There's danger on the edge of town...

The weekend was good, thanks for asking.
The Leafs won on Saturday night - for Leaf fans, beating Ottawa is almost as good as beating Montreal - for their second (two!) win in a row. Sometimes it's good for a team to have low expectations heading into a season; with pundits shovelling dirt into your grave before the puck even drops, it can force players to collectively buy into whatever coaches are selling (supposing the coaches know what they're doing), and it can also create a mentality of "us against the world."
That's not a bad thing.
The Browns also won on the weekend in what was essentially a must-win game. It's sad when a mid-season game is already a "must win", but that's what you get when you have too many prima donnas with an over-inflated sense of their own worth. You see, sometimes it is bad to go into a season with high expectations.
Re-read a couple of very good Steven King books, too. One of those - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - is decidedly non-horror in its content: a nine-year-old girl gets lost in the New England woods, and all she has to keep her company is her beloved Boston Red Sox cap, and a small radio to listen to Sox games. If I were lost in the forest and all I had to pass the time was the Red Sox, I'd probably want to crawl under an old log for a nice long dirt nap. But that's beside the point.
The other King book I read on the weekend - Pet Sematary - is quite a nasty piece of business and not something you want to curl up with, if you haven't come to grips with the inevitability of it all. Or maybe it is. Taxes is one thing, but that other thing - the thing we don't like talking about - is much more worrisome. Skeletons hanging off the front porch and graveyard scenes on the front lawn - it's so fun and whimsical at Halloween, isn't it?
King once said that he wished he'd never written Pet Sematary, because in hindsight he thought it was too evil, too black. I liked that.
The movie was so terrible it was entertaining, but at the risk of sounding like Oprah you might want to give the book a read. Good time of year for it, too. Best you not have anyone around to disturb you, though…it would be better if you were…alone. Oh yes, it would be.
Also read something called "Great Moments in Canadian Hockey" on my down time.
One of the interesting things I learned from this little tome was the manner in which Bill Barilko's disappearance was solved. Barilko, as many know, scored an overtime goal in the 1951 Stanley Cup final, winning the Cup for the Maple Leafs. He went missing the following summer and the Leafs would not win it again until after the body of Barilko was found; 11 years after his goal, a forestry pilot spotted the wreckage of the small plane that Barilko and a friend had used to go fishing in northern Ontario back in '51. A search crew later found the aircraft, two skeletons strapped in their seats.

Scotians are stingy

There's nothing scary about the start the Pictou County Junior Scotians are enjoying unless you're trying to score on them, that is. Eight games into the season, they've yet to lose in regulation and have given up just 21 goals in that span. It's a long way from now until the playoffs, but they've established dominance in the defensive zone. A stingy 'D' will win you a lot of hockey games. In fact, most coaches say that paying strict attention to the defensive side of things often creates scoring opportunities. Making players believe that is often another matter.