Blazers

Yesterday was quite a day. I woke up, turned on the computer, checked ESPN.com, saw that the Blazers got the #1 pick in the upcoming NBA draft and then saw that I had many emails alerting me to the fact that the Blazers got the #1 pick. Unbelievable. I was actually thinking of staying up the night before to track the lottery, but it took place at 3-4am local time, so I thought better of it. I probably would have been evicted from the hotel if I had.

Then, I saw reports that Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert were planning a press conference to announce whether they were staying in the draft. Rumors had Hibbert coming back for sure. I was hoping that both would come back, but hey, with just Big Roy and our incoming freshman, we should be a top 5 team again next year. Bring on the Cougs.

Wrapping up the basketball topic, I decided today to finally change the channel from CNBC to see if I could find coverage of the Colonial golf tournament. No luck, but they are showing some European Tour event and I did find some Greek basketball. Lovely. Now I can watch my favorite all-time golfer - Colin Montgomery and soon watch Sabastian Telfair play alongside his brother in Greece. Maybe I should forget the whole business world and just play Euro basketball. The Greek game is so brutal I'm confident I could be the Earl Boykins of the GBA. However, I've heard that the Greek fans throw stuff at the players so maybe I'll just become Joel Freeland's training partner that way I don't have to leave the UK.

Went to watch the European Cup last night with some of Tiffany's co-workers. While soccer/football is huge here, it's really just men who give a rip. So, of course we left in the 40th minute to grab dinner. I'm not a soccer convert yet so I didn't care, but I would have bet that Liverpool would have won as they seemed to dominate the first 40 minutes. Shows what I know.

Some political news for everyone - the UK just swore it's first sex-changed mayor. That's pretty crazy. Imagine being the person that lost that race. Imagine that in the US.

I'll end on some good news - we're moving out of the hotel tonight. Well it's sort of good. The apartment is OK, but not great. The good - it has a kitchen and laundry and there is a gym on-site. The bad - it's not much bigger than our suite, the furniture is pretty tired, there's no air conditioning (and the tube runs nearby so if we leave the windows open we could be kept awake by the trains) and I'll have to bid adieu to my pals on the hotel staff.

Ciao. - Greg