Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My dad emailed me this photo yesterday:

It’s the odometer of his truck, which he bought on the same day that I bought my car, and yes, that is showing that he’s driven 100,000 km! In 944 days¹.

In contrast, here’s my odometer:

53,683 km². Or 54% of the distance my dad has driven.

Further, 9,806 of the kilometres that I have driven have been for work³. Meaning that I’ve only driven 43,877 km on my own time⁴, compared to my dad’s 100,000! Clearly, my dad is superior to me in the field of putting mileage on his vehicle!

One area that my dad doesn’t beat me though, is in winning bets on Canucks vs. Leafs games. Such as the bet we have on tomorrow night’s game. I expect to be the proud owner of a lottery ticket purchased by my dad after the Canucks beat the Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada!

1. Mathletes will note that works out to 106 km per day!! [↩]
2. That’s 57 km per day! [↩]
3. Not commuting to and from work, but driving to meetings, interviews, focus groups, and other such work-y events. [↩]
4. Or 46.5 km per day. [↩]

So it’s my week to do the update on the hockey pool that I’m in. I really wished that I’d volunteered to do the Week 7 update, where I reigned supreme! Instead, I’m doing the update on this past week, so I get to report on how sucktastic I am. But since it’s not all about me, let’s look at the graphs, shall we?

Figure 1: Week 9 points

As seen in Figure 1,  Cath and Bob did some butt kicking this week, followed closely by dreamsandhope, Lava, and Modscientist, and then Gerty. Me, Richardipus, and Scientist Mother did significantly worse than the others, with the notable exception of arkmennis, who is sadly, sadly at the end of the graph there.

Figure 2: Change in point totals from week 8 to week 9.

Looking at the overall standings, Dreamsandhope, Richardipus, and Lava are in a three-way¹ tie for first overall (287 points), followed closely by Modscientist (285 points). Cath is in fifth place (281 points), followed by Gerty & ScientistMother (272 points each), and then Bob (268 points). As you can see from the graph, arkmennis (248 points) and I (254 points) are breaking away from the pack in a race for the bottom. He and I are clearly able to get by on much fewer points than everyone else, so I think it’s pretty obvious that we are just much more efficient that our competitors.

It appears that my strategy of forgetting to update my team each week is not doing me much good² – so I actually tweaked my lineup for week 10. Here’s hoping!

1. Three-way. Tee hee. [↩]
2. With the exception of week 7 where I changed nothing and won the week, but I was in Montreal at the time, and Montreal is a hockey mecca, so I think that’s why the hockey gods smiled upon me. [↩]

I watched the start of one game and the end of the other, but both Cup games played in Vancouver this weekend ended with a victory for the good guys!

Truth is, I’m not really much of a football fan and haven’t been since many, many years ago when my Dad and I used to play in a football pool run by my Uncle Harry¹. But since that pool stopped, I don’t think I’ve watched a single football game, which makes me think I was more of a fan of winning money than of the sport. But I digress.

Friday night, as I mentioned previously, my alma mater played in the Vanier Cup – which my friend and fellow McMaster alumna, Therese, got to go to. I watched most of the first half – if having the TV on the background counts as “watching” – and then Devon and I headed to out for dinner and to meet Rachel & Peter for drinks. The score was 20-0 for McMaster when we left and apparently they had a bit of a meltdown in the second half, but managed to win it in the end! Hooray Marauders!

Tonight, of course, was the Grey Cup² that  (which my friend and hockey teammate got to go to!), and I got home from my hockey game in time to watch most of the second half. There were some really nice plays – even a football neophyte such as myself could tell that – and a few points for Winnipeg to keep us from getting to confident, but the BC Lions managed to take it in the end. Hooray Lions!

So, even though I’m not really a football fan, I’m not above jumping on the bandwagon to cheer these two victories!

1. If you’ve ever seen the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa and Homer are in a football pool together – it was like that, except that my Dad and I were both good at choosing teams. [↩]
2. I learned from Gillian’s tweet that the Grey Cup was commissioned by the grandson of the Earl after which Earl Grey tea was named. Clearly, my newfound love of Earl Grey has contributed to this BC victory. [↩]

Hey, remember that time I set a world record? I know, how could you forget with it being so epically awesome and all?  Well, I think I mentioned¹ that there was a documentary film crew that was following us around before and during the game, capturing the highs and lows and all the various goings on of 40 women who decided to play hockey for 10 days straight to raise money for, and awareness of, Cystic Fibrosis.

Well, the documentarians are hard at work on creating their masterpiece and they are at the point where they have some teaser videos for us to watch. Here’s a 40 second clip:

And here’s a 2 minute preview of the documentary:

1000 points to the first person who correctly identifies the three times that I appear in the second video!

