to North Station. Of course, this train only went as far as Government Center… It is not unusual for the green line of the T to be a disaster, so we weren’t exactly surprised.

We arrived at the Gardens (or whatever it’s called these days) pretty uneventfully, and took the short cut through the lines that is allowed to the “Premium” visitors. The word “awesome” applies. Of course, we got slightly lost, and ended up going up about eight thousand flights of stairs to get up to the main concourse. We then took our special escalator up to the promised land – the “Premium” level. Awesome!

We walked around the perimeter of the stadium and quickly found the correct box and opened the door. We were lined up with the blue line, with an awesome view. The box itself was like a small hotel room (sans bed). It had a private bathroom with fancy fixtures, a little kitchenette type thing, a closet, a couple squishy leather chairs, a bar and bar stools facing the ice, and a huge glass sliding door. We ogled everything, and then went out to the seats in front of the glass. These were also squishy leather and each seat had ample room and a cup holder or two. I tried to call my dad. No answer. I left a message.

The waitress (waitress!) came by and opened the glass doors all the way (we didn’t realize they opened all the way!). She asked if she could get us anything, and Kate asked her to come back later after the rest of the group had arrived. As we waited for them and for the game to start, Mike discovered that one of the three television screens (three!) was actually an interactive system. Using the touch screen, you could dynamically select the camera angle, pick out a replay, and read all kinds of statistics right from the “Premium” box. It was super-cool-awesome-neat.

Eventually the other two groups came. One was five people from a department Kate doesn’t work with (no customers) and the other was three people from Kate’s department (also no customers). Given that Kate was somehow the highest ranking of the three employees, she was in charge of ordering food and putting it on her company credit card (!). The employee attached to the group of five didn’t think they should do that, and was kind of a bitch about it. Kate, meanwhile, had been sat down by her boss before she left for the game, and he told her she could spend like $300 on food for the 11 of us. We got together with the group of three (which consisted of employee, husband, and cute-as-a-button [why are buttons supposedly so cute?] 7-year-old who was wearing a Bruins sweater), and picked out a pizza and some fancy nacho dip thing, along with some beers.

The food arrived very quickly, and it was pretty darn good. We settled in at the bar, allowing the families to spread out in the seats below. The bar really did offer a great view, along with convenient places to eat from. By about ten minutes into the first period, and the Bruins looked to be doing well. They had significantly more shots on goal than the Maple Leafs, and the puck generally stayed away from their goalie. Sweet. In the second period, the Bruins finally scored. Awesome!

Unfortunately, the third period did not go so well. The half of the stadium that had previously been booing was now cheering relentlessly. See, the Bruins aren’t exactly the most popular sports team in the Boston area. We prefer our Red Sox and our Patriots in most cases. So, the stadium doesn’t sell out. It seems that some Torontonians figured this out, and pulled a reverse on what Mike and I did for our vacation. Anyway, the people in the stadium that were wearing blue and adding “Eh” to the end of their phrases started getting their chance to cheer during the third period as the Leafs came from behind and beat the crap out of the poor Bruins 4-1.

As we rode back to our cars on the T (along with a few sad-but-not-disappointed Bruins fans and a large number of happy-and-chipper Leafs fans), I savored a most exciting birthday.