lots of connectivity

Take six first cousins of mine... their 19 children and 14 grandchildren (eek!), a few SOs, plus my aunt and uncle and my five... plus early on, my grandmother... and that's a large cookout and family gathering. My kids went from knowing a handful of same-aged relatives to lots in one afternoon... and that's just part of my mother's side. =)

Exhausted from last night, we started off today slacking, sleeping in until 8am. Then swimming and a workout after breakfast... catching up on email and such... getting ready to meet my Aunt Carol and her husband Mike at a nearby restaurant for lunch, which went well.

Shrieks from the bathroom... patgreene is holding the sink off of the floor. It was an under-counter mounted sink whose brackets had worked loose... she caught it before it could land on the tile floor and shatter. I went to the hotel... their maintenance guy is out on Mondays (?), so they comped the room and moved us to a larger one upstairs.

After lunch, we visited Topeka HS and then the Brown v Board of Education National Historical Site... the differences in accommodations between the formerly-white collegiate-gothic campus and an old formerly-black school were apparent. I think that it really sank in for James...

( Photos mostly of relatives... )

huh?

I was checking on the boys, who were eating breakfast in the hotel's small dining area... there was a TV playing some infomercial on "the Greatest 150 Country Songs of All Time"... as I left the room to head back to finish packing, I heard... "Islands in the Stream." Not the Dolly Parton duet version, but ... the BeeGees. I'm not terribly pop-culture-literate, but that still seemed wrong, somehow...

Time to leave Topeka and head to Chicago tonight.