Miss Smith showing off her Pink Cup 🥤 from last night 🌙
In a lifetime of bizarre weeks, the next 8 days and 7 nights promises to rank right up there !
The Hill, Bryce Mountain, Page County, Church, Bryce, Roanoke, Duke Medical, Glenvar, Elkin, Roanoke, and finally back to Laurel Fork. Sadly, somewhere in the middle of that stretch, Lin has to fly back to Missouri for yet another round of medical appointments.
Little fella kept me company last night at the scorers table. Thank you, Vickey Ritchie!
The first list was the cities where life will lead us, and here is the list of people involved with the events.
Vickey Ritchie, Pappy Meade, Nancy Sorrells, Brian Hendrick, Alan Knight, Chris Carter, and his entire family. Plus, it is time for Dennis Zimmerman to slide into the pulpit on Sunday at two different churches, we will see 👀 both Chris Dodson and Mr & Mrs Chris Graham.
The staff at the Duke University Medical Center and, if all goes well, Cindy Edwards and Company Tuesday night at Glenvar. Add more Chris Carter and Alan Knight to a little bit of Marion Harris on Wednesday. Bill Gallimore will be in the thought process along the way.
Here in a couple of hours, the most celebrated Uber Driver in all of the Land will pick me up outside and drive 🚗 me to The Hill (Kris Richardson is just that cool 😎) in order for me to assist Coach Vickey with her day long event, Little Feet.
I have to laugh when I think back to the first time that I was blessed to be a part of this event. Charlotte McPherson was standing next to me when the light bulb 💡went off, and I believe that I actually startled her. Blind trust led me there that day because I have that with our Special Olympics group, but we were probably one hour into it before I caught on as to the goal / purpose of the event.
The first thing that I can tell you is that at the end of the day, if nothing else, you will have a greater appreciation for all kindergarten and elementary school teachers !!
Today will be uplifting, followed by a long drive up to exit 273 and west, but know that the festivities at Tommy Thompson Field will be running through my worn-out brain 🧠.
My commitment to Coach Edwards and her volleyball 🏐 program is one that I take pretty seriously, which led to the over stacking of this week. We play at Glenvar this Tuesday and off on Thursday, so there was room to chase down a few folks!
Kris will be by here in a bit, so I need to get ready but I will create our Morning 🌄 Brew here in a bit!
Let’s start with Cindy Edwards and Company. There are now four weeks left in the Carroll County High School Volleyball season.
Seven matches remain with three taking place on The Hill and four more on the road ➕️ one ” off night.” One of the three home matches is different because it will include the Middle School while another will be Senior Night.
Tomorrow night is the first of two with James River High School. The Knights are the lone Three Rivers District team that our Lady Cavaliers have yet to face.
My unofficial math has us at 4-1 in the league with seven to play, meaning tomorrow night is halfway through the TRD schedule 📅.
So, Tuesday and Thursday this week belong to Cindy Edwards !
Linda has a medical appointment on four of the five work days that I will need to get her to, and there is no reason to elaborate any further about that.
Next on the list is Vickey Ritchie !
Yesterday afternoon, I heard Coach utter two words that I figured I’d never hear !!! Vickey Ritchie admitted, out loud, that she was tired. She gives everything she has on a daily basis and somehow plows through it without flinching.
Yesterday afternoon from 2pm until 4pm, we combined forces to create a ” show ” that couldn’t have happened without some AWESOME folks from within our / her community !
Vickey gets the top spot on both Friday ( Little Feet ) and Sunday with our next edition of Who’s coming to Dinner / Practice ?
Saturday is normally blocked 🚫 off for the Duke University Football team, but this week is one of our two bye weeks. I will need to adopt another team for the weekend because it is a mental break time slot.
There is a vital meeting that will take place on two occasions this week. One will happen later today up in Salem and the second one on Friday afternoon on The Hill. Both will change the path of what’s next in the Big Picture 📸 we call life.
Thursday involves the flipping of the calendar 📅 from September to October. This means that Greg Bolen will step down from the King of the Banner and he has to be replaced with the next contestant on Who is the face of our Efforts to save the World 🌎 from the likes of Doctor Evil 😈?????
Then there are lingering questions about things like Chick-fil-A ??? Does the food taste better because it is God’s food, or is that just what you tell yourself when you wait in line like we did on Saturday morning down in Durham ????
Next up is the fact that for the twelve time this year, my phone storage is sending me cries for help. See, life happens faster than I can process it by a wide margin.
Blind faith on display here as this video 📹 came from Vickey Ritchie, and I haven’t watched it yet because I was also tired yesterday.
Shawn Montgomery will have a cross country meet once or twice this week, Half Pint Harris will also play ▶️ one or two matches.
I’m going to see Travis Osborne at least once this week and Austin Keith twice, which are both things to look forward to !
