GO DUKE!!

2006 ACC Champs!!

Calvin went to bed about halftime, but Carter is a great fan -- stayed up with me and Chris, biting his nails until the very end. And he was so excited! One of my work friends here is a UVa grad, and he was following the tournament on Game Tracker, so we even got a call right after the game congratulating us (Ted is so happy just to have another ACC fan to talk to, he can afford to be magnanimous. Plus, like most of the other fans I know, he didn't want BC to win the championship in its first year in the conference). I can't say it was almost like home, but it was still pretty satisfying. Now we're trying to figure out how to get and send home the brackets for a pool. Have not found streaming video available for the Selection Show, which saves us from being up at midnight.

We had a productive but not efficient day. Got up early to go to the market. The sun was shining for the first time in a few days, but it was still bitter cold. Yes, while you've all been enjoying 70 degree days, here it's been about -2 degrees...celcius, but that's still cold. Tomorrow it's supposed to be +2 or 3 degrees. But there are buds on the trees and some forsythia starting to flower, so we hope spring is on the way here soon.

Anyway, it's much easier to have the kids at the market, and negotiate with our limited French, before it gets too busy. That took up most of the morning. We played for a while at home, had some lunch and a nice long nap. This afternoon we hopped on the Metro to track down a French-English dictionary. I've been helping Carter with his French homework, and can do ok with the pronunciation on most things, but I keep having to skip over translating the sample sentences or just guess at the meaning. This weekend he had a poem to read and practice reciting, and I decided we couldn't wait for our shipment of stuff to arrive to have a dictionary. So it turns out to be a lovely little poem about a blue bird spreading his wings, like two small fans, and fluttering away like a delicate butterfly into the bluest blue sky. I had gotten the "blue bird" part on my own, but the rest of it was really beyond me. My original translation for Carter (the one that prompted our little errand) went something like, "His beak is blue. Some other part of him is blue. And another part, but I don't know that word. He does something... maybe his tail is blue? It says something about a butterfly. And then it talks about the sky, so this might mean that he's flying."

We had dinner on our way back from the bookstore. Somehow we ended up with sandwiches, even though our main reason for wanting to eat out was to have something different than what we had a lunch, and for dinner last night, and for lunch yesterday, and for dinner the night before -- which was (you guessed it)... sandwiches. But we consoled ourselves with a selection of eclairs and mini-fruit tarts for dessert before settling down to watch the championship.

Think of us during the selection show, and when you're cutting work.. I mean, feeling sick... on Thursday afternoon when the tournament starts.