Glenn Kubish

Three Things from Edmonton podcast, episode 120, is here for the listening. It is composed of three things I noticed I noticed made me feel happy and grateful. Give it a listen: Or give it a read, starting with: 1. Teamwork There was a play late in the Oilers series-winning game against the Los Angeles Kings that didn’t get enough attention from the professional sports pundits. It wasn’t a goal or pass or a hit or a forecheck or a fight. It wasn’t even a hockey-specific play. This is what happened. In front of his own net, Oilers goaltender Stuart Skinner gave the puck away to the Kings’ Phillip Danault in a jaw-dropping piece of live, televised misfortune. Skinner’s stick had snapped. Danault scored. It was, as Harnarayan Singh on Hockey Night in Canada said: “Unbelievable!” The arena in Los Angeles was bonkers. Hockey fans knew that momentum had switched. Skinner, on one knee in his crease, looked as broken as his composite stick. What the cameras caught next ...

  It’s the end of the week as we know it! Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness. Three Things, episode 110:                                                             1. Timing   There’s a difference between saying the right thing and saying the right thing at the right time. Both take skill. They are different skills. Shelagh needed grated ginger for a ginger cake, and I was in the produce section at Andy’s IGA where I quickly located everything she didn’t need for the cake—garlic, shallots, chives, bok choy.   It was like looking for a word in the dictionary not knowing how to spell. I walked over to the produce clerk who was unloading oranges and with mock weariness asked him, “How close am I to a knob of ginger?” He nodded, smiled, removed his hat to make sure I didn’t miss the fa...

Once a week I’ve try to notice what I noticed made me happy or grateful. So the noticing equipment doesn’t freeze up. This week's podcast is episode 100:                            1. Wherewithal   Through the kindness of friends and the historical support of taxpayers, I got to Rogers Place to watch an Oilers game in person. The person I watched, with the puck, without the puck, watched even as he skated onto the ice for warm-up, was Connor McDavid. It’s a different Connor McDavid than you see sometimes at the dog park or at the IGA, where he’s just another dog lover and coupon clipper. On the ice, on skates, free from the hold of the thick earth, #97 moves like the wind. Over, between, into, against, around, across, through, by. He skates prepositionally. And that would be quite good enough if what he did for a living was the league’s skating skills competition. He plays hockey, though, and that means he skates...

To keep the feeble noticing equipment from completely seizing up, I try each week to think about three things that left behind tracks of happiness or gratitude. The snow is good for tracks. Episode 95:                      1. Fables   I was lyin’ on the living room couch in, if not quite, pain, then, at least, unease, as Shelagh, bent over over under the lamp, sterilized needle in hand, face set in determination, pricked the sole of my right foot. For days, I had limped around with a sliver in the ball of my foot. I had to modify my walk down the stairs to footfall on the heel. Pedalling was a pain. Shelagh is a sliversmith, though. And, after a minute of “come on, alreadys,” she got it.   This sliver that had come close to incapacitating me, was, as I looked at it, thinner than the 1/8th inch notch on a tape measure. Undone by so tiny an intruder, I felt slightly mortified. But Shelagh made the reasonable point that log, ...