Last Night’s Canucks Game

Only two days into my 1001 days and already I get to cross something off my list!

43. take Tod to a Vancouver Canucks game

Last night I took Tod to his first ever Vancouver Canucks game.  Shocking, I know.  He has lived¹ his whole life in BC, most of it in and around Vancouver, without ever having gone to a Canucks game.  Mercifully, this has now been rectified.

You’ll note, however, that I didn’t specify on my list that I would take him to a good hockey game.  You know, like a game in which we wouldn’t have to give our goalie the hook at 3.5 minutes into the game because he had already been scored on TWICE!  Sanford came into replace LaBarbera and soon was inexplicably behind the net with Gionta (a Devils player) putting the puck into the net².  Combine those with the fact that the Canucks let the Devils win every battle for the puck and let the Devils skate around them as if they were a bunch of pylons and it was so bad that the whole stadium booed the Canucks off the ice at the end of the first period!  A little kid a few rows back was heard asking, quite loudly, “Why do they suck so much?”

Thankfully, the ‘nucks came out much better in the second and third periods.  They managed to make a game of it and there was some entertaining hockey to be watched.  Surprisingly, though, there wasn’t a single fight.  I think I’ll have to accomplish #44 on my 101 list (take Tod to a Vancouver Giants game) to see the fighting action. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get to see another full team brawl!

In somewhat related news, when I was telling a friend of mine at work that I’d been at the game last night and mentioned that the Canucks were playing the New Jersey Devils, my friend said, “Oh really? I met a bunch of NFL players from New Jersey on Sunday.”  She meant NHL (but that’s an indication of just how much she’s interested in pro sports) and after a quick look at the Devils’ website, we discovered that she was partying with Dainius Zubrus and Zach Parise that night.  Parise, as it happens, is on my hockey hotties list and it looks like Zubrus needs to be added to my roster!

¹Although whether one can say they’ve truly lived without having been to see a Canucks game is up for debate.
²I miss you Roberto. Please say the rumors that you are coming back tomorrow are true!

Photo credit: Tod Maffin on Flickr.

101 in 1001 for my 1000th post

So, for my 1000^th blog posting I wanted to do something special. And I decided that the something special would be a “101 things to do in 1001 days” list.  The first time I saw one of these was on Dave’s blog and I may or may not have soon after written a parody version called “102 things to do in 1,000,001 days” on a satire blog that may or may not have been removed from the Internet for possible libel issues. Anyway.

The idea behind this list is to come up with 101 things you want to do – things you’ve always meant to do but haven’t gotten around to,  things you want to challenge yourself to accomplish and, let’s be honest, a few things that sound good but you are pretty sure you’ll do so that you can gain the satisfaction of checking at least a few things off your list.  As well, it’s important that the goals are clearly defined/measurable (or, as we say in the Research Methods world – you need an “operational definition” of each) so that you know whether or not you’ve done it.  Props for this idea go to triplux, who appears to be the creator of this idea (or, at least, is the first Google hit for “101 in 1001”).

So, after much thinking and pondering and reflecting and considering and deliberating and contemplating and ruminating and reading the thesaurus, I have come up with the following 101 items that I intend to do in the next 1001 days:

