Soul Searchings

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m very good at saving money when it comes to buying stuff. I will always do my research and get what I’m looking for at the best possible price. By doing this, I’m sure I have saved thousands over the years.

Strangely, while I’m good at saving money, I’m not very good at making my money grow. I’ve never done any investments, and even when I have some decent money saved up, I just let it sit in my savings account, which has next to no interest. Just this weekend, I’ve finally looked into putting some money into a RRSP, and I finally realize how much of a tax break this can result in.

February marks the one year mark of employment with my current company, and I got a nice raise and a bonus to boot. That was a very pleasant unexpected surprise.

For me, I think the saying is true - money only matters when you don’t have any. I find that I’m a lot less diligent in keeping track of my money now that I don’t have to worry about whether I have enough. Since my company is expanding and hiring a lot of new employees, I’ve had to help buy a lot of new equipment on my own credit cards, before expensing it. In this last month alone, I’ve rolled almost ten grand on plastic for the company. I’m so unconcerned about the money, that I keep putting off submitting my expense sheet. Also, I’ve been so lackadaisical with keeping track of all the purchases, that I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed expensing some of them. Hopefully I didn’t miss any of the large items, but I’m not sure why I’m not even that concerned about it.

My main credit card is a PC Financial Mastercard, which gives 1% back in PC Points to spend on groceries at Superstore. I have like $400 worth saved up, just from expensing so much. I only have about a $5500 limit on it, so sometimes when I have to buy a lot of stuff in a short period of time, like last month, I need to defer to my Starbucks Visa card, which gives 1% back to spend at Starbucks. They give nice perks with this card too, where often they include coupons for free beverages or food with their statements. I’ve hardly put any personal purchases on the Visa myself, but I still have almost $100 to spend at Starbucks.

On the poker front, this month has been pretty good so far. I’ve only played five sessions, totalling about 7.5 hours, and I’m up $273.75. I haven’t had a single losing session yet, but one of those sessions, I finished up only a nickel. In the past, a significant portion of the money I’ve earned from online poker is by way of being a bonus whore and just clearing deposit bonuses, while winning only small amounts in doing so. This month, that figure represents basically pure winnings, so I’m pretty happy about that.

As for an update on my hockey pool, it looks like I’m well on my way to winning the $120 pot as well. I’ve been leading the pool since November, with the difference to second place ranging from between 80-30 for the most part, but just in the last week or so, it has grown to over 100, and barring any catastrophes, I can’t see anyone catching up. My lineup now consists of:

1. V. Lecavalier (doing way better than anyone predicted)
2. B. Richards (not doing close to what was expected)
3. M. Nylander (doing pretty well)
4. M. Straka (almost keeping pace with Jagr)
5. E. Staal (significantly underperforming thus far)
6. R. Brind’Amour (old-timer doing better than Staal)
7. P. Kariya (well below last year’s pace)
8. J. Arnott (meeting expectations)
9. M. Savard (great pickup and exceeding expectations)
10. M. Sundin (steady as always)
11. B. McCabe (very strong start but faded off)
12. T. Kaberle (same as McCabe)
13. S. Gonchar (can’t go wrong being on same powerplay as Crosby)
14. D. Boyle (doing better than expected)
15. M. Brodeur (best goalie, period - 10 shut outs already)
16. M. Kiprusoff (second best goalie in my league, tied with Luongo)

My strategy of picking my goalies early while sacrificing my forward picks has paid off in spades. Right now, Brodeur is worth a good 30 points over any other goalie in my pool - representing a significant portion of my lead. The other key to my lead is my defensemen, all of which are my original draft picks. All four are in the top 13 point getters for my league. My forward picks were actually pretty bad. In fact, I only have four of my original ten forwards, and out of those, only Lecavalier is doing well.

For those more hockey savvy, you may have realized that I have a lot of pairs of players from the same team. With my fourteen players, not including goalies, I only have seven teams represented. I have two Rangers, two Hurricanes, two Predators, three Lightning, and three Maple Leafs. These teams all have better than average power plays, and when they get it going, I can really rack up the points fast. The best goals are on the Lightning or Maple Leaf powerplay, where for example, Boyle will score on assists from Lecavalier and Richards (which happened today) or Sundin scores from Kaberle and McCabe. Those end up being 7-point goals for me. I think I’m the only person in my league that has more than two players from any one team, so nobody else can get those 7-point super specials.

Anyways, barring any major injuries, I think I’ll just keep my lineup the way it is until the end of the season, and that should be enough to win. I’m so hesitant to modify my lineup that I can’t even pick someone to drop so that I can pick up Forsberg, now that he’s finally got his skate problems fixed.

I think all the others in the pool have basically given up now. Nobody has shown much interest in the pool in the last little while, and I don’t blame them. =)

This past Saturday, the annual Monster Jam was back in town, so as usual, I headed down there on my own to catch the show.

I paid $23 for the cheapest ticket they had available, which was near the back of the lower bowl, towards the corner section. In reality, even this seat wasn’t that bad - the angle wasn’t ideal, but the view was fine. But, as I do almost every year, I scope out where there are a bunch of empty seats in the prime viewing sections, and wait until about the first intermission, then make my way to those better seats. I’ve never had a problem doing this, since the place never even comes close to selling out.

I watched the second half from basically the best seats possible, right in the middle of the stadium, just a few rows up from the floor. Unfortunately, the show itself was pretty mediocre. There was absolutely nothing that stood out in this year’s show. In fact, I would hasten to say that while the price of the tickets have steadily gone up, the quality of the show has steadily gone down.

