Blown Away

Like that nice play on words there for the title and Chicago's nickname? I thought so. I impressed myself with it too, I have to admit, particularly because it's a Monday morning before noon. My brain cells rarely work well on Monday mornings.

Dan and I and Loren, Dan's best friend from way back when and a close friend of mine, too, all spent several days in Chicago toward the end of June for another friend's wedding and a mini vacation. It was a fantastic trip--the only down sides being that Loren lost his phone and his shoes, I found that none of my shoes are really comfortable for long-distance walking, and Dan and I had to jump through hoops to fly home with mechanical and weather delays--and I do have pictures.

Dan and I landed and got to the hotel midday, where Loren had already gotten a room. We all shared a room in the interest of saving money and having more fun, and we went out to find food, first of all. I have had Chicago-style pizza before and have always hated it, but this was a revelation in cheese. We theorized that they made a pizza crust, put a wheel of cheese on top, covered that with more crust and then topped it with sauce. I ate about seven pounds of cheese and it was delicious.

Then we wandered for the rest of the day through all the parks and through the Art Institute of Chicago, which was free and open to the public on Thursday nights. We were exhausted, footsore and slightly delirious, and spent the evening floating in the cold hotel pool.

Friday morning we got up early(ish) to do a tour of Wrigley and hit up a local brewery for lunch, since the wedding was in the late afternoon. After the tour of Fenway Dan and I did the day after I moved to Boston, I can now say I've been to the two oldest ballparks in the U.S. and sat in the press boxes of each. I don't think that earns me extra points in the game of Living or something, but I feel like it should. There were more pizza, too, when Daniel (who also went to high school with everyone) showed up famished and in need of a haircut.

The wedding itself and the reception afterward were beautiful and fun. Laura, who went to high school with Dan and Loren, is a fantastic person I've gotten to know over the past five years or so. She's smart, funny, generous, ambitious and she and her new husband, Adam, will have a fun life together while doing a lot of good throughout whatever communities they end up in.

Saturday was spent nursing a bit of a hangover, but we all went to the Field Museum and then Dan went off on a bike ride while Loren and I sat on a river boat architecture tour, revelling in the breeze and pretty buildings. The Field Museum was really impressive--I've seen a lot of museums, because I'm a dork and because I've lived in some good places, like Boston and the D.C. area and London. They had an exhibit on art of Native Americans and ancient Central and South American cultures, and in the gift shop was this fairly wide array of pottery and art, Acoma, Pima, Zuni, Jimez, etc. These are pueblos from around the Albuquerque area, and the art was very much like the art at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. I wondered if some of it was by the same artists, and it was a bit bizarre to see all these pieces I'm used to seeing in one context suddenly showing up more than a thousand miles away in another city not even close to the pueblos. I wonder if tourists other parts of the globe feel that way, seeing things from their home in this place they've never been to before.

The mummy exhibits were also great--as a kid, I was fascinated by mummies, specifically by the idea of pulling out organs and mashing up brains with hooks up through the nose. All the good stuff. It was really crowded in that part of museum, too, and I had to refrain from strangling these parents who would tell their children lies.

"What's that, Mommy?"

"Those are toys that little boys in Egypt used to play with, like you play with your toys."

(Not true. They were statues of boats and houses and servants, which would be animated and would be at the disposal of the dead person in the afterlife. Don't fucking lie to your children about history and facts, man. You can gloss over things a bit, or you can give very simplistic explanations, but don't lie. Geez.)

"Is that the mummy of a little boy?"

"No, that's the mummy of a midget."

(Not true. It was a kid. Again, don't lie. Of course, you could also teach your 8-year-old to read the signs for themselves, but I won't go off on a literacy rant here.)

The architecture tour later that day was prefaced by beer and hotdogs at the Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Ave, a place where journalists from the Tribune and the Sun-Times would hang out and drink and clog their arteries. The hotdogs had a slight taste of bologna to them (bizarre, I know), and the beer had little flavor but lots of coldness, so all in all it was satisfying. Besides, all we were doing was sitting on a boat, taking a thousand obnoxious photos.

The last meal in Chicago? Pizza. Again. Naturally.

Also: I want this tree in my front yard.

My Thighs Still Hurt

I moved over the weekend because the good Lord didn't give us three-day weekends to actually have us enjoy ourselves. Nuh-uh, no way. Three day weekends are there to give us a false sense of security about what we can attempt when our weekend is longer (now with 50% more weekend!), and this one falling so nicely at the end of the month meant it coincided with my lease ending.

