January 1-4

2018 began (somewhat appropriately) on a Monday, I marked the occasion with lunch at the mall and the traditional college football games on TV. On Tuesday we were back at McCaskey, the Red Tornado hosted Coatesville in a non-league matchup. From the very start it's been apparent that this season is about building blocks as the club's non-league mark fell to 0-5 with an 85-77 loss. This is a young team as varsity squads go but one thing we saw on this night was its heart, in the third quarter we trailed by as many as nineteen but the guys fought to the end and never folded their tents. This is the whole point of playing a difficult non-league schedule: some teams play easy opposition, pad their record and look better than they really are while JPM schedules the toughest teams it can get, takes its lumps and (hopefully) learns from the experience. We had three players in double figures on this night as Makai Ortiz continued his emergence with 17, Jahsaan Greaves added 13 and Brian McKenzie checked in with 11. The boys are back on the floor on Friday the 5th in league play where they are 2-2 and very much in the running for the postseason with ten games to play. On Wednesday Jenny and I had our usual midweek lunch date, overnight into Thursday we had another helping of the white stuff. There was a major storm system moving up the coast which was expected to reek havoc further north, around here we got about an inch or two of the light powdery variety. Extreme temperature and wind chill warnings were up all over the area, I got my morning run finished and was glad to be home. All day long I kept receiving internet greetings for something that happened in 1957 but I'm long since past caring about it, to me January 4 is just another day. Take care, thanks for reading.