One of the things Amanda and her mom did yesterday while her dad and I went to Lowes was to finish rearranging the bedroom.  The drawers where we have our socks and underwear used to be in the back right corner of the room.  It’s now right next to the bathroom, so this morning when I got out of the shower the first thing I did was head to the far right corner for some undies.  Force of habit.  When I told Amanda that I’d done that she said she did too.  It’s likely going to happen several times.

I checked my e-mail when I woke up at 5:30 this morning and saw that one of our clients had an issue with checking his mail.  I had actually addressed his problem on Friday, but it appeared that I didn’t address it quite properly.  I double checked and reassured him about it this morning before I left the house.  It’s a good weekend for clients.

I directed at church today and I think we did a pretty good job, me and my camera crew.  It was Phil, Joey, Amy and Jason.  Martha was the producer for the last two services, and I think it really is pretty helpful to have someone in my ear to let me know when certain things are coming up, such as instrumentals or who is going to be singing the song or whatever.  The band was really good too.

After church I tried to fall asleep on the couch while Amanda watched a bit of some crappy Sci-Fi Channel movie and then Epic Movie on HBO.  Neither one of us actually cared to watch Epic movie, which has got to be one of the worst of those knock-off movies they’ve made in some time (not that any of them are any good, even though I do own Not Another Teen Movie, but that’s a whole other story), but there wasn’t much of anything on.  When Amanda finally got fed up with that movie she flipped around and saw that Pet Cemetery was on, so we watched that.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole thing all the way through until today, but I really did like it.

After that was over we went to Nanette Manning’s house.  Here’s the story on that.  Today is Dave Sap’s birthday.  Dave is a guy we met through Kyle and Lorin that we like and at church he invited us over to his 25th birthday party.  The party was at Nanette’s house.  A girl from Winston-Salem, it’s killing me that I don’t know her name because she’s really cool and Amanda and I want to set her up with Michael and we’ve met her a couple times now, but anyway, she sort of knew Dave in high school and she and Lorin became friends before Kyle and Lorin moved down here when they were checking out Port City Church.  That’s got to be one of the most poorly constructed sentences I’ve ever written but I’m tired so I’ll let it slide.  Anyway, this girl, whose name I think begins with a J, lives with Nanette, who is the mother of a friend of hers.

So, all that explained, we went to Nanette’s for Dave’s birthday.  He baked pizza on the grill and we had a few drinks, some of us, and we ate cake and watched the beginning of the Duke game at Wake Forest.  More on that later.

Dave opened presents and we got to know everyone a bit better.  it turns out that both of the townhome’s residents know Anna and Barry from when they went to Wrightsville Baptist, which is kinds cool.

Alright, let’s skip ahead.  We got home and watched the rest of the Duke game, that which we didn’t see at Nanette’s or hear on the radio, at home.  I’ll just come out with it.  Duke sucked a fat one and Wake one.  So Duke will no longer be undefeated in the ACC and will probably drop a couple spots in the rankings tomorrow.  It sucks that they lost to the Demon Deacons in that Wake is handily unranked, is a young team, and is being coached by a first-year head coach.  But Wake wanted it more and played with a lot more intensity than Duke.

Duke on the other hand shot pitifully from inside and outside the arc, missed way too many free throws and, though I won’t say they’d have won if this were not the case, but they got absolutely no help from the refs.  There were a couple baseline drives Duke got bumped out of bounds on that were called as out of bounds as opposed to fouls.  Zoubek got some awkward technical.  And get this.  All five of Duke’s starters fouled out of the game.  All five of them.  Compared to one guy on Wake Forest’s team.  There were also calls that were called against Duke that were them mimicked on the other side of the court that went uncalled.
It’s weak to blame refs, but like I said, Duke would have lost anyway, but it didn’t help my frustration.

I was a little snippy with Amanda in the waning minutes of the game.  I apologized, but I really don’t like someone repeatedly telling me that Duke’s going to lose when there’s at least a shred of hope left.  She was sickened by the way the Blue Devils played tonight too, and she’s not looking forward to the bandwagon anti-Duke crowd giving her crap tomorrow.  86-73.  Ugh.  At least Duke is still one game up in the ACC.  Carolina doesn’t (or shouldn’t) have any more tough games until they play Duke at the end of the regular season though.  Hopefully one good thing will come out of this loss in that it will fire the team up for the remainder of the season.

Enough.  Thinking about it is making me sick.

Zach Dotsey