Yes, people, it’s officially underway.  The Duke Blue Devils opened tonight against Presbyterian Blue Hose.  I heard a lot of “The Blue Hose?  Seriously?” tonight.  Apparently it’s a Scottish warrior.  What the heck, the Blue Devils were French fighter pilots, but still.  More on the game in a minute.

I liked work today.  I did a bit of following up with people and got some things done.  I went to pick up my paycheck and as soon as I walked out the door I remembered that I had given my house key to Amanda to unlock the door yesterday while I got some stuff from the trunk and that I hadn’t put the key back in my pocket.  See, normally I just switch things from the pockets in one pair of pants or shorts to another if I’m changing them.  It’s easy for me to keep up with things that way.  Unfortunately, on rare occasions that makes it easy for me to lock myself out of the house.  Today was one of those.

Fortunately, our neighbor, Bonnie Narron, was planning on coming by her house after a while and she has one of our spare keys.  So I went out, got my check, went to the bank, decided to splurge on a McDonald’s quarter pounder since I was out and had a little cash with me, then went home.  I wasn’t home long before Bonnie got there.  She gave me the key and all I had to do was put some Aspercreme on her back.  She’d hurt it twisting something at the shop.  A crankshaft I think she said?

Anyway, work continued on just fine.  Amanda got home and fixed some macaroni and cheese which we ate while watching 30 Rock.  After that was over my stomach was hurting a little bit so I did what I had to do then headed over to Seth Holloman’s, where I was going to watch the game.  Amanda wasn’t sure if she’d be able to make it through a whole game, but it turns out she probably ended up seeing more of it than I did.

Here’s what happened.  I got over to Seth’s and saw the tipoff.  I watched a few minutes than my stomach started to hurt again.  Bad.  I don’t normally do what I had to do over at people’s houses (especially not when it’s the first time I’ve been there), but I was in pain.  So I missed a couple minutes (which saw the score of the game go from 2-2 to 11-4 or something like that), then, at a commercial break I went right back in but this time it came from, well, multiple places.  I was miserable for a few minutes, but after I got everything out I was feeling much better.  I don’t know if it was the quarter pounder, the mac and cheese, or having both of them together in one day.  I talked to Amanda during halftime and she said it was sweet that I was having sympathy pains.

I played with Seth and Dana’s miniature Pomeranian a bit.  She was real sweet and sat in my lap through a lot of the game.  Dana, Seth’s wife, was working on a paper.  Their son, Gavin, was at his grandparents’ house.

So how was the game?  Well, I don’t know if there’s ever been more disappointment in a 31-point win.  Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler looked good, but that’s mostly it.  Oh, Lance Thomas scored in the double digits, which is also good.  Brian Zoubek fouled out.  Other than that I think everyone else did just okay.  The biggest diappointments, to me anyway, were that Gerald Henderson didn’t display any dominance and Miles Plumlee didn’t contribute as much as practices and exhibitions had lead us to hope he would.

It was cool to see Coach K play with a bunch of difference lineups though.  Towards the end the freshmen did show their stuff a little.  Olek Czyz had a nice baseline dunk, Miles Plumlee swatted the ball away with authority and Elliot Williams had a breakaway 360 jam.  He might have gotten yelled at by Coach K for doing that, but really I think it was good to do something to get everyone excited and fired up.

Amanda called me on the way back home and I was surprised to hear that she actually had watched the entire game except for the last couple minutes (because the DVR was recording two shows) and even paid attention pretty well.  She noticed that one commentator had called Greg Paulus by the wrong name.  Rick, I think.  And she had also called Olex Czyz Marty Czyz, even exclaiming, “Marty McFly!” after the aforementioned dunk.

Amanda and I watched How I Met Your Mother.  She usually sings the non-words of the opening theme except for when she’s really tired or drained, and I was surprised to hear her do that tonight.  After she went to bed I made one more stop at the throne, thought it wasn’t as dire as the last couple, then watched the rest of Deadwood, Entourage and True Blood.

Zach Dotsey