Mankato Free Press gets new blog!

Action shot of my son.

My daughter, Emma, in the middle.

I'm the world's worst organizer. So a few weeks ago I decided to try pulling my organizational skills out of the abyss by setting up a Google calendar. And wow, this thing is amazing. It lets you plug in everything! Baseball games, Lancer parades, meetings and appointments -- you name it, I'm scheduling it.

So, to get ahead of the game -- which I NEVER, EVER DO -- I plugged all the dates of my daughter's inaugural season with the Lancers marching band, and all the baseball tournaments for my son's 11AA Mankato Royals baseball team. I was so proud of myself. I actually spent time planning! I got downright giddy when I realized the Lancer website has a Google calendar as well, and you can add the Lancer events on their calendar to my calendar with just one click!

I probably planned and scheduled for an hour that day, getting prouder and prouder of myself as I went along. And then the folly of my ways struck me. As I looked at all this planning I'd done, it finally hit me.

"Holy crap!" I probably said to myself. "I'm going to be busy as hell this summer."

In case you guys are wondering (and I can't imagine why you would be,) this first blog post represents the start of a new digital attempt to connect with our readers. I used to cover higher education and wrote a blog called COLLEGE! for a couple of years. Now, after a little restructuring in our newsroom, I'm no longer covering  higher education. Instead, I'm covering personal and community wellness and nonprofits. It's kind of our effort to make sure we're giving our readers what they want. And lately you've been telling us you're interested in more health/fitness/wellness stuff. I welcome the challenge.

This blog will be a free-flowing journal that hits at the community wellness side of things. It'll be much more of an all-encompassing look at family and free time through the eyes of my own little posse.

For the next few weeks, it'll be all baseball and Lancers as we chase our kids around from activity to activity. That calendar looks darn scary. But really, I'd have it no other way.