Blessed by the Potato

For years now, my normally previously good memory has been absolutely terrible. Today was extra bad: I had something important I didn’t want to forget, so I grabbed a pen & a post-it note… and had no idea what it was I was going to write down. Rather disturbing.

I’m up stupidly late at the moment watching TV at my parents’ house, and despite having something like eight times as many channels as I do, there really isn’t anything on their TV I want to watch… until I hopped over to the usually lame Rogers community channel. They were showing a curling game, and it’s great! I have no idea what it’s for: some sort of national, but the teams are young & mixed, and they haven’t mentioned it at all yet. Curling is, as you all probably know, my sport of choice. I don’t usually watch it on TV because I don’t usually watch any sports on TV: I’d rather play than watch. But I’ve got to say that I’m surprised curling isn’t a more popular spectator sport, since the pacing and action seem better suited to TV. Football and baseball involve long stretches of standing and scratching, and hockey has a tonne of faceoff flurries where you can’t really see what’s going on at all (or maybe I’m just defective that way, as a real Canadian is supposed to be able to follow the puck on the radio). But curling has a fairly decent pace of stones moving, and you get to listen to the strategy discussions in-between rather than the announcers trying to guess at what the coach is calling for the next play.

It’s also nice because since it’s on Rogers’ “no one watches and no one buys advertising” channel, there’s hardly any commercials. This game is also neat because one of the skips is a 27-year-old research assistant at McGill, so I’m thinking the whole time “that could be me!” (except for the part where I think I’m a much better curler than I actually am). This Quebec team is really interesting: they’re completely bilingual, so one’ll ask a question in French, and the answer will come in English. It was a fun game to watch with a lot of good shots, but also a few mistakes to keep things interesting. New Brunswick was dominating through the beginning, then Quebec started coming back to make it interesting (but never quite took the lead back).

While we’re on the subject of curling, I got a new broom last week: an Olson Reactor2 Carbon Fibre with swivelly head. It’s pretty keen and very light, and actually very similar to what the people on TV are using now. I can’t really say for sure yet if it helps the rock move any further, but being able to sweep with the head perpendicular to the rock does help us get our sweepers in tighter. The really light broom seems to use a completely different set of muscles than my old one. It used to be that I’d go home at the end of the night with aching pecs, but now it seems to be more in the tricep area. I have no idea why that would be, though. I got it at the London Curling Club, which has a very small proshop run out of the closet, essentially. Nobody works it full-time, so you have to find the bartender or one of the volunteers to buy things; however, the costs were very reasonable. I got that broom for $125 including tax, while most other places were charging $160 plus tax plus shipping. However, they don’t have very good selection: if you didn’t want a top-of-the-line broom like that, then there was only one or two basic ones to pick from [originally, I was going to get a keen swivelly head broom that had a traditional fibreglass handle which would have run closer to $80, but was lured by the convenience of getting it at the LCC and the prospect of more broom for not quite as much money as I thought]. While the broom is in good mechanical shape, it does have a lot of large scratches on the handle, taking off the paint in various places. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was a factory second (those prices are very low!), but I think it was probably worth it. Oh, and something to ponder if, like me, you get yourself a fancy new broom: consider getting a replacement head or two, as there’s no guarantee the manufacturers will have compatible heads in even a year or two.

Finally, as my glasses are getting more and more fine scratches on them with use, I’m finding that the usual winter/curling issue of fogging is getting to ridiculous extremes. I’m going to try to find some anti-fog cleaner tomorrow (I know I used to see the stuff everywhere, but since I’ve been looking the last few weeks, I haven’t seen any). I’d appreciate any advice as to which, if any, are actually effective.