I'm back. At least temporarily.

As I wrote in my last blog, I'm running out of good stories from my life and career. But I'm still going to write when and if my lapsing memory comes to life. And that is exactly what has happened.

In the fall of 2000, Judy's mother and aunt were both in crisis mode.

Her mom, mid-80's and attempting to recover from head injuries suffered in an automobile accident, was in a suburban rehab facility north of Chicago. Judy's Aunt Irene, then 92, still sharp mentally, was dealing with the ravages of age on her body and was in a rehab hospital on the north side of Chicago, about 20 miles away.

Although both were in recovery mode, it was apparent that neither of them was going to be able to move back to their apartments and live by themselves.

Judy and I made an executive decision to bring them to North Carolina, where we were living, and find a suitable assisted living home for the two of them.

We had been trying for years to get one or both of them to move near us - or even move in with us. But neither Mom nor Aunt Rene, as she was known to us, wanted to leave Chicago and their independent way of life. Now, they really had no choice.

The logistics were formidable, but I had five weeks of vacation coming and the racing season was about to end, giving us a window to close down their Chicago apartments and get the ladies moved to Raleigh.

We informed Mom and Aunt Rene or our plans and, surprisingly, neither raised any objections. It was clear to them that this was the right way to go at this point.

Immediately after the NASCAR banquet in New York City the first week of December, we flew to Chicago and began the arduous task of getting them moved.

The logistics were formidable.

Each day, we would drive between the two rehabs, visiting the ladies and letting them know what we were accomplishing. Making things more difficult than the hour-long drive in Chicago traffic was the weather. The last month of 2000 turned out to the snowiest December on record and also one of the coldest.

Mom's apartment was pretty easy to close down. She was a meticulous person and the place was pristine. The furniture she was not taking, we sold or gave away. And we culled through the clothes and knickknacks, keeping only what we thought was important.

Aunt Rene's apartment was a different story. At 92, her eyesight was about shot and her legs were giving out on her. She never had been much of a housekeeper - working for years as a book keeper and marrying Uncle Irv late in life.

Her apartment, in a high-rise building on the north side of Chicago, was a disaster. One drawer in the kitchen was filled with odds and ends and cockroaches. A lot had to be simply thrown away.

What could be salvaged of clothes, kitchen gadgets and furniture was to be given to the Salvation Army. We set up an appointment to have it picked up. 

The truck arrived and the guy came to the door of Aunt Rene's apartment. He looked around with a jaundiced eye and said, "Nope, we don't take most of this stuff. You'll have to get rid of it somewhere else."

Judy and I just looked at each other in shock as the guy turned heel and headed for the elevator.

I called the Salvation Army office and talked to a supervisor, who said they were using ex-cons to help the drivers load and unload their trucks and that some of them didn't really want to work. He sent them back and, this time, the first guy and the driver of the truck grudgingly and with dirty looks took away everything.

To keep from being overwhelmed by the job we had taken on, Judy and I decided to try to eat a different ethnic meal each night, taking advantage of Chicago's wonderful array of neighborhood restaurants. We ate Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, Thai, Filipino, Indian and more. It was a highlight of a very difficult time.

We had been in Chicago about 10 days when I got an unexpected call that almost changed our lives completely.

I answered the phone and the voice on the other end said, "Hey, Mike. This is Jim Hunter. How would you like to come work for NASCAR?"

The stock car organization, based in Daytona Beach, FL, had been suffering some pr setbacks and was dealing with an often adversarial relationship with some of the writers and broadcasters who regularly covered the races.

"We're looking for a fresh perspective and somebody who can better relate to the media," said Hunter, the head of the pr department. "Somebody like Mike Harris."

I was flattered, of course. At that point, I had been with The AP for 32 years and had just assumed I would remain in that job until retirement. But, despite the difficult situation in Chicago and my comfort with my AP job, I was intrigued.

Hunter's boss was George Pine, NASCAR's senior vice president who worked out of the company's Charlotte office. I was invited to meet with them in Charlotte later that week to discuss the possibilities.

So, in the middle of the madness we were dealing with in Chicago, I left Judy at her mother's apartment and flew to North Carolina.

The meeting went well. I told them some of my ideas for dealing with the media in a more direct and friendly way, discussed salary _ quite a bit more than I was making at AP _ and timing. They agreed that I would start the week before the Daytona 500 in February.

It not only meant Judy and me moving to Daytona, but also finding a facility for Mom and Aunt Rene. Hunter and Pine even agreed to pay some of the moving costs for the ladies.

It was a big move for me. And I was more than a little conflicted when I called my boss at AP, sports editor Terry Taylor, to tell her I was leaving. She sounded disappointed, but didn't try to talk me out of it.

I flew back to Chicago the same night and got back into the effort to move Mom and Aunt Rene.

In the meantime, I also wrote up a "white paper," detailing the changes that I would like to make to the pr department and the way NASCAR deals with the media. I sent it off to Hunter, thinking hard about how I would initiate the changes.

A few days later, Hunter called. He and Pine had read my "white paper" and thought it might be "a little too radical."

I was already having second thoughts about the move, but I quickly found out that I would have no autonomy in the new job and that they really didn't want any big changes - just a new face.

I called Terry Taylor and said, "Terry, I'm having second thoughts about leaving. If the AP can sweeten the pot a bit, I'd like to stay."

