The return of the number 3!

Shaftesbury High School Uniform

Toronto Warriors Uniform

After a nearly 8 year hiatus, the number 3 jersey is coming out of retirement!

I have my first 9-man volleyball tournament this weekend! It's the Canada Day tournament held annually in Toronto. All the Toronto teams participate and sometimes teams from Montreal. We're playing Saturday and Sunday in the parking lot of Rick Hansen Secondary School out in Mississauga. There'll literally be hundreds of Asian guys and girls playing volleyball on concrete. It'll be good times :). Come out and watch if you're in the area!

Why don't they make them like that back home?

You know, you see stuff here and you think to yourself, why don't they make them like that back home?

Use the friend key. You'll likely get it if you ask.

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Minneapolis after an 18 hour drive

So I'm in Minneapolis for a conference. Whoopeeeee.... (that's sarcastic if you didn't notice).

We left at 5:45am EST and got to Minneapolis at 11:45pm EST (10:45pm local time). 7 guys in a 7 seater van. Fun times. We were stopping every 2ish hours to take a break, change drivers, and rotate seating, as the back seat fit 3 across and was not well suited for 3 adults. Being the last one in the van, I got sandwiched between two not-so-small guys in the backseat right at the start. That wasn't very pleasant. We had to overlap shoulders in order to fit. Oh, and I didn't know any of them beforehand, though a few look familiar from various talks and stuff.

We would have arrived sooner, but we got held up at the US border for an hour b/c of the Mexican in our party. Plus we hit some bad traffic and construction around Chicago.

The drive wasn't too bad though. I basically slept the entire time :). My knees are kinda shot though from being cramped in a small space for so long.

I didn't sleep the night before, so that probably helped my sleeping, but I tend to sleep quite well in moving vehicles anyways. I can't believe that even not sleeping, I just barely had enough time to pack and get ready. I may have been doing laundry from 1 - 3am and I may have been in my office at 4am printing out copies of my paper :p

We're staying in a hostel. The place is actually pretty nice. We've got a large room with 7 beds and I'm the only one up right now (just finished showering, so I'm waiting for my hair to dry and am continuing with my Internet addiction). The snoring level is reasonable...

Anyways, gotta get up early tomorrow for the conference.

Mishmash of stuff

This always happens. I go on vacation and then want to blog about it, but am too lazy to do so, and I don't want to blog about new stuff when I haven't blogged about the vacation, so then I just don't blog, until I have the need to blog and then I blog and then the vacation post just gets less and less probable of ever getting written. I'll try and write it. Maybe on the way to Minneapolis...

Anyways, here's what's happened in the last little while:

• Volleyball
  • Started practicing outdoors on concrete. Let the scraping begin!
  
  
  • Played my first ever 9-man game! It was fun! Not as much of a difference as I thought it was gonna be. It was still volleyball. Plus, we've been practicing a lot, so I was prepared.
  
  
  • Saw Gizelle leaving Scarborough Town Centre in her car while I was in the parking lot and we stared at each other, half recognizing each other, but not 100% sure it was the other, especially since we were way out of our usual environment.
  
  
  • Saw the Columbians (or some sort of Spanish speaking people) play on the 10' high volleyball net with a soccer ball again. I need to bring my camera to practice to snag a picture for you guys.
  
  
  • Finished my second week in a row of 20+ hours of volleyball. That's without playing beach... I've been going to the girls' practice to help out and get some extra practice.
  
  
  • Learnt how to fist serve and serve with a lot of top spin. Working on fixing my arm swing when hitting and snapping my wrist. Chris was very observant.


• School
  • Bio is not inspirational
  
  
  • Finished my poster! My first poster for a conference. I would have rather had a talk. You can't do posters too last minute b/c you have to get it printed and crap. It's an ok poster. Not a great one. At least it was pretty easy b/c I just needed to pull stuff from the paper.
    
    
  
  
  • Patent pending. All I had to do was sign some documents and now I have a patent pending. Neb filed it for us for the work above. We had to get it filed before the conference otherwise prior art would have been an issue.


• Procrastination
  • Procrastinated by coding. Hacking facebook to be exact. Details to appear later.
  
  
  • Tribal Wars. Justin and I are addicted. I need more wood!!!
  
  
  • Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
  
  
  • Usual dicking around online
  
  
  • I get the National Post now. I'm not a big fan. I'd rather have the Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, or Winnipeg Free Press. But, it was free b/c of my Citibank credit card for 90 days.


• Outings
  • Serena Ryder in concert. Jeremy Fisher opened. The guy in front of me was really annoying b/c he was tall and he kept moving his head. It was obvious that he wasn't really paying attention and was there just b/c his boyfriend dragged him.
    
    
  
  
  • Clubbing last Friday
  
  
  • North by Northeast and FCUK fashion show with Tina, Donna, and Newton.
    
    
  
  
  • I was on the subway and someone was reading a Russian newspaper. I was able to read some of it over his shoulder :)
  
  
  • Lunch with DT fancy pants.
  
  
  • Seeing Chris Bosh at Holt Renfrew in Yorkville
  
  
  • Dinner with Cris and Teresa b/c I didn't want to break the streak of seeing Warriors everyday for the past week. Random event of the night: being served by Marieke at the restaurant.


• New music albums
  • Kelly Clarkson - My December
  
  
  • Missy Higgins - On A Clear Night
  
  
  • Mandy Moore - Wild Hope
  
  
  • Maria Mena - Apparently Unaffected
  
  
  • LeAnn Rimes - Whatever We Wanna
  
  
  • t.A.T.u. - Dangerous and Moving

Most random encounter ever!

Overheard at the club tonight:

Random girl: Do you have a blog at veenix.blogspot.com?