hey everyone. I AM DONE!!! for now anyway. wow, what a good feeling. i can't believe how much i actually got done over the past two days. i guess when the pressure is on, you take things into your own hands. i've seen the sunrise the last two mornings. THERE WON'T BE ANYMORE OF THAT!!! that is for sure. it is 3:07 pm right now and i am going to sleep for a little while. (or a long while...only time will tell).

i might as well give you all my chicago update. to start...it was a fantastic trip and NCAA basketball is definitely an exciting event. we left waterloo around 12:30 am on Friday morning and drove all night. along the way, we stopped for gas in some small broken down place outside Detroit...kinda sketchy. when I was inside paying for a bottle of water, the guy asked me where we were going so i said that we on our way to the tournament in Chicago. he then asked where we had come from so I told him that we had driven all night from Toronto. His reply was "Toronto, wow, isn't that like 20 hours from here?" All I have to say about that is...what a fool. We arrived in Chicago on Friday morning around 9:00 am. Next came the whole hotel fiasco but the short version of that story is that we ended up staying in Skokie, Illinois which is the equivalent of the relationship between Scarborough and Toronto. Needless to say, Skokie worked out well and we got all that we wanted...

Now, it was on to the NCAA games. We left Skokie and arrived at the United Centre for game 1. We missed the first 5 minutes of the Creighton - Florida game. Very poorly played game but very excited. It went into double overtime and the 12th seeded Creighton Bluejays upset the 5th seeded Florida Gators on a three pointer at the buzzer to end the game! It was very exciting. Game 2 was garbage. Illinois killed San Diego State and we were all falling asleep during that one although there were thousands of Fighting Illini fans in the stadium. We then had a 2 hour break so the 6 of us piled into the minivan and we all slept for a while in the parking lot. Next came the night session...game one - Bobby Knight and the Texas Tech Red Raiders vs. the Southern Illinois Saluki's. The game started out pretty good. The Saluki's won for the upset which was sweet. The best part though was when Marty, Jimmy, Tchao and I managed to scam seats in the lower section of the stadium. We were sitting about 15 rows from the action and it was so good. For the final game of the night, me and Jimmy moved over to the other side of the stadium and were joined by Marty shortly there after. The three of us watched the 3rd seeded Georgia Bulldogs take on the 14th seed Murray State Racers. What a wicked time! We were sitting in the 2nd row behind the Murray State bench for the entire second half of the game. We even got on CBS a bunch of times cause we were sitting pretty much directly behind the coach. There was one scene when they were zooming in on him and there was Gokhale's melon right above his shoulder. It was so much fun.

I am getting tired so I should go but I will finish the tales of Chicago later.

Before I leave - this is what the hotel gave us (some info about the United Centre) -
"NOTE: This is not a good area, arrive and dpeart with other fans. Do not walk around nearby streets."

Pretty interesting, eh?