I can’t *wait* until this movie is ready!

1. I say that I “think” I mentioned because I was kind of delirious from pain and sleep deprivation during most of that game, so I can’t be certain of what I did or did not say during that time. [↩]

Astute mathletes will notice that a 2-5-0-1 record does not a .666 winning percentage make. This is because the winning percentage only counts the games that we’ve played in Division 3, to which we were recently demoted. We are 2-1 in Div 3, hence the .666.

Happy Halloween, y’all!

A while ago, I bought a Groupon for the Running Room – $50 worth of stuff for only $25. I figured it was a pretty good deal, given that I often buy stuff at the Running Room and I assumed that I’d run two half marathons this year and thus would, at the very least, need a new pair of running shoes. Of course, I decided to set a world record in hockey instead of running a second half marathon this year and thus, still don’t need a new pair of running shoes. But my Groupon was set to expire on October 30, so I found myself in the Running Room on Friday trying to decide what to spend my $50 on. As I mentioned, I don’t need any new running shoes, nor do I really need any new running clothes or other running paraphernalia. And then I saw the Acuball.

 Me and my new acuball.

I remembered a blog posting that Dan wrote a while ago about his shiny new blog balls. And I remembered that he loved said shiny new blue balls. And after a quick few texts messages with Dan, I decided that I needed to be the owner of my very own shiny blue ball.

By now I’m sure you are wondering what the heck this thing does. Well, the idea behind it is that you use the nubs on the blue ball to put pressure on tight muscles and, by holding that for a few minutes, the muscles will release. So I spent some time yesterday playing around with it and I have to say, it was totally worth the money. Especially since I was using my Groupon, so it was half price.

Also, since my Groupon was worth $50, but the acuball only cost $30, I bought an entire box of Sharkies! Mmmm, delicious Sharkies!

I got a text message from my friend JB yesterday. All it said was:

“Beth Snow + David Booth = babies?”

David Booth, I thought? Who the hell is David Booth?  Turns out that I’ve been a negligent Canucks fan and had missed the news that we’d traded away Samuelsson and Strum for Booth and Reinprecht from the Florida Panthers.

This is David Booth:

Hello, hottie!

My friends know me too well!

The rest of the people in this deal are uggoes, so by my calculations we unloaded two not-hotties and picked up one hottie and one not-hottie. Thus, I approve of this trade!

I’ve been incredibly lazy in my hockey pool and haven’t changed my picks since the first week. And I’ve suffered the consequences, as I now sit in last place in my pool! *hangs head in shame*

So I decided that it was time to shake things up, which meant I had to actually look at my list and see who was underperforming and who I should replace them with, which, of course, meant I had to make a spreadsheet¹. And after this in depth analysis, I made the following changes to my roster.

Kicked Off The Team

• Benoit Pouliot
• Dustin Brown²
• Shea Weber
• Brent Seabrook
• Victor Hedman³
• Carey Price

New Recruits

I should point out that I have adapted my definition of “hottie” for the purposes of this pool. If I can find just one photo of a player on the Internet in which they look hot, they now qualify as a hottie⁴.

Thomas Vanek

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins

I scouted out Ryan as a hottie in my analysis of the new draftees earlier this year, and while I realize his good numbers have a lot to do with the hat trick he got against the Canucks, I decided to take a gamble on him that he’ll keep playing this well – and that he won’t get sent down to the minors for development.

Erik Karlsson

Christian Erhoff

Former Canuck. Current hottie.

Sheldon Souray

Kari Lehtonen

Here’s hoping the new recruits bring me up from my sad little last place existence!

1. I do love a good spreadsheet. [↩]
2. Although Dustin actually has more points than Alex Burrows, who I’m keeping, Alex in my only Canuck. [↩]
3. Probably the hottest guy on my team, but just not performing at the actual hockey playing part. [↩]
4. As opposed to my previous definition where they had to look hot in most of their photos on the Internet. [↩]

So the hockey pool has started! And since “week 1″ only constituted two days¹, Cath decided that she’d start doing the weekly updates next week. Well, bollocks to that I say! I’m doing well and need to brag, because you never know how long you’ll be on top! I could be in last place by the time next Saturday rolls around! And with that, I give you this shiny line graph of the hockey pool’s standings as of the end of Week 1:

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, as of this writing, I am currently #1 in the pool, with a cool 26 points after last night’s games. Take that, everyone!

1. Thursday and Friday, since the CBC hockey pool that we are using starts it’s “weeks” on Saturdays. [↩]

http://runforyourlives.com/

Props to Dr. Erika for passing that along to me!