10 Book Recommendations

Lorne, SNL, Susan Morrison, True and False Magic, Stutz, Dickens and Prince, Hornby, Heartland, Larry Bird, Keith O’Brien, The Uncool, Cameron Crowe, American Predator, Maureen Callahan, La Belle Sauvage, Phillip Pullman, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, Mildred Fish Harnack, Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir, Louis XIV, Josephine Wilkerson

10 Books we Recommend. Click to listen to the episode.

Bill’s 5 Book Recommendations 

  1. Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison 
  • Michaels’ father died when he was 14: Michaels often invokes William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, in which the narrator, reflecting on losing his mother as a child, says, “The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.”
  • This reminds me of a lot of scripts including Ted Lasso: Bob Schiller, the middle-aged Lucy writer, had also become a close friend. Michaels memorized the comedy rules Schiller dispensed: In every script, there has to be a joke every three lines. Also: The audience has to see a performer’s eyes.
  • He thinks nothing of scheduling a meeting at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday.
  • There wasn’t time to overthink or get too precious. “I realized that to get better, you’ve got to get up to bat,” he said. The show was hammy, the sketches ticking along to Catskills rhythms; Teri Garr was a regular, just before her breakout role in Young Frankenstein. The pay was $500 a week.
  • The book alternates chapters as in a chapter from a week on the show in which Jonah Hill is the host. It’s the Monday meeting with the host. And then the next chapter is from early in Lorne’s life. 
  • Click here for our Amazon link to check out the book. 
  1. True and False Magic by Phil Stutz 
  • When my coach was bearing down on me, I got the idea to use a mantra, though I didn’t know that word at the time. I would silently say heart to connect to my courage, and I would repeat it over and over again.
  • Do Something Creative: It doesn’t matter what type of activity you choose; anything creative will wake the unconscious up really nicely. It doesn’t matter if what comes out is shit—keep going. It’s like activating a certain muscle.
  • So writing about what you think is going wrong with you is good, even if you’re wrong.
  • Click here for affiliate link. 
  1. Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby 
  • Both artists were incredibly prolific: Sign o’ the Times included sixty-three songs that weren’t on the original album.
  • It was the two men’s production that linked them for Hornby: When I read about the boxed set, I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way.
  • Dickens had to pay the bills and sometimes wrote and finished two novels at once. Shakespeare had the same situation: In 1599, Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It. Oh, and Hamlet. In the twentieth or twenty-first century, the creation of any one of those might have resulted in a great deal of self-consciousness and second-guessing. Jesus Christ, how the hell do I follow up Hamlet? But Shakespeare had a theater company to pay for.
  • Click here for the affiliate link. 
  1. Heartland by Keith O’Brien 
  • The intermittent time between Indiana and Indiana State: In late February, just two weeks after his father’s death, he returned to the basketball court and began playing for a new team: Hancock Construction. The team was out of Mitchell,
  • The writer doesn’t tip toe around Bob Knight: John Wooden, a good guy, won his last championship in 1975 and rode off into that great basketball sunset at age 64 with 10 NCAA titles to his name and with three standing ovations from the crowd. Bobby Knight, a bad guy, won in 1976 with an undefeated Hoosiers team that could have included Larry Bird, if Bird hadn’t hitchhiked home from Bloomington a year and a half earlier.
  • A note from John Wooden to Coach Hodges after the loss to Michigan State: “I am sure that you are disappointed,” Wooden told Hodges, “but you conducted yourself most admirably. Disappointment may be quite painful, but it is only a temporary thing and as the great statesman, Winston Churchill, said, ‘Victory is never final and defeat is never fatal.’ ”
  • Click here for the affiliate link. 
  1. The Uncool, A Memoir by Cameron Crowe 
  • There are lots of quotes from Crowe’s mom in this story: Watching the evening news, she would study Richard Nixon with squinting eyes and a deep sense of history. To her, American politics had become a Shakespearean play still in search of its tragic ending. “ ‘Envy no man until he is safely dead,’ ” she might cry out. “Herodotus said that!” (huh-RAH-duh-us) The Father of History! He wrote The Histories, an account of Greco Persian Wars from late 400’s BC. 
  • Mom: Sometimes the thing you most worry about doesn’t come about. 
  • Mom: Don’t let your actions be based on your fears. 
  • Frank Sinatra’s drummer wanted to meet Frank: One night the drummer finally asked his road manager if he could be introduced to Sinatra. The road manager declined his request. “Frank,” he said, “has met enough people.”
  • Crowe’s dad gave an interview to a local paper the night before he died of heart attack: Success, he explained in an interview I discovered years later, given to his hometown paper on the eve of his own death by heart attack, was defined by something he learned from his own dad. Did you bring joy to your community? Did you put something back into the world?
  • Click here for affiliate link. 

