Today I got access to the server back and got my business paperwork stuff moving again for February. Boy was that a weight off my shoulders. I did a bunch of email and had half a burrito for breakfast. By breakfast I mean brunch…. and by brunch I mean… er…. brunner. Feeling a fair bit better today, even if I was vampiric in my lack of seeing the sun.

Probably the biggest thing that happened was I went to my first NBA basketball game! The Seattle Supersonics vs. the Detroit Pistons. Unbelievable. Just a phenomenal atmosphere… huge number of people in the Key Arena, all of them going nuts. I think almost the whole arena was on its collective feet for the final two minutes. I have never been to a closer game, bar none. It was back and forth throughout the whole game, Seattle mildly maintaining an edge throughout the first half. I think the largest lead at any one point in time was 6 points, which was recovered by a couple of 3-pointers just seconds later. Very fast paced, a lot of running game which had some attempts to slow it down and run some plays, but mostly it was run, maybe a few bullet passes (sadly an awful lot of them one-handed) before someone pulled up a jumper or took it to the hole. Since the D was pretty tight, they usually only had fractions of a second to pull of their shots, even from outside the 3-point line (sometimes way outside the line). A lot of offensive rebounding from both teams, all in all they were pretty evenly matched. There was the odd poor call by the refs that affected both teams, and Detroit was worse from the free-throw line but all in all it was a fantastic game. With 6 seconds to go, both teams were tied at 96, and Detroit had the ball. They ran the clock and pulled off a nice jumper from the right side baseline between the key and the 3-point line. The clock stops at 0.2 seconds. A time out by the Sonics, with the Pistons whooping up the court. The Sonics get it up the court and alley-‘oop it, get a rebound and almost put in the hole before the buzzer goes off. Bloody amazing, but the key word there is ‘almost’ – Sonics lose after a fabulously tight game.

Lots of noise, everyone was getting into it, they had cool displays on the ‘SonicVision’ scoreboard and a drumline that came out a couple of times and did some wicked performances. They had a dance team that came out fairly regularly, they had a ‘Boom squad’ of about 6 guys doing hip-hop dancing… can’t remember the word for it. The mascot was a sasquatch in basketball gear called ‘Squatch’, who threw things into the crowd at various points and actually played a drum kit like a maniac with the drumline in one of their performances.

You haven’t seen entertainment until you’ve seen a sasquatch in basketball gear going nuts playing a drum kit with a great degree of skill.

I had a brilliant time, I didn’t spend very much money (food wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be) and I got to see one of the closest games I’ve ever seen. Since there are a bunch of home games coming up in the near future, I think I’ll have a look around and see if I can’t get some people (and tickets) and go again.

And ok, I knew not may people read this, but two people commented about my story… two? Far out, people. I’m not entirely sure how to take that. I think I’ve talked to more people that have read my blog than that, so I’ve got no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if I’ll post it up or not… I’ll do a bit of editing then I’ll see.