Zach Dotsey

“So, Zach,” I hear you say.  “I notice that you’ve changed the look of your blog.  What’s up with that?”

First off, I know it is a blog, but I don’t like calling it one.  Blogs seem to generally have a theme or a purpose, like talking about sports or technology or commenting on news.  My site really doesn’t have a point other than to chronicle my day to day activities.  While it seems pointless now, centuries from now some archaeologist will find it and love it.

Yes, apparently my site and the internet will still be up and, what’s more, accessible, centuries from now.

To the point, I just thought I’d switch it up.  I had the last design up for a good long while.  This new design is simple but sleek.  There was another one I was going to use, but there was a bit of configuring that would have to take place before it would look right, and I just didn’t feel like messing with it.

Cyra commented on her titular post today!  Huzzah, it’s been forever since I’ve had a comment!  Turns out though that registration was turned off and one of the plugins the site was running messed it up further, but that’s all been rectified now.  If you want to leave a comment, feel free.  It’s much easier to do so now.

Not too much to go into today.  Milly slept all through the night and didn’t get up until 8:20, which was after my shower.  Actually she did cry briefly sometime after Amanda got out of bed, but it didn’t last long.  She’s such a ridiculously pretty baby.  That’s here nor there, but I just love looking at her, even when she’s crying her face off.  The best, of course, is when she smiles.  Sometimes she’ll give this sly grin while looking at you out of the corner of her eyes, then sometimes she’ll have this big, wide open-mouthed smile.  I just love it.

Since Amanda went back to work I’ve mostly been working out of the living room, because it gives me more options with Milly during the day.  I had a number of phone calls to make today though, so once Amanda got home I sequestered myself back in the office.  I really need to pick that room up a bit.

Angus came and sprayed the house today.  I guess he saw my Duke posters because when he came out of the office he mentioned being a Duke fan.  We’ll have to have him over for some games this season.

Speaking of Duke, there sure is a lot of recruiting buzz going on right now.  First of all, Kyrie Irving has yet to publicly declare for Duke, though pretty much everyone still feels confident about him heading there next year.  It was thought that he’d end his recruiting after his official visit to the university a couple weeks ago, but he is planning on going on his other visits.  I’m not too worried about it.

Harrison Barnes, the consensus number one player for the 2010 class, was long considered a heavy Duke lean.  Now it seems to be a battle between Duke and Carolina.  Coach K had an in-home visit with him on Monday, the last day such a visit was available.  Everyone was excited because Duke had the last in-home and was also scheduled for the last official.  However, for some reason the Barnes family invited Roy Williams of UNC to have another visit, and it ended up getting scheduled to be right after Coach K’s visit.  That had a lot of Duke fans worried, but that’s worn off some.  Every possible scenario concerning the event has been posited, but really nobody seems to know anything concrete outside of the Barnes household.

That’s pretty much it for today.  Amanda and I watched Supernatural, Heroes and House before she went to bed at a little after 9:00.  She was tired tonight.

Zach Dotsey

Yikes.

So, there’s this discussion going on on the Facebook page of a family member and I thought I’d brush up on a bit of governmental policy circa World War II.  I found a forum where people were discussing a a few systems of government, and after reading a few posts I thought, “This isn’t sounding quite right.”  I took a second glance at the URL then clicked around a few pages and realized I was on what I think was a Neo-Nazi website.  Yikes and yuck!

So, other than that Amanda and I did the usual every other Sunday thing- woke up, went to church, dropped Milly off at Grow Zone then helped out there ourselves.  Amanda told me afterwards that they were short on people in the two-year-old room, so she ended up helping out there.

I had a good time with my three-year-old room.  I was playing with blocks with a couple boys, then one of them decided he wanted to play hopscotch on some carpet squares.  That was fine until a few other kids wanted to jump from square to square (which is really all they were doing), but then it got crowded and they wouldn’t line up to just jump in one direction and, while nobody bumped into anyone else, it got messy.  After craft time even more kids wanted to play hopscotch, but this time I told them I had an idea to make it better.  I put all the carpet squares in a circle, and they all started hopping in in line one after another, and all in one direction.  One kid even told me that it was better than it was before.

