Hello again, Boots readers. I've missed you.

I'm planning to start a serial account of the motorcycle trip as soon as I stop sleeping 10 hours a night and waking up tired.

Here's a journal entry from Digby, Nova Scotia, July 9—two weeks and 3,000 winding back-road miles after I'd left in the middle of a deafening Michael Jackson drumbeat—says, "News still full of Michael Jackson. Don't waste your life in front of TV. Nothing ever happens."

What have I missed since I've been gone, from the world of communications?

I'm such a chronic over-estimator of my own talent that it's disorienting when I pleasantly surprise myself. But with a story about the Chicago Force women's football team that aired this morning on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty Eight show at 9:00 central time, I actually managed to do it.

Click here to have a listen (and see portrait of quarterback Samantha Grisafe by my brilliant photographer pal Bruce Bever).

All my thumbs and I are grateful to WBEZ producers Aurora Aguilar and Joe DeCeault for being so encouraging and for cleaning up after my technical messes. Most editors make rookies feel like rookies—and try as hard as they can to make veterans feel like rookies too. Not these guys.

And speaking of veterans and rookies, the Force's are all traveling to Seattle for round one of the Independent Women's Football League playoffs to face the mighty Majestics.

Force Family Win.

The schoolteacher wife is off for the summer, which means a major household reorg. Out of the domestic dust storm came my late mother's portfolio from her advertising copywriter days back in the mid-1960s.

How about this public-service ad headline, over a soft-focus photograph of a sleeping child: