I now have two meetings tomorrow. I had a lady call from Goldsboro who asked a number of questions about designing a site. I guess I answered her well enough, so now she wants to meet with me. My other meeting is concerning a Blue Cross website. We do the website of the number one agent in North Carolina. Since he gets all his business from his site and these facts have been brought up to oher agents lately, we’ve been getting a lot of calls about such sites.

I realized today while I was being very busy that this week seems to be going by pretty quickly. That wouldn’t be bad, I guess, except that it’s so busy because of a spike in support issues. It’s not generally stuff that we’re doing wrong or anything like that, just people needing changes and updates and the like. However, trying to do that, as well as keep up on all the current design projects, and making it all run smoothly, is not an easy task. It’s even less easy when there are so many people who want to meet with you, which detracts from time needed to do support or check up on projects. I asked Scott Hendrix, my boss and the owner of the company, how he ever did all this on his own. He said it wasn’t always so crazy and there were plenty of times when he sat around twiddling his thumbs all day.
The biggest event of the day was in taking our cat, Mr. Cobblepott, to the vet. I was being constantly distracted by flurries of phone calls which, fortunately for me, mostly ended around 3:00. My goal was to be out the door at 3:30, and fortunately, not to mention surprisingly, Cobb went into the cat carrier Amanda bought from Pet Smart this weekend very well. It is a top-loading contraption, and I was able to pick him up, put him in it and hit the clasps without any ado. He made a little bit of noise while we were driving, but it was nothing like last time he was in a car, which was when I was moving him from the rental house over on Harrison Avenue to the new house. He was in a cage then, and kept prowling around and meowing as loud as he could.

He’s such a sweet and affectionate cat.

We got to Dineen Animal Hospital, highly recommended by Anna and Barry Frazelle, as well as Scott and Ann Marie Hendrix, right on time. There was a delay though, as a woman had brought in a sick cat. I talked to her and this other guy wo had a beautiful three month old German Shepard. His ears were huge. The dog’s, not the guy’s. He was also very well behaved (again, referring to the dog). The guy told me about a place on the UNCW campus to take Bruce to that souds really great.

Anyway, Cobb did surprisingly well. No bites or scratches or anything. The reason that’s surprising is that Cobb is usually very shy around new people. He had some time to prowl around the small examining room at Dineen before he was actually seen by the doctor, so maybe that helped. He got a rabies shot and some heartworm pills. I also got a six month supply of a flea and tick/heartworm pill for Bruce. I can’t remember the name of the stuff, but it seems to work pretty well and it’s nice to only have to give him one pill at a time. The total bill was just over $100, which was nice. I expected it to be more, but then again I expected to have to do more for Cobb. Since we’re trying to indoorize him, we didn’t have to get as many things done to him. I told them I was pleased with the bill and thought it’s have been more and the lady behind the counter told me that was nice to hear because she usually gets told the opposite.
I got home right around 5:00 and started cleaning, as we were expecting Ben and Jessica Lambeth, Kristen Barriner and Paul and Kim Ayars. If you notice that Kristen’s boyfriend, Rob Peterson, wasn’t mentioned, it’s because he had a work-related function to go to. They had tried to see if we could change our small group meeting night, but Kim had said her schedule had already been set at work and Wednesday was the only night she was available. That’s why I was actually a little annoyed when Paul called up at 7:15 and said he was sick and neither of them would be going tonight.

Anyway, Amanda and I cleaned up the house some and Amanda had just started on the spaghetti when Kristen arrived right around 7:00. She thought it would take her longer to get to the house than it did, but her timing was just fine. I showed her around, as it was the first time she’d been to our new house. Ben and Jessica got here just a few minutes after Paul called. Since we were missing half the group, we decided to put the lesson off and just enjoy dinner and company. We ended up having a really good talk about relationships though. I think it was a really helpful discussion for some of us, so it seems things turned out in a good way.

We had some Caesar salad with the spaghetti, and I actually ate it without ranch. I told Amanda after dinner that I thought it was really good. If I can get that type of Caesar dressing moe often, I may be able to ween myself off of ranch and start eating healthier salad. We also had some cake that Amanda had picked up from the grocery store. It had a cream cheese icing and it was really good too. We topped it all off with some Hatteras Red wine from the Duplin County winery.

I forgot to mention that I was very tired last night when I went to bed. I had actually been working on wedding pictures and dozing off doing that in the living room while half-watching TV with Amanda. Anyway, when I went upstairs to go to the bathroom, I’m not completely sure what happened but I think the toilet seat did some kind of bounce back which hit my hand and made me hit myself kinda hard, so I fell asleep mumbling about the pain I was in. No biggie, but I felt compelled to share. TMI, I know, but really, how many people read this site regularly? We’ve got Terry, Amanda’s cousin in Texas who is moving back to the Raleigh area shortly, and I understand that Aunt Robbie and Linda read this, but they have yet to post any comments. (Hint, hint.) So, whoever you are, if you’re reading this, leave a comment for me, will ya?

Zach Dotsey