Oooh! This is the fun part where I get to tell you how awesome I am, right? Yay! I have the best family and friends in the whole world. I totally love watching -obsessing over- hockey, traveling, writing, reading, shopping, family stuff, and going to completely boring school stuff with friends and seeing how we can make it interesting. Little kids love me and I like to pretend that evveryone else does, too, but I completely doubt it. I’m a little bit shy and my friends ask me for the answers to questions in school. Maybe they think I’m smart. I secretly (Oops! Not so secret anymore, is it?) love it when people take my picture. Unless it’s a candid shot. I hate those. My favorite hockey team (Columbus Blue Jackets) loses a lot, and they always promise improvement, but they still don’t make the playoffs. *Sigh* I’m really random and I can talk about nothing for hours. I’m completely insane and I really don’t care. Anything else ya want to know? Ask.
If I Could Be a Character From a Book, I'd Be…
This might be cliche, and I might be a girl, but just hear me out?
Harry James Potter. He has a life that is the complete opposite of mine, and is something I would love to experience. He is famous, and I am far from it. His first memories are from a time when he was alone, unloved. I have always had family and friends and felt like I was a part of something. He has a name to live up to, and I have always had a create-your-own-adventure type of future. My life is sheltered. Harry, his whole life, is finding adventure and trouble – exciting. He has real, tangible magic in his life. I'm going to have to find that for myself. His life is pure mystery, and mine is purely predictable. He comes from a different place entirely, and I would love to experience it.
Stories and Worries
Stories and worries. Usually, these days, it's stories that start whirling around up in my head. I start thinking about a character, and then his background, and the character that could play the part of his enemy or best friend, and it goes on and on from there. The setting starts developing, and before I know it, there's a little bit of a plot.
Worries was a bigger factor when I was younger. I worried about this person dying, and that person getting sick, and me getting cancer. I was, when I was really little, concerned that terrorists were going to invade our house, and made my father check the basement for them a few times. I try not to have so many worries now, and just take the line J.K. Rowling gave Rubeus Hagrid in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire": "What's comin' will come and we'll meet it when it does."
Me, As I Am
In my own eyes, I am a little awkward, as far as teenagers go. Pretty, but still awkward. My naturally highlighted blonde hair falls about my bony shoulders in shiny waves. My sometimes green, sometimes brown eyes sparkle more often than not. My fair skin is "stunning". I have heard it so many times: "You should be a model!" Well, it would be a way to get some money…
I am tall, thin – too thin, have no chest, and move clumsily. My limbs are long, and my posture is generally good. My makeup is simple, and I wear jeans more often than dresses. I have too many clothes, so many. Inspiration is never lacking, not for me, and I try to see the beaufiul imperfection in little things every day. I am happy and confident. Doesn't that alone make me pretty?
But I do think I am beautiful, and I guess that's what matters. I'm sure I started to believe this because I have been told it so often. From stranger, friends, and family. I think everyone should be so lucky as to really, honestly believe they are gorgeous. Because they are.
What Do You Think of Me?
What people think of me. It would be more for my knowledge than anything else, because I'm not one to change just to make people happy. I just want to know how they feel, because it might help me understand them. I will always be me, but I don't know enough about others. It is easy to get this from the way they view other people. It would be more teaching than a year in my school.
I could and would still do what I want, but I would know who the real friends are. Isn't that what we all want?
Sleep
It’s overrated. Really, who needs it? Four hours of sleep a night is plenty. I can function. I can, actually. On that much sleep, I might not make sense, but I’m still productive. That’s a good thing, right?
Boucher
Wow, am I behind. It’s been awhile. Anyway, Hitchcock was fired (he’d been given a long time past when he would’ve been fired in bigger hockey markets), and GM Scott Howson has extended the coaching position to Guy Boucher of an AHL team for Montreal. Boucher hasn’t given his reply. Ohhhhhhh crap. According to Aaron Portzline, this is not a big deal. If he doesn’t want it, he could just want to wait for the head coaching position of the Montreal Canadiens, or a promotion, or just think he’s not ready for an NHL job. But it doesn’t look too great when a job offer is turned down, on the part of the franchise. Then again, Howson was a second choice. It could be okay, and maybe he just wants time to think, but my instinct is to be scared (and I’m likely wrong).
