Antonio has been playing a lot of basketball. His coach entered their C.Y.O. team into a few tournaments and they did really well. They made it to the championship game in the Bayhawk Christmas Classic hosted by St. Dominic but fell to Sacred Heart, a stacked team from North Merrick that didn’t seem to belong in our division. Antonio has been heavy into PC gaming since he built his own computer this summer. He’s getting better and better with Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. I am still hoping he’ll wake up and start monetizing his growing skills. Lots of his peers could benefit from his ability to create intros to their youtube channel videos and Antonio is fully acclimated to the whole process.
As an aside… it’s interesting to see how Antonio and Giovanni differ in their view of technology. For Christmas, they both wanted upgraded video cards. Antonio wanted a GeForce 770 a hefty upgrade from his 660. Giovanni wanted nothing other than the 780, a card that came with a $200 premium over the 770. Antonio looked at the benchmarks and immediately saw only moderate performance gains over the 770. He knew Santa has a “budget” and opted for the 770 + some sleek new Air Jordan 11 Gamma Blue’s. In the end, Giovanni did get slightly better frames, but Antonio didn’t care and is loving his new basketball shoes.
Marco is even more intensely into basketball shoes than his older brother Antonio. He’s on 2 basketball teams and is online looking at shoes almost daily. Now, you may think these shoes are overrated. Overprice sure, that’s true. However, compared to a “cheap shoe” they definitely perform much better. When you watch Marco run across the court and stop on a dime, you know the shoe is doing it’s work. A lot of the kids in an “average” shoe are slipping and sliding all over the place. Of course, Marco uses baby wipes to clean the bottom of his shoes before and after every game so clearing the  dirt and dust from the rubber bottoms also helps. Who said obsession was a bad thing?
Sera is also in 2 basketball programs: C.Y.O. (Catholic Youth Organization) and P.A.L Â (Police Activity League… I think). She loves it so far and now that I’ve been through things twice before with Antonio and Marco, I’m pretty well prepared to give her the opportunities the other boys didn’t have. That is… if you want to get good at a sport, you need to do it as much as you can, all year long. Hey, if they love it then I support them.