HNIC

A highly controversial news story, published early this afternoon by CBC.ca, revealed to hockey fans across the country CBC's intentions not to renew licensing for the much-loved Hockey Night in Canada theme song. This shock came a day after the Detroit Red Wings beat the Pittsburgh Penguins to win the Stanley Cup. Thousands of Canadians watched what turned out to be the last broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada for this season and, apparently, the last time the popular theme song could air with the program. As of right now, the online story has 415 comments, almost all of them very negative about CBC's decision to drop the current theme that, for so many Canadians, is considered to be a second national anthem. Only hours after the first story, CBC.ca published a contradictory article to the first one, reporting that a new deal with the theme's composer is still possible. It will be interesting to see whether next season's first HNIC broadcast will use the traditional theme or feature a new, and highly unwanted, one. I, of course, can't imagine tuning in to watch HNIC on a Saturday night without hearing the old, familiar tune.

Watch a HNIC intro that first interviews star Canadian players from the six Canadian teams and then goes into the highly-revered song.

Olympic Update

This afternoon, Canadian diver Alexandre Despatie was granted a conditional placement on the Olympic team. Later, Canadian gymnast Kyle Shewfelt was also conditionally placed on the team. In honour of their almost assured spots on Team Canada for the Beijing 2008 Olympics, here are the clips of both athletes starring on the Rick Mercer Report. Laugh along as Rick learns to dive and tries on an Olympic gold medal!

For more wonderfully entertaining Rick Mercer videos, click here. The 5th season starts June 10!

Hockey Fall

If you haven't done so already, check out the video on Bryn's May 26 post. We both were watching Sunday's Memorial Cup final on TV when the unfortunate accident occurred and, after about 15 seconds of complete shock, we found it exceedingly amusing. Monday evening after work, I turned on CBC to watch the start of the Stanley Cup final around a minute before the scene in the following video took place. This time there was no shock, only utter glee! See for yourself.

Julie Days

After coming home from college, I had three days between trips to relax in Kelowna. I spent a good part of those three days with one of my bestest friends, Julie. On Tuesday we hung out and talked, a lot. Wednesday afternoon we biked 9 km's on the Mission Park Greenway from my house to the lake. It was downhill on the way there, which meant it was uphill coming back. After biking 18 km's total that day, I'm still recovering!

On the Manteo Resort dock before starting the uphill journey back

On Thursday, my mum took Bryn, Julie and me out to Milestone's for lunch where I spent a good portion of the meal trying to watch the Canada/Norway World Championship hockey game on a TV much too far away from our table. Then we drove downtown to the Sails and Kerry Park where my mum held a mini-photoshoot of the three of us.

Other activities included having an English-author movie night and playing mini-golf at Scandia. Friday morning our family drove to Lacombe, AB for a weekend family reunion and Sunday morning, before we had even started driving home, Julie flew back to Andrews for PT summer school. Hopefully August comes quickly so that I can hang out with Julie again when she comes home to do her clinicals!

Driving Home

Finally, close to four weeks after leaving Collegedale, I've decided to post some pictures from our trip back to BC. Had we traveled nonstop, we could have made the 4,318 km (2,683 miles) trip home in less than two days (or sooner if we'd taken the quickest, but much uglier route). But alas, we had three cars and only four drivers, so we got home in four days instead. Check out our trip map for the route home.















Stopping in at Union College to visit friends & a cousin


Parking at the Yellowstone N.P. geysers


Cutest little bison in the park


Catching a ride across the boardwalks


Celebrating my 3-year-old memory of this spot


Watching Old Faithful