1. go to New York City
2. leave the continent
3. live above ground
4. run another half marathon¹
5. run the full marathon in Sacramento (i.e., the net downhill one!)
6. assemble my last 7 years worth of photos into scrapbooks²
7. give something a cool name (i.e., not just adding the letter “y” to the end of what the thing is a la “froggy” or “puppy”)
8. get my blog onto WordPress.org
9. participate in a political campaign
10. attend Women’s Campaign School
11. conduct some kind of  education research project
12. conduct another systematic review for the Cochrane Collaoration
13. publish a paper in a scholarly journal on the training program that I run
14. write something creative (e.g., a story, a script or a poem)
15. change a life
16. write a book
17. teach a course at a college
18. ski at Whistler ³
19. ski at Big White
20. ski on Grouse Mountain
21. learn to snowboard (or at least try it)
22. go surfing & actually stay up on the board
23. skate at GM Place
24. coach a hockey team
25. hike Black Task
26. hike the West Coast Trail
27. write a computer program
28. start a business
29. learn French (at least a little bit. Like more than just what’s on the cereal box)
30. write a blog entry entitled Word to Your Moms, I Came to Drop Bombs⁴
31. read something by Salman Rushdie⁵
32. visit Macchu Picchu⁶
33. for one week, go to bed at 9 and read non-work related books⁷
34. read The Last Spike by Pierre Berton⁸
35. take pole dancing lessons. Like, a whole set of them, not just the intro class.
36. beat my current record of 10 points in a hockey season (which I achieved on the Blazing Blades team in both the Winter 2007/08 and the Spring 2008 seasons)
37. teach the same course at UBC twice⁹
38. participate in the “365 Day Challenge”. This involves taking a self-portrait every day for 365 days and posting it to the 365 Day Flickr group.
39. make a list of 100 things that make me happy
40. buy a Smart Car
41. buy an iPhone
42. skate on the Rideau Canal
43. take Tod to a Vancouver Canucks game [Accomplished: 13 January 2009, Canucks vs. NJ Devils. Next time I should try to take him to a game when the Canucks win!]
44. take Tod to a Vancouver Giants game
45. go to a BC Lions game
46. go to a Vancouver Canadians game
47. see a Vancouver White Caps game
48. start composting
49. keep a plant alive for a whole month
50. write in my journal every day for a month
51. go kayaking
52. camp at Joffre Lake
53. visit Galiano Island
54. visit Salt Spring Island
55. visit Bowen Island
56. save $500 in coins¹⁰
57. deposit that $500 worth of coins into my 40th birthday savings account
58. write 10 friends real letters, on paper, with a pen and snail mail them
59. follow Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating every day for 1 month¹¹
60. go to a Bikram yoga class
61. go to a spa for a facial
62. visit 5 new American states¹²
63. visit Newfoundland
64. visit Nova Scotia
65. visit New Brunswick
66. visit the Yukon
67. visit Nunavit
68. do a 24 hr blogathon
69. do 15 minutes of yoga every morning for a month
70. sort through my many boxes of papers (most of which contain papers from my thesis), recycling the papers I don’t need and filing the ones I do need
71. find out my credit rating
72. determine my net worth
73. buy a bike
74. bike to work every day for two months
75. record a cooking show (at least 5 episodes)
76. publish said cooking show online
77. participate in five research projects (as a subject/participant, not as a researcher)
78. sell counter top dishwasher on Craig’s List¹³
79. see at least one Bard on the Beach performance¹⁴
80. put up a Christmas tree and decorate it with chili peppers¹⁵
81. live blog something
82. go to bed every night for a week with all the dishes cleaned
83. achieve inbox zero and maintain for one full week (where “maintain” = by the time I go to bed each night)
84. up my blog readership to an average of 200 readers a day¹⁶
85. break my current record of 460 blog views in a day¹⁷
86. write a blog posting about the Car Co-op¹⁸
87. go sky diving
88. resurrect my teaching blog
89. see the Dresdan Dolls in concert
90. see Groove Coverage in concert
91. see a show at Richard’s on Richards before it closes down
    
92. devise some sort of proper back up system for my computer files
93. get my ring from my great Auntie Bernice re-sized to actually fit my finger
94. buy a pair of brown dress pants¹⁹
95. bake at least one thing per month for 12 months in a row, without baking the same thing two months in a row²⁰
96. go zip cording
97. make homemade vegetarian marshmallows
98. go on a polar bear swim
99. recycle my old Sony Vaio desktop and my old Palm Pilot that are now just taking up space in my apartment!
100. scan all the photos from my pre-digital camera days
101. publish a blog posting for each of the next 1001 days!

So, there you have it.  I expect I’ll be posting updates when I get stuff on the list accomplished and possibly some excuses about my abject failures.

End Date: Monday, October 10, 2011 (thank you dateandtime.com!)

Footnotes

¹Ya, this one is totally cheating, since I’m already training for another half. But it’s hard to think of 101 things!

²Um, ya.  I have seven years worth of photos in boxes, waiting for scrapbooking.

³Can you believe that, having lived in Vancouver for more than eight years, I’ve not yet skied Whistler?

⁴This one is stolen from an homage to Dave’s 101 things in 1001 days list. He didn’t actually manage to do it, but I think I can. I think I can.

⁵Also stolen from Dave’s list. I’ve been wanting to read something by Rushdie, so here’s an extra push

⁶This is the last one I’m stealing from Dave’s list. Promise.  Also, Dan said I should go there.

⁷Stolen from Triplux.

⁸Which Sarah’s been telling me to read since forever. And which she just gave me for Christmas, so if I fail to accomplish this one, well, that would just be sad.

⁹I always seem to get a course for one term only.  I taught Nutritional Assessment last year as a sessional, but the department hired a new prof and he chose that as one of his courses to teach, so I don’t get to teach it this year. And then, this past term I taught another course as a sessional because the usual sessional needed a break from it for one term only, so I probably won’t get to teach it next year. Now I want some consistency!

¹⁰Just because it would be difficult.

¹¹i.e., meet the recommended number of servings for each food group every day and consume no more than one unhealthy “other” food per week.

¹²i.e., ones that I haven’t been to before. Or ones where I’ve only been to their airport/airport hotel (I’m looking at you Texas, Oregon and Arizona), if I actually go to somewhere other than the airport/airport hotel.

¹³since it doesn’t fit in my kitchen. =(

¹⁴I can’t believe I’ve lived in Vancouver for 8+ years and not once have I been to see Bard on the Beach. I like Shakespeare (I even have a minor in Drama that included a whole course in “Acting Shakespeare”). And I like beaches!

¹⁵Inspired by the tree at the Mexican resort I stayed at this Christmas.

¹⁶My 2008 average was 93 readers per day.

¹⁷Which occurred on Friday, September 26, 2008 as a direct result of my list of the hottest players in the NHL

¹⁸Which I have partly written and can’t seem to get around to finishing.

¹⁹I’ve been trying to find a good pair of brown dress pants since forever! Hopefully I’ll find them in the next 1001 days.

²⁰Because I really enjoy baking and I never seem to do it anymore.