at 1:46pm, I was born at Washington Sanitarium & Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland to a young mother from New Rochelle, NY and a young father from Charlotte, NC. I have no clue what my birth weight was cuz it’s not listed on the birth certificate. Maybe, I was too big for them to weight me… lol. So in essence today is my birthday. I’m looking forward to a enjoyable, peaceful and relaxing day. Today is also the last day of my weeklong vacation from work, so I’mma definitely try to kick my feet up and chill today for tomorrow I must arise and reaquaint myself to the workplace. I am grateful to be able to wake-up this morning with a smile on my face and still have the love and support of my family and close friends. Although at times there have been moments of turmoil and distress, I must thank God for allowing me to make it this far. With all that being said…
It’s my birthday… It’s my birthday….. It’s my birthday!!!!!!!!!
Yeah… I took my oldest niece to the zoo today and what an adventure. It was in the 90’s in the DC area today and it was kinda hot out there. Since taking my nieces to the Universoul Circus last month, I promised the oldest that I’d take her to see the animals again. So I picked her up around noon and off we went. The whole entire ride all she talked about was animals and the circus. Everytime I said something about the zoo she started crying. I guess she really liked the circus after all! Anyway, I found a parking space on the street by the zoo and we started out adventure. Halfway to the entrance I was sweating like a mad dog and realized that I had forgotten to bring a towel. Boy what a mistake that was. For the next 3 hours we walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. I kept asking her if she was tired and she’d be like “No… let’s run”.
After making the rounds of the entire zoo I finally gave in a bought her a firecracker popsicle. We sat down on a bench by the Monkey House (bad move) and chilled for about 10 minutes. No sooner had she finished that popsicle and back in full gear. The brief intermission we took on the bench allowed me to cool off, but the smell in the air was killin’ me!!! But she wanted to see the Gorilla as she ate her ice cream. Don’t ask me why. So we start walking again, she sees the elephants and wants to go back inside the Elephant House. Lord, this place smelled worse than the Monkey House!!!! It was so bad that she noticed also. saying “Ewwwww Uncle Greg, it stinks in here”. But she wanted to stay nonetheless. The baby elephant was up in there wildin’ out and everybody pulled out there cameras and camcorders. After that calmed down we went to see the Panda Bears one last time before leaving. Sensing that we were getting close to where we started, she started giving me the sad face. Better yet, she looked at me and said “I’m sad”. Now I couldn’t just leave the zoo on that note right? So we walked to the gift shop and I bought her puzzle (she loves puzzles) with a lot of animals on it. She still had that “I don’t wanna go home look”, but it was not as bad as before. I was tryna get outta DC before rush hour hit and we skipped down the sidewalk to the car. I put her in the car seat and off we went back to my sister’s house. I think I might have gone 3 blocks when I looked back and saw her fast asleep in the back seat. It was at that very moment when I realized just how much joy I had brought to her that afternoon. I must say… I love being Uncle Greg!!!!!
(pictured above: My Dad, My Granddad, and of course Me)
This past weekend I spent in Charlotte, NC with my family for Father’s Day. The majority of my time was spent at my grandparents house with my Dad, Granddad and Grandma. I had a wonderful time with the old folks. I ran around the city of Charlotte a lil’ bit with my Pops and then chilled at my Grandparents house. I enjoyed hearing all of them tell old stories of things that I did when I was young. Some of those stories are just hard to believe. I honestly don’t remember all of that stuff. Anyway, I swear I think I gained about 10lbs from my Grandma’s cooking. She hooked up the grub southern style for her only grandson. I remember eating around 2 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, then waking up around 6pm. Yeah, that good food put a brotha to sleep somethin’ nice. The weekend was just a relaxing one and really one that I needed. Just to get away from the DC area and spend time with family was a blessing.
