Greetings my friends! Tonight I get to present to you my first Thursday Rundown of 2015. A New Year’s resolution of mine was to make these weekly blog posts even shorter than they were in 2014.

Southern Cold – For the first time since I moved to Myrtle Beach, I was cold today. Arctic air managed to find its way down South and made temperatures plummet into the low twenties. Although these freezing temperatures lacked the crushing winds and inches of snow I became accustomed to out west, I definitely didn’t feel toasty walking outside this morning. Now you can imagine that if I thought it was cold the locals really found it arctic-challenging. Tips were distributed on how to bundle up, schools were delayed, and the local news stations reported exclusively on the frigid temperatures. My co-workers made every attempt to stay inside. Social media was flooded with people aghast at the conditions outside. However, I will take this cold over the cold back home in a heartbeat …even with the unusual temperatures the sun still shined brightly all day long.

It was cold today but the sun shined brightly the whole time.

Bring on the National Championship! – The College Football Playoff is the best thing ever. New Year’s Day was an incredible day of watching football. Even better, the result that came about from the two semi-final matchups justified the long, tough battle it took to bring about this playoff. By now it is well-documented; if we had another year of the BCS it would have been an undeserved, travesty of a contest between Alabama and Florida State. Instead, we get a true national championship game as Oregon and Ohio State will square off. Look for Oregon to roll as the Pac-12 asserts itself as the best football conference in the nation.

Leave Your Legacy – At many universities you can find certain walkways that are paved with personalized bricks commemorating alumni, donors, and fans. With all the brand new buildings going up around Coastal Carolina University, the opportunity to create such a spot on campus here was made possible. The “Alumni Walk” in front of our recently renovated Atheneum Hall Alumni Center will soon be paved with personalized bricks from the CCU community. A wonderful way to donate back to my place of employment while also leaving my mark, I purchased a brick yesterday. I may or may not have pushed my personal brand when I decided the text I wanted my brick to be engraved with. When the bricks are installed next month I will let you all know what I went forward with.

Pretty soon this walkway will be paved in bricks with one of them containing my special text.

Social Media Promo to End the Day – The Harlem Globetrotters will be on campus this Sunday. I requested and was granted some free passes from the group’s marketing director to give out over social media. For today’s Facebook contest I simply asked our audience to tell me why they wanted to go to the game. In two hours I received 60 responses from people pleading their case. Most of the pleas came from parents wanting to treat their son or daughter, thus making my job pretty hard. In the end though I chose a woman who recently had her father pass away as he left a Coastal football game. She stated that going to the event on Sunday afternoon will remind her of when her dad took her to the Globetrotters many years ago. Enjoy the game with your daughter, Mandy.

This was the post that I put up today for the chance to win Globetrotter tickets.

Ending Quote – I want to end the first rundown of the year by highlighting the advice that was given today in my Life’s Little Instruction calendar. Every now and then I need to remind myself that satisfying the minimum won’t enable me to achieve greater things in life. I need to do a better job of pushing myself more. In 2015 I want to make a conscious effort to overachieve in all situations. 

This is some good advice for me to remember in 2015.

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Have a wonderful night, everyone. I am happy to report that this has been a good week. I didn’t know how it would go after having two weeks off for the holidays but I hopped right back into the swing of things. I will have a lot of energy to take on Friday tomorrow and I hope you do too. Don’t Blink.