Zach Dotsey

I was playing College Hoops 2K7 last night.  It was NCAA tournament time and I got as far as the Elite Eight and lost by a basket or two.  I thought about resetting the game and trying again, but I figured a Sweet 16, three consecutive championships and an Elite Eight appearance was all good enough.  At the end of the season, Coach Bob Redford got an offer from Ole Miss and just couldn’t pass up the chance to coach an SEC team, as much as he enjoyed Campbell and the players he recruited there.

So this evening Ole Miss played their first game.  It was quite an adjustment, not being as familair with who the go-to players are, and only one true SG, which meant substitutions were a little awkward.  We were up a basket or two with about a minute and a half to go in our first game then the Xbox gave a disk read error.  It seems to do that about once a day with that game, and it usually comes at the end of a game.  I hate that, but then I did buy the game for $5 used, so I can’t complain too much I guess.  I just wish it had started doing that earlier so I could have taken it back and swapped it out.

The stock market bounced back up pretty nicely today.  I still don’t know how much to be worried about all of it.  Maybe that’s the answer- don’t worry, because what good would worrying do anyway?

I tried to shore up a bunch of end of the month stuff for work.

Amanda came home and we reviewed our small group materials then headed over to Justin and Lisa Hauenstein’s place for the meeting.  They have a pretty cute house.  It’s laid out a little bit like ours but better and with a bigger kitchen.  They’ve got a lot of Pier One decor too, and colors to go along with it.  I liked it.

I also liked their dogs.  They’ve got a chihuahua named Emory who looks similar to Bruce but she’s a she, is smaller and a lot thinner.  They’ve also got a year and a half black lab (I think) and I forgot her name but she was sweet too.

Everyone showed up tonight and we ate a chicken pasta and salad.  I think the discussion went well and everyone contributed some.  Lisa hasn’t been feeling great lately, but she did fine tonight.  She’s also going to be taking another insurance job.

After we got home Amanda and I watched Fringe, although I missed a chunk of it in the middle because I fell asleep.

I won one fantasy football game this week (by one point) and lost the other.

Zach Dotsey

The bailout bill, a $700 billion package to fix the financial crisis, didn’t pass the House today.  $700 billion.  Let’s write that out.  $700,000,000,000.00.  That’s a lot of freaking zeroes.  Democrats are blaming Republicans for putting ideology before the interests of the country and Republicans are blaming Democrats because Nancy Pelosi made a partisan speech before the vote.  It’s awful.  It’s a mess.  Of course, the fact that 40% of Democrats didn’t vote for it might say something was rotten about the deal anyway.

My understanding is this: if we don’t bail out Wall Street then we face a world economic collapse and the money Amanda and I have been putting into IRA accounts and such won’t be worth squat.  If we do the bail out, where do we get $700 billion from?  A lot of Main Street people (there’s been a lot of buzz about Wall Street vs. Main Street) are upset because if we’re going to spontaneously generate $700 billion they think it could go elsewhere, and not help out companies that put us in such a bind.

I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I’m no financial analyst and I have little clue as to the far-reaching ramifications if the House can’t pass something to help out the economy.  I know it would make things really rough, but part of me says that if we bail out these companies, what’s to stop them from being irresponsible again in the future?  And how many generations are going to be paying it off?  And will anything happen to the people who got us into this mess in the first place?

Ugh.

There wasn’t a whole lot that went on today that was personally exciting.  I worked, and I tried to finish up a bunch of things before the end of the month.  Amanda was going to go to lunch with Billy Supplee and Cyra Sherburn, but Cyra decided not to go, so Amanda told me she wouldn’t go to lunch with just Billy if it made me uncomfortable, which it didn’t.  I told her I was fine with it as long as they weren’t sitting there at lunch plotting how to kill me and make it look like an accident.

Reading the news (the stock market had its largest ever crash ever today in terms of points on the news of the bailout not being passed), I was a bit down before Amanda got home.  We slipped into mindless television for a bit, Smallville, Big Band Theory, How I Met Your Mother and Heroes, and I have to admit, we were able to put it behind us a bit.  TV is the new opiate of the masses, afterall.

I keep thinking that, overall, this shouldn’t affect us too terribly.  I mean, Amanda’s company is secure.  I would think it’s so now more than ever.  I mean, people need a place to live, and if they can’t get a loan for a house or they’re defaulting on their mortgages, they’ll go to apartments, right?  Either that or they’ll move in with their parents I guess, but there comes a time when you just can’t do that.  (I think.)

