Rick Bronwell as Peter Griffin; former assistant Phil Shipp as Brian

Aeros equipment manager and resident comedian Rick Bronwell continues his Aeros.com blog. Bronwell filed the following prior to Tuesday’s game against Milwaukee. Rick loves hearing from his fans...rather, Aeros fans...so e-mail him now!

(Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. at Toyota Center)

Hey everybody. Welcome to The Blog. I’m going to refer to it as The Blog from here on out. It’s definitely The Blog to read if you’re anybody. And you want to be somebody, trust me.

My favorite game of the year is coming up – Thursday, Feb. 1’s Chronicle in Education Kids Day Game at 11 a.m. I love hearing thousands of schoolkids screaming for goals and fights. And you have a chance to get involved! There are many Title 1 schools who can’t afford to go to the game but really want to. Click here to find out how you can sponsor as few as 10 children to attend the game for $7 each. A special offer from “The Blog” as well. Buy 50 tickets to the game to donate to children, and you not only receive 50 tickets for your own use to one of three future games, but the first five people to sponsor 50 kids will receive a behind the scenes tour of the Aeros locker room from me! And maybe we’ll even have a nice little gift for you too. Call Jeremy Burson at 713.361.7946 to place your order, and don’t forget to tell him Rick Bronwell sent you!

Also remember, that’s a great game for you business people downtown to take a bit of an extended lunch. I have been known to take a long lunch on occasion. Center ice seats for this game are $20 instead of $30! Call 713.974.PUCK to order tickets to the “Hockey Hookey Day”.

Let’s rewind on this past week. Nothing eventful really happened, we had a nice little win Sunday. Milwaukee was very tired. It was fun to have a game where its 6-1, it’s a lot more relaxed in the third period. You don’t have as much stress or worrying as in a one goal game or shootout. The players were definitely more relaxed. It felt like it did last year.

After Tuesday’s game, we’ll have a post-game meal, which is usually set up if we play back to back games. It comes out of the guy’s per diem. It usually consists of grilled chicken, chicken parmesan, potatoes, and some type of pasta with meat sauce. Oh and a nice, big salad. It’s served buffet style. We usually have dessert, a lot of times ice cream with caramel and fudge sauce. After the post-game meal, we’ll hang the gear at Toyota Center. After that, we will get up at 3:15 a.m. and pack the bags and throw them on our truck and go to the airport for Wednesday’s game in Worcester.

The team will stay at the airport tonight because we have a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago in the morning. From there we fly out to Hartford. Today (Tuesday), we’re sending out extra gear like my equipment trunks, one skate sharpener, a glove dryer, all of Jerry’s stuff, and we’re taking that on separate United flight, through Chicago tonight. We have a really good relationship with the guys in Chicago, Johnny and Sparky, they take care of us pretty well. They have a Penske truck they’ll put our extra gear on, and lock it up, so we can get it all on the connecting flight.

The reason we have to do this is we have another small regional jet going from Houston to Chicago on Wednesday so we can’t fit all 52 pieces. We have to make sure it’s all on. Our connecting flight is an MD 80 plane, so we’ll be good there. We fly into the Hartford/Springfield airport. It’s pretty much a hub for anyone who flies into New England. It’s the biggest airport you can fly into without too much hassle in the Northeast. It’s small enough where it’s not hectic as Newark, La Guardia, or Boston. Worcester is about an hour drive. We land in Hartford/Springfield at 1:30, the guys get on a bus, and I will go on the truck with the gear. Jerry and I will drive to the rink with our gear. The bus will go to the hotel, the guys will get a quick bite to eat, come to the arena and play.

We play the game in Worcester on Wednesday, and after the game we hang the gear there. We have a practice in Worcester Thursday from noon-1 p.m. We’ll have a nice little hour skate, pack the bags and bus 45 minutes to Manchester. Everything’s about 45 minutes to an hour apart up there. It’s like going from Sugar Land to Bush Intercontinental.

