Hi everyone! What a weekend! At 3:30 yesterday afternoon, one hell of a thunderstorm ripped through Ottawa dumping heavy rain and golf-ball sized hail on us all. Luckily, Environment Canada sent out an alert on all our cellphones warning us a full 30 seconds in advance that it would be a good idea to take cover. Always good to know that if I’m actually vulnerable, out in some open field somewhere when a major storm rolls into town, that I will have literally seconds to hide my butt before needing to scoop handfuls of ice out of my underwear.

If that wasn’t weird enough, my son and I witnessed not one but two deadly (or death-adjacent) incidents involving a bird and a cat. As we were playing a game of bowling on the Nintendo Switch, a bird flew right into our window, and after taking about half an hour to regain its senses, the bird walked away. I breathed a sigh of relief, to say the least, because had that bird broken a wing or something, I have absolutely no idea what I would have had to do. Then, two hours later as we were getting ready to go for a swim over at a neighbour’s house, my son took his scooter down the road and noticed that a neighbourhood cat was run over and a crowd was gathered around trying to figure out what to do. I think they took a picture in order to post a message to the owner on Facebook, since we’d all seen the cat for months now, but had no idea who it belonged to. Very weird weekend to say the least.

By the way, I really don’t have a segue to this week’s featured article. I was actually going to just write about the crazy weather we had on Friday, but since I didn’t actually finish the site update until Saturday night, and I had a weird second afternoon in a row, I thought I’d just go all in. Sorry about that, but hey, whaddya gonna do?

This week, I’ve posted an Oakland Tribune article from John Porter in which he writes about the difficult off-season faced by the California Golden Seals. Near the end of the 1973-74 season Garry Young had been appointed the team’s new Director of Hockey Operations, and he was looking to reshape the pathetic roster Charlie Finley and Fred Glover had left him. The Seals didn’t have much talent to begin with, and they would be forced to give some of it up in the upcoming expansion draft that was going to stock the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts. Young definitely had some hard decisions ahead of him, but when you are faced with these types of situations, sometimes good things happen. In Young’s case, his team showed a marked improvement over the following two years, although he wouldn’t be in Oakland long enough to celebrate his success moving on to St. Louis instead. You can read John Porter’s article right here.

Until next time, stay gold!