South Plains College

I spent 2 1/2 years working at the radio station in Levelland, Texas-- April 1998-December 2000. KLVT, 1230 AM and 105.5 FM. I started out as half of the full-time staff, then I became the full-time staff when the gentleman who hired me took another job. I covered meetings, sold advertising (tried to), had the crime beat, anchored newscasts, hosted the morning show, etc.

Something else I did was cover ball games. It was the reason I applied in the first place. Levelland High School was my domain, and when the boss took off I did South Plains College basketball. My last year, winter 2000, I'd accepted a new job in Lubbock and did LHS and SPC games. Four nights a week, two games a night. Home games were a 30-minute commute. And the road games? High school was not too bad. A few games in Lubbock, but also trips to Canyon, Plainview and San Angelo (three hours). Junior college trips were a different matter. Two hours to Midland and Odessa, 1:45 to Big Spring, and two hours to Hobbs and Roswell, NM, plus a time change. Schools in Clarendon and Borger rounded out the conference (I would go to Clarendon but never traveled to Borger).

In addition, my job in Lubbock involved early mornings. That, combined with late-night drives home combined for some raggedness during the week. I remember the driving, the games, and the tired from those days vividly. It even got difficult to stay on the road sometimes.

After moving to Clay Center, I even had the chance to touch base with the women's coach at SPC, who'd brought his team to Salina for the national tournament. Seemed like he remembered me. There were even a few folks in the crowd who said someone that looked like me used to do their games.

Of course, all the success happened after I moved away from the area. First, to Oklahoma and then to Kansas. The men's team also went to nationals a few times, winning it all in 2008, and again tonight. Through the magic of the Internet, I watched the last nine minutes and found myself wandering back to Texan Dome, the road trips, and the miscues (of which there were several).

And the choices. I had the chance to go back to Levelland (since the job I took in Lubbock didn't work out), but I decided going back would constitute a step backward. I could've gone back to doing ball games and news, but ownership was new, I didn't know if I wanted to learn to work with them, and I didn't want to go back. They sank a lot of money into KLVT, and it would've been a better place to work than the place I started out with. the new people would've offered some structure and a real chance to learn. I never really got a chance to learn much under previous ownership, which was 1 1/2 hours away and with their own agenda.

It's truly one of the life choices I wonder about. I don't spend a lot of time second guessing-- wouldn't do any good.  I'm almost 1000 miles and 12 years away from those circumstances. And so many decisions have been made since then.

We Can Laugh Now, Vol. II

So anyhow, we continue with our travel story.

We got up at 6:00 the next morning and were on the road with a fast-food breakfast by 7:00. The trip into Alabama down I-20 was uneventful, save for having to drive through Tuscaloosa (our destination) to the airport in Birmingham to drop off our rental car, pick up a second rental, get our luggage, drive *back* to Tuscaloosa and check in to our hotel at about 3:00. We soon realized that the hotel we checked into was better than the one we left in Shreveport, but not by much.

So over the course of three days, not the four we'd planned on, we looked at houses and apartments, ate some outstanding food, did some church hunting, started to learn the territory, and met some really nice people.

Tuesday was the second travel day. We'd gotten off to a good start for our late morning flight and were well on our way back to Birmingham to return our car when we got a text message telling us our flight to DFW had already been canceled. Swell. Fortunately we were able to board a flight later that afternoon, so we only spent several hours waiting instead of an entire day.

The flight from Dallas, in and of itself, was uneventful. It left about 9:00, getting us back to KC about 11:30. Remember that noise we heard getting into the parking lot? Turns out two travel-weary people now had a flat tire to contend with. In the KCI parking lot at midnight. It's June in the midwest, so it's still steaming hot, and the sweat just poured off me as I worked to get things done. Someone driving out of the parking lot graciously shed some light on the matter, so that was very helpful.

We finally made it back to Ann's place in Manhattan about 2:00 the next morning, so I didn't get back to work in Clay Center until noon Wednesday.

We are able to chuckle about it now, but just about anything that could have gone wrong on that trip did. Wow.

We Can Laugh Now, Vol. I

Everyone has nightmare travel stories. Here's the first part of one of ours.

Ann and I were married in late June, 2009. About two weeks before the big day, we traveled to Tuscaloosa to find a place for our stuff. I think we knew already, but we learned once again that the shortest distance between two points isn’t always a straight line.

Our journey started from Kansas City—Lenexa, to be specific, where we spent the night with Ann’s mother. Our flight took off at 6:30, so we got an early start. I heard a thumping sound as we drove through the parking lot, but we paid it no attention. We didn’t have time, really. As we were boarding for our flight to Dallas, the gate attendant told us our flight from DFW was already delayed due to thunderstorms. Swell. But we figured it’d be an extra hour or two past our scheduled 11:00 am departure.

Boy, were we wrong about that one. They were already backed up with cancellations from storms the previous day, and the weather didn’t make things any easier. The terminal was filling up with stranded travelers and started to look like the news video you always see in winter. 11 am became 1:30, became 2:00, became 4:00, and so on. The original plan had us in Tuscaloosa about 2 pm for some house hunting, so the plan changed a lot, and in a big hurry.

Eventually we got in the ticket line, and after a few hours (everyone else had the same idea), we found out the earliest flight we could get was 36 hours away. Faced with the possibility of spending two nights in an airport, we called an audible. So we got on the phone with the airline’s travel agency and booked a car one way, and got out on I-20 about 6:00. Our stuff was booked through Birmingham, so all we had was our carry-on bags, so we stopped at a Wal-Mart for toothbrushes and underwear, sat down for really fast food, and got on our way, arriving at our motel in Shreveport at about 11:00 pm. We were on the highway talking to the same airline travel agency, so they have no idea the dump they’ve put us in. We didn’t even want to go back downstairs for a beer to help us unwind. We’d been up since 4:30 and went to bed and sleep almost immediately, hoping the voices on the other side of the wall would soon go away, and that there would be no gunfire.

Downton Abbey

Ann and I typically aren’t appointment TV watchers. News, House Hunters and The Daily Show/Colbert Report are about the only shows we watch religiously these days. We were also huge fans of The West Wing during its prime time run.

We’ve also become addicted to Downton Abbey, one of the series that runs on Masterpiece Classic on PBS. The First Lady is a huge Anglophile, and she says she was hooked before it even came to America from the BBC. It took me a season and a half to get there, but once I did, I enjoyed seeing how things really were (on both sides) underneath the façade, for the Crawley clan and for the downstairs staff.

I also like seeing the interactions between servants and aristocrats—seeing them speak to each other quite candidly, enlisting their aid, even seeking advice, despite the class difference. I find myself drawn to the characters. Rooting for the nice ones and hating on the evil people. Also seeing that there is a bit of yin and yang at work—that there is some good in the bad, and some bad in the good.

I’ve never been a real big soap opera guy, but I suppose this qualifies. 

What's kind of a bummer is that Downton only ran for eight episodes on PBS here in the states, and the current episodes that are airing now (season 3) on the BBC won’t make it here until the first part of next year. So we’re in for a bit of a wait, and January 2013 seems like a long time away.