Monday Musings: Fasten your chinstraps…

We have a funny curse on our team.  We can’t seem to win more than five games in a row (which is nothing to complain about, really).  This is the third time that we’ve won five games and then lost the sixth.  The last time it happened, we were knocked out of the playoffs (yeah, that old story again), and before that, we lost our first game against the Foothill Flyers after our first five game win streak.  We came into this game winning five games straight, so if there was indeed some kind of curse, it didn’t bode well for us going in.

The Volcanoes finally did it and defeated us for the first time, in what turned out to be a good game.  Our bench was a bit short but all of the Hogs played hard and determined games.  We made a game of it near the end and it could have gone either way.  We definitely shouldn’t feel bad about this loss.

Because of one of my actions during the game, I’m not sure I made too many friends on the Volcanoes’ bench, though.  In retrospect, what I did was probably a “jerk” move.

The orange and black attack

One of my teammates and I got in on this bad boy from HockeyGiant.com a couple of weeks ago.  It’s the Nike Bauer Apollo composite (my teammates have demanded that I pronounce it “com-PAUSE-it”) stick. I got the M9 curve with an 87 flex.  The biggest attraction is, of course, that it’s orange and black, to match the Puck Hogs colours.  And, for the price of a wood stick, it’s a great deal.

Unfortunately, I have a horrible shot.  But, I’m starting the 4-week Skatetown shooting clinic tonight, so let’s see if that’ll make buying this stick worth it.  I did the last clinic on stickhandling and it was pretty useful, so I’m looking forward to the shooting clinic now.  For now, I’ll use my Mission M-1 until I get bored or it breaks, and the way I play, it’ll likely be the former rather than the latter.

I still have an Easton Stealth stick sitting in my garage - what I got free with my Easton Synergy 800c skates that I bought in Vancouver last September – that I refuse to use until I have any sort of slap shot.  I have no business playing with a $200+ stick without the mad skillz to wield it.

Maybe I’ll get to use it…some day.