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What’s that smell? It’s superstition and sports
Have you noticed that during March Madness superstition in sports seems to ramp up? People be crazy. Other people, of course, not me :) After watching Wichita State beat Gonzaga to advance to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament last weekend, Lee mentioned that the WSU T-shirt he was wearing had done its job – he had pulled it from “near” the dirty clothes to wear Saturday night because when he wore it Thursday, the Shockers had also won their game. {Seinfeld fans: I think this is the same as the pastry that George ate after it was “hovering” in the trash} Lee’s done this before – in fact,…
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Tripping: A safari museum in Kansas? Yep!
I’m starting to add some of my past published travel articles to my writing and photography portfolio. Here’s one that was published in The Wichita Eagle several years ago. I didn’t take photos, we used photographs the museum provided. Martin & Osa Johnson were unlikely world adventurers from southeast Kansas. The child-free couple explored a world that was inaccessible to so many in the 1920 and 1930s. Their photography, film and writing inspired and educated many who would never experience these places and people first-hand. Today, their material offers a glimpse at culture and wilderness that has since vanished. It’s very cool to see their influence in modern pop culture, too: a clothing line…
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Admitting when you’re wrong
So Lee and I have both received some texts in the past 12 hours since Wichita State beat No. 1 Gonzaga to advance to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA tourney. They say the same thing: am I going to admit to Lee that I was wrong when I wrote this in a post earlier this year: I contend that the best Missouri Valley Conference team would not have an easy game against the middle-of-the-pack teams in the big-boy conferences and would certainly lose to the top teams in those conferences. I love going to Wichita State University games but as I said earlier, overall the level of play in…
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The influence of an aunt
I realized something recently that I really should have realized years ago – I have always had a role model of a child-free woman right here in my own family! My Aunt Linda, my mom’s sister and the woman I was named after, was child-free. I’m not sure how I missed this until now…other than the fact that our situations are quite different. While I’m child-free by choice, my aunt was child-free by chance. And thanks to my Uncle Skip, she had a six-pack of stepdaughters. So any impact on my decision to not have children would have been subconscious. We never discussed it; in fact, I don’t know the…
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MeLinda POV: you’re going the wrong way
First of all, thank you to Lee for writing the first guest post here at Next Door To Normal. I didn’t ask him to write it. In fact, we hadn’t talked about this mishap on our road trip until he asked me to read a draft of his post. I was saving that conversation for the next therapy session :-o It was interesting to know what was going through his mind and so I decided to share my point of view during this same portion of our 2,500-mile road trip from Kansas to Mexico and back. Lee is the driver on trips and I am the navigator. We settled into…