And I’m pretty secure, I think.  We’re not building a lot of brand new websites lately, but we’re keeping busy with updates and the like.  And as a matter of course these days, people need to have websites for their businesses, so I don’t think we’ll see much dropoff in hosting accounts.  So I feel like we’re pretty secure.

Maybe we’ll get some good news before long.

Zach Dotsey

Amanda and I got up and went to Port City Community Church this morning, both of us wearing Grow Zone shirts.  (Mike was a little snug on me, but I think not in a bad way.)  The music was good- Matt Blair returned (or did a guest spot, I don’t know) to the band and sang along with Dwayne.  Mike Ashcraft’s message was a really good one and made me think about what I do as a husband.  There was a little girl in the row in front of us and she was singing one song very earnestly to her grandmother, which I thought was about the most precious thing I’d ever seen.

After the service we ran into Barry Frazelle, Amanda’s uncle, who was talking to Theo Milojevich and Rich Biagini (who both played in the band today).  he was talking about how good the surf would be today and mentioned maybe going over to Figure Eight Island again today.

Amanda and I then headed over to the Grow Zone area.  She was helping tally the kids again, but I got to actually play with some this week as opposed to watching a door.  I had a blast with the three year olds!  The first one dropped off was a little Asian girl named Caroline.  She was shy at first but we started playing with Play Doh and she warmed up quick.  next was a kid names Mason, and I got him playing with some blocks.  The blocks were all made of a soft, foamy material, so later on when I had five or six of them throwing them into the bucket they came from or trying to get the up on a shelf, nobody got hurt from flying blocks.

There was Anna, who is the daughter of Brett Eddy who direct Ripple Effect and was out at Capt’n Bill’s yesterday, and Hannah and Ella Rose and Braylon and Joshua and Hayden and a bunch of other kids.  They played then they ate then they were read a story and played with instruments while music played (and by some miracle nobody got hurt with them all banging sticks together).  Then a lady came in and sang with them.  After that they made little streamers with paper plates and paper and it was time to go.  I had a blast.

I think it was good for the boys to have a guy in the room- they took to me particularly fast, though Joshua of them told me his brother was stronger than me.

After all that we ate spaghetti in the Grow Zone green room then went home to let the dogs out for a bit before heading to Wrightsville Beach.  We hung out at the Frazelles’ for a few minutes then Barry and I went out to surf while Amanda and Anna went for a walk.  Walking out, we ran into Josh, a friend of Theo’s who usually joins us in surfing on Wednesday nights.  He recently got married and we met his wife.  He’d gone out surfing yesterday and was too sore to go today, so he and his lovely bride were just enjoying the beach.

The waves were great, but it was ridiculously crowded, so after a few minutes Barry suggested we go to Figure Eight.  As I was going out I saw Lars Boscaljon getting in.  We talked for a few minutes wherein I expressed that Amanda and I were a little upset about them not calling on Friday night to let us know they weren’t coming.  It mainly upset us because we heard of something else some people were invited to and thought they might have gone to that.  They didn’t though, and the air was cleared.

We loaded the surf boards onto the Lars Rover and Barry drove us over to Figure Eight Island.  He’s friends with Hugh McRae (whose grandfather or great-grandfather donated the land for the park of the same name) so we got to park at his place.  This was the first time Lars or I had been there.  In fact, Lars commented that it was only the second place he had ever surfed, which made me think about my surfing history.

For the record, in chronological order, I’ve surfed at Topsail Island, Wrightsville Beach, Masonboro Island and now Figure Eight Island.  That’s one more place than Michael, due entirely to the fact that I went to Mase one day.

Anyway, we had to swim out pretty far, but the waves were indeed fun.  They were big and powerful, but they were mostly rolling and they went on for a long way with pretty decent space between them.  We all caught some good ones, although my best one was my very first one.  I was disappointed that I didn’t get to run into Mike Krzyzewski though.

We stayed out there for a while then eventually went on back to Wrightsville Beach.  Lars took off, Barry was told Hannah, his daughter, was out on the beach lamenting the fact that her dad wasn’t there to surf with, so he went back out there for his third session of the day.  (He’d gone to Figure Eight earlier in the day too.)  the poor guy was pooped, but he wanted to please his girl.  I hung out with Amanda and Anna on the porch for a few minutes before Amanda and I took off.

