John Sheda

In case you haven’t noticed already, The News-Herald and my staff and I are retiring “The Way I See It,” but only the title change. The column will be hanging around but with a new name–“Take A Mulligan.” This is a golfing reference where if one hits a bad shot, he or she can simply “Take A Mulligan,” or simpler said, a “Do-Over.” Very seldom in life do we get “mulligan’s” but we do here in this column. Mistakes, errors and slip-ups are not only accepted but often encouraged. So when you see a spelling mistake or a grammatical error or anything out of the ordinary, just let me “TAKE A MULLIGAN,” ok??

Well, last week as you saw in the paper, the Shedas were in Chicago to take in a couple of baseball games between the Yankees and the White Sox. We saw two games and the Bronx Bombers won both games. In fact one game lasted 13 innings. My interest stayed high but the members of my family were slowly getting tired of baseball. Finally after the vote went against me, we left one inning early. I am ashamed to admit that but, alas, ’tis true.

Besides the ball games, we enjoyed visiting some of the attractions in Chicago. Sort of! I was a little concerned that we might not find places to spend our money on but soon found out that was not a problem. Guess what we spent the most money on????? PARKING! Yes, paying to park our vehicle seemed to be our biggest expense. Think about it. Every time we wanted to go somewhere, we always had to park the car, right? And every time we parked the car, it cost anywhere between $25 and $35. Navy Pier had an interesting parking rule; Thirty bucks for 24 hour parking!! As we left, I questioned the attendant wondering how many people actually stayed at the Navy Pier for twenty-four hours. We stayed for about two. Crazy!!

We rented a condominium and had a lot of fun as a family but buy the time the group buys all the groceries we THINK we’re gonna need for the week, a lot of money was spent. Everyone has there own tastes and preferences. For example, take coffee. I like simple, cheap regular coffee. Deb has to have decaf coffee and flavored creamers. The two daughters and one granddaughter like those speciality coffees and again their flavored creamers, so drinking coffee in the mornings was simply done in shifts. Someone suggested we buy several coffee makers but thankfully we didn’t go along with that suggestion.

Some like pop, some like water, some like flavored water, some even like health drinks and those that liked pop, liked different kinds of pop. Snacks were the same thing. But we did have fun. Deb and I greatly enjoyed our family and we had a great time. Heck, we might even do it again in ten or twenty years!!

Well, gang, that’s about it. Next week I am going to solve the NFL Protesting The Flag problem. You won’t wanna miss that.

Enjoy the weekend and remember to “Take A Mulligan” every now and then. This is John and my address is jsheda@indytel.com or call at 319.327.4640.