Reporting Live from Sunny Isles Florida - The Ocean is Wetter on the other side of the ...um..Ocean

The sales taxes in Quebec goes up another point in a couple of days.

An elephant in Africa just gained another 10 pounds.

The Habs may lose yet another game tonight.

And we're here in Florida in beautiful balmy weather and could not care less if what is already a bad situation gets worse.

It's amazing what distance will bring: perspective.

Put in perspective the fact that every time I venture out to buy a carton of milk on a January day in Montreal several of these plausible scenarios may occur:

• I may slip on the ice covering my front steps and break important vertebras in my back
• I may spend about 90 minutes unbinding the windshield wipers that have been encased in a solid block of ice
• I may skid into a parked car on my way to the corner store which is a 5-minute drive from home
• I will pay a sub-total of 1.25$ for the carton of milk plus 76.43$ in sales tax
• I will crash into a small dog on my drive back home
• The dog owner won't be able to sue me for more than 11$ because you can't get shit out of the courts anymore
• the plaintiff/dog owner will have spent 65,000$ in legal fees to win the 11$
• I'll have gained the court's sympathy because of the collapse of another bridge on my car on my way to court
• I'll wait for about 23 hours languishing in an emergency room to fix my broken hand
• I'll get C-dif waiting in the ER
• The doctors in scanning my hand will have found strange spots - in fearing a cancer diagnosis, they send me for a scan
• I am told there is a 7-year wait for scans in Quebec
• Revenue Quebec taxes my 11$ court award and I'm left with 67 cents

My point? We spend hours on end worrying about the Habs when there are much larger fish to fry. It's cold, and damp and expensive and corrupt and hard to go through. And our government knows we spend our time and money obsessing over this bunch of millionaires. Sneak a peak at an ER in Quebec on game nights. On playoff nights I hear the hospitals are closed.

It's nice to get away from it all, grab some sun and the vitamin E we are so severely deprived of 8 months out of the year and enjoy the condo on the beach that will be foreclosed in a few weeks.