We ran into some friends we haven’t seen in a bit and found out that they’re pregnant.  They find out the sex of the baby in a week or two I think.  Very excited for them!

We didn’t do much after getting home.  I really should have messed with the porch, but I just didn’t.  I don’t have a good excuse.  I did walk to the grocery store to take the recycling and pick up a few things though.  I called my baby sister, Andra Sawyer, on the way home to wish her a happy birthday.  She’s 24.  Wow, my baby sister is 24.

I’d tried calling earlier, even calling my parents since I knew they were visiting her in Gastonia this weekend, but they’d already left and were heading back to the Rouge.  At any rate, I did talk to Andra for a good bit.  I talked to Jackson a little bit, but he ended up mostly making loud noises to try to get Addison to make noises.  He was too busy doing that to tell me goodbye when I told him it was time for me to eat dinner.

It’s Seth Holloman’s birthday today too, so if you read this, Seth, happy birthday!

Amanda and I watched last night’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by Megan Fox.  The good: Megan Fox was a better actress than I’d have though.  The bad: pretty weak episode, overall, especially for a season premiere.

After we put Milly to bed we also watched Supernatural, though we watched it online and had some issues with the video hanging up here and there.  We’ve watched a few things on that website over the past couple weeks and this was the first time we had an issue with it.

In Duke news, Kyrie Irving, a much sought after point guard prospect for Duke, had his official visit this weekend.  All signs point to it having been a great trip, and most expect him to commit to Duke sometime in the next day or so.  All fans who follow recruiting are extremely excited.  Aside from getting a crazy-good point, it’s also thought that his commitment might help cause a domino effect and get commits from other prospects such as Harrison Barnes (who is thought to be split between Duke and Carolina right now) and Austin Rivers (who committed early to Florida but wanted to look around and loved his unofficial visit to Duke last week), as well as possibly others.

Zach Dotsey

I composed this little ditty for Hannah Frazelle for her birthday, in the grand Chocolate Starfish tradition.

Happy Birthday, Chocolate Starfish

How old?

How old?

I’m 20, Chocolate Starfish

I’m 20!

I’m 20!

My goodness, Chocolate Starfish

You’re old!

You’re old!

So, happy actual 20th birthday, Hannah Frazelle.

Not a whole heck of a lot to report on today.  Amanda just kind of took it easy tonight, which was a welcome change to how things have been lately.  We watched the last three episodes of Supernatural.  Still the best show that I don’t think anybody watches.  it left off with Dean accidentally breaking the final seal to release Lucifer from Hell.  He and his brother, Dean, kill the demon who tricked Sam, which shows the brothers Winchester have each other’s backs again after having fallen out.

After that we watched Pushing Daisies.  Yes, Pushing Daisies, which is such a great show!  To our pleasant surprise, it’s coming on next Saturday too.  I mean, I hate that it’s coming on Saturdays, but at least it’s coming on some more.  I didn’t think they were ever going to show any more episodes, but then Jason told me the other day that he noticed his DVR was recording it Saturday, and fortunately ours picked it up too.

I’m thinking the show’s already done and canceled, but I’m holding out hope.  I hope Supernatural comes back too.  It left off on such a horrible cliffhanger.

I just read on Wikipedia that there is a fifth season planned for Supernatural and that the show actually does have high ratings.  Coolness.  Pushing Daisies has two more episodes and is done with no real series conclusion.  Sounds like the writers’ strike from a couple years ago really hurt the show.  What a tragic shame!  There have been talks of making a movie or a comic series to wrap it up, and it sounds like the comic is more likely to happen.  I would possibly pick that up.  Heck, I might even get Amanda to read a comic book if I do that!

