The Beach is back.

So we are currently, as of this post, all square at 9 in the B&B battle for the surfboard. We swept Irvine, 3 games to nil. What made this satisfying for our crew was that in Game 1, UCI was never able to get a game point of their own, while we had to go to 36 to finally take it. Paul otman never missed a beat, getting 8 of his 17 kills in that game. Ironically, he is 88 away from reaching the 1,000-kills club. Go figure. I reckon he will come close to after our first tangle with the Waves.

The Anteaters were effectively taken out of the match in Game 2, thanks to the heroics of one Tommy Pestolesi. When he got onto the court, down 27-23, the Threefold Law came into effect. I asked the question during coach Alan Knipe's last timeout of that game: You can make two choices: 1. Make this a best-of-three, or 2. Rally back and put their backs against the wall. To my delight, Tommy, on behalf of the guys, chose Choice 2. Good decision.
Down 27-23 due to two hitting errors and an ace by the Zots, Pestolesi got the Beach back through Irvine imploding off the serves with three straight aces, a kill, and a couple of hitting errors from the visitors in blue. Hey Kari, you are welcome to fall in and transfer here with your big bro...if you want to.

Mentally, and physically, UCI never recovered from the 49er rally. This was where the leadership of the seniors from last season were missed. With most of the team returning for my guys, we took advantage. A funny thing happened at the end of the game. I flung my shirt off after the sweep...and by sheer luck, it landed on Kevin Cape's head. Now, Kevin had a great, if not illustrious, career at Long Beach State, and now he was standing in the student section with me. I've already graduated, and I STILL am making some memories here at the Beach, for good or for bad.

Next up is UCLA at the Pauley. If we can improve on our consistency...roll up, and as Lord of the Dance Michael Flatley likes to say, fasten your seat belts, 49er Nation, because we're The Beach, we're The Beach, and The Beach is back (sorry Elton John), and the Magical Redemption Tour is up and running. All aboard!

Habemus musum

Thanks to help from my mom, I was able to escape a bit of a Catch-22, although I need a new stack of empty TDK DVD-Rs to make it complete. I am typing from my desktop, which I simply call Haruhi'S Hard Drive (a tribute to the great woman of legend from Nishinomiya North Senior High...or is it East? I have no idea.), and I am relieve that, after over several weeks of being in limbo...I finall have a mouse for my desktop.

You see, my optical mouse died, even with the battery change. It is now lying about in the room in my house called simply The Old Room, with the DSL modem that preceded the current one in use. So, I had to ask my mom (a great preschool teacher of three decades plus) for a new mouse. Since my current desktop, an old VPR Matrix, still had the mouse plug a la pre-USB, an expendable mouse from her work would suffice.

And as a result, I am now able to clean my desktop, download and install some critical updates, uninstall some unnecessary programs, and eventually convert it into a seeding station for a number of torrents. It was brought to my attention that my ration had gone down. Luckily, I was still seeding at the time, so I wasn't banned from the tracker. But since the people at the tracker upped the minimum to a 0.3 ratio (thanks a lot for making it hard for the rest of us, you abusing leecher pricks!), I decided to go ahead and recall the torrents I backed up on my DVDs, because I knew that if times called for desperate measures, it was imperative that I was prepared for this.

So now Haruhi's Hard Drive, my desktop of over 6-ish years (yes, it IS old), is now a seeding station, while LOveGen is primarily for leeching. Every now and then the bandwidth will switch between HHD and LoveGen, because both of them are leeching torrents. One thing is for sure: my hard drive on my desktop is going to be on for a long period of time. And I have to thank my mom for finally giving me a mouse.

NOw, if only I can muster enough money to back up some more torrents on DVD...