It seems to have snowed pretty much everywhere in North Carolina (and just about everywhere from the midwest on, at least) except here in Wilmington.  But it was cold today.

We got up today and headed out to the mall. We did some Christmas shopping and got our yearly Christmas ornament then the whole Warkentien crew met us for lunch. In between all that we took Milly to see Santa Claus for the first time. She actually did really great with him. When we sat her on his lap she turned to look him in the face and gave a huge smile. It was adorable! Unfortunately the camera wasn’t at a good angle to get her big grin and she was much more serious looking in the shots where she was facing the camera. But it really was sweet when she was looking up to Santa and smiling at him.

I was excited about today because of two basketball games. The first was Carolina and Texas. Texas is the second-ranked team in the nation right now and I was expecting them to give Carolina a nice beating, although given the way things tend to work out I was figuring Carolina would pull off a win. But no, Carolina lost 103-90, which I was pretty happy about. That game was played in the new Cowboys Stadium, which is huge. What impressed me the most was the scoreboard. When they showed it it looked superimposed, it was so large. It’s an HD screen that is about as tall as the basketball court is long. Amazing.

Overlapping the end of that game was Duke and Gonzaga at Madison Square Garden with the teams ranked #7 and #15 respectively and it was expected that the Zag interior would give Duke all kinds of fits. The first nine minutes of the game was horrendously slow with neither team seeming to want to make a shot. Duke picked it up though and the score was 31-17 at the half.

We left the house just before halftime though, as we had dinner plans at Polly and Dave Clawson’s. Chris, their son, noticed that I had a Duke shirt on and turned on the game briefly for me, but after a minute I said I was DVR’ing the game and that if it were on I’d get sucked into it.

We had a good time visiting with them. There was an invite for all the small group leaders in Polly and Dave’s cluster or pod or whatever, but it ended up just being us and another person, Veronica. It was nice though, as we were all able to really visit and catch up. Milly, of course, was the star of the evening. Their dogs are great, but they barked when people made pretty much any sudden move, and I think they were jealous when Polly was holding her Mills. At one point the dogs barked at her and Milly shouted back at them, which was hilarious.

We got home and fed Milly, put her to bed and watched a little TV. Once Amanda went to bed I started watching the second half of the Duke-Gonzaga game. I already knew the score near the end was something like 65-34 Duke , but I wanted to watch it anyway to see how everyone played and who did what, you know.

Zach Dotsey