I literally couldn’t watch the Eagles 2^nd and goal from the one yard line series that cost them the game last night.  I had such a sick feeling in my stomach about it that I went upstairs to do some work and kept hitting “refresh” on my ESPN.com scoreboard to blunt the impact of the inevitable.

But the rest of the day before that was terrific.  In the morning I helped Reverend Christopher Bullock break in his brand new church on Route 9 in New Castle.  He is going to do wonderful things for the community from that church, and it is a beautiful facility.  I then hopped over to Bethel AME church just in time to join Reverend Beaman for a great service he does once a year to send off the church’s children into a new school year.  And then up to the AIDS walk in Rockford Park.  I called our supervolunteer Steve Burke to tell him I was running late, and he responded “I have to call you back, I’m on top of a fire truck ladder cutting down an AIDS ribbon.”  Not exactly what we had asked him to do for me.  I was very afraid and had no idea what he was talking about until I read the newspaper today and learned that he had saved the day when the event organizers’ effort to unveil a record-sized AIDS ribbon were temporarily snarled by the Rockford Park tower.

I ran home to take the Denn boys to the library—a painful exercise because we had renewed our Clifford and Bob the Builder treasuries as many times as the library system allows and had to bring them back—and then off to the Pincus’ house for our much-vaunted fundraiser.  And what a night—we had so many people show up that we had to move the party into the back yard, and the donations exceeded our best-case projections.  We also had a terrific surprise visitor: future Governor Jack Markell.  I suggested to Bob Pincus that we offer anyone willing to give another $1,000 on the spot the right to throw Jack in the pool, but he nixed that idea.

After such a great day, a competent Eagles performance would probably been asking for too much.