Anne’s 5 Book Recommendations 

  1. American Predator by Maureen Callahan
  • Israel Keys, a serial killer. Grew up in a religious community, remote plot of land in Washington
  • How shame and sin, living off the land, isolation, all combined to shape him
  • A planner who would bury murder kits across the country for his use in the future. Would fly to city, rent a car and drive long distance before finding someone/some people to kill
  • Click here for affiliate link. 
  1. La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
  • Part of a series of books, started with His Dark Materials, this is a pre-equal. I enjoy the setting/world, theocracy rules and heresy is illegal, many worlds you can cut into. People all have “daemons” animals who are connected to them
  • It reads like a good mystery, fantasy thriller
  • Click here for affiliate link. 
  1. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner
  • About an American woman (Mildred Fish Harnack) married to a German living in Germany who spies on Nazi Germany and is executed by them. She and her husband helped Jews escape and organized against Nazis.
  • Her husband Arvid also agreed to spy for Russia.
  • They often acted the part of followers of Nazis, they had to be secretive all the time, heartbreaking book as many suspected them and didn’t ever know how they acted against Hitler’s power.
  • I think it was very interesting to realize how some people did not seek it out but the circumstances of life led them to be the type of people to resist.
  • From a boot review on artsfuse  “Arvid and Mildred were arrested on September 6, 1942, as they were trying to flee Germany. On February 16, 1943, Mildred was beheaded, after copying out and translating into English the line of the Goethe poem that is the title of this book. Arvid had been hanged two months earlier.”
  • Click here for affiliate link. 
  1. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
  • Story down to its basics is 2 people who are antagonistic to each other have to join forces as they go on a series of trials. Set in fantasy world that I found interesting, but the main thin is the 2 people are interesting and have a nice chemistry.
  • I think of a scene in this book from time to time, and I find that in some books I can recall the memory my brian made of the written scene for years after – do you think of books you read like this? They are in an old crazy mansion doing trials and I have that image in my head when I think of this book series.
  • Click here for affiliate link. 
  1. Louis XIV by Josephine Wilkerson
  • Biography of the Sun King, who at age of 4 (1643) became King of France in (His mother was regent until he came of age) Ruler of France for 72 years
  • Known for his love of the arts and sciences, Versaille, an absolutist and micromanager.
  • Bios can be slogs sometimes but this is very entertaining, leans more into his personal life than world events
  • Click here for affiliate link. 

If someone would pay you $500 to read one of my book recommendations, which would you pick? 

If someone would pay you $25 to read each of my books, would you read any of them?  

Next week, we’re doing 10 Books We Want to Read. Let us know what you’re reading!

Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories post!

A Little Bit Better on the Emotional Front

On the day of Dad’s surgery to fix his broken hip, I arrived at Watauga Medical Center before 8:00 am. Even though I’d been told the night before that nothing would happen with Dad before 9:00 am, he’d already been moved from his room downstairs to be prepped for surgery. I joined Mom and Dad in a room that had been created by being curtained off within a much larger room. It was a giant space, like my old high school cafeteria or a conference room at a convention center, and curtains hung everywhere. We could see lots of other patients and their families waiting for surgery. Doctors came in to stop by and visit with each patient. Dad’s surgeon explained he would put a rod in to connect the upper femur to the hip area. He explained the break wasn’t technically the hip, but they still called it the hip. I asked him about what we could expect for a hospital stay after the surgery and where Dad might go next. The surgeon thought three to five days in the hospital and then added that it wasn’t his area of expertise, but he thought Medicare would pay for at least twenty-one days in a skilled nursing facility. The doctor said to just let the hospital know where we wanted Dad to go. 

