I got up at 6:20 this morning to make it to Port City Community Church by 7:00. It wasn’t until I was heading to the car that I remembered that I was supposed to be there at 6:00, so I called Mike Paschal to let him know I was on the way. Actually, it was probably a really good thing that I woke up later. When I got up I was so beat that I had to really focus on holding the railing as I walked downstairs to let Bruce out to pee. If I’d gotten there earlier than I did I’m pretty sure I’d have been useless.
The service went really well. We had five songs to do today and I think the production crew worked together really well. The music was good and I think we were all just feeling it pretty well. It’s a good feeling. I direct the video portion of the service once a month, for those who don’t know. It entails calling shots and operating the switcher board to pick which camera’s view gets shown at any given time. A few weeks ago we started “going live” at every service, which means we show that to the larger auditorium, as well as the Video Cafe, the extra room set up to show the service which was the reason they started doing this in the first place.
I left church around 2:00 after packing up some cameras. College Road was crazy busy. I needed to put some air in my front tires, and I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now so I stopped at two different gas stations on the way out of town. One had an air pump, but it was out of order. The other took literal minutes to get out of because College Road was so packed and the person at the front of the line to get out of the parking lot was apparently a wuss and wouldn’t go until there were absolutely no cars coming.
I found some air at the Kangaroo right down the street from the house.
Amanda had done a little shopping to spend her time. She’d gotten some new coffee mugs, a small stand and a carpet. The carpet, from Pier One, didn’t quite fit the living room so we took it back on the way to the beach.
It was pretty cold at the beach, cold and windy. Bruce had a really good time though. He ran a lot and I ran with him, and he got to be social with a number of dogs. Sadly, next Saturday is the last day we’ll be able to take him out on the beach thanks to the stupid dog laws at Wrightsville Beach.
Oh, I saw this morning that I had a missed call from my parents’ house. I called them back, worried that, if they were calling around 8:00 in the morning that they might have negative news, but it turns out that Adam, my brother, and his girlfriend Renee Sikes, saw that Cirque du Soleil was coming to Raleigh next weekend and my parents offered to buy us some tickets, which is extremely generous considering that they wanted to get some good seats. Turns out they had called Amanda too, and she thought they were just talking about going to a circus next Sunday night, meaning she’d get less sleep heading into her next work week. But when I talked to her after the 8:30 service at church and explained that it was Cirque du Soleil, she changed her tune.
As we were going to the beach, I called Michael and asked if he was interested in going with us next weekend, but he declined. When I called, I found out that he was at the grocery store by the house picking up a few things. He’d spent the weekend with his friend Chris Flowers down in Charlotte. They went to a Bobcats game last night, but the Bobcats lost in overtime.
Amanda and I got home in time to see that Oregon had lost to Florida, and we got to see Georgetown tip off against Carolina. Georgetown started off pretty well and got up to a seven point lead, but then for the rest of the game they struggled between a five and ten point deficit until late in the second half, after Michael had decided he wasn’t nervous about it and Amanda and I both figured it wasn’t going to turn out like we wanted. However, Georgetown rallied and tied up the game in the last minute!
Carolina made one field goal in overtime- a three with little enough time left for it to matter. In fact, in the last fifteen minutes of the game the Tar Heels made that one field goal out of twenty-three attempts! What a collapse!
Yeah, they went farther than Duke, but Duke’s whole season was (for Duke) a bit of a letdown. I was hoping Carolina would lose, but I never expected circumstances like that. Oh, it was so wonderful! I immediately called Joel Freeman to discuss the gloriousness, and a little later I called Jason Revill. Jason had stopped watching the game in order not to jinx it. Joel and I had both made sure not to move from where we were sitting once the Hoyas started doing well. For that matter, I wondered if it was imperative for me to drink a single Mountain Dew and eat honey roasted Planters peanuts.
The 2006-2007 UNC Tar Heel season is over, and that is cause for celebration in my book!
Amanda trimmed my hair tonight. It’s been about three months since the last one and I was getting desperately in need of it. I was even able to start pulling my hair back into a very tiny sprig of a ponytail again. So Amanda cut it, but she cut it much shorter than she meant to. She’s not happy with it, but I kind of like it.
We watched this past week’s Supernatural, which, as I always say (say it with me now) is the most underrated show on TV. This episode was no different. Amanda and I predicted the twist in it, but the end was surprisingly wrenching.
After Amanda went to bed Michael and I played a little bit of Gears of War. We played split screen because his Xbox 360 is broken. We ended up playing against the same group a bunch. Even when we were outnumbered, Michael and I won every match except the last which, ironically, was four on four. (Ironically because we won when outnumbered or when the game room wasn’t full.)
Zach Dotsey