Now, if someone out there wanted to help the cause, here is the graphic that I could really, really use !!!!
Take a picture 📸 of a witch 🧙♀️ and replace the face with one of Vickey Ritchie. Next, take a picture of a mangly cat 🐈, place the Cat ( probably should be a black one ) and then put my face on the it’s face.
It’s now 3:30 a.m., and I might have the opportunity for a nap before the creation of our Morning 🌄 Brew at 6 am.
Don’t forget, this pic means that there will be an actual reason to stay in contact with that Kristy Jones lady !
Of no, I just remembered that I have five more personalized. Thank you cards to write from the Alumni Game…..
Now, because this story isn’t really about any one person, there is no reason to send it out to a group of people.
So, now you know why the group of diehard readers are sooooooo important to my mental health.
This story is / was about what all is bouncing around in my brain 🧠, to the point where it woke me up at 2:00 am.
The biggest reason why I don’t go looking for things to care about, it’s because I struggle to keep up with the ones I already have.
Everything I have typed to this point is of equal importance to ” The Cause “
But seriously, if someone can create that graphic I need, I will compensate them with two slices of pizza 🍕🍕 at the next home volleyball 🏐 match ! That is a 2-fer because for that person to claim their reward, they would have to attend a volleyball 🏐 match !!!
Normally, I would circle 🔵 back at this point and recap this story, kbut the circle would be too big !
It’s almost time to start the wall to wall coverage of Pierre Curtis and Furman University Women’s Basketball 🏀 !!!
Here’s my take on the photo above. I knew that Alyssa Ervin has a rather cute little brother, but I had no idea that she had a sister too.
Life is full of surprises, and that is what makes it worth living !
Yesterday afternoon was fun and fellowship with some awesome people, but if you don’t know those people, you might not truly care about that story.
That part is okay because I don’t write for clicks or money, I write to bring joy to others.
I sent that story to eight people. I sent it to the people involved in it ➕️ Marion Harris and Mr Chris Dodson. The last two because they know most of the people that were part of the story.
There’s an inside joke 😃 there about the relationship dynamics between Alan Knight and myself, and it stems from an old Kevin Bacon movie 🎬 about degrees of separation.
Alan laughs at the fact that with six steps or less, I can find a way to laughingly take credit for anything good that happened. It’s fun because if you break it down, all I am trying hard to do is bring light to positive people who are using their God given talents for the betterment of others.
Everyone who knows me in Carroll County knows how much respect I have for both Vickey Ritchie and Greg Bolen. Take those two and add them to Alan Knight, and it gives you the idea 💡 of the workload that this Dodson fella carries every day.
Right now, Dodson is adjusting to life after being a full-time teacher ( following the career path of that Knight fellow) but he didn’t search for a fishing hole somewhere, he just added the next challenge and this one he can tackle with his Bride.
There will be a day when his life slows 🐌 down, and when it does, I hope that he will stop by my nursing home 🏡 and we can reminisce about the life he has led.
Back to the inside joke, because I might not still be around when Dude slows down, I will connect the dots on how this works…
I am the Public Relations Manager who takes care of people like Alan Knight and Lawrence Nesselrodt while working with anyone who can tolerate me.
So, being that Alan is under the umbrella 🌂 and the highest level, the fact that Alan taught a young Chris Dodson as well as gave him someone who he could look up to as a high school student, means that I have already ” taken ” credit for everything Chris Dodson has accomplished…….
But seriously, you are my daily inspiration, and I look forward to the day when you catch your breath. It will mean that instead of grabbing a slice of pizza 🍕, you will have to ask my nurse what flavor of pudding 🍮 you should feed me during our visit.
Circle back part of the story :
The comparisons –
Like Alan Knight, Dodson has seven rings 💍
Like Greg Bolen, Dodson could just run around and beat people up that bother him but he knows that there is a better way.
Like Vickey Ritchie, Dodson had a built-in reason for it, he has spent his entire life dedicated to folks with special needs.
While this might be a solid read in one of my places that I was never from, it will have the opposite effect in the current place I’m not from. In Carroll County, Chris Dodson is Darth Vader because of the history between the girls’ basketball programs as each school might have one more State banner if not for the other.
Dodson is a Home Town hero, and I’m honored 🎖 to be “not from” where we works all of his magic
The funniest line from lunch yesterday afternoon came from Quentin as I was telling the story about the time that Frank Comer was heading into the season finale with an 0-9 record. I consider Frank Comer a big part of my story because he shared an office 🏬 at the High School with Alan for decades.
On game day, I went to school with Frank and stayed with him from 7am. until the final gun sounded. People were going to come after him, and I wanted to be standing next to him when they did. In my world 🌎, it’s not about how much you win, its about what you do with your success or lack there of.
