Indi­ana Pac­ers (16–31) @ Toronto Rap­tors (25–22)

Game­time : 6pm

TV Cov­er­age : The Score

this is a big tune right here.. glad to hear real music still being made

Today I had a lot of run­ning around to do, as lately it seems there are not enough hours in the day to get any­thing done.  After re-entering the pup­pet­world, you learn to appre­ci­ate days off and just want to do a gazil­lion things, but more­times end up doing one or two of ‘em

Had a cou­ple of client meet­ings dur­ing the mid-day, which had me dropped off on the other side of the city.  After my last one, I was dri­ving home when I past by a Chap­ters that was ran­domly placed along Bloor St. W, and I remem­bered that I still have my gift card in my wal­let, so I decided to pop in.

As lit­tle as this place appeared to be from the out­side, you walk into this joint and you’re instantly taken back by how big it is inside.  Then on top of it’s spa­cious inte­rior, you are then taken back by how dif­fer­ent this Chap­ters is from any other Chap­ters I have ever walked into.  Maybe I’m just fas­ci­nated by such lit­tle petty things, but hah.. impressive

Sadly though, the pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion was a HALF shelf, not even a full one which was highly dis­ap­point­ing.  So no luck in find­ing the book I have been so des­per­ately try­ing to get my hands on.. and there were really no other books that I felt com­pelled to pick up either.  The search continues.

After Chap­ters, I had it set in my mind that I wanted to get my incense vibes on.  For those that really know me, I’m not a fan of can­dle burn­ing at all and the Glade plu­g­ins are a’ight.. but some­times the smell is a bit tough and too syn­thetic.  So I remem­ber being at a client’s house late last year and her place was smelling real nice, so I had asked her what she had going on in there that was caus­ing such nice smells and so she told me about Nag Cham­pas.  So as I do every­thing else, I took to Google to find out what this stuff was and where I could get it from.  I ended up on this ran­dom web­site where this chick was writ­ing some tes­ti­mo­nial about this place called Shanti Baba, located down­town Queen St. So I made note of it and headed there

Def­i­nitely some inter­est­ing things going on in this store, but I knew what I was there for so being side-tracked wasn’t one of ‘em.  The female work­ing there (if I only remem­ber your name, I know it starts with Geeta.….…) was quite help­ful, as she proved to be quite the incense pro­fes­sional.  I wanted to get a sim­ple incense holder-ma-jig and end up walk­ing out this joint with smelly sticks and this native indian look­ing pot­tery cre­ation.  Also thanks to Steff Ivory for pop­ping my incense move­ment, and start­ing me off with the same smell I was drawn to, as she gen­er­ously gave me a bit of her stash ear­lier today.

Couldn’t wait to get home and bom­bard the place with such new aro­mas.  And that was all ready to be the plan, until I decided to stop by the stu­dio first.  And what I thought to be a sim­ple lit­tle chill ting, cause I haven’t seen these guys in awhile due to work, ended up being us (well them really) decid­ing to go BACK down­town to chill for the night.

I relunc­tantly agreed, but fully knew I wasn’t really going to drink or any­thing much due to the sim­ple fact I have a huge day ahead of me tomorrow

Now this is Mikey, we’ve all met Mikey before.  Mikey appar­ently loves life so much that by the time I real­ized it, I notice this guy smok­ing in my car at the gas sta­tion, SITTING in front of a propane tank pile with NO SMOKING signs lit­tered all over the place.  Oh yah.  Should have put this as a FAIL pic bro, you get the bozack.

Any­way, we headed down­town and first decided to get some­thing to eat, and we end up at this Viet­namese joint

After that, we then went over to this place that looked straight out of a washed out Fast & Furi­ous : Tokyo City type of movie

Asians every­where! At first I thought I was the only col­ored guy there, but that was eas­ily out­done as another ran­dom col­ored guy popped out and had this seri­ous ‘I’ve never been this drunk before’ moment all night.  Buddy was loud, danc­ing, show­ing peo­ple his tat­toos that he doesn’t even know, and seemed to have come alone.  Or maybe his friends were just so embarassed that the just left him there and went about their busi­ness, poor guy.  Prob­a­bly woke up the next day in some ran­dom alley way robbed, cause some of the asian peo­ple he was harass­ing looked a tad bit seri­ous still

We stayed here till a good 3am, and all I could think about was how I have to wake up for 8am and do a shoot tomor­row before going to work and doing a 12hr.  Nice, real real nice.

