U10 Girls - why they don’t need a ref (especially not me)

Ok, so here’s the deal. I’m reffing a U10 girls game tonight at my old high school. Normally I wouldn’t complain (ok, that’s not true…I wouldn’t complain enough to actually write a blog entry about it), but it just so happens that I have to ref the two worst teams in the league. And when I say worst, I don’t mean skill-wise (that is of course implied with any U10 girls team - first of all, they’re 10, second of all, they’re girls), no; I mean they are the worst teams to ref. So now you’re probably thinking, grow up, they’re only 10 year old girls, right? Well, I suppose you’d have me there. Aside from the fact that they suck total monkey balls and don’t even know the rules of the game (I’m talking not even the basics, I often have to call people for hand balls outside the box (or in a U10 game’s case, the “semi-circle”…oooohh), hand balls on the field, and just sucking in general), they actually talk back to me on half the calls I make. I mean, it’s nice that you’ve got attitude, but you’ve got attitude about something you know nothing about and have no control over whatsoever. That’s basically like me going into a toilet store (something which I know nothing about), listening to their smartest employee explain to me in the most in-depth detail he can fathom about the inner-workings of a toilet and other sewage-related products, and at the end of his masterful speech, me telling him he’s wrong. Not only that, but then I’d have to take a seat on the fanciest toilet in the place and drop the world’s biggest deuce with everyone watching. (more…)

The End is Fucking Nigh

And so, here we are on August the first, as my summer will soon draw to a close (in case you’re wondering about the title, it is of course a reference to the 2002 post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later). Yes, while you may be thinking, “Wait Paul, you’re crazy! There’s still a month of summer left!” Sadly, this is not exactly true for me…although I suppose technically it may be, but we all know I’m not technical about such technicalities. No, my summer ends in a couple of weeks from now, as my Jillybear is leaving for Florida on the 17th, and personally I see no reason to be here in North Bay any longer without her. My contract with the MTO ends next Friday (a week from today), for which my excitement cannot be expressed in mere words. It’s a win-lose situation, you see: while this job is finally coming to an end (something that I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time…even longer since they extended my contract for several more weeks), it also means that I know my days of seeing Jill’s beautiful face everyday are numbered. I’m literally counting down the days until I have to leave her…leave her, but not forget her; never forget her. It’s sad, and a little heartbreaking I guess too to imagine going back to the days where I can’t just go see her whenever I want, or run to her when I’m having problems, or just know that she’s only a few minutes away. Yes, I suppose there are people that have it much harder than we do; at least Sudbury is only just over an hour away from North Bay. There are people in much longer-distance relationships that can be several hours away, several provinces away, or even in different countries or continents. However, perhaps people in relationships so far away from each other have been hardened by the distance between them; something that I know will never happen to Jill or myself. Still, that doesn’t make being apart any easier. (more…)

New Computer!

Yes, it finally happened; I got my long-awaited and -desired computer! I still like my laptop, and I’ll be happy to have it this year for school when I don’t live on-campus and have to wait around during the day for my next classes…but as far as my new machine goes, it’s a beast. It’s running an AMD Phenom Quad-Core 9500 processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 500GB internal SATA HDD, with nVidia GeForce 8600GS dedicated video card. Finally I’m now able to play all my Valve games that I’ve had for the longest time but haven’t been able to play (HL2, CSS, TF2, etc.), along with other games worthy of playing that have been released since (COD4, BioShock, Crysis, etc.). It also came with a very nice 21.6″ widescreen LCD monitor, which totally blows my mind. It came pre-loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium, which I was a little skeptical about before I bought it (as I’d never really used Vista at all very much at that point), but to my surprise, it’s really not as bad as everyone claims it to be. Yes, it gets a bit annoying when you want to delete a file and it asks you about 4 times if you’re sure you want to do it, but aside from that it’s really pretty decent, and not to mention looks totally badass with the new effects and whatnot (of course, this wouldn’t be so pretty if you didn’t have a good enough computer to take advantage of them). Anyways I’m having a total blast with it, well worth the cheap price I got it for!