Amanda and I await Milly’s arrival.  We’re hoping it’ll happen sometime during the week, just because we’re ready for it to happen.  Every time I talked to her on the phone today I asked if she was having contractions yet.  Watch Milly come two weeks late.  That would be the suck.

Zach Dotsey
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Nick and Amy Warkentien took their son, Eli, on his first plane ride today.  Nick’s side of the family hadn’t had a chance to meet him yet so they flew up there to introduce him.  When I talked to Nick last night they were afraid Eli might fuss the whole trip to Michigan.  I haven’t heard one way or another, but I hope their trip went well.

Work kept me busy today.  Seems like I had absolutely everyone who wanted something done in the last hour of work.  I got most of it knocked out, but there was one thing someone wanted done tonight for which I needed them to send me something.  I waited for a while and kept checking the mail, but I never saw it come in.

Amanda and I caught up a bit on Supernatural and watched Lost tonight.  Lost is consistently one of those shows where I curse when it ends because it just leaves you there wanting more.

Michael called earlier and asked if I wanted to shoot some basketball.  I should have said yes, but I was feeling lazy tonight.

Speaking of basketball, I heard from a source who has a source that people I trust as sources trust (that’s not at all convoluted, is it?) that John Wall had made up his mind to play at Kentucky.  But then, Eric Bledsoe, another top-10 ranked point guard, committed to UK and now there’s a rumor that Wall will be visiting Duke tomorrow.  Not that I’ve been following recruiting very long, but this seems like an awful lot of drama.  It’s definitely dragged out the college basketball season for me.

Other than that I’ve been working on getting my desktop up and running properly.  I’m still having trouble getting it to recognize all the hardware installed on it since I reisntalled XP on it, but I think I’m making progress.  If I could just get it to recognize the wireless network adapter I’d be in business.  As it is I have to download things on the laptop then move them to the desktop.  Kind of a pain.

Zach Dotsey

So I’ll admit, I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the news lately.  Apparently this swine flu is a pretty big deal.  It’s killed 149 people in Mexico and there are another 20 confirmed cases.  In the US there are 40 confirmed cases, but it hasn’t killed anybody and people here seem to get over it like it’s any other flu.  A few other countries have some confirmed cases and a few more countries have some suspected cases.  It’s just a little odd that it’s killed so many Mexican people, but to everyone else it seems to be just a regular bug.  I don’t know if it has to do with vaccinations, health care or genetics.  Maybe someone’s already answered that- I don’t know.  Like I said, I haven’t been keeping up much with the news lately.

Also in the news, Bea Arthur died at the age of 86 on Saturday.  She’s best known to people my age as Dorothy on The Golden Girls.

My work day was pretty steadily busy today for the most part.  Afterwards I went out surfing with Lars.  It started out a bit slow but then the tide came back in a bit (is that right?) and even though there was a pretty strong rip, we had a good time.  The waves weren’t huge, but they broke nicely and we both caught some really good ones.  There were several that I caught today where I felt like I had really good control over what I was doing and where I was going.

I came to realize that most people have what I’m calling a signature dismount, or a way they instinctively jump off the board.  I’m talking about times when the wave has just run out and you voluntarily get off the board.  Michael Mercer (who was working today and could not join us), for example, will take a dive into the water.  Lars sort of sits back off the board.  I tend to walk off the back and kick the board out away from me.  For the most part, anyway.  There was one wave I rode in really far, but to get it going I moved my weight pretty far up on it so that it ended up hitting the sand and I involuntarily walked off the front of it.  The board popped up and rammed into a spot just above my elbow and it’s been hurting ever since.  Fortunately the water was coldish, which I’m guessing will help keep the swelling down, but it’s pretty damn tender, particularly if I have to exert any force with my right arm, like when pushing myself up on a board or picking up something heavy.  Oh well, I’m sure it’ll be fine soon.