Quentin, who I hadn’t seen since High School, adds I don’t know what season that was because we didn’t win a single game while I played. He added that even though he won 🏆 a State Championship in baseball ⚾️ and won ZERO games in his time at Page County High School, that his time in football was more fun.
Win or lose, Friday Night Lights is THE REAL DEAL in high school 🏫.
Everyone who reads my work knows that I bleed Duke Blue. I am sitting here outside Wallace Wade Stadium typing this story, but the one thing I don’t write about is Duke Men’s Basketball, and that’s because it would be the very definition of overkill.
This winter should be exciting because there are seven or eight storylines to follow. One of those will be can Chris Dodson break the tie 👔 of 7-7 with Alan Knight in regards to rings 💍. Know this, whichever one gets to eight first, I will take credit for it !
Addie Greene and Chloe Smith together for the National Anthem !
There were so many steps that went into the pairings between our Special Olympics Basketball program and both the current players and the alumni. Most of them were decided by the physical limitations that each member of our group has, but this one was different, to the point that it was the only one that I hand-picked.
Addie Greene is the granddaughter of Tammy Quesenberry. She is also the daughter of Allison Dalton, not trying to discount that at all, but the two of us don’t run in the same circles. Granny, on the other hand ✋️, played a MAJOR role in my hopes and dreams across the past six years here.
The funniest thing about my relationship with Tammy is that for the first two full years, I only knew her as Addie’s grandmother 👵. It wasn’t until year three that someone pointed out WHO granny actually was / is.
Addie Greene has burdens to carry. First, there’s being the granddaughter of a person who has influence, and second, she is the best player on a team that has a number of holes 🕳 to fill. In her spare time( insert laughter here ), she needs to squeeze in being a teenage girl and enjoy her senior year of high school 🏫.
Other than that…..
I’m sure that there were some folks there on Sunday afternoon, that were wondering about what it was that Rick Nester was trying hard to discover ? When you flip over 50% of your lineup card and only have four upper-class players returning, a great coach has to try his best to mix and match to see what is going to give Greene, Laynie-Jo Leonard and Natalie Burress the best opportunity to have a successful final season.
I try my best to make as many people smile as possible on any given day, and on Sunday, I had my moment where I brought a smile to Miss Greene’s face and now let’s flip the script to the pairing up with little Chloe Smith.
The amount of weight that goes with caring about others in the manner that folks like Vickey Ritchie, Tammy Quesenberry, and I do is ginormous. That is not to say that we are the only three people who care, just the three in this story.
You can not fake caring and to the degree that Vickey cares about everyone inside her circle, well, it tugs at the heart strings. It is amazing 👏 to watch how many people walk through the door 🚪 at Hillsville Elementary School 🏫 on Sunday afternoons, and Vickey knows each and every one ➕️ the back story to the situation. She is willing to share that information with me but only when there is something I need to know.
Chloe Smith is a fun young girl 👧 who brings joy and laughter to those around her. She has become somewhat famous in our circle 🔵 because she made fun of the way Vickey said the word again. It sounded like aaaaaaaagin, and we are still laughing about it months later.
Now, her father 👨 is the absolute definition of a OneofUs.Care person. Everyone should truly CARE about their own child but it takes a special person to show the same love ❤️ for others. Trust me, Patrick Smith has that in SPADES ♠️.
It’s Kevin Burress like, the way that he watches out for everyone, not just Khloe. When the doors 🚪 open up on Sunday, neither Vickey nor I have any idea 💡 exactly who will walk through the door, we just know that we will do our very best to treat them all equally.
But in the transparent world in which I live in, I will state that I’m a better version of myself when Patrick is there to share his energy and love for others.
We need Tammy to be Tammy for as long as she can, for Addie Greene to be Addie Greene and enjoying do so. We need the positivity of Patrick Smith and the silliness of Chloe.
I mentioned that when I was going to thank everyone, it would include a number of people who others don’t like. I include myself in that category but I’ve never asked anyone to ” Like Me “, just to respect 🙏 my efforts for others.
Yesterday morning 🌄 , I prayed 🙏 for the strength 💪 to drive 🚗 the 25 minutes to The Hill, spend what turned out to be 11 hours, doing my absolute best to make every person that I crossed paths with felt welcomed.
The last decision to make was what shirt 👕 to pull out of the closet ???? Well, if you are praying 🙏 for what it takes to act like Tim Tebow and represent God at the same time, put on a shirt with Tebow’s name on your back.
Well, just to show you that is a cost of doing business, I type this with a fire 🔥 red ring around my neck. The good news is that I don’t have to appear in public until we host volleyball tomorrow night.
If you’re a fan of our ministry, say a prayer 🙏 for a speedy recovery. The flip side is if you’re not a fan, insert laughter 🤣 here, and then I will say a prayer for you.
There will be a story about the following, but each individually.
