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Showing posts from January, 2016

Adventures in Cross Country Skiing

Cross country skiing is somewhat of family tradition. It all started when our neighbors convinced my Grandmother (Ema the Great) that it was a fun way to exercise. We started borrowing skis from them, gliding through the pasture and woods behind their house. We had been doing this for a few years when Ema the Great went out with us one day and came around a corner. Corners at the bottom of a hill are tough if you don't hit the trails often, and she certainly didn't get out as often as us kids did. She was going down a slight decline and couldn't steer away from a small sapling. Eventually, and I use that word purposefully because she was going so slow, she hugged the tree, thus ending her cross country skiing career. I, however, had been bitten by the skiing bug. I helped teach my two of my cousins when they were just old enough to put on skis. When I had time, and in the days when metro Detroit used would get a decent amount of snow each winter, I would be on the trail

Where will listening to girl music take us? To more women's basketball games for starters

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Add caption A few weeks ago, The Kid implored me to listen to girl music. "What's girl music?" I asked. "It's music that has girls singing, Papa," she stated with a hint of disbelief that I didn't intuitively know that. So we started scanning FM stations, eventually finding girl music. The next day, I put on a playlist of Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Aaliyah to avoid frustration when we couldn't find appropriate music over terrestrial radio. I realized through this exchange that she is starting to figure out who she is in this world, and what makes her different from other people. I reflected on our conversation last month about why I have white skin and she has brown skin (hint, we are all made a little differently). I thought about my tendency to take her to sporting events that feature men, Detroit Tigers baseball, Detroit Red Wings hockey, and Oakland University Golden Grizzlies Men's basketball. Talking abou