Boucher apparently has a very unique system, and isn’t stubborn? Really, there is some level of stubbornness required to be an NHL coach. His players like this system, because they win with it, but he adjusts the system to fit them. I’m so confused. If he comes, I’ll just have to see it, then. Right?
I just hope he says, “Yes”.
The Olympics
I love the Olympics. Winter, anything I can watch. Oh, except for cross country skiing. Summer, anything there is. Obviously, during winter, I love hockey. But really? How is it fair? Women’s hockey is all Canada and the U.S. Men’s is a little more spread out, but not much. I discovered last night… snowboard cross. I think it’s insane, of course, with four people on snowboards trying to race with not very much room. But still, it looks like fun. I watch figure skating, though I don’t count it as fair, since it is based on judging and not absolutes. Ski jumping looks cool, until they can’t land properly. Luge is dangerous – RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili – and bobsled only slightly less so. Anyways, the point of this was hockey.
Canada’s top line is Patrice Bergeron (Bruins), Sidney Crosby (Penguins), and Rick Nash (Blue Jackets). Brilliant line. Really, everyone thought Jarome Iginila (Flames) would be in Parise’s place; I believe that’s what people guessed at the beginning. Then there’s the U.S. top line of Zach Parise (Devils), Patrick Kane (Blackhawks), and Paul Stastny (Avalanche). Strong line. Russia? Pavel Datsyuk (Red Wings), Alexander Ovechkin (Capitals), and Alexander Semin (Capitals). How much better does it get? These will be fun games. There are perfectly good players on other teams, obviously, but how do you not pick one of these three to win? I’m Canadian. When it comes to hockey. I’m American, really. Just not when I’m watching the Canadian hockey team. I’m hoping for a Canada-U.S.A. final, though. Just me.
Hitch (Only A Few Weeks Too Late)
Okay, so I’m waaaay behind here, but Ken Hitchcock was obviously fired from his position as head coach of the Blue Jackets. Lots of people thought Howson was insane. A lot of people thought he had it coming. My place among these people? I think Hitch got a lot more time with this team than he would have in any other NHL city. He gave the team an identity as a hard-to-play-against team. They lost this identity promptly the season after making the playoffs for the first time. It was time. Other NHL teams fire coaches when they’re winning. Hitch got, oh, almost 30 games after we started an awful downhill trend. It’s unfortunate it didn’t work out; Ken Hitchcock is very respected in the world of hockey. Maybe that’s part of the reason why he was given so long. Really, really unfortunately is that our team is built around Hitchcock and his style of play. We have big guys, many of whom aren’t incredibly skilled. Our young, skilled guys aren’t suited to play in Hitch’s defense-first system. They’ve learned, and that will make them even better players in the future. That’s how Rick Nash learned. Rusty Klesla (defense) has gotten much stronger, and the team is definitely weakened when he is injured. R.J. Umberger has now played under Hitch in two cities and has enormous respect for him. Really, all the players should. Yes, he is known to clash with players, but his system worked. In Dallas. Not really in Philadelphia or here for any extended period of time. To take his place, for now? Assistant coach Claude Noel. The guy is quirky and rambles on and on, but he’s trying to build a system of trust. The other day, the morning after a lost game, the interim coach didn’t show up to practice. The players thought of fining him when he showed up, but he didn’t come. They got the message: figure it out yourselves. Nash and Umberger ran practice. Hitch gave the team two sets of t-shirts. One was last year during the playoffs: “Why not us?” The other set was this season: “It starts now.” Those didn’t work, obviously. Noel introduced the corny idea of making the hardest-working player of each game do his interviews wearing a hard hat. O-kay. It’s not likely that Noel becomes head coach in the offseason. Unless he gets us to the playoffs. I believe even mathematics will soon say that that is not going to happen.
