Good Morning, Miami

Here I am in the place where I come let go/
Miami the base and the sunset glow

High quality rhymes from Mr. Smith back in his heyday. My favourite part of the song is when he calls out the – ah, forget it. I’ll keep it moving as fast as possible, cause there are things overwhelmingly more necessary to discuss than that obnoxious concoction… just YouTube it. You won’t be disappointed after seeing the choice dance moves and how high Will Smith’s pants were ridin back in ‘98. Also, watch for the part where he says “jig it out”. Jig it out? I don’t think that was said, let alone cool in ‘98, nor will it ever be. But moving on.

After 6 weeks of strugglin’ with Team Canada in Peg City, it was time to see if we actually have the skills to pay the bills. Wednesday we rolled out to Miami for PanAm Cup and we’re here til July 4th, reppin for the homeland. After getting up at 3:30 am, we were looking real nice and fit right in with the locals but so far, it’s goin’…

We opened the tournament vs. Brazil a.k.a ranked #1 in the world (sidenote - how often do you ever get to say that? IN. THE. WORLD.) a.k.a m’freaking Beijing Olympic gold medalists. You just can’t really argue with cred like that. Needless to say they taught us a thing or two... The game can essentially be summed up in the following statement – they made 1 hitting error in the entire game. ONE.

Respect.

So we moved on to today vs. the Dominican Republic and we shoulda taken care of biznass but did some unfortunate stuff and lost in 4. Yadda yadda yadda. You live and learn? Or at any rate, you live.

Come and see how good we look.

So we have tomorrow off and then play Argentina and Trinidad & Tobago before hopefully finishing well enough for playoffs later in the week.

After we finish hurr, we roll to Puerto Rico on July 5th for a world championship qualifier tournament which is for all the marbles. We need to win the tournament (there’s only 3 other teams there… doable) to qualify for next summer in Japan. Heyo. And we also get an extra week off if we do. So eyes on the prize baby, we gotta pull it out bigtime.

Also, to sum up the last 6 weeks quickly:

• Peru came up (#17 in world rankings) and played a few games against us in Winnipeg.
• I had a weekend off and surprised my German in Phoenix. Too good to be back in the 480, I’m tellin’ you… I miss the people down there. Maybe I’ll write about that if I get bored enough in the next few days.
• Lastly, one of my top 5 favourite people, a.k.a my cousin Meg, got married last weekend in Alberta so I got to roll out there to be in the wedding. She was stunning and it was rad to see the fam for a short 48 hrs. Shoutout to the new Mr. & Mrs. Cano.

Anyway, back to the situation at hand. Miami is sweet? Well so far it’s just hot & humid as balls but we’re goin to South Beach tomorrow so my feelings on the place should improve significantly. Still, tonight I was walkin’ to the gym, listening to some chill hiphop with a nice little piano beat and just watched the sunset through the palms. And I had to think life’s not bad sometimes. Then I tripped on my flip flop, and we lost our game. Ha. That ended fast. Still, it’s nice to finally get out after training 33 hrs a week and play some games. And yeah we got bored enough to count that up.