This need for us to know where Dad was going next came fast. Of course I had no idea where we wanted him to go. I actually couldn’t name a facility, couldn’t even imagine where one was. Shortly after the surgeon visited, the anesthesiologist stopped by. He explained Dad would receive a spinal block. I took this to be like a woman might receive before delivering a baby. I think the idea was the block would minimize risk and potential further cognitive decline. I thought about one of the tough choices I’d expected: whether or not Dad would have the surgery. It seemed like it was so obvious that he would have it that no one asked. Mom signed the paperwork for it, but there had been no discussion. There had really been no decision. Looking back, I think that was right, and I have no regrets.  

In our history as a family, we Torgersons haven’t been very open or expressive emotionally. I don’t ever remember telling either of my parents that I loved them in high school, and I don’t remember them telling me. For sure, it was clear both mom and dad loved me; it just wasn’t something we expressed with words or hugs. When Dad was in his fifties, he had a procedure to put a stent in his heart. The surgery had been in Indianapolis, and I remember that my sister Anne, my Mom, and me were there with Dad when they wheeled him out of the room. Back then, we’d only been able to muster words to wish him luck and to tell him we’d see him in a few hours. After Dad had been wheeled away, a silence hung over the room like the eye of a hurricane. I remember my sister Anne breaking the silence saying, “We’re such freaks.” I took this to be her observation that we were completely unable to express ourselves emotionally. No I love you’s. No talking through potentially being afraid. Just silence and off you go Dad to have something placed in your coronary artery. 

This time in Boone with Dad’s hip surgery, we did a little better on the emotional talking front. The dam that held all of our emotions in side had cracked a little when I was married and divorced in less than three years in my twenties. I had started to tell my family I loved them, and they had sometimes reciprocated it. Dad told Mom what a great wife she was and how appreciative he was for all the years she’d taken care of him. He told me how proud he was of the father I’d become and that he wished he’d been more like me. Dad expressed regret to me about all the years he’d spent in gyms coaching other people’s kids and all of the time he’d spent on the golf course when we were growing up. Dad was able to say all of that eloquently even though sometimes he thought we were living back in Winamac, and he often forgot the name of the disease he had. “Isn’t that the darndest thing?” he’d say, “I can’t even remember the disease I have.” 

I pointed out to Dad all of the things he did right as a father. After all, he had been an English teacher, a manic preparer for whatever job it was he had to do, and a basketball coach. I was all of those things too, and I thanked him for the example of high character, especially when it came to keeping his word, meeting his responsibilities, and working hard each day. With my Mom and Dad, there were no mental health days from school. Since they were both teachers, we all went to school if it was at all possible. As a coach and teacher’s kid, I was to exceed all of the expectations placed on students and athletes. Dad once called the head basketball coach to report that I had arrived home two minutes after curfew.  This time in the Watauga Hospital, we all told each other we loved one another. When Dad was wheeled out for surgery, I texted my wife Megan and my sister Anne that it felt like we had just said our goodbyes to Dad. We were told we could go up to Dad’s hospital room to wait for the procedure to be over, and that someone would be in touch to tell us how it went. 

Dad’s hospital room at the Watauga Medical Center in Boone was really nice. There were two comfortable chairs, one of which could be converted to a bed and that Mom had slept on the night before. It was a private room with a television and a large window with a view of the south side of town and of the mountains beyond. It felt a little closer to a hotel room than most of the hospital rooms I’d ever been in before. Dad’s surgery took much less time than I expected, less than two hours. The surgeon told us the bones came together nicely. 

Dad arrived back to his room via a hospital bed that whooshed as he was pushed down the hall. “Did I just ride a train?” he asked as he rolled in. It took me a second to realize he thought the hospital bed he’d ridden back to the room was the train he was talking about. The bed really did make a kind of whooshing chug, chug sound. Dad seemed to be under the impression he’d ridden a train from his hometown of Winamac, Indiana. His high school friends and basketball teammates Vic Heater and Bob March were mentioned as passengers on the train. Dad also named his friend Joe, who’d been killed over fifty years before when he was hit by a train. My middle name was Joseph because of Dad’s friend and my daughter Charlotte’s middle name is Josephine after me. 