A Wet Game

So I reffed soccer on Monday night at 7:30. So I’m on my way to the field, everything’s great, the weather’s nice, it’s sunny, and yes, I think I could even hear a bird chirping here and there. As I crossed the bridge from downtown to Lakeshore, I started seeing little wet spots appearing on my windshield. I thought nothing of it and merely closed my sunroof. I found a pretty mint parking spot, grabbed my gear, and headed to the field. I threw on my new Adidas Predator Absolutes (yes, the cleats designed and worn by David Beckham himself…sure, it doesn’t make me any better, but they’re white and gold, and I just know that if Jesus ever played soccer he would ditch his sandals in a heartbeats and strap these babies on), met with the only linesman that showed up (helpful, aren’t they?), and talked to the coaches. As I was making my way down the field to get the game cards, the rain started. First it just rained a little; just enough to make my game cards nice and soggy as I put them back in my pocket. Once I blew the whistle to start the match, it was like telling the clouds themselves to piss on us; it came down like a mofo. It must have poured for a solid 30-35 minutes into the half. Now, I have nothing wrong with rain, and I don’t even mind getting wet, especially when playing soccer. But when you have in your pocket several sheets of mere paper with extremely important information on them (i.e. information so that you get paid for being out in the shitstorm in the first place), it’s not so much fun. So with one hand on my trusty whistle and the other doing its best to cover my pocket where the papers hid, I did the best I could to call what I could see (which wasn’t much since it was basically raining in my eyes). To make matters worse, the game was a U14 vs U16 boys match, which meant that the one team was considerably stacked against the other. And when I say “considerably,” I mean they were a straight-up rapeshow. I had to call a penalty kick against the youngins several minutes in, as one of their defenders had a questionable hand ball in the 18 yard box. With a 1-0 lead, the older team went on to score about 7 or 8 more goals before the half was over…the first half. By this point the rain had subsided almost to a stop, but because there was so much moisture simply hanging in the air it might as well have been raining anyways. The second half continued, the younger team inevitably defeated, the older team slacking off and lazy. They scored an additional 5 or 6 more goals before the defense slacked off so much that they let a little attacker in and he scored the first goal for his team, and they actually went on to score another not too long after. As nice as that is, they still lost hardcore by 13-2. Ouch.

I was actually supposed to ref on Tuesday night as well, but the game was cancelled as it basically rained non-stop all day long and the field would have been a total mess. We ended up carrying on with our plans that we had for after the game anyways; a wee bit of a “double-date” if you will between myself and Jill and both of our best friends (who are also fairly good friends…and perhaps will soon be friends with benefits…sexual benefits that is, AYO!). Anywhoo that was a good time for sure, and then it was back to work for me the next day…eww. I spent the end of Tuesday, all of Wednesday, Thursday, and today doing the refresh (setting up the new computers, installing all the applications, backing up user data and restoring it onto the new machines, etc.) for all the new equipment for the office. And yes, I’m basically doing it all myself, and it’s the most tedious stuff in the world. Anyways, thank God the weekend is finally here, I think I would rather take my own life than work another day.

SA-TUR-DAY…Night!

First of all, if you didn’t understand the format of the title, you’re clearly a major noob for not knowing that it is of course from the Bay City Rollers’ classic song, Saturday Night (go figure). Still, as long as you expected this entry to have more to do with Saturday night than the song, I guess I won’t have to beat you with a dead trout.

Anywhoo, we had a pretty exciting day overall. After my shower, breakfast, and an hour or so of outdated Disney channel cartoons, I headed out and got my hair cut, for which I was long overdue. Unfortunately, the chick who was cutting my hair either wasn’t paying attention or just didn’t care (I understand, as I wouldn’t give a fuck about someone else’s hair either, but the fact is, I was paying this bitch to cut my hair and she damn well better not fuck it up), but she left my unruly sideburns just sitting there on both sides of my head, which, as you might expect, I did not appreciate. Now, perhaps it’s somewhat my fault for not noticing at the time and mentioning it to her (I’m used to them asking me what they want me to do at that point), but the way I see it, why blame myself when I can just blame her? I know, right, it makes perfect sense. But hey, I didn’t go to college for nothing. Or did I? Hmm, that’s a long story, and I think we better not get into that right now (although it’s not as if I don’t have the time, again I’m sitting here at work doing absolutely nothing, I’m essentially being paid to work on my blog and play Hearts, Solitaire, and whatever other games suit my fancy). So anyways, back to my story…wait, what was I talking about again? Ah yes, my haircut. Aside from the uncontrollably hideous tufts of hair sticking out on each side of my chiseled face (yes, I said it), I was quite pleased with the job she had done. Was it worth the $12.95 that I had to pay? Probably not. If it were up to me, I’d say $7.95 would be quite sufficient. Oh well, I guess I need to get used to this “reality” thing. (more…)

