A New Month Begins

With the calendar turning to April today, I am taking a day off. March was a busy month of hockey with everything that happened in the last few weeks, and I just need a night to unwind and not think about the game. Aside from updating some spreadsheets and cleaning up the desktop of the laptop where I do some of the graphic and video work you see here, tonight will be a night where I can purge whatever leftover thoughts I had from March and press on into April where the temperatures will rise, the game will intensify, and teams will begin preparing for a playoff run or an off-season of changes. While it may be April Fool's Day, this is not a joke: I am taking today off.

I can tell you that work has been far busier and far more challenging in the last month than anything I've seen in my career with my current employer. I'm not complaining about being busy nor do I feel overwhelmed, but it's that sort of constant stream of work where you look at the clock at 9am before checking it again only to see that it's 2pm. I like being busy at work, but that kind of constant flow of work starts to wear one down as there never seemed to be a break where one could have caught one's breath. And everyone needs that break.

On that note, it was one year ago where I proclaimed that I would likely be posting less stuff on this site. That proclamation never came close to being true as I continue to add something daily over the last year, even if it's not hockey-related in any way. I was thinking about the promise I made to have the site undergo serious renovations - something I am going to complete in the summer - but it occurred to me that I need to start adding more to one part of the blog.

I was looking at the bookcase that holds a number of the books I've reviewed here, and I have two piles of books that aren't organized on the shelves because they have yet to be read and reviewed. How did I get two piles of unread books? They were bought or given to me as gifts with the intention of cracking their spines, but my time was directed elsewhere and those books were forgotten.

Having admitted this, I am making it my goal to read two of the books I have set aside with the intention of reviewing them on here and on my GoodReads account. According to the total on that site, I have 38 hockey-related books I have yet to read, and that number is far too large for my liking. The only way to reduce is to start flipping pages and absorbing the information from those pages. That will start this weekend. If all goes well, there should be a review of the book I chose to read next week. After that, it becomes habit.

Not every weekend will see my face in a book, but I do want to whittle down that list of 38 publications to something in the single-digit values. There are some titles that are interesting to me, and I fully admit that I should have read them before embarking on this new habit-forming venture I'm undertaking. For a guy who laments those at work who either don't read directions or skip the mandatory parts of directions, I should be following my own advice.

March may have been National Reading Month in Canada, but I'm kicking it up a notch or three in April. Better late than never, right?

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!