Dad experienced impressions of things such as trains and lots of people from the past. His stories reminded me a bit of the James Thurber story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in which the character has many daydream adventures. When dad had come back from his CT scan the day before, he’d mentioned Russia’s Putin and told me that Putin had loaded him into a nuclear warhead. Dad was so relieved that for whatever reason Putin had decided not to launch the rocket he’d been loaded into. I realized that especially from Dad’s point of view, the machine that took the scan must have looked like a warhead. What a life: Dad used to teach classes and enjoy golf and morel foraging in his free time, and now he rode trains and was loaded into nuclear warheads.

  • Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories post! This is an excerpt from a longer piece I am writing about dad’s passing and Hurricane Helene’s arrival to my home near Boone, North Carolina.

Workspace Setups, Good Podcast Hangs, & The Future of the Pod | Ted Lasso S4E3

Sure, having three offices is a blessing, but I also struggle to get them all organized and decorated. In this episode, my sister Anne and I dive into the puzzle of workspace setups and talk through the ways we fail—and occasionally succeed—at organizing our lives. Plus, Anne shares a few podcast recommendations, and we make a big decision about the future direction of the show (starting with Ted Lasso S4E3).

Click above to listen to the podcast episode

Sure, having three offices is a blessing, but I also struggle to get them all organized and decorated. In this episode, my sister Anne and I dive into the puzzle of workspace setups and talk through the ways we fail—and occasionally succeed—at organizing our lives. Plus, Anne shares a few podcast recommendations, and we make a big decision about the future direction of the show (starting with Ted Lasso S4E3).

Workspace Setups & Staying (Un)Organized

Inspired by Keeley’s bold, all-pink office in Ted Lasso, Anne and I take a look at our own desk setups—and the systems we use (or fail to use) to keep our daily lives on track.

  • The Dream Setup: If you could design an office with zero constraints, what would it look like? I don’t even know! We’d love to hear yours!
  • Systems vs. Chaos: How do you actually remember to do what you need to do? From calendar alerts to pure luck, we discuss whether we adapt our schedules for the people around us—or expect the world to adapt to us. I think the situation I describe might be hopeless!

What Makes a “Good Podcast Hang”?

We spend time talking about the media we consume, so we broke down what keeps us coming back to our absolute favorite shows.

Here are some of our favorite shows:

  1. Doughboys (Anne) Link here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/doughboys/id996151267
  2. L is for Losers (Anne) Link here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/l-is-for-losers-preview/id1580151789
  3. Fluently Forward (Anne) Link here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fluentlyforward/id1589952385
  4. The Rewatchables (Bill) Link here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rewatchables/id1268527882
  5. Good Hang with Amy Poehler (Bill) Link here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/good-hang-with-amy-poehler/id1795483480
  1. Host Chemistry: Feeling like you’re sitting in a room with long-time friends.
  2. Clever Angles: Top-5 lists, obscure movie deep dives, and unexpected debate topics.
  3. The ‘Slice of Life’ Feel: Mini-narratives that balance humor with actually learning something new.

Ted Lasso S4E3: “Richmond’s Got Talent”

This week’s episode sparked a great debate on where we draw the line on story credulity:

  • What Worked: The emotional weight of the women’s team getting their own locker room, the rapid-fire pun density, and the callback to the shareholder report. Plus, the new coaching staff dynamic is officially clicking.
  • The Suspended Disbelief Problem: A D-II American football coach landing a Premier League job works great for comedy. But middle school girls sewing uniforms for a professional team? We debate where the line between “fun absurdism” and “too ridiculous” really lies.

What’s Next for Torg Stories?

If you’ve noticed our numbers fluctuating or wondered where the show is headed, we address it head-on in this episode.

Focusing on a single TV show every single week limits the kind of stories and discussion questions we can bring to you. Since we built this podcast on sharing what we’re reading and discovering together, we are returning to our core format starting next week!

Support the Podcast & What’s Coming Up Next:

(We are an Amazon Affiliate and purchases below help support the pod)

Aloha brand peanut butter chocolate chip protein bars in an orange box, featuring a 12 pack with nutritional information and organic certification.
  • Next Week: Anne and I will each be sharing 5 book recommendations, complete with quotes and questions meant to spark conversation. See you then!