To her great credit, and my relief, she said, "I'll talk to the folks on the seventh (corportate) floor and see what I can do."

She called the next day to say that the powers that be had authorized a pay raise if I stayed. I immediately called Hunter to tell him I was not taking the NASCAR job. He seemed relieved. I know I was.

Judy said, "They wanted someone like Mike Harris, who got along with everyone. They just didn't want Mike Harris." Made sense to me.

Staying at AP turned out to be the best decision I could have made. I would have been way over my head when Dale Earnhardt was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500. Instead of trying to deal with that as a pr person, I got to write the story.

My coverage of Dale's death got me awards for the best AP story of the year and the best deadline writing of 2001. It was bittersweet, but a big moment in my career.

We finally got both apartments cleaned out, got the paperwork done for the ladies to move into a brand new assisted living facility 15 minutes from our house in Wake Forest and made the arrangements to move the ladies out of their respective rehabs.

The furniture we were keeping was to be picked up from both apartments the day before we were scheduled to fly to Raleigh with Mom and Aunt Rene.

It was been snowing nearly nonstop the whole month we were in Chicago and the street in front of Mom's apartment was piled high with the white stuff. The moving company informed us they couldn't get their big truck to the building and would have to ferry the furniture from the building to the truck, parked on a main street a block away, in smaller vans. We would have to pay the extra cost.

We really had no choice.

Aunt Rene's place was on Sheridan Drive, a main drag on Chicago's north side. So no problem with that.

The building manager for Aunt Rene's apartment had been kind enough to let us use a parking space in the lot, although it turned out to be the spot where the plows deposited the snow. The space kept getting smaller and smaller, but I managed to squeeze in.

That last day, as we closed up the apartment and turned in the key, I had turned in the rental car I had used all month and picked up a Lincoln Town Car so that we would have room for us, the ladies and all of the luggage on the way to the airport.

I pulled the big car into the narrow space, with the driver's side hard up against an icy wall of snow. I slid across the seat, got out the passenger side and went to finish our work.

When we were done, relieved that the big job was almost finished, we walked out to the car and found the doors locked. No problem, except the rental company had told me the fob was lost, so I only had a key. And the only keyhole on the four car doors was on the driver's door, which was hidden, inches from a wall of ice.

We were tired and frustrated and about beside ourselves as we stood in the cold, with more snow coming down and no apparent way to get into the car. I thought about calling AAA to tow the car out of the parking spot. But we decided to try a hail mary.

Since my arm was likely too big to fit into the opening between the snow and the car, Judy crawled across the hood and scrambled up onto the six-foot wall of snow and ice. She found her arm just fit between the snow and car door. With great difficulty - and worrying she would drop the key - (and with me holding my breath) - she was able to reach down, insert the key in the lock and get the door open.

It was a relief and we were both laughing hysterically as we drove away.

We picked up Aunt Rene from the rehab in Chicago. As we were grabbing the few things she had with her, a nurse came up and handed Judy a large bag of medicine bottles.

Judy said, "How do we know what she should take and when?" The nurse replied, "It's written on the bottles."

A quick look through the bag and it was obvious it was like a maze and would be about impossible to decipher. Judy went to the nursing supervisor and told her we needed a written list of the medications and directions for using them. She got a nasty look in response. But, after insisting that we wouldn't sign the release form for Irene without a written list, the task was assigned to one of the nurses.

It took her over an hour to get it done.

We then took Aunt Rene to visit her sister in Deerfield before we checked into a hotel.

The hotel stay turned out to be another adventure.

The three of us stayed in a junior suite, with a bedroom and a pullout couch in the living room. Irene insisted we take the bedroom, but the problem was that the only bathroom was through bedroom.

We told Irene to feel free to just walk to the bathroom any time and we all went to bed.

During the night, Irene got up to use the bathroom and, instead of walking into the bedroom, somehow found herself out in the hallway of the hotel. The door swung shut behind her and she was locked out. She didn't want to wake us and didn't know what to do.

At that moment, a hotel employee, delivering newspapers, came down the hall. He saw a 92-year-old woman in a nightgown wandering the hallway. He didn't want to just let her into the room. Finally, he called.

We were startled and scared when the phone rang at 4 a.m., immediately thinking something had happened to Judy's mom or one of our kids. But the voice said, "This is hotel security. We have a woman out here who says she is with you."

We opened the door and let in a relieved Aunt Rene. It was hard getting back to sleep.

The next morning we picked up Mom from her rehab and headed for the airport. We had arranged for wheel chairs for the ladies and I dropped them off and went to turn in the car.

They were nowhere to be found when I got to the gate. But I found out there was a hospitality area where they had been taken. I found the three women there, with the two older ladies hunkered down in wheel chairs and Judy looked like the cat that ate the canary.

It turns out that the two women who were pushing the wheel chairs tried to get Mom and Aunt Rene to give up the chairs after getting to the hospitality area. Judy asked them how they would then get to the gate when it was time and the two workers had no answer.

Judy turned to the ladies and said, "You just stay seated."

Finally, the two workers simply left.

The flight to Raleigh was uneventful and the very tired ladies' introduction to their new home was also uneventful.

It was a relief for Judy and me to get back home and know Mom and Aunt Rene were safe and ready to settle into their new home. It was a good end to a difficult and fulfilling adventure.