I think, after two days, I might be done with the springsuit already.  It’s chafing the back of my knees and my shoulder blades a little.  Besides, Lars was in a neoprene top and baggies today, and Josh, a guy who’s out there surfing a lot when we are (congrats on the pregnancy too, by the way- and the same to his brother, who recently moved here!), was wearing a rash guard and baggies yesterday and today.  Besides, I’ve been wanting to get my neoprene top, which I’ve had since my birthday, wet for a while.

Lars and I surfed about an hour and a quarter, maybe an hour and a half then went on in.  Barry went out surfing too, but we didn’t see him.  Lars took off and I was going to help Hannah with a project but her computer wasn’t working very well.  The issue was that she’d had to publish some web pages but her images weren’t showing up online even though they were showing up on her computer.  The solution was pretty simple (for someone who works on web pages for a living) and when she called me later tonight I was able to help her pretty quickly.  She just hadn’t uploaded the image folder.

Amanda and I watched a Supernatural when I got home, followed by tonight’s Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, in which something was said about girls whose names end in -ly that had us reconsidering our daughter’s nickname.  I wanted to watch the season finale of Heroes after that, but Amanda was tired and went to bed.

Her sunburn continues to hurt her, particularly on her legs.

I mentioned to Amanda that I hadn’t felt Milly moving around much lately, and she said she just didn’t tell me all the time when it happened, so I spent a few minutes after she went to bed feeling my daughter stretch and kick inside the womb of my wife.

I then helped Hannah with her problem over the phone and caught up on this, my own website.  I was pretty far behind.

Also, as the title says, today was my mom’s 53rd birthday.  I called her and talked to her for a while this morning.  I haven’t gotten a gift for her yet, but I intend to.  I just haven’t been able to think of anything yet.

Zach Dotsey

Amanda woke up and got up earlier than I did today, which is a Saturday rarity (though it happens every day throughout the week).  I was originally slated to shoot some more soccer pictures for Taylor and Esther Hutchens, but Esther e-mailed me yesterday that it was being pushed back a week due to expected rain.  I won’t be able to do that though, because we’ll be heading to Richlands for our first baby shower.

Anyhoo, Amanda set about updating the baby registry.  She came upstairs, I guess to wake me up, and I convinced her to spend some quality time with me by pointing out that we had nothing particularly planned and she could work on the registry whenever she wanted.  After that and showers I set about doing our taxes.  Finally.  I’ve been meaning to do them for the past couple months.

I used TaxACT to electronically file.  They do a really good job in asking questions to help you optimize your return as well as explaining things you might not understand too well.  Amanda and I will be getting a pretty decent bit back.

After I finished that we were going to go over to Anna and Barry Frazelle’s.  Michael and I (and Lars, who I got in touch with on the way there) were going to go surfing and Amanda was going to maybe go walking with Anna or something, but when I talked to Barry he said Anna would probably be helping Kirsten study for most of the afternoon, so Amanda instead went to Lowe’s to pick up a new shower head.

The story on that is that when I was in Costa Rica Nick and Amy Warkentien’s water heater broke so they were taking showers over here in our downstairs shower.  One time when Nick went to put the shower head back in place he broke it.  He thought it snapped in, when in fact he was supposed to slide it into its holder.  Not a big deal- it was old and not particularly nice.  Plus, Amanda decided that she wanted to put a detachable shower head upstairs, so she got a new detachable one to go upstairs and we’re going to move the fixed one that is currently upstairs, downstairs.

At any rate, Michael, Lars and I, as I said, surfed today.  It was the first time I’ve gone out since coming back from Costa.  The two of them went out last week or so, but it was when my toe was injured.  The toe is still a little tender, and, go figure, I hurt it a little putting on my bootie.  There’s a divider between the big toe and the rest of the toes (like a ninja boot) and I stubbed it against that.  Normally it wouldn’t have been anything, but like I said, it’s tender.

