I recently came across a story of a woman who had incurred $250,000 in student-loan debt, which has ballooned to $550,000 and is in collection. And no, she is not a doctor.

Back in the 1960s my folks decided to get me into the land business. So they purchased 10 acres of backwoods east Tennessee property for a few hundred bucks, put it in my name and let me pay the taxes on it. I'd never seen the property and had no interest in it, but didn't mind because those taxes only amounted to about ten bucks a year and hey, I was landed gentry. Pretty sweet for a kid.

I've been having some fun over the past several months volunteering as a docent at the Wamego Historical Museum.

My wife and I have been together nine years, and I have yet to spend one penny for Valentine's Day. And going forward, I intend to keep it that way.

I like Frank Martin, and think he has a chance to become the figurative king of Manhattan.

The phone rang the other evening and it was a pollster from the Centers For Disease Control. He wanted to ask my opinion about cigarettes.

These stories won't make anybody's list of ''biggest'' for 2009, but I liked them.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love to walk.

A package arrived in the mail the other day from a friend I had lost touch with nearly a quarter-century ago. He had read a column of mine about Bruce Springsteen, and then we found each other on Facebook. He sent me some CDs of a bootlegged Springsteen concert from 1988, the first one I ever saw. Suddenly, when those things started playing, I became a college sophomore once again, blown out of my mind by the power of the E Street Band at the Centrum in Worcester, Mass.

  My personal rating of the effectiveness of the rotating courtside billboard messages at K-State mens basketball games.