Hello once again boys and girls.  Fresh off memorial day weekend, it is great to be back here with each and every one of you as the daily spotlight returns.  I couldn’t be happier today as I’m working out of queens today which chops my commute by over 2 and half hours as opposed to Brooklyn and this also allowed me to sleep an additional 2 hours so my overall quality of life as well as my mood as through the roof!   Memorial Day weekend was really quite enjoyable for me, albeit a bit of a recharge weekend.  I do hope that all who celebrated and had a nice weekend, took a minute to think about the men and women currently protecting our freedom overseas as well as those who lost their lives making that same ultimate sacrifice.  At the end of the day, these men and women are the reason why memorial day is such an important day of the year.

–  My girlfriend and I hosted two barbecues with family and friends over the weekend on both Sunday and Monday.  It was of course a little tough for me personally being the first memorial day without my dad.  He used to really look forward to memorial day as he deemed it the unofficial kickoff of summer and would plan different dishes for the grill weeks prior to the event.  They say that every first when losing a loved one is tough and they aren’t lying.  In any event, the first of the two barbecues included two friends who we hadn’t seen in over a year.  For me, it’s always great catching up with old friends especially when it’s so hard this day in age to make time to simply hang out and get on the same schedules.  What’s great about these guys, and so many of my friends really, is that we can take such a long while away from seeing each other and pick up like we had never missed a beat or that we had hung out so often.  Immediately following the barbecue, we all came back inside and our friends asked to see some of the more recent photos from our trip to California so we plugged the laptop into our big screen and streamed them off there.  I’m always big on taking photos that document our stay in a particular destination, not even necessarily of us, but of the destination itself.  Thus, it was really cool to see our friends looking through the 1200+ photos and marveling over the different sights of Cali.  I’m going to get into some of the highlights of that Cali trip later in the week.

– One of the other big highlights of the weekend for me was the series between the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder.  Now I should probably mention that I’m not a big basketball fan.  I used to be, however, as a matter of fact, the way it went in my house growing up was that baseball was my mom’s sport, football was my dad’s and basketball was mine.   If you grew up in the 1990s, how could anyone not be a fan of basketball?  From Michael Jordan to Patrick Ewing to Shaq there were stars on every single team and always something good to watch.  Even throughout most of the 2000s my gift each year for my birthday was NBA League Pass.  Then something happened.  Whether it be the sad state of the New York Knicks or the retirement of most of those players I enjoyed watching or, more likely, my increased love of baseball and football and the less time I had to dedicate to basketball (I’m also a big fan of professional wrestling, have I ever mentioned that?).  Well, on Saturday night my girlfriend and I had dinner reservations and due to the restaurant having a slow night the place closed early and so we ended up at the buffalo wild wings nearby.  Let me tell ya, you would have thought Ronda Rousey had returned to the Octagon.  The place was packed and everybody so invested in the Warriors-Thunder game.  We ended up staying for the entire second half and I couldn’t help but cheer the Warriors on, despite the rest of the fans in the place mostly rooting for the Thunder.  I get the appeal in rooting for the underdog but for me I just think the Warriors are both fun to watch and a classy group of guys.  I can’t help but root for them.   As many of you know, I’m also a huge fan of history and I would hate to see the 73-win tarnished by them falling short in the finals (contrary to my celebration of epic proportions when the Patriots lost the superbowl to the Giants).  With that said, I don’t quite get the belief that if the Warriors win the NBA Championship this season, they are the best team in the history of the sport.  I mean sure, I guess record wise they would be but today’s NBA is very much different then the NBA of the past.  This day in age players rest (cc: San Antonio Spurs) and there just isn’t the star power that there was in the past.  Not to take anything away from the Warriors and I couldn’t be more impressed that they were able to comeback and win the West, but this team isn’t the 96 Bulls.

– Well, that’s going to do it for me right now but later today I’ll be back with my spotlight on Raw (which i already have in the can) and then either tonight or tomorrow I’ll be back with my spotlight on the excellent documentary that aired on the WWE Network following Raw on Seth Rollins.