1. I had a lot of fun today preparing food and getting ready to serve cocktails a day ahead of family dinner. Details to come after dinner is served.
2. Kellogg's most recent High Holy Days concluded tonight with the Saturday Elks Crab Feed. The Crab Feed is so popular that it's held on both Friday and Saturday, filling the upstairs and the downstairs of the Elks Club and raising money for the Elks and for the ROTC program at Kellogg High School. I brought four plastic shopping bags and left with three and half bags of shells and will soon get my crab stock production line in operation. Tonight, my friends asked me to make a big batch of chowder with the crab stock I make so we can have a dinner party. All of my cooking insecurities rushed through me, my mouth went dry, butterflies flew in my stomach, but I agreed we should do it and I think I might even put my big boy pants on and help the others organize such an event.
3. Going to the Crab Feed meant that I didn't see the bulk of the Zags loss to BYU nor the Ducks mens team's thrilling overtime victory over Arizona. I caught the very end of the Zags game when I returned home and read up on it in the middle of the night (Charly and I were up together every 90 minutes between about 11:30 pm and 5:30 am).
BYU is a sharp shooting team. They have the conference's strongest and most deft center in the pivot, Yoeli Childs -- and, from what little of the game I saw and from the highlights I watched on ESPN, Childs is exactly the kind of player I've wished Gonzaga faced more often in their conference, but no other such players are in the WCC. Childs scored 28 points and snared 10 rebounds. Childs and the two primary Cougar snipers, TJ Haws, and Jake Toolson, combined to score 61 of BYU's 91 points (Zac Seljaas added 12) in the Cougs' resounding 91-78 victory.
The hope for us Zags fans was that this was what is often referred to as a "good loss". What did the Zags learn about themselves tonight? Will they carry those lessons forward and be an improved team because of what happened tonight? If they do, yes, it was a good loss, albeit, as I could see on their faces and their bowed heads as they left the court, a painful one.
I won't get into it much here, but Baylor's loss to Kansas today had a similar feel to it, for me. It was a closer game (Kansas won 64-61), but similar to the Zags, Baylor was dominated by a strong Kansas player inside, Udoka Azubuike, and if Baylor learned something from this game about how to deal with Azubuike when the two teams will almost surely meet again, then they will have turned a very disappointing loss today into a good loss.
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