When I was a little boy growing up on the prairie...

My son had a tendency to roll his eyes whenever I began a conversation with "When I was a little boy growing up on the prairie..." because he always knew it would followed by some improbable statement like "...we only had 2 1/2 TV channels in black and white and programming only ran from 6AM to 11PM." Or "... we didn't have pizza delivery." Or, "...I had to pay for my own car insurance and drive a car without air conditioning." (Insert copious eye rolling here.)

In The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson shares his experiences growing up in the most cosmopolitan of all Iowa cities, Des Moines. Anyone who was a kid in the 1950s will certainly see shades of his/her childhood in this very, very funny memoir by the author of A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburnt Country. This is Jean Shepard’s A Christmas Story – with a bite and some bad language.

I know a number of people in my family who will be getting it as a Christmas gift.

I took the weekend off to read Bryson and spend some time hiking with the LWW at Perot State Park near Trempaleau, Wisconsin. Beautiful country as you can see from the photo below taken from Brady's Bluff looking down the Mississippi River. This weekend is the last for awhile I'll actually have to relax since I am out speaking and consulting for much of the next three weeks.

Before you start feeling too sorry for me, know that the speaking will be for the EARCOS folks at their administrators' conference in Bangkok and the consulting will be for the  Instituto Educacional Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Lima, Peru. (And I am managing to squeak in a 4 day hike on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu - one of my life-long goals.)

So, I guess this is leading up to - don't expect many entries in the Blue Skunk for a while. 

And please, don't let anything exciting happen while I am away!

Comments

[Melissa Techman]

In my elementary school library this year, I got tired of telling kids, "quit trying to find a perfect pencil - just grab one- your classmates have bitten off half the erasers!". Now I tell them, "When I was growing up in Africa, we didn't HAVE erasers.
When we made mistakes we drew a horizontal line through it and wrote the correct word near it.". I have never told them about the inkwells in our desks, because I always thought it sounded too "when I grew up on the prairie"...