His first visit to Washington after signing (and he again tells people how to pronounce his name)

José signed with Washington on July 1, 2008, and his first visit to meet with management and staff was July 10, 2008. Here are some photos from that day.

Then this was a bit of his media scrum. I liked how he admitted he'd had some bad years, but they made him stronger mentally. And I love when he tells people how to pronounce his name, since so many people mess it up. I apologize for the background noise, so idea what's going on back there...maybe a Zamboni!

Then here is when he sat down with Mike Vogel the same day for a Snap Shots interview. Here again he addresses his last name. He says:

"I don’t know why they say ‘THAY-uh-dore’, because it’s actually an English name, my dad is English, so it’s ‘THEE-uh-dore.’"

What I'm up to

Over on tumblr I've been going through all José's games from the 2007-08 season, because those are the oldest games I can see on GameCenter right now. They keep all NHL games in their archive for 6 seasons. So I've been watching all of them and taking screen shots and posting photos from the games as well. I didn't know if it's something I should also do here, but maybe I should have. Although honestly it seems most people come to this site anymore looking for photos of José and Stephanie (which I love, because I'm happy to provide a place for people to see so many of their photos), so maybe people wouldn't really want to see the game-by-game stuff....I'm struggling a little bit with what I should do on here. I don't want to totally give it up, because it's the first José blog I started, and it was the beginning of it all. But I have more followers on tumblr and Facebook, so I just don't have the time to devote here.

I think I will still post shots of José from his TVA appearances. He's still been doing that. I'm waiting for my friend in Montreal to send me the shows, so once she does that I'll have screen shots to share. He usually went up to Montreal one week a month, and the other appearances were from his home in Florida. I have a feeling his family will be headed back up to Montreal for the summer soon, so maybe he'll be in-studio this coming week to discuss the Stanley Cup Finals games.

And since I finished his last season in Colorado over on tumblr, I'm now moving on to his first season in Washington.

But I will share this. I recorded the celebration and handshake line after the Avs' Game 6 win over Minnesota on April 19, 2008. We get to see a very happy José and hear the announcers talk about how great he was and how he was the series MVP.

So this was from April 19, 2008.


Then they met eventual Champions Detroit in the next round, and José had a bad case of the flu the first 2 games and wasn't able to finish either game. And the Avs were swept that series, so I won't focus on that. But that Minnesota series was awesome!