This is a short list of what happened to me last week:

1. My wife Barbara and I flew halfway across the country expecting to watch our alma mater get stomped by a Top 10 football team.

2. I got laid off.

3. The bag in which I was carrying five six-packs of fine Kalamazoo beer and seven bottles of premium Kansas City barbecue sauce (four Gates and three Bryant's) split open in the St Louis airport.

So you might think I'm a bit down these days. But I'm not. And I've got a few good reasons for that.

First, our alma mater didn't get stomped. Las Vegas placed the spread at 21 points, but Missouri played Kansas State tough, losing 28-24. Yes, the game was almost too terrible to watch, with both offenses sputtering and the officials blowing just about every call imaginable (even the wire reports of the game gave the zebras low marks), but it's always interesting to go back to the old stomping grounds and realize that some things never change.

Literally.

We wandered into the new newsroom of the Columbia Missourian, the city daily paper put out by the Missouri J-school. The building was new, but the machines were the same IBMs that we used years and years ago. We're talking 386s and 486s here. Maybe some of them have new cards in them, but I don't think so. I'm guessing the stuff is as buggy and messed up as it was 10 years ago.

Then we walked over to the student-run radio station. One of the DJs lamented the fact that there was no budget and that recent fund-raisers hadn't really raised any funds. Gosh, I said, sounds just like the old days. He didn't seem to appreciate my commiseration. Mainly, I think he wanted to bitch.

Like I said, some things never change.

It's that realization which makes so happy that I've lived in so many places since graduating in 1992. My life has hardly been static, unlike those of so many other people and institutions I know. I've had a lot of jobs (and not had a lot of jobs, if you know what I mean). I've lived in five states, in cities big and small and in the North and the South (and in St. Pete, a northern city that's south of the South). I've gotten to know the east coast of the U.S. quite well. Things in my life change all the time, and I rather like that.

Moving down my list a bit more quickly: While my layoff supposedly doesn't take effect until February 15, Missouri's football coach is packing his bags right now. I saw the news of Larry Smith's firing in the St. Louis airport (a couple minutes after the bag mishap). The guy took MU to two straight bowl games for the first time in 15 years and he gets canned after 4-7 and 3-8 seasons the past two years. I'm kinda ambivalent about his firing myself, but I'm sure he'll console himself with the three years at $190,000 or so left on his guaranteed contract.

As for that bag mishap, well, the split came at the bottom of one of the side pockets. The wrapped bottles of Bryant's sauce didn't even fall out. The excessive tension from the strap which caused the seam to blow somehow kept the bottles stuck to the side of the bag. I transferred those bottles to Barbara's bag (which already held a six-pack of fine Kalamazoo beer and a six-pack of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot ale) and we traveled on without mishap.

So, see, nothing is as bad as it seems.

On top of all that, when we arrived at the Raleigh-Durham airport, a three-inch blanket of snow graced the ground. Not the streets, of course, as the temperature had already climbed above freezing and the snow will be lucky to last until morning. But snow in my part of North Carolina is always welcome, no matter the circumstances. Time can always be made for a blistering snowball fight.

Jon Worley would like to have spent the later hours of Sunday evening playing in the snow, but he had to write this column instead. Sometimes, unfortunately, duty calls.