Training Camp
I love hockey season. It’s really entertaining. And amazing. But training camp is here. (They all had physicals yesterday, but today was when there were a million fans there.) I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated training camp quite this much. So we went today because Hitch has this whole new setup. The owners drafted four teams, instead of just the coaches making an A and B team. And training camp is a tournament. Brilliant, right? So the goalies are rotated amongst all the teams, because it would clearly not be fair to give one team Mason unless they wanted all the other teams to have to goalies in the net. At the same time. If you care, here are the teams:
Team Wolfe:
Forwards:Rick Nash, Derek MacKenzie, Kristian Huselius, Tom Sestito, Michael Blunden, Jared Boll, Daniel Steiner, Andrew Clark, Tim Miller, Jon Mirasty
Defense:Kris Russell, Mike Commodore, Grant Clitsome, David Savard, Tim Filangieri, Spencer McAvoy
Team Crane:
Forwards:Derick Brassard, Sammy Pahlsson, Derek Dorsett, Pascal Pelletier, Trevor Frischmon, Tom Cavanagh, Matthew Calvert, Darren Archibald, Brock McBride, Zak Ray
Defense: Fedor Tyutin, John Moore, Mathieu Roy, Doug Lynch, David Liffiton, Dylan Reese
Team McConnell:
Forwards: Antoine Vermette, R.J. Umberger, Raffi Torres, Chris Higgins, Tomas Kubalik, Alexandre Picard, Stefan Legein, Andrew Aggozino, Kevin Harvey, Cass Mappin, Matt Caria
Defense:Jan Hejda, Rostislav Klesla, Brent Regner, Steven Delisle, Cam Brodie
Team Pizzuti:
Forwards: Jake Voracek, Nikita Filatov, Jason Chimera, Fredrik Modin, Jared Aulin, Maksim Mayorov, Andrew Murray, Scott Tanski, Ian Duval, Tayler Jordan, Tyler Murovich
Defense:Marc Methot, Jonathan Sigalet, Andrei Plekhanov, Kevin Roeder, Paul Bezzo
Half those names probably mean nothing to a lot of people. That’s nothing to be worried about, seeing as half of them will be gone soon. The two most important goalie names are Steve Mason and Mathieu Garon. After that Kevin Lalande and Dan LaCosta. But mostly the first two.
Onto the things I noticed today:
- Voracek and Filatov have both filled out quite a bit.
- Mason didn’t have a great day. It was a better day than Jamie Tucker, who I feel really bad for, but it didn’t look like the same Mason as last year. It was, though.
- Nash, Brassard, and Vermette all looked okay.
- Huselius is already hitting posts. Maybe by the time the season starts he’ll have learned to get it in the net. Maybe.
- Boll got hit in the face and on the head. I’m pretty sure he came back by the end of the scrimmage, but injuries already?
- Chimera has a really hard shot. Really. We were standing at the plexiglass and he chipped one hard and high. Made me jump about a foot.
- Commodore was having too much fun. He was giving Mayorov some practice. And Claude Noel (assistant coach) was trying to hold him off the puck and he was mock-slashing the backs of his knees. How painful would it be to get slashed when you aren’t wearing pads?
- Hejda looked good.
- Lots of contact.
- Jamie Tucker was put in the net for the blue team after one period in the afternoon when the white team hadn’t scored at all. A few minutes later, the white team had pulled ahead. They won 5-3. I felt really bad for the kid.
- Mason, Brassard, Dorsett, and someone we couldn’t see very well showed up in the afternoon to watch Team Pizzuti play Team Wolfe. My dad took many pictures. He was excited. He even went back to get a close-up of Mason. And Hitchcock.
- There were a lot of fans. In the morning and in the afternoon. It was standing-room only right along the glass. But that was fine with us, because that was right where we wanted to be.
- The one power play I saw was not reassuring. I didn’t expect it to be, but it was not pretty. But neither was the penalty kill.
- The players during the game were louder than Hitch during the drills. I wanted to hear what he was saying. The same goes for the assistants. That would be interesting.
- What I saw of Moore said what everyone’s been saying: great skater.
- Legein is a short guy.
- Mirasty and Sestito are huge – Mirasty is thick, Sestito is tall and thick.