We all caught some pretty good waves and the water was (relatively) warm.  I was comfortable out there the whole time and wasn’t bothered too much when I had to duck under the water.  My hands were actually a little too warm in the gloves I think.

Lars got a chunk taken out of his board.  He had ridden a very nice wave to shore and was coming back out.  I think I’d taken one shortly after  his, but I was in front of him as we were heading back out when a largish wave crashed in front of us.  I tried to hold onto my board but it slipped out of my grasp and, I later found out, hit his board and put a bit of a hole in it.  Michael and I saw him getting out of the water, but we figured he was just ready to get out.  My board’s fine (the result of epoxy vs. fiberglass), and there’s really no blame in the whole deal and he’s wasn’t mad, but I told him I’d at least pay for a repair kit or help with a repair if it was something he couldn’t do himself.

There were only two points of surfing today that were negative (aside from damaging Lars’ board).  The first is that the waves took a little getting used to.  Usually when you drop in on a wave and go it’s a pretty smooth ride, but today when you got going it was a little riding over speed bumps.  It threw me a few times, since it took some balance adjustment, but I got used to it after a few times.  It was just odd, was all, since I’d never run into that and it’s not like the water was particularly choppy.

The other issue with today was crowding.  The number of people wasn’t so bad in and of itself, but there were these two guys that we would keep paddling away from and they seemed to keep paddling right back over, usually right behind or in front of us.  It was just annoying.

It was raining as Michael and I came in and de-wetsuited (which is when I learned about the major ding my board inflicted upon my friend’s board).  I let Michael and Lars have the shower first and went to stand in the rain with my wetsuit half off, which was kind of a nice feeling.  I would have just used that to rinse off, but it wasn’t raining hard enough for that.  Lars then left and Michael and I talked to Anna a bit.  Barry showed up for a brief second.  Michael took off once Anna started talking about breast feeding.

Say a prayer for Hannah Frazelle.  The girls going through about three kinds of unpleasant sick right now.

I got home in time to help Amanda make some white chili, which we were taking over to Nick and Amy’s.  We were one of several couples who offered to fix and take dinner to them while they settle into the schedule of early parenthood.  I diced onions without crying and then chopped up the chicken while Amanda did the bulk of the work.

We took that to them, ate then baked some cookie while just hanging out.  They just finished feeding Eli when we got over there and he was out pretty much the entire time we were there.  Marilyn Cuthbert, Amy’s mom, was gone until a few minutes before we left.  She’d gone to Wal-Mart to pick up a bunch of stuff then missed the turn off of I-40 to get back home.

Amanda and I brought  Bruce with us, and when we first got to the Warkentien house we didn’t notice that they had the back door open.  Bruce noticed though, and he slipped out to go check out the neighbor’s yard.  It took us a few minutes to find him, and we only did so because he trotted back over to us from a thicket between Nick and Amy’s backyard and their neighbor’s.  I told him to go inside and he did so, just trotting along wagging his tail.  He really seems to enjoy these little unchaperoned outdoor excursions.

While Eli napped on the couch I couldn’t help but think about how we’d have a little baby so soon ourselves.  It’s great that Milly and Eli will be so close in age and that Nick and Amy live so close to us.  I was imagining the kids being a few years old and kicking a ball out in their front yard.

Speaking of Mills (I’ve called her that a few times lately), she’s done all kinds of moving lately.  I think I talked about that a few days ago, but it’s so cool how active she is and how large she’s getting in little Amanda’s giant belly.

When we got home I watched the end of the Pittsburgh-Villanova game.  I was sort of pulling for Nova.  The better they do the better Duke’s loss to them looks (though it was a terrible one).  It was a really close game and they battled back and forth for the lead, but Nova was able to pull it off in the end.

Amanda and I watched an episode of Supernatural then she headed to bed, which is where I’ll be in just a few minutes.

