Living in Florida offers year round outdoor activity. Something the Wife and I enjoy is going boating. We have often thought about buying a new boat, it’s something the whole family would enjoy. However, owning a boat means having to store a boat. I only have a two car garage, which means no boat in the garage. I guess our family boating will have to involve a cruise ship every couple of years.

I mentioned I played ice hockey the Wednesday night. Did I mention how sore my inner and outer thigh muscles are? It’s a good kind of hurt, but just reminds me of how old and out of shape I am.

Here’s one reason why I like hockey. Most of the players in the NHL are the kind of guys you’d want dating your daughter, or the kind of guys you wouldn’t mind having as a next door neighbor. You don’t typically see hockey players making the news for spousal abuse or drug abuse. I’m sure there are a few bad apples out there, but for the most part, hockey has a lot of “nice guys”.

Unlike some other sports…where the players are constantly in the news for shooting off guns in clubs, or using their SUV’s to run people off the road, or going on a 2 day Coke binge. Hockey has stayed away from all of that. Must be the Canadian influence!

Well I know everyone has been eagerly awaiting my synopsis of the Lightning’s season and I would like to thank everyone for respectfully allowing me a mourning period. I will break this down into two, possibly three blogs. Regular season, post season and next season. The Bolts started slow, but made up a lot of ground after the first of the year. Thanks in large part to the emergence of Swedish netminder Johan Holmquist. Holmer proved to be spectacular at times and confounding at others. But for an NHL rookie, I think he was solid and has the tools to be great. He moves in the crease with great ease, and his positioning is usually outstanding. I’m optimistic if about next season if he comes back.

Next, two words, Vincent Lecavalier. He turned promise into results and became the dominant two way player everyone loves to see. Later, I’ll rant about the marketing jackasses in the NHL, but not pimping the hell out of Lecavalier, especially in the south, is a huge blunder. Best thing the NHL could have done, was arrange for Lecavalier to be visible at one of the Florida Gators National Championship celebrations.

All and all second in the toughest division in hockey is not bad, but who plays for second?

I’ve got a buddy I’ve known since high school who is still living the bachelor life, and because of that, he’s got the time and money to go traveling around the world. You never know where he’ll be off to next, a hotel in Vegas, a cruise ship in Greece, or cheap holidays to Egypt. It must be nice not only having the time to take great trips like that, but the cash too.

As a family man, my next vacations won’t be so glam. We go to Disney a lot, and we’re going to Canada this year. Would I like to go to a beautiful all inclusive resort in the Egypt desert? Duh. But it’s not exactly a quick getaway the wife and I can make, and it’s not a place I’d want to take my kids right now.

Man, I love this motorcycle. I can’t get enough of riding it, and it’s such a pleasure to take it out on a beautiful spring day. Of course, once you buy a bike, you always want more bike. We’ve looked at local dealers before, and actually came really close to buying a new bike last year, but didn’t. The bike I got was a great deal, and it’s a great starter bike for me to learn on. That hasn’t stopped me from eyeballing the selection at the local dealers. We’ve got several Kawasaki dealers around here, and it was a Kawasaki motorcycle for sale that almost had me riding last year.

I’m not sure when we’ll be replacing this bike - probably depends on if Wife learns to ride. I can give her my bike and buy a new one for me!

Wife is a big fan of The Office. I haven’t been watching much of anything on TV except hockey, but she called me over during a recent episode because she’d thought I’d enjoy it. Dwight was taking down Roy with is pepper spray. It was pretty funny - I only wish Dwight had gotten the chance to use his throwing stars and other ninja gear that he’s so proud of! Where do you even buy that stuff at? Can you walk into a store and buy throwing stars or nunchucks? Did you ever see the South Park episode where the boys were anime and bought their own ninja weapons? Hilarious!

Do ninjas even exist, or did Hollywood make it up so that Indiana Jones would have some bad guys to fight off?

Can you believe I received some spam snail mail trying to hock some sort of funeral insurance? You know how it works, pay something like $20 per month and when I die my funeral is covered. Jeez, I’m not that old! Plus, I want my wake to have an open bar or be held at an Irish pub with good Guinness on tap, so people will laugh and have a good time. Will it cover the open bar?

I heard about this site that any sports fan will want to check out, it’s called SportsMemorabilia.com. It’s exactly what it sounds like, autographed photos and gear of your favorite players. There are some items with some eye-popping prices on them, for instance a Joe DiMaggio signed baseball for over $2000.

SportsMemorabilia.com has stuff from all the major sports so they probably have something on their site that would interest you. Although, I have never really understood the whole sports autograph market. What makes a person willing to pay X number of dollars for a picture signed by someone? I can see if it is something like $50 or $100 where you are not talking about extreme amounts of cash. But north of $100 is hard to understand. Despite that, while I was at SportsMemorabilia.com, I couldn’t find anything by Vincent Lecavalier - I’ll need to keep checking back for something. That be a cool addition to my son’s Lightning themed bedroom.

Something I really like about our new house is the landscape design package that came with it. It’s nothing fancy or exotic, just simple and easy to maintain. I love plants and flowers, but the reality is I will probably kill most things I plant. Recently, we added some enhancements to our landscaping, such as cement curbing and some flowers. Again, getting back to me killing stuff, we did not want to spend a ton of money. We decided to have cement curbing laid around our landscape beds because it was cheap but looks good. It is colored to match our brick pavers and the wet cement was stamped to have a basketweave pattern. People are shocked when they hear how cheap it was. So far three other neighbors are using the company we used. I should get a kick back. For plants, we determined how much sun or shade they would receive and picked out stuff we liked. So far, everything is alive and colorful and it has been over a month! New record!

A good landscape designer will listen to what you want, and and how you want to use your yard. Do you want an English garden? Huge trees? A pool and party area? Your budget will allow you to only do so much, but landscape design is totally worth it.