Kickball

4 hours worth, and boy was it fun. Rec Sports' Intramurals had a kickball tournament this Sunday, and I played on Greg's team. 9 of us all together, it started this morning at 10 or so. There were a total of 5 teams there, and we got to play each team (so we played 4 games). It was some fun stuff and we kicked butt 1/2 the time. The first game was a nail-biter, as it went into the bottom of the 5th 0-1 and we were scoreless. I should also mention, that I kicked the ball so hard in the 3rd inning, that the ball became flat (yeah I was the one responsible for the delay, what can I say, I kicked the shit out of it).... we made do with the flat ball, pumping it after each play for 1 inning, then we switched to the soccerball for the last inning. I was batting 3rd, and Nick got on base, and Louie kicked it in to score him. 1-1, and it was me up to kick. I smacked that ball directly at the first baseman (base-woman) and ran like hell becauses I knew she couldn't do shit. She bobbled the ball, and I made it across the bag safe... it didn't matter, because Louie made it home and scored the winning run.

Game 2 didn't turn out so well. We were down going into the top of the 5th, as the away team. We had to make up about 6 runs, and didn't come close... we lost that one with me getting pegged in the foot as the last out, after I tried to change directions during a fly ball that I thought they might drop, but they caught it, and hit me with it before I made it back to first base, game over.

Game 3 was a complete joke... we got into a rthym and it didn't end. We developed a new kicking order, and they just demolished them. Final score of that one was like 21-7 or something rediculous, we stopped trying after the 2nd inning, scoring like 11 that half of the inning. They were such a shitty team, and we had like 5 in-the-park home runs.

Game 4 was against what we called the "deuchers".... the guys on steroids. These guys were fucking big, and can drive the ball over our heads. However, they were beat by the same team that beat us in Game 2, because they just kept kicking it into the outfield where it was caught. We lead in the first inning, but then totally fell apart in the 2nd. They scored like 12 runs on us, we just couldn't get the outs. They kept putting the ball on the ground, or in holes where we didn't have people. We mounted a comeback in the 4th, to make the score like 17-6 or something, and we ended them in the 4th and 5th pretty quick. I made some good catches in the outfield, after they FINALLY starting kicking the ball in the air to hit homeruns, but I was there for like 5 catches. We popped a couple home runs to lead off in the 5th, our last efforts. It was to no avail, as we lost to a final score of 20-9 or something.

We ended the tournament 2-2, taking 3rd place. This was tons of fun, and I'll do it again in the future.

Poker

... was the name of the game this weekend.

Part 1:
Friday night, it was the house game at Oceanaire. Phung, Joe, James, Darien, Chris, me, Val, and Mike were the players. Brandon eventually came too. I took some big pots, and eventually my collection ended up being composed of a couple big wins against James early on, Darien about middle game, Chris early game (a couple times), a big all in win against Mike, and a couple good calls against Phung. I was reading Phung really well I think, I made a couple good calls where I was right and my hand held up, whether it was my pair being the better one or the fact that he didn't have anything and I made the gutsy call to claim the chips. Overall, after a buy-in of $10, I cashed out with $32. So I tripled my money after playing from about 10pm to 3am.

