Week of the Tour Guide

Have a Brownie

Welcome to another Weekend Coffee Share.  It has been a full week, but a good one.  Grab what you’d like to drink and have a brownie, too.  They’re Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate brownies.  They’re really good (but super rich) when you add a few peanut butter morsels or, like we do, strawberries and Cool Whip.  YUM!

~ I went to a 50th surprise birthday party for a friend at the Jazz Kitchen here in Indy.  It was a great night with friends and music.  And, best of all, her husband did a good job planning, because she was completely surprised.  That’s always fun to see.

~ Wednesday morning, my oldest and I headed off to Evansville, IN, which is a little over three hours away, for a tour of University of Evansville.  The campus only covers a city block.  From the perimeter, it is not an impressive school.  However, when you get on the inside of the actual campus, it’s nice.  There are only 2,420 students, so it falls into the “small school” criteria my son has for possible schools to attend.

View From Hanover College

The tour was tailor-made for him.  Our tour guide did the tours on a volunteer basis, because she enjoys it and loves the school.  When we were done with the tour of the campus, she dropped us off at the theater building where a senior in the theater program took us on a tour of the building and answered the questions we had.  We left with a very positive impression of the school.

We spent the night in Louisville, KY, that night and headed off for Madison, IN, the next morning to see Hanover College.  It is also a small college and have a beautiful campus.  However, the tour guide who took us on the tour was clearly doing it as a job.  I could almost see the script in her hand as she spoke from memory.  After the entire tour, I can really only tell you that they have a business scholar program available for all majors (that seems quite impressive) and what types of food are served in each food area.  Pretty sad.  I’m sure the school has much to offer, but it wasn’t conveyed to us.  We left the school with no real idea what Hanover College was all about or if it would, in any way, be a fit for my son.  Sad.

~ Yesterday we went to a reunion of friends from my alma mater, Ball State University, at one of the friend’s houses that still lives near the university.  This is a wonderful group of people. The stories and memories from school, combined with our lives now, gave us plenty to talk about.  They make me laugh and I feel like I’m with family when I’m with them.  It made me think about our trip to U of E when the tour guide told us how one of the dorms has such bonding among the residents that they refuse to go anywhere else to live, even with it being the only dorm on campus without air conditioning.  It made me think of these friends of mine.  We all lived in the same dorm complex at some point during our time at BSU.  We became very close and the bond is still there.

Umm…what happened?

~ Lastly, I will tell you about my shoes (pictured above) and what happened to them.  We were walking into church today when I stepped up on the sidewalk leading into the church from the parking lot and it felt like I was stepping into a hole on my heel.  Odd, I thought, and then I stepped with the other foot and the EXACT same thing happened.  By the time I made it into the church (and decided to go barefoot the rest of the morning) they looked like this!!!  Walking out of the church, I saw that I had left a trail with every step leaving more and more of the shoe on the ground.  What are the odds of BOTH shoes falling apart in the exact same way at the exact same time?  I really liked the shoes and had worn them many times, so I know they had been made well to have lasted for several summers.  Not quite sure how or why it happened, but I had to share.

So, what did you do last week?  Did you go on any trips or have your shoes totally disintegrate at the same time?  I’d love to hear from you.

~ Joanna Lynn

(Weekend Coffee Share is part of the Part Time Monster blog.