I used to play a lot of basketball in my life and I used to coach a lot of basketball in my life, and since COVID and my two knee surgeries, I've been out of the game. And it just so happened there was a practice over winter break in my hometown, and I went and saw a few old friends of mine there, former teammates and former players I coached. And I just thought while I was there in my street clothes that maybe I could shoot a couple of flat footage shots as I recover from knee surgery, still rehabilitating, etcetera. And the shots felt pretty good, and I felt good enough at some point, where I was getting a little warm in my jeans and whatever else, that I was like, "Gosh, you know what? I have some shoes and some shorts and a shirt in my car." And I went ahead, and I went out to my car to get my basketball stuff, and I came back in and over two hours -- this is a very drawn-out story, I understand -- but over two hours I began to try a little bit more and more. And I actually had my first shootaround in probably two years, which is a huge deal for me. I still have a weak knee, and there's still things that I can't do, I'm not close to playing in an actual game. But I couldn't believe that I could actually shoot jump shots, not just flat-footed jumpers, but I can actually bend my knees with really just soreness in the way that like my left knee has not been used in a while. Not pain where I had my surgery per se. Was able to bend my knees and rise up and, and shoot, and it felt good. Somehow my shot hasn't left me. I know that some people might say it's like riding a bike, that you never forget, but I figured there'd be some rust involved, but my shot was strangely on. And for most of the practice, I stayed to like mid-range jump shots, from 10 to 18 feet away. I didn't want to mess with three-point shots, I figured it would take too much lift and explosion, but toward the end, my friend kind of encouraged me to give that a shot, and I can shoot three-pointers…

We hosted an event at our house a couple summers ago, and it's a little bit hard to exp- explain, but it was essentially a tournament for this really obscure sport, and then there's a lot of like secondary activities. And one of the other activities was a new talent show. So it was announced maybe a month before the event, which was a weekend thing. And the rules were it was a talent show, but it had to be something that you learned or taught yourself basically in that month. So you know people did like stand-up and played instruments that they had just learned how to play, and my husband, what, what he wanted to do was tap dancing. And, as a joke, he signed up one of our other friends to do tap dancing. Not with him, separately. And sort of the whole month, my husband had the intention of learning, like, a little bit about tap dancing, he ordered the shoes and stuff, and he just kind of never got around to it. He was busy finalizing details for the event. And by the time the event happened, I remember looking over and seeing him as people are pulling into the driveway, in the corner of our garage with a YouTube video pulled up, trying to learn one or two steps of tap dance. So anyway, this friend that he signed up, we get to the day of the talent show, and he goes first, they wear the same size, so he borrowed the shoes, and he does amazing. Like, I'm not kidding when I say genuinely almost borderline professional tap dancer: like, so good, amazing, to the point that I could not -- and still kind of will not -- believe he is not. I keep calling him the "Secret Tapper,” like I think that he had years and years of tap dance training as a child or something. Like, I just can't fathom that he genuinely made that up on the spot. And then it was like extra -- it was highlighted how much, how good he was -- underscored, I should say -- by the fact that my husband went shortly after and did not tap that way. He was not a "Secret Tapper.” So comparing the two it was beyond amazing because the friend of ours learned that day of the, of the show…

The first time I met Jimmy Carter, he was governor of Georgia, and I was at that time a graduate student at the University of Georgia. This was 1973, and it was a Saturday afternoon. I was over in the science building of campus doing homework on the computer and I came down the elevator, and as I was walking through the lobby of the science building that late Saturday afternoon, I saw a crowd of people. And there was Governor, then Governor, Jimmy Carter. He was there in the lobby to dedicate a skeleton of a dinosaur that had been dug up in south Georgia and donated to the science department at the University of Georgia. Before I left the building, I had the honor of shaking Governor Jimmy Carter's hand. The second time I met Jimmy Carter was when he was the Democratic nominee for the presidency. This was in the summer of 1976. At that point, I was a graduate student at Penn State University and I was visiting my parents in my hometown of [town name]. Because it was July 1976, and the Democratic Convention had already been held and Jimmy Carter had been nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, but, because the Republican Convention had not yet been held, and it was not yet clear whom Jimmy Carter was running against, he had a time out. And he was down in Plains, Georgia. And that Sunday afternoon, he was playing baseball. He was pitching for the Secret Service team. And they were playing against another government team, I can't remember which, but before the game began, those of us who had gone to witness the baseball game that afternoon got to shake Jimmy Carter's hand.