As some of you may have already noticed, about a month ago I joined the team over at SB Nation’s Rangers blog, Blueshirt Banter.  I’ll primarily be re-posting the higher-profile, broader-interest stories I write here over there, giving Banter readers quicker access to the information while driving traffic back to this little corner of the Interwebs.

On occassion, I’ll chip in with an original piece if I feel moved to write about something that falls outside of the prospect / Russian focus here.  I posted my first such story last night.   So if you’re interested in my take on the Rangers inviting veteran defenseman Kyle McLaren to training camp, head on over.  While you’re there, why not sign up and join the banter — there’s a pretty high level of dialogue by both writers and commentors alike.

Just make sure you come back here when you’re done! ;)

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to follow @byndblueshirts on Twitter.  We’ll be heading up to the Rangers training center for Fan Fest tomorrow and will tweet anything of note.

Just a quick note to say I’ll be celebrating the one year anniversary of Beyond the Blueshirts (I can’t believe it’s already been a year!) by spending the week in the Adirondacks.  So don’t look for much in the way of postings this week unless something really important happens, in which case I’ll either drop in here and post about it or throw something up on Twitter.

For the record, any rumors you might have heard about Artem Anisimov and Nikolai Zherdev being invited to the Russian Olympic camp in August have been dismissed by national team assistant coach Igor Zakharkin.  The list of camp invitees won’t be released until August 1st.

I planned a long, soppy post looking back the roller coster year that was here at Beyond the Blueshirts, but I simply ran out of time before leaving for the week.  I do want to take a minute to say thanks to everyone who’s made this blog fun, and to those who’ve supported and encouraged me over the past year.  A special shoutout goes to Dubi Silverstein of Blueshirt Bulletin (if you don’t subscribe, why not?) who got the ball rolling by sending thousands of visitors this way early on and has been quick to offer help and support whenever asked.  And to Vlad and Anna, who’s translation assistance when I get stumped has been invaluable.  I also want to thank the folks who read and comment regularly — I won’t try to name you all for fear of forgetting someone — but this little side project wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable without you guys.

Have a great week!

Me? Hardly. Nevertheless, you can learn everything you never wanted to know about me and how this web site came to be under that heading in this week’s issue of The New Yorker.

There’s something incredibly intimidating about seeing my name in print in a magazine as renowned as The New Yorker; I’m more the type of person who prefers to hide behind her keyboard in anonymity. And I’m still not sure that what I do here is all that newsworthy, but folks with far more experience in knowing what people do or don’t find interesting obviously disagreed, so who am I to argue? Besides, it’s not very often that hockey gets so much as a mention in the mainstream press (unless there’s violence involved, of course) so I’ll consider this my Sarah Palin moment, my selfless good deed for the game (cough) before I fade back into obscurity.

It’s strange to see pieces of the two-hour conversation I had with the author snipped, clipped and rearranged into a two-column story that starts somewhere around the age of 11 with me living in fear of World War III and ends up with me talking about reading children’s stories in Russian outside a Manhattan hotel at the age of 35. Granted, there are chunks missing and details glossed over, but the story covers the gist of why and how I came to learn Russian and why I ended up starting this blog. While it’s largely accurate, I’m disappointed to admit that my Anisimov jersey is not, in fact, signed (yet?). And I’d hesitate to call my attempts at speaking to his family in Hartford last season a “conversation”, though they do qualify as the most words I’ve strung together in Russian in about a dozen years, so I guess I can’t say it’s inaccurate.

So there you have it… the woman behind the keyboard revealed. Please be kind, I have a thin skin. ;)

Big thanks go to the author, Alec Wilkinson, for making the whole process far less scary than I thought it would be, and for coming up with the idea to do the story in the first place. And also to Dubi Silverstein of Blueshirt Bulletin, who put him in touch, and who gave my early, pre-blog translations a home. Without his support (and links!) I doubt the majority of you reading this would be here right now.