The Hockey Sweater

I had a childhood flashback this week when I saw my sister reading the book The Hockey Sweater for her French class. I remember it being my favourite book growing up.

WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD; It is a story about a kid whose favourite team is the Montreal Canadians but is forced to wear a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey because his Montreal jersey no longer fits. Talk about a loser kid :)

At family gathering, you know when you come across a kid that knows all the statistics about every single hockey player, well that was me as a kid too. Fortunately, I am not that obsessive now, but looking back, those were definitely the good ol' days.

And the winner is ...

The 2006 NHL playoffs begin this Friday, April 21st. These athletes will play some of the toughest 2 months of hockey in their life, all for the glory of the Stanley Cup.

In honour of the playoffs, I have made my picks in my first annual NHL Playoff "ozzies". As you go through these picks, you may be surprised as to the team I choose to win it all this year. Let's see how many of these picks I get right. Click on image for larger picture of my picks.


The San Jose Sharks are the hottest team in the playoffs, no two players in the league are playing better then Joe Thornton and Jonathan Cheechoo. Although the Ottawa Senators have not played well down the stretch, they are too good of a team to get upset in the first few rounds. However, I believe Peter Forsberg will work his magic and the Flyers will make it to the Stanley cup finals only to lose to the Sharks.

Let the games begin!

Coinage Optimizer

I consider myself a “coinage optimizer”, a definition that you won’t find on Wikipedia because it is a term I have made up, but a fitting term to describe the following characteristic of mine, that being:

“Change carrying hater”.

Whenever I make a cash purchase, I always try to give the cashier a cash amount that will return me the least amount of change. Recently, I had the following situation happen to me three times:

The cost of the items I purchased was something dollars and two cents, however, I only had something dollars and a penny.

Here are the results:

1) Starbucks: The cashier let me off the hook with a “don’t worry about it”.
2) Subway: The cashier said “no problem” but did not end up returning any change, while I was expecting something.
3) Target: The cashier was a stickler, almost giving me back $0.99 before I tried to negotiate a better coinage return.

I thought to myself, is it appropriate to ask such a favour? I am a simple law-abiding citizen who just doesn’t want to sit on an extra-heavy wallet filled with change. I ask you the people to be the judge or if you’re my friend, be a biased judge in my favour.