Ah the sweet pungent smell of Hockey is in the air because tonight I attended the first session of Hockey Educational Systems Phase I Adult Clinic. Hockey school is located at Olympic View Arena, way up in the middle of nowhere. While carless John typically considers anything not on Capitol Hill or within a <15 bike ride from it way out there, this really WAS way WAY out there. I borrowed the Neon to attend tonight's lession, but I'm going to sign up for Flexcar ASAP. The course costs a couple hundred bucks for 12 one-and-a-half hour classes. The group is very diverse, with a couple guys my age, some women, and even some grandpas. We didn't play a game tonight, rather, it was all drills and working on skating and puck handling fundamentals. The funnest part was playing the hockey version of British Bulldog. You have to carry your puck down the length of the rink without losing it to the players who live in the neutral zone. If your puck gets stolen, you join them and try to steal other people's during subsequent crossings. Players go back and forth until the last person to make it across with their puck is declared the winner. If you ranked us all by our British Bulldog score, I would sit roughly in the middle of the class. The purpose of British bulldog was to work on protecting the puck when you have possession of it. After we learned that technique, we practiced the complementary skill -- stealing the puck by any legal means. We leared what was a slash, what was high sticking and what were the allowable ways of messing with the opposing player in order to take the puck away. By the end, I was a bit tired but not even as much as after playing a UW Rec. game. It was funny because the coach kept mentioning how if we felt light-headed or too exhausted by the drills we should feel free to take a break. I guess they've had a few heart-attacks/lawsuits in the past. Mom and Dad: Why wasn't I playing *hockey* as a kid instead of, say, taking all those piano lessons?