Look out Wayne Gretzky.

Well, if Wayne had a broken leg, he may have to worry about me. Seriously, I got on the ice and it was just like the "riding a bike" cliche. I lapped the rink a few times, fell into my old stride and felt the wind on my face, the cool air in my nose and watched my breath stream out as I began to breathe harder. The skates more than lived up to expectations and the practice was energizing, invigorating and spawned a whole cavalcade of memories to parade through my mind. All the good times on the ice as a kid and an adult came back. God I love hockey.

First real game is next Tuesday and I can hardly wait. After an hour and fifteen minutes of practice with the A and B sides, I feel I'm ready to play with the C team for this year. No contact to start (feeling a bit of a nancy boy about that really) but next year I'm gonna step up the B side and see how it goes.

Work has been interesting lately, we've hit a bit of a lull in the workload as we've piled things onto the Department's HR team for approval. Three months of work I deposited on their desks for approval to action last week so this week we're sitting around, doing reporting and killing time. The government works in ridiculously inefficient ways. I got a report to read for a meeting the Secretaries (heads of Departments) attend en masse. It was 11 pages long. I then got a call from the HR team asking me to put the report into brief format for the secretary to read before he goes to the meeting. I asked why. They said because he never reads original documents, only briefs. What the? Apparently the majority of a lot of senior peoples work never gets read in full by the intended audience, it is cut and pasted into briefs for the MP's and senior execs. Why not just write them originally as briefs I suggested, also to shocked silence. Wow. I did it, but have told them that I won't do another one unless they actually need real input from me in relation to the issues being discussed. I suggested that they could just give the whole report to the secretary, which didn't go over too well. Seriously though, the guy can read!!