It's easy being with green.

I forgot to mention that on Thursday of last week (if you consider Sunday at the end of the week and many people don't) I went to the annual Duke basketball banquet. It consists of a meal, which our tickets didn't include, and an awards ceremony. The ceremony consists of lots of long speaches given by the coaches and graduating seniors. The seniors tend to get overly emotional. There are also filn clips set to music chosen by either Mrs. Krzyzewski (past years) or one of the Krzyzewski daughters. When I first started going to these, back in1986, all the players hung around for autographs afterwards, which was loads of fun. Most of them made a quick escape this year. I did manager to accost Shavlik Randolph and David McClure. As the success of the team has grown over the years, it's been harder and harder to get tickets to the banquet, so I hadn't been in a long time. I was able to get another autograph from Coach K and was able to tell him that I first got his autograph 19 years ago. Somewhere we have a badly detiorated VHS tape of my getting that autograph, because the local ABC affiliate, WTVD, put it on the news. I didn't see any television cameras this year, because I guess the novelty of a successful season in Duke basketball as worn off a bit since then.

I was going to mention something else from that week that I'd forgotten. I need to start jotting down what I want to mention in my Treo 650. I can't believe that I haven't thought of that before.

Did I do anything this week? I went to Eastern Lights for dinner on Wednesday and afterwards worked on my mom's birthday present. I made an ornament type thing to hang in the window using beads and gold-filled wire. I thought it turned out pretty well. Hopefully it will look nice hanging up.

Thursday was her birthday, so we went to Kemp's for dinner. I was able to eat oysters. I'd gone to Rudino's for lunch that day and eaten another entire Spinach Sophia grinder. Those things are just fantastic. In any case, I wasn't overly hungry at dinner time. After that, my dad suggested that we pick up some pastries at the Coffee Cafe around the corner from my house and continue to celebrate at my house. I was really stuffed after that. They had a chocolate "croissant", which was wonderful. It's not like any croissant that I've ever had, but it's very good. I think the dough is more like you'd expect with a danish or something.

On Friday evening, I met my parents at the Duke Pre-Majors Advising annual picnic. The weather was very pleasant and they had good fried chicken. Again, I'd had a big lunch of Shrimp Pad Thai at Champa, so I wasn't terribly hungry. A meal consisting of chicken wings and brownies was pretty nice, though.

We went to Nantucket Cafe & Grill last night and I tried their pork ribs. They are very good. The meat comes off the bone very easily and they are generous with their sauce. Not bad. I have leftovers in the fridge, which I'm looking forward to having for lunch this week.

Yesterday, after going to the OCRA Ham Radio breakfast, I spent almost the entire day making jewelry. I made myself three bracelets and five pairs of earrings. The earrings were mostly very small, so they were quick and easy. It was fun and it will be nice to have more jewelry, since I so desperately need it. Right.

It is so very nice and green around here again. I really love spring. Lots of things are blooming in my yard now. The "stratosphere" daffofils are still blooming along my walk. The dianthus is blooming along the concrete pad in front of my house. The bright green oak leaves are just fantastic, though. You can just barely see the neighboring houses now. The good thing is that I was pleasantly surprised at how it looked without leaves. Several people have said that it almost looks as if I live in the mountains, because this is a fairly high spot compared to the rest of the area. It's definitely nice to be able to appreciate all of the seasons.