To All My Faithful Readers…

First off, I’d like to apologize to those faithful readers of mine who visit frequently to check for any updates and who are disappointed to find there aren’t any. I wish circumstances were different, but I’ve been quite busy over the past month or so and although I have the time to update the blog fairly frequently, I just never get around to it. Now I’m at work (my new job), and bored out of my tree because they haven’t setup any of my admin accounts yet, which means I really can’t do a whole lot until I get those. So here I am, essentially getting paid to write in my blog. I guess I really shouldn’t be complaining. (more…)

Yikes! It’s Been Awhile!

Hey fools, sorry I haven’t been able to update much lately…or at all really in the past week or two. Anyways, I’ll just give you a brief synopsis of what’s happened…

First of all, I got all moved out of the shithole known as Sudbury, and successfully moved back home. Unfortunately I only had one day at home between when I moved back and when I had to leave to start work in Algonquin Park. Interesting story. I got all moved into Algonquin Park, but I was totally miserable and depressed, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so down as I did back then. I decided that I wasn’t ready to spend the summer away from my Jilly after spending the entire year away from her…so I ended up quitting before my first shift at 7 in the morning the next day, and I moved back home again that afternoon. The next day I spent dropping off resumes and applications to pretty much everywhere imaginable. Luckily I ended up getting a couple jobs out of all that work…they aren’t anything spectacular (so much so that I won’t even mention where they are right now), but it’s money, and that’s all I care about. Yes, I probably won’t enjoy these jobs, but it’s only for the summer, and it’ll make me money to pay for next year. (more…)

And Then There Was One…

Yes, my summer is just within reach…finally! As you will no doubt know (from my previous posts or the countdown on my sidebar), I will be officially done my first year of college at 12:30 tomorrow afternoon! This week hasn’t been as bad as I expected, and to be totally honest, it’s gone by really fast which I’m extremely thankful for. My math test went okay enough I guess, I felt like I did pretty good on most of it with the exception of the last section (simplifying truth tables and boolean expressions…ewww). But overall I think I did pretty well on it, I’d really like to get 80+ on that test, but I’d be happy with anything over a 70 to be honest. My NOS test yesterday is a completely different story; we were supposed to only have 2 hours to write it, but that got changed to 3 hours (as we would have had an hour long class with the same professor immediately after it anyways)…unfortunately, I ended up not finishing the test until around 4:30 (and if you think about how I started at 10:30, that’s a 6 hour test…longest test ever), and I didn’t end up getting out of there until around 5 because I had to mark someone else’s test. It went okay as well and I felt pretty good about it as I was doing it…until I went to test some things and they weren’t working, which is why I spent the next few hours trying to hide my tracks of screwing up somewhere. Still, I think I managed well enough on it and I should hopefully be able to maintain a mark somewhere around the 80 that I had going into it. We did our VB presentation today, which, as you may know, I was probably the most worried about, simply because I didn’t expect the program itself to be done. However, a couple of the guys in our group really stepped up and got their shit together and we managed to pull it off, and it looked pretty damn decent too! Special thanks to Dan for organizing all the shit and to Jimmy for doing a lot of the tough code. You guys really made this project possible, we all owe you hardcore. And tomorrow I’ve got my final databases test which I feel pretty comfortable with; it’s on SQL, queries, forms, reports, and other Access bullshit. But it’s all pretty straightforward stuff, and I feel pretty confident that I’m going to do well (I’m in the low 70’s in that class and it would be really nice to bump that up a few ticks). Either way I really can’t wait until I’m done tomorrow. And that’s not even that half of it…in addition to being all done, my Jilly will be coming up tomorrow afternoon to visit me and spend the night so that she can help move me out on Saturday. I can’t wait, it’ll be like the best congratulations-you’re-done-first-year present ever! (more…)