We’ll play Friday in Manchester. We don’t have ice in Hartford on Saturday, there’s a UConn basketball game, not sure if it’s women’s or men’s, I’m not going to attend anyways. I’m gonna’ stay in Manchester while the team buses to Hartford after the game. I’ll pack the gear around 9 a.m. The Hartford guys are meeting me at 10 a.m. to put it on the bus and drive it another hour. We’ll load it up and put it on the truck after the game. We fly out at 6 a.m. Sunday to get back and have a couple days off for the All-Star break.

Curtis Murphy is going to the All-Star Game. You can watch it on KTBU 55 and B2 Networks live on Monday. Murph goes right to Toronto from Hartford. He’s on the Canadian team, so we have to bring his white game jersey, socks and helmet. It’s not a big deal, but it’s something some people don’t realize how that stuff gets there. He’ll throw it all in his bag after the game.

I’m looking forward to having a few days off. One thing I am doing is, Ben Thomson and I are going Monday to Elkins Hightower High School in Sugar Land. We’re going to hopefully lay down a bunch of tracks for the CD. It’s going to be a lot of fun. They’re doing a little DVD shoot, a behind the scenes thing. It’s very MTV-ish. We’re going to have a lot of fun. We hope everyone enjoys the CD. I know I’m going to love it but I’m sort of biased. We’ve been fine tuning our songs we’ve written. We’ve got four down. We’re working on some others, and figuring out if we can do any cover songs.

We want to write one more song. If we can get some requests, we’ll probably ad lib as we record at the studio. Give us some requests. Give me an idea. If you’ve ever watched Whose Line Is It Anyway, just give me an idea for a song, we’ll write about it, maybe we’ll do a couple like that. Just go from scratch.

Let’s see, on the personal side. My daughter Addison just turned one. She pounded a cake. We bought two, one for us at the party and one for her. It was one of funniest thing I’ve ever seen, she demolished it like she was in demolition. I should have had the Dirty Jobs guy come out and do a spot on her eating the cake. She was really timid at first, picking at it a bit, but then she got into it and really started cramming it like…I can’t even come up with an analogy.

Heather told me to say something funny but I don’t remember what. Oh, that’s right. Heather hates Family Guy. Hates it. I don’t understand why. It’s completely funny. I laugh my butt off, and keep thinking Heather will do the same thing. All she does is roll her eyes like a slot machine in Vegas. I don’t understand how she can’t find that funny. Peter Griffin is me, in a nutshell pretty much. But I’m not that bad. Actually yeah I might be that bad. If Heather doesn’t like it, I bet former KHOU anchor Lisa Foronda likes Family Guy. I wanted to have Lisa’s face as Lois on the picture in The Blog, but that Stanzel guy is worried about lawsuits and such!

The dog is doing better with the thorns in his butt. We’re still picking them out one by one. We’ll find one every once in awhile.

Onto our questions.

Q: I hate to be a nit-picker, but as I understand it the measurement is the depth of the groove between the edges of the blade. Thus, Curtis Murphy's 5/8 is deeper, i.e. sharper, than the normal blades at 1/2 (4/8). Thanks, Bob

A: Bob, I like where your head is at. You’re actually showing me you’re thinking about sharpening the skate. Bob says 5/8 is sharper than ½ inch. The way he described skate sharpening is absolutely correct. If you took that semicircle and made a complete circle, it’d be ½ inch circle I you take ½ and 5/8 circle, there’s less hollow in it. The higher the fraction number you put on the wheel, the duller the blade because there’s less curvature to the wheel. If you do 1/8 inch hollow, it’s way sharper than anything because the distance between the ice and the top of the hollow is greater than if it’s 5/8.