Taylor Swift, Nazis, and a Confession to the Nurse: Part III of Hurricane Helene and the Passing of My Father

On the night dad broke his hip, he was moved to a hospital room just after 11:00 pm about five hours after his fall. It was just he and I while mom went home with my wife Megan to get her things to spend the night. By the time we got to the hospital room, dad had been kept in the same position for a while, and I think all of the pain medications he had taken gave him some relief. Dad struck up a conversation with the male nurse who had been assigned to us, and it came up that the nurse was traveling to London the following week to go to a Taylor Swift concert. Dad really perked up at the mention of Swift. A few weeks earlier, he’d asked to watch the Reputation documentary, and he had described her as quite a sensation. After dad and the nurse talked about Swift, dad then tried to tell him how the Nazis were making a comeback all over the world. I could sense the nurse’s discomfort and felt my own discomfort growing as the nurse and I first heard the word Nazi from dad. Where is this old guy with dementia going with talk of the Nazis? The nurse and I were both relieved when it was clear from the way that dad told his story that he didn’t think it was a good thing the Nazis seemed to be growing in number. To be clear, dad never talked about the Nazis in any way other than an evil force that needed to be stopped. He was always on the lookout for current events and how they might tie to the Second Coming of Christ. He thought a Nazi comeback probably signaled the apocalypse.

Dad wrapped up his conversation with the nurse by giving an impromptu confession about a DUI he’d been guilty of at least twenty years prior. The arrest happened right outside of the small town of Winamac, Indiana–population 2,000–where he’d grown up as a kid, taught and coached for over a decade, and where my sister Anne and I had gone to high school. Dad had gone out for beers after golf, and he’d been pulled over just outside of town. He failed a field sobriety test and was arrested. He was humiliated and mortified that he could have hurt or killed someone, and I think he felt like he’d let down every student or player he’d ever worked with. Dad never had another drink the rest of his life.

The nurse handled dad’s DUI confession well. I imagine he heard all kinds of things from patients, especially patients who were on a lot of painkillers with dementia. After the nurse left, dad said to me, “I don’t know why I told him all of that.” Although dad didn’t bring death up specifically, I think he probably realized that he was really at death’s door this time, especially if he was going to have surgery on a broken hip at the age of 85 with advanced Parkinson’s. Although we’d never been Catholics, it made sense dad might want some sort of confession. When mom returned with Megan to spend the night with dad, I went home with plans to come back in the morning for dad’s surgery. We were told that wouldn’t happen any earlier than 9:00 am.

Note:

  • This has been an excerpt from a longer piece about the passing of my father and the coming of Hurricane Helene through the area where I live outside of Boone, NC. I plan to continue to share excerpts from the longer work.
  • Thanks for checking out this post!

Ted Lasso Season 4 and College Road Trip to University of Utah

Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 2 titled “Curiouser and Curiouser!” inspires conversation about feminism, inequality in men’s and women’s sports, and we cover a road trip to take Izzy to college that spanned from Boone, NC to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 2 and Road Trip to University of Utah

What would you say was the “big news” of this episode?

  1. Beard is back! Also, Beard was looking like Big Foot and something happened with him and Jane. What do you think? Chicago’s “You’re the Meaning in My Life Scene.” 
Close-up portrait of a man with long, curly hair and a full beard, wearing a maroon baseball cap with the text 'KC Sines' Original'.
Coach Beard appears to have let himself go in Ted’s absence
  • Beard refers to himself as Mr. Gladstone as a movie reference to the 1967 classic film The Graduate, where it is the fake name used by Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) for clandestine hotel meetings.
  1. Ted meets the players. I was pleasantly surprised! 
  2. The women got a new locker room! 
  3. Chilton decides to stay. Why do you think so?
  4. What was Ted’s gift to her? Do you think we’ll ever find out? 

Best line/s: 

  1. For a sport that asks you to be light on your feet, women’s football sure does seem to have a lot of weight around it.
  2. On couples on the team: Ted: You don’t get a lot of that in men’s football. Chilton: Not that you know of. 
  3. I think keeping people apart who belong together is bad for everybody. -Keeley about Beard to Roy 
  4. What’s the point in life if you’re not feeling? – the goalie who didn’t wear gloves, who doesn’t take novocaine at the dentist 
  5. You can polish a turd but all you are left with is a rag that smells like dookie. 

What are themes you see this season dealing with? 