Part 2:
After playing so much the night/morning before, I had my filling of poker for a bit... but Greg did ask if I wanted to play in his chemistry frat (AXE)'s poker tournament yesterday, and I was so enthusiastic about it, and he called to ask if I was coming again. I eventually agreed, and went. $10 buy in once again, and it was much smaller than everyone had anticipated. They had I think about 13 or 14 people play overall. It was insanely painful, because there were people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and having them deal when it was their turn was hard. But, it was pretty easy to semi-bluff my way to some good pots and hold my own at the first table without taking too many hits. Actually I don't remember losing a big pot at all... anyways, by the time we condensed the table I would say I was sitting in about the middle as far as chips went. I then proceeded to first take out one of the girls, who had maybe a similar stack as mine starting at the final table. I did that in 2 separate hands. Then it came to one of the guys who had the big stacks, but after I took the girl out I had a bit more than he did. He went all in pre-flop, and I was holding KQ of hearts. I called, and he was holding KJ of spades. It was looking good, as flop came out with each of us hitting one of our suits. The turn was another heart, so I was in good shape. River was a blank, so I took the big pot and was now the big stack. My next victim was Nick, who had a pretty good stack... and he decided to put the shortest stack (Greg) on the table all in, he folded, but I called. I had K6 of diamonds, and he had like a Q5 of another suit. I hit a 6 on the turn, and he was out. It was then myself and Greg, and I took him out with my second hand playing heads up with him with a 8-2, hitting the 8 against his 3-6 or something rediculous. AXE took a fatty chunk of the winnings, saying it was a "fund raiser" and after collecting what was the cash equivalent of over $150 in cash in front of me, I walked away with a measly 1st place prize of $30. Minus the $10 buy in, I made $20 from about 6pm to 8:20pm. It was good experience I guess..... no wait, it wasn't. I was playing against shitty people most of the time, and got lucky a couple times, and beat out 14 other people. Big whoop.

Movie Critic

So I've watched quite a few movies recently, so I'll rate them and tell you why they were kinda good or if they sucked.

Fantastic 4: I heard many bad things about this movie, but in the end, I thought it was actually quite good. I'm seeing myself develop as a bigger and bigger fan of super hero movies that have been adapted from comic book series recently... or maybe I'm just a fan of Stan Lee mostly? Anyways, the movie was really good in the plot, action was great and pletiful with very good special effects, and the humor was pretty good. The negatives that I to comment about mostly has to do with the length (or lack thereof) regarding the main Dr. Doom vs. F4... and by that I mean there wasn't too much of a struggle between the 2 sides (good vs. evil) until about the last 1/6 of the movie. If they could've doubled the length that they were the good guys fighting the bad guy and made it more dramatic with a higher plateau of an ending, it would've been great. I could've done without the last bit of Invisible Girl marrying Mr. Fantastic... should've left us hanging like Spiderman did in the first movie - the bad guy is defeated, but the good guys didn't have a 100% happy ending, which shows that there are more to come. Final rating: 8/10


Into the Blue: I had no idea what the premise of this movie was going to be... maybe a modernized version of Jaws or something, but ended up being pretty dumb. There was more Paul Walker than Jessica Alba, and the co-star couple were butt ugly to look at. The story itself was cheesy, with the action portion of it being moderate at best. Treasure hunters they were... believe me, this movie was NOT a buried treasure at the video store. The story basically described a struggling wanna be treasure hunter with a hot girlfriend, and a friend shows up with a dumb bitch, accidentally discovers a crashed crack filled plane, and the friend digs bigger and bigger holes for Paul Walker to get himself and his g/f out of in an attempt to simultaneously rescue a REAL treasure. Story sucked, not enough of Jessica. Final rating: 4/10

Wedding Crashers: Definetly not something you want to see with you mom, because low and behold, there are boobies! Titties at 2 parts of the movie and a bunch of references to sexual anneuendos. Storyline got too cheesy, espcially at the end, but the premise itself of a legacy of wedding crashing is very tantilizing and interesting in itself with all of the rules (I read them all in the bonus of the DVD). Great jokes here and there, and makes you wonder if you can pull something like that off yourself (crashing weddings), but the guy-chasing-already-taken-girl simply lasted for way too much of the movie and should have focused more on crashing more weddings that they shortened at the beginning. Would serve to be a great "date" movie though I think. Final rating: 7/10

