Grr.

I realize this really wouldn't interest anybody outside of a small circlr of friends . . .

. . . but I really had hopes that the players and owners were going to come to some kind of agreement, and the NHL season wasn't going to be entirely scrapped. I know, I know; as they pointed out on CBC this morning, baseball's spring training started yesterday, so a hockey season at this point would be more or less a lame joke.

Well, but I'd have laughed.

I was really looking forward to watching hockey while riding the bike; hockey provides the perfect diversion. I find it utterly gripping, but it requires no advance preparation and you don't have to remember anything from one game to the next. (This is unlike knitting, say - where you have to remember where you were, and how to make the pattern stitches, etc. etc.) So I'm bummed . . .

And I must say, I tended to side with the owners on this one. There's something wrong with an economic model that prices tickets to games outside the reach of ordinary people, that's pushing hockey outside of Canada (where they actually have ice in the winter! And a tradition of playing the game!) to cities like Columbus, Ohio . . . which can't support it, either. (Or to places with no ice - like Phoenix and L.A. and, I'm told, New Orleans - which was supposed to get a team called the Ice Gators. Now that's a warm-weather team I would have cheered for; I'm a sucker for bad puns . . . )

Okay, so much for the rant; I realize this is definitely a minority concern. But it's heartfelt. When I get home, EB and I are gonna cry into our orange juice and beer, respectively . . .