This year the GenCon Game Fair -- home to everything games from cards to board games to role-playing to electronic and online gaming -- got an early start with "Trade Day" in a downtown Indianapolis hotel Wednesday afternoon.

The convention proper starts today (Thursday) across the street at the Indiana Convention Center.

Trade Day activities were for those in the game industry -- game makers, distributors and retailers -- as well as for educators and librarians. (Press like me get to tag along.)

Until I began high school, I’d never lived more than three years in one place.
My father was in the Air Force and so every few years my family would move from one military base to the next.
By the time I moved to Indiana at age 15, I’d lived in California, Texas and Louisiana – not to mention Japan and England.
So I guess it’s not surprising that I love to travel. I’m fascinated by history and cultural differences.
In this blog I'll share personal travel experiences: both cool things I've seen on the road and mistakes I've made along the way.

I was back at Eastern Hancock on Monday to visit with coach Kyle Johnson and a couple of the players for my season preview story. (Check out Thursday's Daily Reporter for our eight-page football preview section.) I brought my 5-month-old son with me, and I was hoping that he’d sleep through the whole thing.

Yeah, right.

We often think of our pets as little people who just happen to be furry and walk on all fours. But when you have feelings for an animal companion, has it become more companion than animal?

You don't see too many good old-fashioned fairy tales on the big screen these days. Hardly any, in fact. You know, a story in a magical fantasy setting that starts "once upon a time" and finishes with "happily ever after."

My mom once told me a story about my dad’s Aunt Beulah.

She used to set her oven timer, and then she’d tell everybody, “When the timer goes off, we’ll go to church.” Or eat dinner. Or visit relatives. Whatever. The point is that she wouldn’t let anybody do anything before the timer went off, even if everybody was ready to go/eat early. So they’d sit around and wait for the timer to go off.

There are a lot of things I look forward to every summer. Baseball games and ballpark food, playing ping pong in the garage, a cold beer while listening to the Cardinals, playing golf with Daily Reporter photo editor Tom Russo.

Another thing I look forward to: college football preview magazines. I pick up two or three of them every year, and I spend the next few weeks reading every single word. I grabbed the Athlon Sports Big 10 preview last week. I always read that one first, in part because my friend Bob Asmussen (who named his boy after Hank Aaron) is a contributor.

I can't help but wonder if competitive cloggers from other parts of the country tremble when they hear "Greenfield" or "Hancock County, Indiana," judging by all the championship hardware I see on pictures that cross my desk. There's a couple more Junior Olympians in today's (8-7-07) Daily Reporter.

I'm noticing I have been including a couple of upcoming activities in the "Happenings" column. Usually, the Friday Lifestyle "Town Crier" has the upcoming events, while "Happenings" on Tuesdays concentrates on things that have already happened.

A couple more upcoming events to add to the mix:

WW II planes at Mt. Comfort
From the press release: A World War II B-24 bomber will land about 2 p.m. Monday at Mount Comfort Airport. Besides the B-24, visitors will be able to climb inside it, a Boeing B-17 Flying fortress and a North American B-25.
The airplanes will be on display from 2 to 5 p.m. Monday, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, and 9:30 a.m. to noon Wednesday. It's part of the Wings of Freedom Tour of 130-city nationwide appearances, sponsored by The Collings Foundation.

Welcome!
And with this entry I launch this copy desk’s intrusion into the blogosphere. I’ll be posting here a few times a week to add my observances regarding the sections of the Daily Reporter that I work on.