Sunday, March 25, 2007

In Town Recommendations

EDIT: I got the scoop on Martinizing. They ARE NOT owned by C&R Cleaners, and never have been. They are part of a small cluster of Martinizing stores owned by a pediatrician (from Bismark, I think). EXCELLENT service? Not part of C&R? Owned by a baby doctor? All the more reasons to give them your business!


Here's a place where you can recommend, or ask for a recommendation, for a service here in Grand Forks.

I'll start: I recommend Martinizing Cleaners over C&R Dry Cleaners. The latter really messed up an order, and had a "blame the customer" approach. If the person taking in my order had put down the personal call she was taking on the phone and served me properly, then my order might not been so messed up. Additionally, the people at C&R were always grumpy to me when I did business there. Never again.

Thankfully, I found Martinizing. They are always happy to see me, pay attention to me, and have never messed up a cleaning order.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Hockeyland

Since moving to North Dakota, I've gotten back into hockey. I used to see a lot of hockey back in NY (RPI and Union were the big locals). My wife likes hockey as well, but probably not as much as me. She went to Colgate U., a small school with a big hockey team, and she saw her fair share, including the 1990 team that lost to Wisconsin for the national championship.

However, the attention hockey gets in NY is nothing compared to here in ND. This is ridiculous! And I mean that in a good way. I can't think of any high schools growing up that had hockey teams. Certainly not the one I attended, and we had fairly large (300ish?) students in each class. Here, it seems like even the elementary schools have teams.

I've seen a bunch of UND games via the telly, and I'll probably watch as many playoff games as they are in, but for me it's been the Minnesota Wild that has drawn my attention. (As I type this, I'm listening to the Wild play the Oilers, and Marian Gaborik just scored!) Nice.

I'm trying to get my seven year old son to watch the Wild games with me, but he doesn't seem to "get" the game when watching on the TV. He's seen some hockey live, however, and he does a decent job watching and trying to follow the game. The other night he expressed interest in playing. I think a used pair of skates might be in order for next winter.