Okay, so it’s over 90 degrees outside right? I come home after a very long day at work and find that the air conditioning in my apartment building is down. Sounds like a lotta fun doesn’t it? I called the maintenance and they gave me the usual response “We’re working on it”. You wanna talk about a brotha angry… I was heated!!!! (ß maybe that was a poor choice of words) Anyway, I cut the fan on, but of course it’s only blowing hot air. I grab an ice pack from the freezer and lay it on my chest. But that only helped for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile Comcast decided that they wanted to have problem with my cable internet service at the same time, so I couldn’t even go online. Here I am sitting is a sauna of an apartment with no air and no internet. At about 10pm I decided to call it a night and I laid down on the bed to go to sleep. I woke up around 2am in a pool of sweat… I mean drenched! That was it for me. I jumped outta bed, threw on my New Balance kicks, grabbed my car keys and went outside to my car. I got inside the car, reclined the seat and started the ignition. I set the A/C on high cool, cut on the radio and went to sleep. Yep, I stayed in my car until almost 7 that morning. That’s how bad it was. I could not sleep peacefully and comfortably in my apartment and that was the only option for me at the time. Of course I probably could’ve gone to my sister’s house which was less than 10 minutes away, but I wasn’t thinking about driving. Being in an apartment with no A/C with the temperature is over 90 degrees is no joke. I wanted to go to the rental office with a baseball bat and do a Principal Joe Clark up in there. But they ended up getting the A/C fixed that morning, but who knows how long it’s gonna stay on this time around. I swear, I gotta find somewhere else to live. I can’t deal with this craziness all summer.
Those of y’all who know me, know I’m a hustla. I stay on top of all the concerts and sporting events going on in the DC area as well as other places. Well, I’ve got some very good seats for two upcoming tours that come to DC in July. Cedric the Entertainer on July 16th and Destiny’s Child on July 31st.
Cedric the Entertainer DAR Constitution Hall Saturday July 16th at 8pm
As you can see below, I’ve got tickets on the floor in two areas.
Section 1
Section 4
Prices shown on the above ticket confirmations from Ticketmaster are only indications of the seat locations and face value prices for the tickets. You don’t actually expect me to sell the tickets for the same exact prices… do you? C’mon now, I’m a hustla. This is my second job and I’ve gotta get mines too! However, if you’re interested in either event feel free to shoot me an email.
I’ve been busy as hell the past few weeks. I’ve tried on a few occasions to sit down and try to write a few things about events going on outside of the workplace. Obviously if you look at the date of this entry and the date of my last entry it’s easy to see that I was not successful. Anyway, I just finished working a rack load of OT the past few days and I’m bout to try and get a lil’ bit of sleep. I’mma be back though…
This past weekend I did something that I promised myself that I’d never tell anyone. It’s a secret that I’ve held for quite some time and one that kind of made me feel funny on occasion. For years and years I sat and listened to people talk about this, but I never experienced it for myself. In fact, it’s been 20 years since I first heard about this. A whole 20 years!!! I can’t believe it’s been since 1985. Saturday afternoon I was at home and I didn’t have anything to do, so I figured that I’d watch a movie. Now I have hundreds of DVD’s and most of them are old school movies or Blaxploitation joints. I do have an assortment of recent movies, but I tend not to buy movies that have been released within the past 5 years. I looked on the shelf of my entertainment center and saw the DVD case of a movie that I knew I had to see. This movie was one that I just had never taken the time to sit down and watch.
It was The Color Purple.
Now, there’s not really a reason for me not ever watching it, except for the fact that I never took the time to watch it. I didn’t see it in the theatre, never watched it on cable and never once was interested in seeing it during the times when it aired on regular television. Last year I told a friend that I had never seen the movie and got a very evil look from her. I then went out to Best Buy and purchased the 2 disc special edition on DVD. Somehow over the past year, this DVD just sat on the shelf along with a bunch of others that still remain in plastic. See, I have a habit of buying movies and never watching them. There’s probably close to 20 movies that I’ve had over a year that I’ve never watched. I tend to watch the same movies over and over and over again. But this Saturday afternoon, I sat down and watched The Color Purple. It was a good movie, but I suppose that I expected too much from it. Hearing folks talk about for years and years I suppose raised my expectations. I was finally happy to figure out who Harpo was though. When people used to holler out “Harpo”, I had to act like I knew what they were talkin’ about. I knew it had something to do with the movie, but that’s all I knew. I was always quiet when discussions of The Color Purple came about. Hell, I didn’t even know that Danny Glover was in the movie. Now that I’ve seen it, I can sit here and talk about Mister and Celie and Nettie and Sophia and of course Harpo. I’ve felt sort of ashamed of the fact that everyone had seen it but me, but what can I say? I wasn’t bout to broadcast it to the world. Well… I guess that’s what I’m doing now. Although it took me 20 years to do so… I saw it. I saw The Color Purple!!!
