Soul Searchings

I miss playing a wide selection of sports. Since high school, the only two sports that I have played with any regularity is volleyball and tennis. While at times I have felt the want to play other sports again, it wasn’t until recently that I realized how much fun it was doing so. A couple years ago, I joined an ultimate team, and although that was my first real experience playing this particular sport, I had a really enjoyable time with it. As mentioned in previous entries, in the past few months, I’ve been playing soccer again in the corporate setting, and that’s been a blast as well. Today, a coworker had me come out to join his softball team practice. The last time I played softball had to have been three or four years ago, and before that, all the way back in high school. I have made great plays in most sports that I’ve played in, but the one feat I’ve never done is to make a great catch - a full out diving catch in the outfield - in baseball or softball. Today, I finally managed to accomplish this during batting practice. I tracked down a long fly ball in right field and the ball met the glove just as it reached the grass with my body fully layed out sideways. I’m actually pretty proud of that. =) While my inexperienced definitely showed, with many of my throws being errant, I think I fit in pretty well, as I think my natural skill was fairly evident. I may be subbing for their team for some games, but that remains to be seen when. I think I would like to buy a decent catching glove, batting glove, and baseball cleats if I intend on playing more than a couple times.

Following up on my previous entry, we indeed did defeat Mobidia in our soccer match, by the slim margin of 2-1. They were definitely a formidable bunch. Apparently I may have had a hand in breaking some guys ribs during the match. We didn’t even know until the following week when one of their guys, who used to work for us, told us of the fact. Apparently it happened when he went up for a header and got sandwiched by two guys, and from the video that we recorded, the only such event that matched that description involved me as one of the sandwichers. It doesn’t even look like much of an impact, so I didn’t even include that bit of footage in the Youtube highlights video.

A couple weeks after that match, we played a game against Citadel. In keeping with the tradition of every team being tougher than the last, our winning streak finally ended, although our undefeated streak did not. After about 40 minutes, we held a comfortable 4-1 lead. Unfortunately, our team completely disintegrated after that, and they came roaring back with four unanswered tallies to take the lead at 5-4. We managed to notch the tying goal to salvage our dignity, but it was still a disappointing result.

Last weekend, the annual Asian Invitational volleyball tournament took place again. As I said previously, I would actually be quite happy if we managed to finish even as high as we did last year, which was 3rd place in the lower tier. This year, the experience was absolutely terrible. On the first day of play Saturday, we got off to a decent start and won our first set, but then proceeded to lose the remaining 11 sets. Granted, out of the six games in the round robin, we did play what proved to be three of the top four teams in the tournament. On a personal level, I played absolutely terrible as libero. I shanked way too many serve receptions, and even managed to pass some free balls errantly. Completely unacceptable. However, as the record would indicate, the rest of the team wasn’t doing much better. That night, I actually got called for a work emergency, and I ended up having to go downtown and move three servers from one building to another and install and configure the systems. I did this remarkably quickly, and it only took me about 2.5 hours until 2am to get it done. On Sunday, I felt I played much better as libero, but we still did terrible. We lost our first match, and got relegated to the backdoor. We managed to beat the first team in the backdoor draw, but then lost a heartbreaker in the next round. It was one set to 25, hard capped. We led the entire set, and got to a score a 24-23. But, the other team won the next two points to take the victory. Ouch. So out of 9 teams in the bottom tier, I think we finished 8th.

Honestly speaking, our team is not quite in the same league as most of the other teams. We’re pretty much a bunch of high school friends playing together, while other teams bring together players from all over the lower mainland and beyond. The best teams even have a bunch of collegiate or university players. We’re never going to be able to rise to that level. In a way, I feel priviledged to actually even have a chance to play against these high caliber players, but the bottom line is we’ll never be a formidable opponent for them. But I think that’s okay.

Exactly one month has passed since my last entry, but strangely it’s felt like it’s been even longer than that with everything going on.

First off, I found out why the hacker only did it with $200 - it’s because that’s the maximum you can bet on a hand on PartyCasino’s Blackjack. Of course, if he had lost that $200 hand, there was nothing stopping him from trying again and again to lose my entire balance. But that seems to be over and done with now.