We stopped at Lowe’s Food to get some lunch meat (I felt the need to eat some meat) then went home, ate and watched TV.  I dozed off a bit during Saturday Night Live, which actually isn’t a commentary on the program but on how tired I was.  I was pretty sore when I got off the couch, which a day of volleyball followed by a day of surfing can do to you I guess.  Amanda went to bed and I watched Deadwood and Entourage.

The work week begins again tomorrow.  We have a lot going on the next couple weeks.

Zach Dotsey

Woke up to a pretty normal Saturday.  Amanda misunderstood something I said, so I decided it should be her new nickname.

Amanda decided she wanted to fix breakfast this morning so after she showered she ran to Lowe’s Food.  I invited the Warkentiens over.  Nick was working but Amy was not so she came and joined up.  We had waffles, eggs and apple turkey sausage with  orange juice outside on the patio.

After Amy left I watched Duke trounce, and I mean thoroughly TROUNCE Virginia.  The score at the half was 3-3 (although Duke should probably have been a touchdown up but do to a missed and unreplayable pass interference call, the Cavs intercepted a pass in the end zone), but the final score was 31-3.  It was Duke’s first ACC win since 1994 I believe, and what a statement it was!  Seth Holloman was celebrating his 30th birthday at the game, so I’m glad they won it for him.  I just wish my own borthdays had been as lucky for Duke.

I called Barry Frazelle during the game to check on the surf, and he said there was a little bit out there but if I had anything else to do he’d suggest doing it.  Because of that I missed an opportunity to go jogging with Coach K.  You see, at 4:00 Amanda and I went to Capt’n Bill’s, which is a place with a bunch of sand volleyball courts that also serves food.  Polly and Dave Clawson had set it up for all the small groups they coach to come on out there and have a good time, which we did (though Amanda and I lost all five or so games of volleyball we participated in).

While we were there I got a text message from Michael Mercer, Amanda’s brother, saying that he and Barry had seen the head coach of the Duke Blue Devils, Mike Krzyzewski.  I think his words were “Coach K waved at us.”  I texted him back: “Really?”  I was a little skeptical because he’s a bit silly, Michael is.  He texted back something like, “Yes.  He was sweaty and fat and nice.”  The story, as I later got it, was that Michael and Barry had gone to Figure Eight Island, an exclusive island just north of Wrightsville Beach taht barry had a pass to, to go surfing.  They were walking down the beach and Coach K jogged past them, smiled, waved and said “Hi.”

After he passed them, Michael said to barry that the guy looked familiar then, after a second, realized it was Mike Krzyzewski.  Had I been there I’d have most certainly joined him in his jog, at least for a little bit.  I wouldn’t want to bother the man, but I’d definitely have wanted to talk to him.  I mean, what are the odds that the one time you go to this exclisive island an icon like that, a man who had won more basketball games than any active coach (I think- he’s close to it at least), three national championships, and has now coached the American Men’s Basketball team to Olympic gold, just happens to jog by?

Anyway, Amanda and I had a good time at Capt’n Bill’s.  If there was an award given for hustle I’d have given it to Amanda.  My girl dove all over the place going after balls.  I got a bit sandy myself.  We met a few new people too. One thing of note is that I got a lot of comments on the Duke hat I wore.  I wear it all the time and generally nobody says anything, but while at Capt’n Bill’s I think I had five people say something to me.  The conversation went pretty much exactly like this each time:

Guy: Duke sucks!

Me: Yeah?  Well they killed Virginia today.

Guy:  Really?

Me: Yup.

Guy: What was the score?

Me: 31-3.

Guy: Dayumn!

It was pretty fun, and I’d like to thank Coach Cut and the team for the opportunity to leave dumbstruck many a Carolina, State and whoever else fan.

We came home and watched a little TV before heading off to bed.  We’ve got church tomorrow and we’re volunteering at Grow Zone, helping out with the pre-K kids.

Zach Dotsey
.

Work was busier than I expected it to be today.  Amanda was let off early so she stopped by the store to get marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, chips and drinks for tonight.  Oh, and bread.  That was important because later on Amy wanted a sandwich.  Amanda and I picked up and cleaned up a bit.

We put the time to arrive at 6:30, expecting people to show up late, which everyone did.  Nick and Amy Warkentien were the first to arrive, followed a bit later by Chris Burfield, David Sapp and Adam Dotsey and Renee Sikes.  Michael Mercer showed up too, even though he said he wasn’t going to come.  He worked with his boss tonight and his boss decided to close up an hour early.