Sade — Sol­dier Of Love
Sade is one of those rare artists who don’t come out as often and don’t seem to be influ­enced by what sounds are ‘in’ and hot right now, but cre­ates and deliv­ers true music. Her newest release is one of those CDs that you have play­ing when you’re hav­ing a mature bunch of friends come over and you’re all sit­ting in the piano or liv­ing room, hav­ing light discussions.

Track­list:
01 — The Moon and the Sky **PICK**
02 — Sol­dier Of Love
03 — Morn­ing Bird **PICK**
04 — Baby­fa­ther
05 — Long Hard Road
06 — Be That Easy
07 — Bring Me Home
08 — In Another Time
09 — Skin [ ALBUM PICK ]
10 — The Safest Place **PICK**

TGIT!  Which I guess leads into TGIF, but it’s all the same to me as long as when I wake up today.. I don’t gotta worry about going back there for a few days.  And last night/this morn­ing was going a-ok, up until the end there when my team leader was telling me to move some parts quick so he can fork­lift out some other crap, and when I went to do that.. some came tum­bling down.

Now, the thing about hav­ing very fast reflexes (as I do), you tend to want to save every­thing that falls auto­mat­i­cally.  And when deal­ing with sharp cut pieces of metal, that’s not the great­est thing to do.  So as I see these pieces falling, my first reac­tion is to catch them.  SLICE. Oh yah baby, another fin­ger.  This time I had my damn gloves on and it still pen­e­trated right through

2 down, 8 more to go with my luck!  And when it hap­pened I didn’t feel to report it because then there’d be this whole ‘fill out a report’ non­sense and I just wanted to go home.  So I got some paper towel, a piece of see-through tape and made myself a damn bandaid.. or atleast pre­vent the bleed­ing from get­ting all over the place.  This one is gonna sting, man.

On a bright note, I sneak­ily got some footage of the gnome that works at my work!  Don’t ask me how I pulled this one off, I had to do some seri­ous sneak tac­tics.. but man­aged to get it.

I’m going to bed, Avatar 3D tonight?  Look­ing for­ward to it!

Toronto Rap­tors (24–22) @ New York Knicks (18–26)

Game­time : 7:30pm

TV Cov­er­age : TSN2

Last night/this morn­ing wasn’t so bad, the shift kinda breezed by quite nicely actu­ally.  The funny thing about it though, was that yesterday’s shift I had ‘walked’ into a prob­lem.  So the story goes like this, I had to pull out this case of parts that weighed a good 300+ pounds or so, so I get the pump truck and I’m lug­ging and pulling this thing towards me try­ing to direct it to a next part of the plant.  With­out even look­ing behind me, I feel this sud­den pierc­ing feel­ing in my lower back, WHAM.  I backed up straight into this pile of metal brack­ets sit­ting on a con­veyor belt.  Ouch.

One of my co-workers who was there, looked a bit con­cerned and I just had to play it off like ‘ahhh, that’s noth­ing, it’s like stick­ing a knife in my artery.. pffft it’ll heal’.  But errr, it felt like a knife stick­ing into my artery if I ever knew how that felt.  So any­way, let’s fast for­ward to last night

I’m assigned to my work­sta­tion and guess which parts I’m doing?  Duh dun dunnnn, talk about the haunt­ing right here.  And the machine I’m controlling?