Q: I wanted to tell you that I love reading your Blog. It is a highlight of my day. I have a question that I was hoping you could help me with. At Sunday’s game, I was sitting next to a Milwaukee fan. My friend and I were having an argument with him about what the patch on the Milwaukee jerseys meant that is located on their right shoulder. I know that we have a patch there for Zeus Mortgage, one of our sponsors, and we have seen a lot of the teams have them with other corporations. But this fan said that it couldn’t be a sponsor patch. Can you help us by telling us what their patch means? Thanks so much! Keep up the great job! -- Tanya

A: Great question, Tanya. That is a sponsor patch. As far as Milwaukee goes, they are owned by guys affiliated with the Brewers. So that’s the old-school Milwaukee Brewers logo. I love that logo. It reminds me of the old days when the Brewers and the Kansas City Royals were in the same division. And, when the Royals were good!

Q: Rick – Free ribeyes and Schell's in Farmington, Minn., too! Wish you guys would come up here for another game. – John

A: All these offers for free food and beer. Is there a scouting report on me on the Internet somewhere? Thanks for the offer John. Your longer e-mail also asked about the Meigray jerseys.

The Meigray set is going out this week. We got the new jerseys in. Four jerseys aren’t in the set yet, so if you won Weinhandl, Reitz, Rooneem or Stokes, you won’t be getting it until we get all the new jerseys in. Meigray had to order extras for us. Once we get them lettered, we’ll get them out.

Speaking of jerseys…The “new” jerseys came in, and wait until you guys see these. It’s going to look like football next season when we start officially wearing them. The NHL tested them out and the guys liked them, everything went well. They wore them in the NHL All-Star Game too. We got our sample pair of socks and jerseys. The socks are a lot different too. The jerseys are tighter in the arms, they look more like the dry-fit Reebok T-shirts. If I wore it, I’d look like a circus clown. Tetarenko tried it on, and he looked like a linebacker.

Going to grab some lunch now. Maybe even an extended lunch.

1:30 p.m. Tuesday

I’m excited about the Aeros Equipment Seminar on Saturday, Feb. 17, at 3 p.m. in the Aeros' locker room prior to the game against Chicago. This interactive program will be geared towards educating adult players, youth players, coaches and hockey parents. A presentation on proper equipment fitting, care, repairs, purchasing, etc., will be made by yours truly, followed by a Q and A session. We will provide some examples of newer trends in hockey equipment and have suggestions for smart purchases by both players and parents.

Please contact Jeremy Burson at 713.361.7946 for more details.

2:45 p.m. Tuesday

Donny and I are sick as dogs. Sinus infections, that type of thing. One thing about this job that’s unbelievable is that you start to learn as you do it, as you work, there’s really no one else that can do your job anywhere near here. No one knows what to do, so that when you are actually sick you pretty much have to be really, really sick to get out of working. It’s something I like about the job. Stanzel told me one time in Louisiana, the equipment manager (Greg Sieg sure gets brought up a lot in The Blog…Sieger – get your own blog!) was sick, so the back-up goalie and assistant coach also sharpened skates.

3:40 p.m. Tuesday

Another thing I’m really loving is Discovery Channel. I’m getting a better sense of reality of the world around me. Mythbusters rocks. It’s an unbelievable show. Right now, they’re doing something with a boom crane. They’re trying to make it into a medieval sling shot. They’re shooting it so far, I think we could put our gear on it and shoot it to Hartford in 20 minutes.

Dirty Jobs…If you haven’t watched it, please watch it. We’re working on getting Mike Rowe down here to get us on the TV. He can show us lifting jocks and doing laundry. Not that we get really dirty, but we’ll just have a big mudpit and get really dirty every time we sharpen a skate. He’ll definitely come out. Email Dirty Jobs and let them know there’s a job here in Houston that’s really dirty. Lisa Foronda watches that I’m sure too, so it has to be good.

Time to ask again for more feedback. Ask any question at all I’ll answer it. Although we got a question one time if a player was single. I can’t really answer that. Even if you want to ask though that’s fine. E-mail them in. Let’s keep this thing going, if not I’m off the air. Speaking of off the air, when does the next blog in Beaumont come out?

The boys are getting here for the game. I’ll talk to you guys later. Have a great one. We’ll see you on the flipside after the All-Star Break.