We expected a couple other people to show up but we were told (not by them) that some other plans may have come up.  As far as numbers go, they were offset by people we didn’t expect to come.  All in all I thought it was a nice night of just hangign out and talking.  Since it was raining Amanda put some s’more in the toaster oven, which actualy worked out pretty well.  Obviously it wasn’t as fun as actually roasting them over a fire, but they tasted just fine.

We were going to play The Blake Game but we ended up talking so long that we didn’t do that.  Nick, Amy and Dave left around 10:00, so after they left Burf brought in Rock Band 2, which was in his car, and we played that for a bit.  I drummed the whole time, which is a rarity because usually when we  have people over to play they want to do the drums.  Adam and Burf played the guitars and the microphone switched between Michael, Amanda and Renee, which Michael pulling most of that duty.  He was seriously cracking us up with his vocal stylings.

After everyone left Amanda and I put away some clothes while discussing our night.  She then went to bed, which is what I’m going to do in just a sec.

Zach Dotsey

The new season of The Office premiered tonight and the big deal that didn’t happen in the finale of last season happened tonight.  Yes, Jim popped the question to Pam, who accepted, of course.  They’re going to have to add some drama to the relationship of course, and I’m guessing Pam getting chummy with a guy in New York, where she’s going to design school, might help that.

Before that Amanda and I watched My Name is Earl, which I think did a good job of getting back to it’s heartsy roots.  After Amanda went to bed I watched the season premiere of Boston Legal from Monday.

Other than all that today was windy and rainy and generally dreary.  Michael Mercer’s apartment was being sprayed today, so he had to get the cats and stay out of it.  He dropped Mooo! and Goat off before heading to his class today then came by and watched TV for a while.  He called me in to watched a bit of Dora the Explorer and Go Diego Go.  They were both awful. That will be the downside to having kids one day- having to watch  stuff like that.  I’m sure kids love all the interaction in the show, but there’s so much that defies logic.

The part that got me the most was when Dora and her monkey and her backpack and her map (all of which could talk) were chasing the blue cow in the hot air balloon to try to give him sticky tape (redundant?) so he could patch a huge hole in his balloon before he drifted into Crocodile Lake (which was the size of a small pond) and Swiper, a fox with gloves and a mask, stole the sticky tape.  He’d tried before, but had been driven back by the assumed millions of children shouting at him, “Swiper, no swiping!”  He got the sticky tape on his second attempt though, and once he got it he tossed it about five feet down the path Dora and her monkey were already going on then scampered away.

What was the point?  He stole the sticky tape and then, for all intents and purposes, just gave it right back to them.  What he just trying to be a dick?  I mean, with as many uses as Dora came up with to use the sticky tape, he could have done something with it.  I think the best thing would have been to tie up Dora and her monkey, steal and fix the balloon then go over to where Deigo was trying to save a stupid-ass sloth who couldn’t climb down a tree in half an hour to cross a narrow path to safety to avoid a very fast-looking but apparently very slow mudslide, then steal his backpack, which can turn into anything but must first offer stupid, useless suggestions.

Swiper was, by far, the best character on Dora the Explorer though.  He wears an expression of irony and, thinking on it more now, I believe he was just trying to be a dick.  Anything to shut up the “We did it!  We did it!”

And how did Dora know the balloon was going to end up at Crocodile Pond Lake?  Somehow the map figured out that they had to go cross the Windy River, go over the Slippery Rock (which would have been much easier to walk around as opposed to wrapping sticky tape around their shoes) and end up at Crocodile Pond Lake.

I just didn’t get it.  And I won’t even get started on Diego.  Sorry for some of the language above.  I generally try to stay pretty clean on this site, but what I watched of those two shows just brings it out.

Michael and I had lunch at El Cerro Grande.  I think this was the first time I went there with him that the service was good and it didn’t take forever.  Last time I ate lunch with him there they sat us in a booth with a thermostat, and since we were bored we played with it.  That didn’t happen this time.  There was a little girl with a Dora the Explorer jacket though.

I came back and stayed pretty busy with work.  I did a lot of troubleshooting on a couple sites with Scott, which made my late afternoon a bit busier.

After work Amanda asked me to run by the store to pick up some breakfast materials as she had to pick up some party supplies.  Tomorrow is her boss’s birthday (or at least they’re celebrating it tomorrow) and they’re all making a big office breakfast for her.  Early happy birthday, Laura Glasscock!

That’s about it.  I thought it was a good day for grilled cheese, so Amanda made some for us.

