Pucks and Flicks

This post may come as a bit of a surprise to my faithful readers (all six of you), as I’ll be dealing with a topic I don’t usually discuss: sports. More specifically, hockey. I am not much of a sports fan. I enjoy the occasional blue blood sport like tennis (I still look back on my tennis camp days with great fondness) and I also enjoy figure skating, which some (narrow-minded dolts) will claim is not even a sport. Be that as it may, as far as team sports go, it’s all hockey for me. Being a hockey fan has been tough recently, with the long lockout, and being a hockey fan in DC is even tougher, with a team that breaks my heart every year. Yesterday, two very good tickets to last night’s game against the New York Islanders fell into my lap. The game wasn’t so great. The Caps lost 5 to 2, bring their record to 2-4 for the season. But it still gave me reason to hope. Backup goalie Brent Johnson made his first start for the Caps. Yes, the result might have different with the Cap’s veteran goalie Olie Kolzig (a Vezina trophy winner) playing, but it’s early in the season and Johnson needs to get some practice (given last night’s showing, LOTS of practice), so starting him is good thing. The Caps were pretty sucky in the first period, but they took it up a notch in the second and third periods. The defense needs work, but rising young star Alex Ovechkin (the number one draft pick of 2004) looks very strong and scored his sixth point of the season. So, I am cautiously optimistic about this season. What makes me less optimistic is that the arena was barely 1/3 full last night. It must be hard for a young, inexperienced team to play in these circumstances. With football, basketball, and baseball teams, is there just not room for hockey in DC? I think there is, but I am just one hockey fan.

On a completely different note, we joined Netflix a few months back. Lord Kissington has handled the queue, and I hadn’t even looked at the site. I would just tell him to add things as I thought of them. Well, this week, I finally went to the site, and I started adding movies left and right. If I don’t leave the house again until Christmas, I just might be able to make it through the list. I have a long list of movies from the past 7 or 8 years that I need to catch up on. I was thinking about why this is, and I realized two things: (1) I was in a long relationship where we could never agree on a movie. Because of this, we rarely went to the movies or rented them. We had a few movies that we liked in common, but usually, it was just too much work to come to an agreement. (I guess compromise wasn’t really part of that relationship.) (2) When that relationship ended, I was too busy being social to have much time for movies. I started going out six nights a week, which didn’t leave much time for going to or renting movies. As a result, there is a lot I never saw. I’m trying to catch up, but between working, drinking, and sitting around on my ass, there are only so many hours in the day.