Zach Dotsey
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Today was a big day for Duke sports.  The basketball team had their first exhibition game where they beat Virginia Union 114-50.  I mean, it was an exhibition game so something like that was expected, but there were a few big things of note.  It appears, first off, that three-year starting point guard and team co-captain Greg Paulus will give up his starter role to sophomore Nolan Smith.  Reports so far say that he’s accepted this role graciously.

The other big thing is that it looks like freshman center Miles Plumlee will be the starting center.  Miles Plumlee, whose younger brother, Marshall, had actually committed to Duke before him and will be joining the team next year (and there’s another one, Mason, after him- we might have an era of Plumlees at Duke), wasn’t talked about all that much in the off-season, but the kid appears to have a good head on him and is picking up the Duke system quickly, so he may turn out to be the most important get of the season.  Along with even a little improvement from Lance Thomas and Brian Zoubek, Duke’s front court weakness shouldn’t be quite so glaring.

On top of that, Duke’s football team was playing at Vanderbilt today.  Vandy has done pretty well this year and I think was sitting atop the SEC rankings not too long ago and number 14 in the USA Today poll a few weeks ago.  Duke beat them 10-7, holding them off with an interception at the one yard line with under a minute left in the game.

It was raining and the wind was blowing pretty hard last night, which results in my front and back lawns being entirely covered with pine straw.  They were only mostly covered in pine straw before.

The JDRF walk was this morning.  The company Amanda works for is a big sponsor for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and every year about this time they have a fundraiser and a walk around the park at Greenfield Lake to raise awareness.  It was supposed to be raining this morning as well, so we didn’t set an alarm, so we missed it.  The weather seemed to be pretty nice though, so hopefully everyone who showed up had a nice time.  We’ve been to it each other year that Amanda’s had this job.

We got up after a while and Amanda wanted to make waffles, but for some reason our waffle maker wouldn’t power up, so she went and bought some Eggos instead.  After that we watched a couple episodes of House, did a bit of nothing then showered.

I was planning on going surfing around 4:00, which is when Barry Frazelle had told me the other day he thought it would be pretty good.  Amanda and I left the house around 3:00 and went to Lowe’s to look for a part to fix the leak in the upstairs shower, but we found out that the part isn’t sold my itself- we’d have to buy a faucet to go along with it.  Now, you can get some cheap faucets, but we didn’t want a new faucet because the one upstairs is part of a set that we paid some good money for a couple years back.  We went to Home Depot to see if they sold the part by itself and they didn’t either, but the guy there was at least helpful enough to show us some gaskets we could buy that might make the part work.

After that we had some cheddar ale soup at Main Street Brewery.  I spent a bit of time checking for updates on Duke’s exhibition game with Virginia Union.  Then Amanda and I headed on out to Wrightsville Beach after that.  Anna and Barry Frazelle were at a wedding, but I put on my spring suit and went on out to surf.  Amanda sat on the beach and watched.  The waves were big, but the water was rough.  I tried to go out at one spot where it didn’t look so bad but I kept getting nailed.  I went back up the shore a bit and had to wait a few minutes for the waves to settle back down (I’d swear they were stalking me) and finally got almost all the way out to where a bunch of other surfers were, but then a set came in and kicked my ass back to the shore.  I got out, and it’s a good thing I did because after we walked back to the Frazelle house I realized how much energy it had taken out of me.  I was out there probably half an hour, paddling almost the entire time in cold water with a spring suit on.  By the time I got in the car I felt slightly nauseous, but it passed pretty quickly.

Back home Amanda and I caught up on Supernatural and watched an episode of The Soup.  I worked a bit on fixing the tub upstairs while Amanda got ready to go to bed.  I may have fixed it.  I finally got the part on with the gasket not looking like it’s out of place, but to test it and make sure I have to reattach the faucet and run the shower, and I didn’t feel like doing all that and taking it apart again if it didn’t work, so we’re going to try to tackle it tomorrow.

Zach Dotsey
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