all about the tourney

So you may have noticed from my twitter update that we won the international tourney out in Delta last weekend (which just goes to show you, we WILL drive an hour for 19 minutes of ice time). It's taken until today to start feeling slightly like myself again, to get over the exhaustion and the aches and pains that left me largely immobile yesterday. It was worth every minute of it.

Highlights included meeting some fine new hockey players (our team was two teams combined, as neither could get enough players out), bonding with my Kaos team-mates (have I mentioned lately how great they are?) and playing alongside one of the best defencepersons I have met in awhile. And there was a hot tub in there too - the only down-side was two days of greasy pub food.

But most of all, it was pretty satisfying to beat 3 American teams (we faced off against Canadians in the final), one of them being a university team, the USC Trojans. Are there divisions in university hockey? I was slightly confused by our beating them, although they gave us the best game. I was also surprised at how apologetic they were on the ice - not the kind of behaviour one expects from Americans, and this was true for all three teams we faced - they kept saying sorry at the slightest bump. And the more they apologized the more I was like:



So much for the unapologetic Americans and the nice but boring Canadians!

Homeless Pt. III

About one hour before the realtor called to tell us our house was sold, we were offered a 3 bedroom in a co-op one block from our house. Can you imagine any better timing? We got a bit of help from my friend Vanessa who put in a good word for us (and now tells me to bloody go to church already, because someone sure is looking out for me - I think it's just her, so I'm going to make sure I have lots of extra sugar), and the best thing (aside from living next door to our best friends) is that we won't have to leave our neighborhood. Our son gets to stay in his school AND there's a secure playground outside where he can go play with a bunch of kids AND we won't get kicked out yet again because someone wants to sell AND we get a whole month to move.......phew.

Honestly though, how wrong were we in thinking that the place wouldn't sell quickly? 589,900 for a 3 bedroom duplex (better make sure you have a cat for the small rodent problem) when there's a 9 bedroom 5 bathroom house for sale about 4 blocks away for less that. We thought that the real value is in developing the lot (its huge) and the economy is rotten and it's a bad time to develop blah blah blah....but people are buying even if they barely look at the place, and Canada's economy is hanging in there and for that reason yesterday the Globe and Mail called us a nice but boring nation.

We'll see if we're that boring. Tonight is our women's hockey tourney where we get to face off against some Americans, and trust me, we take our hockey very very seriously, over here.

Band Practice

Its odd how some nights you can go to band practice and your instrument sounds like shit, and then the next week its amazing. A week ago I could barely tolerate the tinny sound of my guitar, even rolling off all the treble didn't do anything. Last night it was fracking great and I have no idea why. It's too bad that I'm always forgetting things - I've been short one guitar cable since our last gig and the kids scattered my guitar picks all over the living room (but luckily I had the one that Christine gave me last week in my pocket) and worst of all I broke a string and forgot to put a new one on. I am seriously pushing it with how old my strings are, and how sad is it to show up to band practice with a 5-string guitar?

The thing about playing in a band with two songwriters is there's no shortage of material, and we were working on Christine's new song in which I was having a grand old time with the delay pedal, rendering my bandmates near-deaf. It took us awhile to navigate our way through 3 segues (Third Segue same as the First!) but by the end of it we'd trimmed it down to 1. I'm pretty excited about it, and I'm keen on getting myself some more fancy effects.

The time has come to try and get the band out there a little more, and I've got some BIG plans in store (she said, rubbing her hands together excitedly).