There is life after basketball, I realized again. More time to catch up on reading and other things.

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I went in to the Et Cetera Shop last week and bought back the pink purse Nancy owned way back in the early days. It was only 25¢ plus tax.

I was wrong in my column, though. She didn't get it when she was a senior in high school. She was actually a freshman.

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We are now posting all of the legal notices we print in the Free Press Extra and Free Press on our Web site. If you aren't already bookmarked for the Free Press site, the address is located at the bottom of the front page each week.

Putting the legals on the Web makes them searchable. If you can remember a key word, you'll most likely find what you're looking for.

Actually, the same goes for most articles that appear in our newspaper. You can go to the "advanced search" area and type in a key word or words and find what you were needing to know.

We use it a lot ourselves for research.

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The cost of shopping at home keeps getting cheaper as the price of gasoline continues to rise.

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I was in Wichita Friday, placing our book about the Hillsboro Mennonite Brethren Church fire and the "Hillsboro's Heritage" photo books in bookstores. Every store buyer I spoke with was keenly interested in both of them and each store took some for inventory.

When I went into Borders (east) I discovered that Robert Beattie, the author of the new book on BTK, was just leaving with a handful of his books. I recognized him from television and asked him if he would wait in the parking lot while I went in and purchased a copy so I could have it autographed. He agreed and signed it as "#4."

Then we got to talking about the book and the people I knew who were involved in the early news coverage of the murders back in the 1970s. He said he had extensively interviewed Ron Loewen, who grew up in Hillsboro, and Cathy Henkle, who was the reporter who broke the story in the Wichita Sun in December 1974. She is now the sports editor of the Seattle Times and Ron works for a company that buys TV stations all over the country.

It was kind of a surreal day. I also ran into the first editor of the Wichita Sun and his wife at Watermark Books just before going to Borders.

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We have some nice older oak chairs that we got from my parents that are now in need of recaning. Some are torn so instead of fixing them we have just put them away.

I decided to do something about the problem so did a "chair caning" search on Google. I came up with a site that has everything I need to get the job done.

But before I buy from someone I don't know, I will check with our local suppliers for the materials since I now know what I need.

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I don't know about anyone else but I kind of miss the pot pies and TV dinners I ate when I was a kid. My wife said she had plenty of those too when she was growing up and we wouldn't be getting any of them. It's probably like bologna. When you've had enough, it's enough.