Dakich

Tonight i went with my dad to the annual “Old Timer’s” banquet in Indianapolis. It was my first time going with him, so i really didn’t know what to expect. I figured there might be a few hundred people there, but there ended up being 1100 people there with most of them being of the baby boomer generation. It was basically a huge meeting of old white guys drinking miller lite and rehashing stories from the olden days.  

So anyway, my dad informed me last week that the main speaker was going to be Dan Dakich ,who is most famous for being an assistant coach in the Bob Knight era at IU. He’s also famous for throwing up in his hotel room the night before he learned he would be guarding Michael Jordan the following day.

Knowing that this banquet usually brings in some pretty famous former athletes or coaches as guest speakers such as Tommy Lasorda, Oscar Robertson and Paul Hornug, I wasn’t overly excited to hear Dakich speak. All i really knew of him was that he had coached at a few places and played for IU. But as he started speaking, I was surprised. He was outstanding, and had captured the room of 1100 old white guys about as well as anybody could possibly do. The fact that there were bunch of IU fans there probably didn’t hurt, but Dakich was a great storyteller and was very funny. He had a pretty foul mouth, which added to the hilarity of some of his stories. He said the funniest thing he ever saw while at IU was when Coach Knight called 3 of his players in to his office after a loss to yell at them….and Coach Knight was completely naked with only a towel drying himself off at the same time as he was yelling at the players.  He kept joking about writing a book, but i think in reality if he did, it would probably be really good.

Needless to say, it was a good experience and something I hope to return to in the future. I was told that he was probably the best speaker they have had, so I guess i picked a good one to go to. It was also good to see my dad mingle with some of his old buddies.

-Looking forward to having a 2nd straight day off.

coldplay

I’m pretty excited to have the weekend off. 

Going to see my little nephews tomorrow, as well as the rest of my family. Looking forward to that. My pops is taking me to an event which should be a good time. 

I just finished watching the movie “pride can glory” with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell. I thought it was a pretty darn good movie, maybe just a step below top notch.

I’m sitting here late at night on a friday night watching Coldplay storytellers. I’m just not sure there is a better band out there right now. The music they make with a simple 4 piece band is pretty amazing, and Chris Martin’s personality on stage is a perfect ingredient to making them just exciting enough, but not over the top. Listening to them talk in several interviews, you can tell they are sincerely humble about everything they have. I’ve seen them 3 times live in concert, and they are stellar. Being at those shows, you really feel like your seeing a special band, and not just at any ordinary concert. At least that is how i feel. I hope they keep it up for a long time.

Obama, pre-presidency

One of the reasons i continue to blog is so that one day i will be able to look back and see exactly what i had going on at a certain time period in my life, or maybe even what i was thinking about a certain person, place or thing. So I figure seeing as tomorrow is a pretty historic day for a variety of reasons, i might want to weigh in on my current thoughts.  

But i’m not on here to blog about politics and expressing my opinions about it, because there is no point. But i will say, that i’m truly excited about what an Obama presidency might mean to the entire world, not just the U.S.. And i’m hoping that just the global excitement alone about Obama is enough to create more togetherness and less hatred in our world. I don’t think i’m alone in those sentiments. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the next 4 years.

damnit

So I decided to challenge a traffic ticket i got a few months ago because I thought i had written proof that i wasn’t in the wrong….and that the officer was making assumptions, which he was. Today was my court date.

So i show up pretty confident that i had the documentation to prove my innocence, thinking i would have a nice little trial or that the cop wouldn’t show up and it would be thrown out. Well, it doesn’t exactly work like that. There was about 100 other people in the room with me, and about 75% of the cops showed up, including mine. You could tell the police officers just loved showing up to these things, knowing us criminals were hoping to get out of it if they didn’t show. I know i would if i were them.

So the prosecutor basically tells you that unless you are 100% confident you can win the trial, then you might as well pay the $200 fine, because if you don’t and you decide  to go to trial and you lose, then you could pay up to $1000. I was one of the last ones to go, and after hearing the prosector basically spell it out to people to not take their case to trial, i knew i shouldn’t either. So after going in there confident, I walked out of there with $200 less dollars, and half of my day wasted.

To make matters worse, you aren’t supposed to leave the courtroom for any reason while it’s all going on. Unfortunately, i had decided to stop for coffee this morning. So i got there at 9am, and didn’t leave until almost noon. I was about to pee my pants starting around 10:30am. You had better believe that i wasn’t going to make the decision to go to trial and wait another hour, instead of being able to leave the courtroom and use the restroom. I was probably the happiest person in the room paying the $200 fine, because it meant i could use the restroom.

It seems that this is how my life normally goes.

Have you ever noticed that the Oprah show really only lasts about 20 minutes, and the other 40 minutes is commercials. They must make a killing from advertising during her show.

A sense of something different

Today was my first day of class in my new field of study, Visual Communications and Photography. It is something i’ve been looking forward too since I decided I would sign up.  Lately my life has been pretty out of sorts, having started a new job that requires an inconsistent schedule. I’m still trying to adjust to all of this newness, and now throwing a few classes in the mix, it’s really going to be an adjustment. 

Sitting in a college classroom for the first time in almost 7 years was interesting. Seven years ago, I really had no desire to learn what I was being taught by the instructor, for I had no real interest in the subject. I was there because that’s what you do after high school, you go to college. Well, I should of taken a different path and saved myself and my parents a lot of money, because I had no interest in being in school. Hell, I probably wouldn’t of even passed had all of my classes been soley based on attendance. I truly hated it. 

But tonight was different. Most likely it’s because i’m probably a bit more mature, but also more than a little interested in the subject of study. I’ve basically been trying to teach myself these computer programs and the best ways of creating a quality photograph for the past year, so having somebody else teaching me these things and giving me hands instruction should be great. At least I’m hoping so this time around, because at this point in my life, time is money and money is and money is something I don’t exactly have an abundance of right now.

smelly cat part 2

My brother and I have noticed our house starting to smell more and more like cat pee in the recent weeks. We do have a smelly cat, but not smelly enough to cause our house to smell this bad. So finally today we realized that in our basement, there is an air intake on our heating unit sucking in a lot of air. This shouldn’t be there. But because it is, this means that since the litter box is in the basement, as well as the cat, it has been sucking in all of that lovely cat smell and blowing it throughout the house.  So we ended up covering up the intake, in hopes that it will get rid of the awful smell. By the way our house smells, you would think we had 20 cats. It’s awful.

I bought some clothes at Old Navy today. Got some really good deals on dress pants and a nice black coat. I don’t remember the last time i bought new clothes. It felt good.

My room is a disaster. I have little storage space and have papers all over the place. The walls are pumpkin orange with nothing hanging on them. I don’t mind the color, but they need something on them. I really need to just spend some time organizing my room. It’s not very cozy feeling to me yet. I don’t really even have window covers. So hopefully nobody pays attention.

I can’t believe it’s 2009. It’s amazing how quickly time goes. When i was younger, i would of thought that the world would be like a Will Smith movie by now, that i would be married with kids, and that i would have life figured out. None of those things have happened. Maybe that’s a good thing. I just hope the next 10 years don’t go as fast as the last 10 years have.