  1. Feminism 
  • Do you fault Rebecca for not interviewing any women for the head coaching position? 
  • bell hooks work introduced 
  • Chilton challenges Rebecca 
  • Rebecca’s mom hopes she isn’t a feminist 
  • Title IX: Title IX states “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance[.]” All federal agencies that provide grants of financial assistance are required to enforce Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate.
  1. Stigma from men to other men about coaching girls 
  2. Analytics with origin stories 
  3. ACL injuries: 
  • Females injure ACL about 3.5 times more than males in basketball. In hs girls soccer, there are 13.3 tears per 100,000 athletes vs. 4.9 in boys. 
  • Athletes who suffer an ACL injury are 15x more likely to tear one of them again as athletes who have never torn one. 
  • In my 6 years at Watauga I can remember four players who tore ACLs and two of those tore theirs 2x. 

As the episode wrapped, what questions do you have about what is coming up? What has you interested? 

What new characters stood out to you? 

  1. Caroline Seaward the physiologist 
  2. Tanya Reynolds as Coach Alice Chilton
  • From the LA Times: A week after sending in the tape, “Ted Lasso” co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis asked Reynolds to hop on a Zoom call. “I assumed it was part of the audition process,” she says. “We had a chat and then at the end he was like, ‘Well, we’d love you to do it if you want.’ I went away and watched all three seasons, and I loved it. It’s the kind of telly I seek — light and soft and heartwarming and optimistic.”
  • Sudeikis wouldn’t give her any scripts. He did tell her the character arc and he said he hadn’t done that before. 
  • Standing up to Hannah Waddington / Rebecca: “I remember filming that scene and trying to be intimidating to Hannah Waddingham,” Reynolds says. “I was looking up at her and trying to square my shoulders and feeling like a worm in a tracksuit. I was trying so hard to be tough and to be a bulldog. And Alice is trying to be tough and taken seriously, but actually she’s wobbly, like I was.”
  • Click here for the LA Times article on Tanya Reynolds. 
  1. Goalie who doesn’t wear gloves

Craft Observations: 

  1. We hear an episode before we see it. This time we heard an Elton John song. 
  2. Rhetorical device of “This Morning” television show. (think it’s a real show) 

bell hooks quotes: 

  • It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression. – Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981 
  • All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity. – Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995
  • The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.  – Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012

Road Trip to Salt Lake City to take My Daughter Izzy to College 

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Road Trip, Vedauwoo, Lake Marie, 130, Mirror Lake, dorms
from Boone, NC to Salt Lake City, UT

On Izzy’s leaving: 

  1. 18 years. Every minute of 5 days and then she’s gone. 
  2. Most of what made Izzy’s room hers is not in there. It looks empty an plain. 
  3. That room, in that building, on that campus, in that city is a really exciting and fun moment for her. 
  4. Very proud of who she has become that she wants to go away on this adventure by herself. 

Impressions of University of Utah: 

  1. Modern lodge feel to the campus. 1400 people in her residence hall. Has a food court, recreation areas, a computer lab, sophisticated Amazon delivery, and lots of meeting spaces. 
  2. Izzy is within a mile of her classrooms, library, pool, arena, and football stadium. 
  3. The amount of money that goes into keeping the campus looking like that. 
  4. Light rail right outside the residence hall that goes downtown and one train change to the airport. 
  5. Clean and safe city. 
  6. Mountains surround the whole campus. 

Some of the most memorable sights: 

  1. The University of Missouri felt like IU, UNC, and UK to me. 
  2. Bleakness of Western Nebraska. Sandy flat ground with scrub brush. 
  3. Vedauwoo climbing area 30 minutes west of Cheyenne. 
  4. Snowy Range Scenic Byway / 130 West of Cheyenne: Mirror Lake and Lake Marie (I think winner of most beautiful spot I saw on the trip) 
  5. Snowbird 
  6. Terrain went from super light brown sandy mountains, to Grand Canyon Looking, to Red Rocks, to the Rocky Mountains of Glennsprings and Vail. 
  7. Glennsprings, casual fun, huge mineral pools, ride to the top of the mountain to amusement park to activities on the river. 
  8. Vail’s closed alpine looking streets. 

I have some complaints: 

  • Poison ivy, midnight bedtimes and 6 am wake ups, driving most of the day, sleeping in strange beds, 6 out of 7 days packing and then unpacking my suitcase each day 

Thanks for checking out Torg Stories! We appreciate you!