The Old Fort, Hockey and Anger

I don't really like to blog about my travels before they happen, announcing when my house might be vacant.

And right now Rick Three is living here, too -- named Three because of his ranking in the World Bodyguard Championships and number of seconds in which he can kill a burglar.

So now I will tell you that I spent last week assisting chaperoning eight 12/13 year olds from northern schools at the Old Fort. Unfortunately, we were supposed to wear voyageur costumes for a day, but it didn't work out.

However, we did groom and harness and drive the draught horses, play shinny and lacrosse, go canoeing, make beadwork, moccasins, tin nutmeg graters, wooden nut crackers, Jacob's Ladders and nails.

We ascended Mt. McKay and also had one of those crazy drive around town scavenger hunts. The girls team did get photographed in jail. Neither team was successful in being photographed BEHIND McDonald (Arthur)'s counter, but we did get behind KFC's. Conclude what you will from that.

We did archery, shot muskets and the cannon, and did a GPS scavenger hunt.

The program was provided entirely by the Fort. Ryan (Basil) McDonnell did an excellent job assisted by Jane (Angelique). My fellow chaperones, Kate Burns, Honor Wallace and Adam Moir also did an excellent job.

What is the right verb for archery? (Don't say "arching", Robin or Shroom.) One of the chaperones said "play archery", but I know that's not right.
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Got a hattrick last night in hockey. That is very rare for me.

The first was a one-timer in front of the net. I did actually practise my shot (emulating timlap) in the warmup and I think it helped.

The second was a goalmouth scramble. Everybody got a chance to bang it in and let me have the honour of succeeding. You can't blame the goalie when he stops the first six shots, but not the seventh.

I felt a little bad about the third. It was kind of a tie between my stick touching the puck and his glove coming down on it and so the puck slid from under his glove and into the net. No one protested, however. I suppose the whistle would not have gone that quickly.

I also got into quite possibly my first shouting match (bearing in mind that the shouting isn't necessarily anger, but just making oneself heard). To me it felt as if he crosschecked me and so as I slid down I grabbed his stick under my arm and didn't let go when he needed to skate forward.

From his point of view, he likely didn't consider it crosschecking and just saw red when he couldn't get his stick free (and I've had that feeling).

But I apologized for my role and he apologized for getting angry. It's not clear whether his alleged crosschecking was included, but we'll just move on and let that go.

This sort of thing happens all the time to people (on and off the ice) and I have always hated that broken feeling and am glad that we were able to sort it out fairly quickly.

It doesn't happen often to me in FN hockey because usually I am not very aggressive, thereby getting into tangles in the goalmouth and corners. Timlap said I played aggressively last night -- leading to my goals, I suppose.

But over all FN Hockey is not a passion to me and so I don't get into as many angry incidents as some of the other guys do, who arguably are no worse than me, but just passionate about the game.

Angry feeling can start to arise, when our identity is threatened, our goals are blocked or our values are challenged. The closer to our core of beliefs (our passions) -- and I mean our real core, not our professed values -- the more likely anger will be. The other party may be totally baffled and just write you off as an angry person. But s/he would do well to try to understand what values (or goals or parts of your identity) s/he has just threatened.

Not too likely to happen on the ice, I suppose -- but possibly afterwards at Robin's.