We’re looking forward to having a few people over tomorrow.  Our guest list will be somewhere between nine and eighteen people, I think.  As far as people who said they are coming we’ve got Amanda and I, of course, Adam Dotsey and Renee Sikes, Nick and Amy Warkentien, Lars and Kaitlyn Boscaljon and Jeaneal Guy.  For maybes we’ve got David Sapp, Kristen Phillips (who I’m pretty sure is coming since a Facebook thing said she wrote to Jeaneal that she was looking forward to seeing her tomorrow night), Matt and Melissa Davis, Elliot Clark and Melissa Nicholson (pretty sure they’re coming), Blake and Stephanie Konny and Chris Burfield.  I think about half of the maybes will show up.

I didn’t end up playing any Halo 3 last night, but I think I might go do that soon.

Zach Dotsey
.

The day didn’t start off too busy, but it got that way this afternoon.  I picked up my paycheck and met Amanda for lunch at J Michael’s then went to the bank, and by the time I got back to work I had enough to keep me busy enough that I couldn’t work on the stuff I was working on yesterday.

After work I headed out to Wrightsville Beach for the newly titled Wednesday Night Surf Club.  Michael Mercer got there in time to go look at the waves and come back just as Lars Boscaljon was pulling up to the Frazelle house on his scooter.  I drove up just as the garage door was closing behind the two of them.

When I got inside after I changed downstairs they were talking with Barry about the waves.  There’s a storm that might turn into a named tropical storm (Kyle would be its name, according to Michael, who keeps up with such things) that is churning up a lot of waves.  The general consensus was that it was not a day for us to go surfing.  Michael, Lars and I walked out to check it out, and sure enough, the waves were pretty angry.  They were almost coming in sideways, the wind and the rip current were so bad.  There was a lot of water too; at mid-tide the water was already covering much of the beach.  The wind was causing the sand to sting our legs something fierce.

All of this was a bit of a surprise to me as I haven’t been keeping up with the weather lately.

Back at the house, Lars and I talked about going out anyway since we were already there, but we eventually decided not to.  Barry decided to walk out to the beach with us again after he finished his dinner, so the four of us walked to the Oceanic and up the steps to Crystal Pier.  The waves weren’t as bad as before, but the water was all mush.  You could see really big waves on the horizon over at Masonboro Island.  It was cool to see waves cleave themselves on the jetty too.  The water had come up to the dunes.

There were a few people out, seemingly for our entertainment.  We watched them drift from well past the north side of the pier all the way down to Access 39, where we usually came out to the beach.  All in all I think we watched five people.  Two of them were bodyboarders and they eventually caught some waves in.  There was one guy we watched walk out and get in the water and you could see him lining his body perpendicular to the shore but moving diagonally as he paddled out.  There were two more people we saw one one side of the pier who ended up way down on the other side of it.  We kept waiting for them to go for some waves and when they finally did one of them cartwheeled off his surfboard.  We all cheered when he finally got up, but when he cartwheeled off it drew a collective “OOOOOH!”

Those two eventually came in and we waited around to see the guy who was by himseld catch a wave.  He did really well with it, but when he paddled back out afterwards we all decided we were bored and cold and went back in.

The sunset was pretty.  It was turning the sky over the ocean and the shallow water purple.

After we got back, Michael, Lars and I decided to grab some food, so we split a pizza at Vito’s, a pretty good deal for $5 apiece.  Michael said he would have gotten two pieces and said it probably would have been cheaper for him to buy them separately, so I asked and the guy said indicidual slices were $2.68 each.  Michael ended up with two and a half slices (the half split with me- Lars got his own third piece), so he came out on top.

I headed home after that.  I talked to Joey Palieri, who was briefly in town.  We didn’t get a chance to meet up.

Amanda and I watched last week’s season premiere episode of House on the computer because the DVR has been funny lately and we’ve had to reset a lot of the programs it was previously set to record.  Amanda went to bed after that and I messed around on the computer a bit, chatting with my sister, Erin Dotsey, and my cousin, Francis Horner, via Facebook.

Erin sounds like she’s doing alright for herself.  She got an apartment in Raleigh and it working from home.  She’s dating a guy named Terry who she sounded pretty pleased with.  She’s having some back problems though.  They sounded pretty serious when she listed them to me, but she said she’s going to physical therapy and is doing better.

I think I might go play some Halo 3 with Michael and Chris Flowers.

Zach Dotsey