Whoa!  Huge.  I call him ‘Red Back’, and I tamed this beast with ease.  I think I was get­ting tired though, because I started day­dream­ing of Trans­form­ers and won­der­ing what kind of robot or object this thing would turn into had it been exposed to that stuff Mega­tron was look­ing for.  Yeah, I was that bored.  Noth­ing really excit­ing hap­pened, very ho-hum

Although, when I was get­ting my stuff to leave and wash­ing my hands in the basin, tell me why I’m see­ing one of the employ­ees from the morn­ing shift not wash­ing his hands but his den­tures?  Talk about a pic­ture you DON’T wanna see in the morn­ing, or ever for that mat­ter.  Geeze Louise.

mos def — “white drapes”

I’ve been loosely fol­low­ing this drama with Are­nas and the NBA, and every­thing else that has to do with this sit­u­a­tion.  I just fin­ished read­ing this news arti­cle today on how David Stern and the NBA have decided to sus­pend BOTH Gilbert Are­nas and Javaris Crit­ten­ton (the other guy involved) for the remain­der of the 2009–2010 season.

Fur­ther­more, appar­ently Mr. Are­nas has requested to have the remain­ing four years of his six-year $111 mil­lion con­tract voided, to which David Stern said that it was up to the Wash­ing­ton Wiz­ards to decide (which I am quite sure they will jump on faster than a lion on a young buck).

I don’t know what it is really?  You take sit­u­a­tions like this and maybe the Sprewell sit­u­a­tion from years back (when he said that x-amount of mil­lion dol­lars wasn’t enough to feed his kids and decided to not play any­more) and count­less other ungrate­ful sit­u­a­tions that have occurred in the NBA and it just makes you think.  Do any of these peo­ple remem­ber being a young unknown kid who just wished they could play in the NBA?  Dreamed that they had that oppor­tu­nity to get paid for doing some­thing they love?

I’ll never for­get when my grandad was alive and we used to take these long dri­ves and just talk, and it’s always inter­est­ing to hear life from a few gen­er­a­tion before us.  And there was this one con­ver­sa­tion where we began talk­ing about how self­ish play­ers have become in sports (in gen­eral) and then he went on to tell me that when he was younger, you had to play for your con­tract, you had to earn that money.  Get a cer­tain amount of hits per sea­son, money.  Get a cer­tain amount of home­runs, money.  Now, these sport fran­chises are just hand­ing out hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to play­ers before they even see the court!  So really, what becomes your incen­tive to play hard every night?  Why should you risk  your body and give it your all when you know that money is already in the bank (or atleast on its way)?

And that’s why I’ve always respected play­ers like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jor­dan, LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Roy Hal­la­day (and the list goes on and on and on).  Because they care about the game and deserve every damn penny they get.

But when peo­ple like Are­nas come along and just make a mock­ery of it all, I smile in dis­gust and am quite glad when things like this hap­pen to them.  So now that Adi­das has backed out of their con­tract with him, and he may no longer be get­ting the rest of that $111 mil­lion dol­lar con­tract, I’m just inter­ested in see­ing what’s next for him.

You live and you learn, some harsher than others.

More Than A Game

Before I went to bed this morn­ing, I thought I’d just glimpse this movie when ended up with me fully watch­ing it instead.  It takes you to Akron, Ohio.. and intro­duces you to four indi­vid­u­als who began play­ing bas­ket­ball together from a very young age.  One of these indi­vid­u­als is the king him­self, LeBron James.  It dives into each of their lives and shows what they went through both as a cohe­sive unit as well as indi­vid­ual people.

When you first look at LeBron’s suc­cess now, you just auto­mat­i­cally assume that he’s had it great and how lucky he is to be both who and where he is at.  But you just have to appre­ci­ate his game even more after watch­ing his tal­ents from so young, and how he was dom­i­nat­ing the courts when most kids are just try­ing to fig­ure out what they wanna do in the future.

Even the mere fact that the “Fab 4″ (later renamed to the Fab 5) all decided to goto St. Vin­cent Mary’s HS just because one of their clique mem­bers (Lil’ Dru) made the deci­sion to go there and this of course started some­thing special.

If you’re a sports junkie, or love bas­ket­ball then I highly rec­om­mend this one for sure.  I always love a good sports doc­u­men­tary and this one was done very well and could very well be a blue­print for those that fol­low.  I can’t even lie, I teared up a bit cause any­time I see a scene with a dad and his son and sports.. kinda gets to me.  Reminds me of when I was younger, blaze.