I didn’t have much time to play poker in April, and managed to only get in four sessions that added up to 7.5 hours total. I actually had a pretty bad month, and lost $130 from the actual gameplay. Most of that was on PokerStars, which I just started playing on. I have not yet had a single winning session there yet. However, I did do one $100 bonus at PartyPoker, and with the addition of the $200 the hacker won me, I guess I still ended up $170 in the black.

For those that actually read my entries, you may recall that I got a traffic ticket for "unnecessary noise" last August when the officer felt that by having taken the turn at speed, my tires made too much gripping sound. Even though the fine was only $109, I decided to dispute it out of principle. Well, today was the scheduled court date, and I got there a little after 1pm. This was my first time attending traffic court, and I found out that the scheduled time you receive is not your own, but rather shared with a bunch of others. In total, there were about 10-12 cases to be heard between 1:30pm and 4:30pm, and the ones that are fully disputing the tickets usually go last, while easier cases are taken care of at the start. Those cases include people that may have been cited for multiple infractions, but came to an agreement with the officer to plead guilty to one, but have the others dropped, or those that would like to plead guilty, but just want a reduced fine.

The first four cases involved officers that were not present, and as such, the tickets are automatically dismissed, even when the offense in question is cut and dry. For example, one of the dismissed cases involved someone being cited for hitting a parked vehicle and then leaving the scene. Also, I don’t know about other judges, but the one presiding over the cases this afternoon was fairly lenient. While he didn’t dismiss any of the tickets issued by officers that were present, he reduced the fines where he was able to in every single case without exception, usually to the minimum. There were two cases of people that got cited for driving without insurance, and the original fine was over $500, but in both instances, he was willing to lower it a bit over $300. For another person that got cited for a level two speeding ticket for driving approximately 100kmph in a 50kmph zone, the judge was willing to reduce the fine to reflect the violation being driving no more than 20kmph over the speed limit. My case was the second last to be brought up, and the judge completely understood where I was coming from, but the problem is the way the bylaw in question is worded, it’s completely subjective and open to interpretation. There is no concrete definition of what "loud" means, or what "unnecessary" means. In the end, basically what came out of it was that if the sound is audible and an officer decides to issue a ticket for it, the ticket won’t be dismissed, regardless of what his definition of loud and unnecessary is. At the very least, it wasn’t a complete waste of time, as following his modus operandi, he reduced my fine to the lowest amount, which was $50.

Of course, I have been following the Canucks closely this whole last month. It’s ironic I’m writing for the first time since the playoffs began on the night that they got ousted by the Ducks. When the tickets for the second round games were released on Ticketmaster, I joined the frenzy and actually ended up buying four single tickets to game 6. I’m not sure why I even did that. Perhaps it was because I thought I could flip it easily for some profit since demand exceeds supply. But I quickly found out it wasn’t anywhere as lucrative as I thought it to be, especially for single tickets. If anything, I guess I was somewhat relieved when the Canucks lost tonight because now I won’t have to worry about getting rid of my tickets. I spent over $1000 on those four tickets, including one in the second row of the lower bowl that cost over $400. I also managed to buy one of the cheapest tickets at $105, which I was planning on using myself, but alas it wasn’t meant to be for me attending my first every playoff game. Maybe next year…

We’ve also started practicing for the 2007 Asian Invitational volleyball tournament. Once again, I’ll be playing libero, which is definitely where I’d be most useful. Our team is pretty much the same as last year, except Wing is setting instead of Thi, and minus Ed, because we simply had too many players last year. Being honest, I’ll be quite happy if we made it as far as we did last year.

The sport that I’m more excited about right now is actually soccer. A few months ago, our company started booking an indoor field at Sportstown BC every other Friday afternoon for an hour, and we would go out and play a quick game amongst ourselves. However, near the end of March, we ended up getting a match set up with MDSI, which is another company in our building. They scored the first goal, but we took over from there. I scored a natural hat trick to get a 3-1 lead, which was plenty as the final score ended up being 7-2 in our favour. Four weeks later, we booked another match, this time against UTStarcom. At first, we were a little intimated with them showing up in their company uniforms, but we held our own just fine. I scored the first two goals of the match, which included the eventual game winner again, as the final score ended up being 5-1. I actually brought a camcorder out to those games and had the action recorded, and after watching the highlights over and over, I’ve got to say I do miss playing soccer competitively. We have another game lined up later today, against Mobidia. Hopefully we will take our record to 3-0!