We monitor our Free Press Web site on a regular basis. I was checking the stories read each day since the Oct. 11 issue was posted and found that the story regarding the Hillsboro High School play and the controversial "n" word ranked at the top every day except for Friday, when it was trumped by the Hillsboro-Marion football game report, and Saturday, when it was second to the Tabor College game posting.
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I was trying to think of a word to describe our KU, KSU and KC Chiefs football teams after Saturday and Sunday and came up with "hapless," which is partly defined as follows:
Adj. 1. hapless-deserving or inciting pity; "a hapless victim"; "the shabby room struck her as extraordinarily pathetic"- Galsworthy; "piteous appeals for help"; "a pitiful fate"; "Oh, you poor thing."
Note that I didn't say "hopeless."
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This past weekend, I headed to my free newspaper association meetings in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I had never been to that city, but found that the people at the hotel where I stayed were extremely friendly and helpful-just as the reviews stated on the Internet.
Customer service was one of their strong suits and it showed.
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When I got there, I thought I smelled oatmeal. And for good reason. It is made right across the street from where I stayed.
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Does a scale have to be accurate when selling fudge?
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While visiting with one of the presenters at the conference in Iowa, I learned that he had played basketball at Sterling College back in the '80s. He knew all about Tabor College and the rest of the KCAC schools.
He lives in California now and said when he came to Kansas he had never visited our state until the day he drove in for enrollment from his home in California.
His last name is Dalton. He mentioned that some of the folks in Sterling thought he might be related to the Dalton gang.
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Sometimes when you get something for free it isn't really free.
I hauled two orders of pictorial books up to Iowa and, when I was unloading them there, two guys were standing there waiting to throw away two metal-frame tables. I said to myself that it would be cool if I could somehow get them loaded along with the cartons of books.
So we finagled them in there and off I went.
Here's where the trouble comes in. On my way back to Hillsboro, the tables were loose in the back of the truck.
When I was cruising through Kansas City, a chain of vehicles suddenly slammed on their brakes. Not just slamming them, but locking them up until white smoke was everywhere.
My load was jostled around in the process, and when I got home I discovered that one of the table legs had slid to the back and poked a hole in the back window of the topper. Now I'll have to add the cost of the repair to the price of my "free" tables.
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The traffic jam I mentioned above was only the first one I encountered in Kansas City. A second one on I-435 lasted for at least a half hour.
I thought I was going to have to breathe into a paper bag to keep from hyperventilating. How do city folks put up with all of the traffic? It would make me crazy.