I remember in the good ol’ days, back in the mid 90’s, the shows were awesome. Aside from the fact that Bigfoot used to come to town, they had a much larger variety of events.

This year, the lineup was the following:

1. Monster truck wheelie competition, which was extremely lame. It was basically just each truck going up to the crush cars one time and seeing how vertical they can get. Most of them were pretty crappy, and no better than any other approach they do, whether in a race or in the freestyle competition.
2. Monster truck donut competition, which was also pretty lame. For some reason, they didn’t bring in any dirt at all this year for the show, which means it was bare concrete everywhere. This means the monster trucks get very little bite, which means much slower driving overall. Doing donuts on a concrete surface is nowhere near as exciting as doing donuts on dirt.
3. Monster truck racing, which was okay, but nothing special.
4. Motocross stunts, which was boring for me, since I’ve seen all those tricks about a million times. However, I was impressed that one rider actually did a backflip off the skinny ramp, with concrete all around.
5. Sportbike stunters, which was also boring for me, since I’ve seen stuff ten times better in videos.
6. Kart racing by youngsters.
7. Remote control cars playing during intermission
8. Monster truck freestyle, which was the only hope of saving the show, but turned out to be very disappointing. Most of the trucks were way too timid, and there were no exciting moments to speak of. What made it worse was that Grave Digger, as the last to go, was just starting to gain steam and potentially getting ready to do more risky jumps, broke unexpectedly.

Only three or four of those above activities could really be considered events. In the past, a single show would feature:

1. Monster truck racing
2. Monster truck freestyle
3. Motocross
4. Tractor pulling
5. Tough truck competition
6. Huge fire-breathing robots
7. Roll-over competition
8. Mud-bog racing
9. Demolition derby (which I found boring)

And probably a few other things I don’t remember. In the past, the show would begin at maybe 7pm, and wouldn’t be over until almost 11pm. This year, I got there right at 7:30pm, and just as the freestyle competition ended, I think I was out of there by about 9:30pm.

Bigfoot has always been my favourite monster truck, but they haven’t been to Vancouver in many years. They used to come to town as part of the USHRA events, but they had a fallout in 1998, and since that time, the two parties have been completely disassociated from each other. That is why Bigfoot doesn’t take part in any Monster Jam events, which is now the main circuit that tours North America. In fact, the USHRA parent company actually started buying out and consolidating a lot of the well-established monster truck teams around that time, such as Grave Digger, Bear Foot, Carolina Crusher and Monster Patrol, just to name a few. To put it in perspective, the Monster Jam brand somewhat became to monster trucks what the WWE is to professional wrestling.

Yes, I know a lot about monster trucks. In fact, at every show I watch, I’m sure there are only a small handful of people who know more about monster trucks than I do - the history, the technology, and random knowledge. Someday, I still want to drive one. =)

In general, I think the sport of monster trucks has become somewhat stagnant. For most of the 90’s, every year saw huge advances in monster truck technology, but in the last few years, I don’t think there has been any new developments at all. The trucks basically remain the same year after year, and as such, everything that can be done has already been done. I mean, for example, the world record for a monster truck long jump was accomplished by Bigfoot back in 1999. Since then, nothing has even come close to making a comparable impact in the world of monster trucks.

Sadly to say, if I can know in advance that next year’s show will be as lackluster as this year’s, maybe it might not even be worth going to.

It’s 3am Sunday morning, and I’m having some trouble falling asleep. Usually, this wouldn’t be much of an issue, as I generally can sleep in on the weekend as late as I like, but unfortunately there’s a lot of work to do at the office, so I agreed to be in by 10am.

I’ve always been a late sleeper, even back in the elementary school days. During that time, I was an avid - perhaps even maniacal - reader. I think most nights, I would read at LEAST an entire novel, sometimes multiple. One of my preferred book series was the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. In grade seven, we were made to keep a log of all the books we read, and I know I had a ridiculous list of books at year’s end. By doing that, I think I regularly slept at 2-3am.

I was no better in high school, but instead of reading, I went on to doing other things till the wee hours, such as being on the computer. So often, I would go to school with only 4-5 hours of sleep, that I was quite known for sleeping anywhere during the day. It didn’t help that I somehow ended up being in choir from grade ten onwards, which meant rehearsals at 7:30am. Even on days I didn’t have choir, I still went to school that early because that was the only time I could get a ride. It was either that, or walk 18 blocks to school in the morning… so I chose the former. When I didn’t have choir, I would often just sit by my locker and do homework if I had any, or just sleep while propped up against the locker.

I found it pretty amusing that even though I fell asleep in class on numerous occasions, I never ever got in trouble for it. In fact, there was one time in grade 11 math where I fell asleep in the front row, and I think Sandip joked to the teacher "Shouldn’t Stanley be awake for this?" and the teacher replied with "I don’t have time to bother with that." If anyone reading this happens to have been there and remembers that, please correct me if it didn’t go down like that. =)

Anyways, since the last entry, I’ve had a few pretty good sessions of poker. All in all, I finished the month of January up approximately $750. That’s some decent pocket change!

So I did in fact stay up for the Australian Open final, and watched Federer dispatch Gonzalez in straight sets. Being that Gonzalez had more unforced errors in the first two games against Federer than in the entire match against Haas, there’s no doubt he wasn’t playing as well as he had been earlier in the tournament. In the end, it’s just another notch on Federer’s belt, and he’s well on his way to being the greatest of all time. At the pace he’s going and with no signs of slowing down in his prime, he could surpass Sampras’ 14 Grand Slams by next year. The real question is whether he’ll be able to win the French Open or not.

Okay, now I’m feeling pretty sleepy, so I think it’s time to sign off.

Until next time…