We’re back from visiting Vanessa’s relatives in Kansas. We had a nice time getting to see them. A long car trip goes well with three drivers taking two hour shifts. I’d never been to Kansas..very hot and humid. I’ve never seen so much corn and soy beans. Uncle Jerry has an impressively large CD collectionÂ…several hundred. Aunt Toots makes a mean Italian meal. Cousin Jake plays a mean ukelele. Sean enjoyed running through their maze-like stair-filled house.
I learned (the hard way) what a chigger is. It’s the larva of a kind of mite that lives in the grass waiting for someone named Nathan Alter to come through. It then pounces on Nathan Alter, heads for hard-to-reach spots (like behind the knees), and turns him into Blister City. They’re so tiny that you never actually see them, but the results are quite evident. Oddly, Sean pranced through all the same places I did but didn’t get bitten once by anything.
Some trivia about Lawrence, Kansas where we were visitingÂ…start up Google Earth and zoom all the way into the default position. TV hates Lawrence, KS. It was nuked in The Day After and Jericho. Their college radio station ain’t bad. (listen here)