- There are a lot of guys at camp. There are a lot of guys in half of camp. Lot of guys. As long as one (or two) of those are guys we’re willing to give up and will get a decent puck-moving defenseman, I’m okay with that.
There are only a few wrinkles to iron out before October third, and they are:
- Where do we get this puck-moving defenseman? Someone has to unload someone, right?
- Where do we dump a few wingers? We have a lot.
- What happens on the second line? Assuming Filatov makes the big club, he should be on the second line, with his skill. But so should Voracek. And Vermette. And Umberger. Traffic jam. No, maybe Filatov just gets a lot of power play time. Hitch won’t immediately put him on the second line. Third? Fourth? Or maybe he’ll split time. But he’s made it clear that if he ends up in Syracuse he will seriously consider the KHL. That would not be good.
- Who gets to be the fourth-line center? There could be a lot of options. Hitch really wants Boll and Dorsett on a line together. That would be a really… tough line. Not a scoring line, but definitely tough. Torres? That would make it tougher. But he has a shot at the third. Chimera on the fourth? Once, he would’ve been a second liner (Malhotra on the first, anyone?), but times have changed.
See, here’s another thing: Hitchcock is raising the bar. Last year, he said we shouldn’t be aiming for the playoffs, but for the fourth or fifth spot in the Western Conference. Shirts were made for the players with the Stanley Cup on the front and the words “Why not us?” on the back. This year, he wants to give Detroit a hard time. For training camp, he’s made different shirts that say “On the rise.” He thinks they have a shot. Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s the eternal optimist. Or maybe he’s just ready to make a name for his team. Not that he hasn’t already.
Harry Potter
Harry Potter has been the biggest part of my childhood entertainment. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I started reading the books in first grade and had the first four done by that summer, when the fifth came out. I started watching the movies pretty much when they came out. The books win by about, oh, a billion points in my mind. I read something today: “You know someone hasn’t read the books when they say ‘I love the movies.’” Truest thing in the world. If you haven’t read the books, the movies are the closest thing to perfect, but if you have, they aren’t quite as good.
And the funniest thing is, I’m not a huge fantasy person. Narnia was okay, but I like the idea of a magical land in the back of a wardrobe better than the plots. Twilight was good for a while, now I think I find the idea sickening. (I saw the New Moon trailer for the first time when I went to see Half-Blood Prince at midnight. When Edward said, “This will be the last time you’ll see me,” the guy behind me said, “Thank God for that.” I almost died laughing.) Now, I like fantasizing, making up worlds and imagining stuff, but that’s an entirely different thing.
But I never could get sick of Harry Potter. I still listen to the books-on-tape everytime I’m in the car. The guy who reads them, Jim Dale, is awesome at what he does. Sometimes we even take the long way home just to hear the rest of my favorite part. I was at the midnight release of the last two books and the last two movies. I checked MuggleNet obsessively everyday for a long time. I was on CBBC chatrooms. (Since I don’t live in the U.K., I would wake up early to check them before school, since they were closed by the end of the day. Yeah, I’m that pathetic.) I believed some really stupid MuggleNet April Fool’s Day jokes about sneak-peeks at Deathly Hallows and I felt bad for believing that Emerson’s marriage to Melissa was a joke (but they were divorced about two days later, so…). When I read Deathly Hallows, I cried when Hedwig, Moody, Fred, Tonks and Lupin died. I wrote and read fanfiction. Sometimes, I still make obscure references to the books and everyone around me who has also read them has no idea what I’m talking about. That makes me lose faith in them. And I knew from the very beginning that Harmony (Harry/Hermione) wasn’t going to happen. I was Heron (Hermione/Ron) all the way. But don’t be too impressed with me. It takes true skill not to pick up anvil-sized hints scattered throughout all seven books.
I bet no one picked up on that reference either.
I love them. J.K. Rowling is brilliant. And she came up with it all on a train ride. I think I need to go on a train ride now. Bye.
Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! Didn’t you love how Daniel Radcliffe portrayed Harry on Felix Felicis?!?!?! It was brilliant.
Bye.