War of the Worlds: Well, we always expect Stephen Spilberg to give us great visual effects and he didn't disappoint, as everything (but the aliens) look very real in the explosion of the cities and such. Now that I think back on it, when I was watching the movie I was really pissed at Tom Cruise's son because of the way he was acting immature and how retarded teenagers can be. But that basically means that the dialogue/script and the acting was very good in making me feel those emotions due to the true representation of those types of characteristics of teenagers in real life! The story itself can be critiqued in one word: shit. We see some parts of Tom Cruise dealing with his sanity as the world comes crashing down around him and his own emotions clashing with his responsibility as a father. Emotions in the movie I would say were pretty good and acting was not bad. However, the story itself as I've said: shit. Aliens taking over, we gotta find a way to kill them before they obliterate everything. Okay, I will throw a granade into the alien vagina looking thing right before it sucks me up to kill me, it blows up and dies. Big whoop, we killed 1 out of the hundreds that are going around the globe killing people. Then, out of no where, birds are flying around one of the main alien battleships, and it starts to die?!?! What did Tom Cruise say? The birds have no metal? WTF? Now lets sit back as the army blasts it with rocket launchers, it crashes down and ONE freaking alien pops out and dies. They god home, end of movie. WHAT THE HELL?? No conclusion of what happened to the world, no CLEAR explanation of how they killed the big robot, and no idea how (if at all) they spread the word to the rest of the world as to how to go about killing the extermination robots. NO conclusions, no explanations, no academy award for anyone that helped produce this movie. Final Ratings: 4/10

2006... and some leftovers from 2005

Okay, so I'm way late in posting this shit, and there are a TON of shit I missed. So this first one will just be what I've missed talk about since last time.

The rest of the vacation... I'll try to remember as many items as I can, and just mention some things about each if I can. I had dinner with Jeana, and got to catch up with my very long time good friend from elementary school. There was Mustafa's party, of which we all had a ton of fun and was a huge high school reunion and waiting for AJ's final arrival at like 1:30 in the morning. As far as friends go, there was one other encounter, and it started off at AJ's house for a poker game... overall the people who played were myself, AJ, Jeff, Mustafa, Mike, Sean, and Riaz. From there, we headed to Stars where we proceeded to see Becky Stutte, Ashley Ramirez, Kathryn McGee, Christina Morales, Kris Goldstien, Kyle Masterson, BJ, Jarrett, Brooke Bosler, Nam, Zeke Hampton, Chris Webber, and even Amy Peterson. It was a huge reunion, I think almost as big if not bigger than Mustafa's. It was good times.

Yeah we played a lot of video games, but it was annoying because of Mom's nagging all the time and because Will had obligations to go to work and even school up until the 23rd, and Leo had school up until then as well... what a fucking retarded Solano County School District schedule huh? Our whole family went to Tracy's for dinner, which was pretty cool to see Goo Goo and Uncle there and our new baby cousin and stuff. We got some cool gift cards from Goo Goo and Uncle, and a nice 512 Mb MP3 player from Tracy/Jocylyn. Fisher's caterpillar toy was pretty funny too.... haha. As far as our house goes, there was a problem with a couple of the outlets in the garage and in trying to fix it, I busted the garage door but managed to fix it with the help of Anthony... and I got to catch up with him a bit. This year for Mom's Christmas present, I fixed the overhead flourescent lights in the kitchen which had been bugging her for a long time and paid for all the costs of the materials. I think she was pretty happy with it, so I'm glad I was able to "get" her something that she really wanted.

So we took my car down to Fremont to have Erik work on it, and he fixed a number of things: my battery is no longer moving around and giving me the biggest headache out of anything from the car... it doesn't move anymore due to the fact that he also fixed/installed a new exhaust pipe and air filter, which pushes up against the battery and holds it snug (on top of the washer he installed to tighten it). We also put in clear side lights for the turn signals.... and last but not least new tires. They are supposed to be great, and by putting them in, it in turn solved the extreme bobble-head action that my rear break light was having. The moonroof is still not locked tight shut when driving fast, my car seems to be a BIT louder, and the acceleration doesn't seem to be as fast once I hit 90+ for some reason. Oh yeah, and there IS the fucking incident of his damn neighbor BACKING INTO MY FUCKING DRIVER'S SIDE DOOR and making this huge dent. That's something else I still gotta go and fuck with... dammit.

Well other than paying for almost all of those things, Mom also got me some cologne and a much needed vacuum cleaner, and Will bought me a nice big backpack which I've discovered, can carry/hold ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. It's huge though. Also before school started once I got back here to SLO, I went to Walmart for once, and bought an iron, a blow dryer, and more clothes on top of a shitload of other things. It's been a busy year, 2006, so far, but it should be a pretty good one.