New Shoes in the Rain

Back from another brief business trip, again to the Nashville area.  And instead of my usual pattern, I overnighted in Bowling Green, a city a bit less than an hour north of the metro Nashville area, so that I could join a friend and take in a baseball game (nice ballpark in Bowling Green, by the way). Then I did something very different from my usual travel patterns.  I had noticed on several recent trips to Nashville that the I-65 corridor between Elizabethtown (where I merge onto this highway) and the "cave area" of Kentucky (home of Mammoth Cave and other natural attractions) is rife with extensive construction due to lane additions to accommodate the massive amount of traffic on this road.  My friend from the Elizabethtown area explained that this has been in the "ten-year plan" for about twenty years, but, no matter, when it's completed, it will be much safer and better able to accommodate all of the cars and trucks zooming north and south. Anyway, I s...

As you likely remember, our son and his wife recently became the proud parents of a bouncing baby boy.  So now that he is the father of a son, I expect him to go through some of the same stuff I have in being his stepfather.  The interesting thing is that for every real experience we share, it creates a mental image of something else that I either wish I could do or would like to do with him. To wit: My beloved Cincinnati Reds (as with most every major league baseball team) operate a "dream week" fantasy camp, allowing regular guys like me the chance to spend a week playing baseball as though he were a member of the Reds.  I love baseball very much and still regret that I didn't get to play more organized ball when I was a kid.  Not that I was that good, I just loved it and still do. Anyway, for the last twenty years or so I've had this recurring dream that I got to go to the Reds' fantasy camp, but in the last five or more, that dream has included my son go...

With apologies to a friend of mine who once uttered the title phrase to me after a day of outdoor painting in extreme heat.... But it kind of fits today.  I don't have any great travel stories to tell, no famous people I've met.  The new grandson is growing and doing well, parents and big sister are adjusting to life as a family of four, so that's all good. But me?  Well, I said it earlier.  I got nothing. Oh, I've been fighting a respiratory infection or something that's caused me to cough and blow quite a bit, but I think I've just about overcome it.  My wife wanted me to go to the doctor for it after spending a tough weekend a couple of weekends ago, but I felt I was making progress and declined to go.  After all, I was going for a physical the following Friday (6/3) and if I wasn't better by then, well, I'd already be at the doctor's office, so why go twice? Pragmatism seldom trumps a spouse who's tired of someone coughing incessantly...

Wow, a great deal of stuff has appeared in the media over the past week or more that deserves comment.... First of all, what's Sarah Palin got up her sleeve?  Crashing the "Rolling Thunder" biker rally in Washington (the organizers were very specific in saying that Palin was NOT invited), visiting the National Archives (what, to check to see if the Constitution is still there?), then on to New York for dinner with the Trumps and on to New Hampshire.  And at each stop she effectively tweaks the collective nose of the press by saying she still isn't sure if she's running for president in 2012. Suppose the GOP isn't all that happy with the choices it's seeing....a well-heeled Iowa Republican fundraiser apparently had dinner last night with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in an effort to persuade him to mount a campaign in 2012. I wish 'em luck. Luck also to Jim Tressel, who completed one of the longest and most blatantly hypocritical stints at ...