So I go out onto my balcony to get a breath of fresh air and what do I see… a bat. My first thought was an expletive filled statement that I won’t repeat. I wasn’t sure if it was alive, but after further inspection (with the broom from kitchen) I saw that this bat was ice cold. So you know what I decided to do after that right… grab the digital camera from the bedroom and take a few pics. Okay so I’m a lil’ bit camera happy at times. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a close-up shot of this ugly creature. This joker looked like a small mouse with sharp wings and jagged teeth. Although I knew it was dead, I was still a lil’ bit cautious just in case this gremlin decided to wake-up from a comatose state.
After I took my pics, I came back into the house to finish watching the Celtics-Pacers game. My squad narrowly escaped with the victory 92-89. Now they gotta play Game 7 in Boston on Saturday and hopefully they’ll have Paul Pierce in the line-up. It’s quite possible that NBA Commissioner David Stern may elect to suspend him for that forearm that he gave Jamaal Tinsley tonight. I didn’t think that it was that bad, but they ejected him for it. The Celtics can ill afford to lose him going into this crucial deciding game. I’mma keep my fingers crossed…
Ya know, I get tired of being in DC ere’ weekend. So I figured I’d take a trip to see my Celtics play against the Indiana Pacers. First things first, I had to figure out whether I could get tickets. Surprisingly, I have able to get a number of good seats in the club level. Once I got that all taken care of, I had to figure out if I could get a reasonable roundtrip from DC to Indianapolis without spending over $200. Well, being that I’m a frequent flier on Northwest airlines, they owed me a free roundtrip and I decided to use it for this particular trip. I packed my bags and I was outta this joint. Arrived at Conseco Fieldhouse about 30 minutes before the game started. The first person that I was when I walked into the building was Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy. He was standing in the will-call line with who looked to be his son. A lotta folks were walkin’ over to him, so I decided not to say anything or take a pic. I walked around the foyer of the arena and took a few pics. That place was really nice!!!! They had a lotta different things to do at that arena. It definitely was one of the best stadiums that I’ve ever been to. Ya know I had my Celtics gear on and the big mascot for the Pacers tried to attack me before I even got to the turnstile. I heard the mumbling of folks around me, but I wasn’t intimidated. Those folks had no idea that I’m a professional antagonist. I’m a Cowboys fans and I walk into the den of lions each time I go to FedEx Field for a Redskins-Cowboys game. I have no fear, plus I had my lucky Celtics basketball shorts on underneath my jeans and I was feelin’ good vibes. Yeah, Antoine Walker had got suspended for the game, but I knew that my squad was gonna represent. Paul Pierce was in that joint droppin’ bombs on em. They did more than represent, they crushed those suckaz. They totally destroyed the Pacers. You wanna talk about a happy brotha… oh yeah I was all smiles after the game was over. My Celts beat em down 110-79. Here’s a few pics that I took from the game.
Maaaaaan… I had the time of my life last night. The first time in my life experiencing a baseball game in the District of Columbia. I could’ve done without the US Secret Service holding up the lines into RFK Stadium or the DC School Board protestors crying out for money to be spent on education and not a new stadium for the Nats. Those were a few diversions at the beginning, but nothing could take away from the magic of this night. The weather was perfect and I got to my seat just in time to catch all the meaningful festivities. The excitement and the energy was just awesome. The President threw out the first pitch. Almost everyone in the place was rockin’ the team colors or National’s paraphernalia. Flashbulbs were poppin’ all night long. Fans cheered and stood up everytime that the home team took the field. Kids were there with their parents to embrace history. Naw, I’m not just talkin’ bout the game, I’m talkin’ bout the Godfather of Go-Go. Chuck Brown performed ‘Bustin Loose’ during the 7th inning stretch maaaaaan. Now my D.C. folks know about Chuck. Folk were up in that joint hollering “Wind me up Chuck“. Anyway, the entire atmosphere was incredible. Although I had to stand in line at the concession for almost an hour (from top of 3rd inning to bottom of 6th inning)and they ran outta hotdogs and a lotta other stuff, I still enjoyed myself. The Nationals won the game over the Diamondbacks 5-3 and this is indeed a night that I will never forget.
