The parents got me a new digital camera for my birthday. It’s cute. It takes great video — with sound! The sucky thing is that it’s a camera made especially for Windows, so the software can’t be installed on my Mac and I’ve had to be guided by tech support through a process by which I can download the DivX player to actually watch my videos (I was just getting a sound track through Quicktime…
James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein. What a weird week. I don’t know how long I will have to work in the news business before the surreal nature of major breaking news makes any more sense to me. We meet and meet and plan and plan and sketch and ponder and set up all these possible scenerios for how the news will play out so that we can hammer it through before the deadline lockdown.…
Monday morning I headed to my parents’ with a carload of gifts and Felix. It was raining and in my haste to load my car (we’re talking 10 trips up and down my tiny twisting staircase and across the parking lot, which was one giant ankle-deep puddle), I had shoved my bottle of water underneath some other stuff and out of reach from the driver’s seat. So I stopped off at a gas station in…
Monday marked a quarter-century I’ve been using up this Earth’s precious resources and processed cheeses. I’m finding (among other clichés) that life doesn’t ever get any easier. Ever. That things you think you’ll figure out by the time you’re X years old, you gradually understand less and less, to the point where every momentary distraction can become an existential crisis. Your relationships and cars sputter and stall and break down. You look for new ones…
It’s technically Christmas Eve. In roughly six hours I’ll be rolling out of bed and joining the throngs of slackers at the mall to wrap up some loose ends. Then I’ll go to work and lay out some pages and wonder what my family’s doing at our annual Christmas Eve shindig at my grandmother’s. This is the second year in a row I’ve missed it, and it used to be my favorite part of Christmas.…
Each year at Christmastime, the heads of editors at small newspapers swell with one delightful notion: Children writing copy and filling a whole extra section (cushioned, of course, with plenty of holiday advertising) with their silly blatherings. It’s a winning tradition, and I’m not being sarcastic. It is seriously such fun to read the natterings of six-year-olds, all of whom are so cotton-picking cute and delusional that you can sit there and imagine what their…
Sometimes you’re up late sipping wine and suddenly you’ve redesigned your blog. Sayonara, T&G 2006: Konnichiwa, T&G 2007! I made sure to drunkenly confess to Travis Beckham, proprietor of Squidfingers< (the site from which I rip these delectable background patterns), how much I love his work. He responded kindly. Which made me a little giddy, I must confess. Incidentally, I have a wicked case of hiccups now. I went back to the thread at Ms.…
Traveled to lovely Horn Lake, Miss., to get the car back today. The bastard started the first time I tried, and hasn’t not started since. And my new brakes are deliciously tight and cushy, much like _________’s mom (reader’s choice). So, victory. Whee! Phil was hopped up on endorphins all day today. He won a beautiful, extremely expensive guitar from work for his outstanding employee performance. And when I say extremely expensive, I’m talking more…
The Seattle Times, in light of the recent major storms and blackouts and whatnot, printed multi-lingual PSAs on the front page, warning of the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning from charcoal heat and generators (from which six people have died and a hundred hospitalized). This will likely disappoint the “Speak English or Move!” crowd, but it might save some lives. And that, folks, is what newspapering is about.
The font of DNA from whence this blogger sprang. These two have been together for 27 years today. I don’t know how they do it. But they do. And I can’t be more happy for them. They are amazing. Happy anniversary, you two, even though I know you’ll never read this.
You must be logged in to post a comment.