Thursday, February 14, 2013

Pucktastic!

I also could have titled this post “Hockeylicious”.  The past weekend was a holiday weekend here in BC.  We celebrated the first ever Family Day on February 11.  What better way to celebrate than to play in two hockey tournaments on the same weekend.  Due to a bit of a scheduling conflict I was signed up to play in an old timers tournament in Fort St. John and the Crystal Cup pond hockey challenge on Charlie Lake (about 10 minutes outside of the John).

I should quickly point out that I was turning 42 last weekend (told you it was busy), so my body does not recover from physical exertion as quickly as it once did.  So the schedule of 1 game Friday night, 3 on Saturday and 2 more on Sunday was a bit daunting.  Due to a scheduling SNAFU on the pond hockey end of things, I only ended up playing one game on Sunday.  Neither team I played for won much of anything other than one game each.  I had a lot of fun though.

The Crystal Cup is completely organised and staffed by volunteers.  The tournament does not aim to make a profit.  I must say, that the organisers did a fantastic job of getting everything (but scheduling) running smoothly.  There were even rinks for the kids to play and skate around on.  I saw a lot of people from town stop by the lake to check out the happenings even though they didn’t play hockey.  The Crystal Cup was truly a community event. 

The weather for the tournament was wonderful as well.  Last year, the Saturday portion of the event had to be crammed together with the Sunday because the weather was so bad you couldn’t see the rinks on the lake.  The Sunday was sunny and the wind was calm, but it was still below –30 Celsius.  I had the ends of two fingers that were numb for tow months after my last game.  I thought the feeling would never come back.  This year the temperature on the Saturday was right around 0 and unfortunately on the Sunday it was about 7 degrees which made the ice a bit treacherous.  All in all, the event was fantastic and I’m looking forward to next year.

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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Learning vs. Doing

As I wrote earlier, I have adopted LEARN as my word of the year.  One thing that I have noticed in the early going of my learning year is the push and pull between learning and doing.  As most people in this world I have a finite amount of free time.  In that free time I would like to learn some new stuff this year.  However, while I’m learning stuff, I’m not doing stuff.  Let me illustrate.  If I am learning about photography by reading some articles, I am not taking any pictures. 

I am finding that it is hard to get the time to not only learn the things I want to learn, but to put those things into practice and get to the point that I can use them.  Adding to the time crunch is the fact that I have multiple hobbies that are all relatively time intensive.  It has been quite a balancing act.  I want to learn lots about my new hobby photography.  I also want to learn some new techniques for my old hobby of painting minis (and gaming with them).

I should add a disclaimer that part of the time crunch is of my own making.  With the return of the NHL, I spend a decent amount of time watching the Blackhawks, during which I don’t learn a lot of new stuff, but it brings me a lot of pleasure (most of the time).  However, Jen has rediscovered the TV, so video games have not taken up much time.

I’ll try to keep you up to date on how the balancing act is going.  However, now I  must go and clean the house, as I am having a Super Bowl party in a few hours.  I expect to learn a lot about beer and it’s effects on human behaviour and biology.