I had a couple things to knock out at work this morning. Chief among them was setting up a few newsletters for clients for tomorrow, along with scheduling some tweets and Facebook posts. After that I had some screen video to grab for a before and after website design video. Milly didn’t seem to care much about my predicament, but I got it all done.

Amanda got home around 12:30 and packed everything up. Milly kept telling us we had to hurry up because Mum Mum and Pap were waiting for us.

Leaving Wilmington wasn’t so easy though.

We loaded up the Escape, but when I hit the has it drove like I was out if gear or had the parking break on. We were dropping some recycling off at the store up the road, so I decided to push through to see if it would stop, and it did until we headed out for the store. It was as had or worse, so we drove home and reloaded everything back into the Jetta.

It was raining, and when I turned the wipers on I noticed something wasn’t right. One of the blades was falling apart, so we went into town before leaving town to get some new wiper blades. I bought. The wrong ones at first, so I had to exchange them after trying to put the new ones on. So that took a little extra time.

Then we were all hungry, so we stopped by Chick-Fil-A. Amanda wanted a chicken Caesar wrap, but this CFA decided not to carry those anymore. Not that that set us back really, but it was just one more irritation. They were also out of ranch packets.

At one point Amanda was sarcastically listing the things she was thankful for based on our attempts to leave town and Milly called her out on it. It was pretty funny.

Aside from two short slowdowns, the rest of the trip was uneventful. We got to Rougemont sometime after 4. Big C, the dog that keeps on going.

Dad and I watched Kentucky play Eastern Michigan. UK struggled early, but they won 81-63. We are spaghetti dinner then we hung out in the kick groom watching tv and chatting.

At 9:30 we put on the Duke-Alabama game, the semifinal of the preseason NIT. Given Duke’s pitiful defensive showing the last two games against teams that, let’s face it, we’re not very good at all, a lot of Duke fans were anxious to see how they played tonight. The defense was definitely improved, but Duke, known for its offensive prowess, started out shooting 1-11 and got behind. Things turned around after Matt Jones got in the game and hit back to back threes and Duke got up by 18. Then, I guess between a zone defense, full court pressure and some poor decision making (and Bama getting fouled on several straight possessions), the lead dwindled to a possession or two before Duke finished up winning by ten.

Jabari Parker scored 27 points, he and Amile Jefferson stepped up the rebounding. Matt Jones was impressive on defense and was a spark off the bench. Quinn Cook was up and down, but he scored well when he played smart. Rasheed Sulaimon didn’t score particularly well (he’s been in a slump so far this season), but I thought he did a better job of breaking the press than Quinn did.

All in all it was a much better performance than the last few games, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Arizona is up next in the preseason NIT championship. They’re ranked 4 while Duke is ranked 6. They struggled in. The last game too, so while I don’t know much about them, I feel it should be a pretty even game. Hopefully Duke continues to build on the improvements we saw tonight.

Zach Dotsey