Michael’s Blog

So the 2010 edition of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver came to a close yesterday hot on the heels of a Canadian win in the hockey final against the United States earning us probably the only gold medal most Canadians cared about.

I was busily migrating Kari’s email and wasn’t watching the game with my full attention but every time a goal was scored I knew about it. As the clock ticked down the final minute I decided to give the game my undivided attention and, of course, the Americans scored to tie up the game . At this point I figured it might be best if I didn’t watch the game anymore. Thankfully a few minutes later our boys got the job done.

These Winter Olympic games proved to be the best showing ever for Canada. We earned 14 gold medals, setting the record for the number of gold medals earned by a single nation during the Winter Olympics, along with 7 silver and 5 bronze. Only the US and Germany managed to snag more medals than Canada with 37 (9 gold/15 silver/13 bronze) and 30 (10 gold/13 silver/7 bronze) medals respectively but I think it’s safe to say that our medals were of better quality .

My Facebook news feed is full of people proclaiming that they’re proud to be Canadian which isn’t something that people normally do. Instead it’s usually full of people proclaiming how awesome it is to be Italian or Portuguese. I must say that this is a nice change since instead of being at each others throats we’re all rooting for the same team.  So until the 2010 FIFA World Cup… go Canada!

On March 31st, 2007 the people of Sydney, Australia turned off their lights for one hour and dubbed it Earth Hour . So today marked the first time this event was acknowledged or carried out globally. Toronto took part of course along with other cities from around the globe. Google drew attention to the cause as well and even made their normally white homepage all black for the day. They of course covered their butts by saying that they are aware that a black homepage wouldn’t actually reduce world wide power usage like some people surmised as this was later proven false and it instead just a gesture to raise awareness of the cause. Anyway, I turned the lights out here. Anyone that knows me knows that try to be energy conscious in all of my actions. Sadly everyone takes a “my little contribution doesn’t really count for anything” attitude when it really does. It’s not just when it comes to climate change, which can be debated backwards and forwards, but more when it comes to any kind of change.