So yet again I mostly moved by myself, since Dan's work schedule got shifted around a bit and he also got shafted with having to work the holiday. This isn't a huge surprise--he often got assigned to work holidays at the various papers he's been at, since he's generally the youngest person working there and it's a whole hierarchy system. But the move meant a lot of lugging my things down stairs, loading it into trucks, driving it and unloading it in the hottest weather of the year so far.

After borrowing two trucks from two families and returning trucks and spending time in laundromats trying to get smoke smells out of my clothes (so glad I no longer live next door to a smoker!) and drinking way too much Diet Coke and not eating enough to keep from getting lightheaded and having lots and lots of anxiety and dragging my sister and Dan into everything, I got it done.

As I mentioned a while back, I'm really excited to be living with these two lovely ladies who are my new roommates and the new (old) house. There are beat-up hardwood floors, a shower in a giant stand-alone tub, chipped paint and a rather endearing child's landscape in colored chalk on one of my bedroom walls. There's also a dog, and while Fenway doesn't trust him, he also boldly walks by and can stop the dog in his tracks with an Evil Eye that is admirable.

Things are still busy with life in general, but that's OK. Busy is fine by me. It keeps me from thinking about how fucking hot this forsaken state is, because damn, it's fucking hot. (Yes, friends, it is time to listen to me whine about the heat again! Yay!) But on the upside, I have swimsuits and a gym membership at the Y, which has two pools, and a box of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer.

Dear Teacher

My French-Canadian couch surfer, Lino, and I were talking about our lives and education last night, and it was on my mind this morning when I was at work. Waiting on phone calls to come in, I started looking up things from my high school years, including the website of the first high school I went to in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

I don't think the school had a website when I was there in the late '90s as a freshman and sophomore, and even now it's a fairly shitty one. There isn't a lot on there, but there are staff pictures, so I was browsing through and looking at the teachers there. I remembered a handful--the math teacher who oversaw the math club I was on (YES, it's been established I'm a mega dork, shut it), the teacher who taught me AP European history and whom I always disliked because she was such a bitch and whose class I only passed because I copied one of my best friend's homework every day, the Spanish teacher who started crying in the middle of a lecture because the plight of the indigineous people of South America was generally terrible.

There was also a picture of my favorite science teacher ever, a woman whose classes I took and whose books I borrowed when I became a student aide. She had a huge menagerie in her biology classroom--parakeets, frogs, guinea pigs, fish, pythons, iguanas, chameleons, hamsters, a hedgehog who would throw up every time you picked him up--and was pretty indulgent to me as her aide. I was there during her break period, so sometimes I could nap, sometimes I'd watch TV (I think I watched the Columbine shooting unfold on her classroom TV), I made her a poster that said "Gravity: Not just a good idea, it's the law."

I got psyched, seeing that she was still teaching there, so I got her e-mail address and wrote her an e-mail, saying I hope she remembered me and thanking her for encouraging me and telling her that although I never went to med school, I still knew about symptoms of Marfan's syndrome and toxoplasmosis during the lecture I went to at the med school when none of the first-year students knew the answers.

She wrote back using lots of exclamation points, saying of course she remembered me, and she was on her way to a meeting and would write back in more depth as soon as she could. It made me feel special that she remembered me, even though this was more than 10 years ago, and I hope I made her feel good, knowing that she really was a huge influence. It prompted me to look up the faculty list of the school outside Albuquerque, N.M., where I did my junior year, but none of the names really stand out. (And fuck Enterprise, Alabama. I hated that school, hated my senior year, my journalism teacher thought man walked with dinosaurs, and I have zero desire to contact anyone there.)

The exchange also made me think about teachers from middle school and elementary school. I remember a few teachers--fourth grade, for example--that were fantastic, but now they're untraceable, retired or even (in the case of a band director from middle school) deceased. And then I think, Shit, people my age are teachers now. That's freaky.

My mom is a career elementary school music teacher, and she's still doing it, and I've considered off and on through life that it would be something worth doing. I'm not born to be a teacher or anything, the way my mom is, but I do think I could be a decent one, and it's always floated in my mind as an option in case I get pushed out of journalism. I would never, ever teach journalism, and strangely enough, I think I'd decide against teaching science and would rather do literature or reading or even straight-up English. (My copy editing professor from college would probably faint at the thought of me trying to explain the difference between "lay" and "lie," because I still don't know what the difference is.)

But teachers were always people I (generally) respected, even from a young age, and it's nice to think that maybe if they knew their students as adults who are working toward ambitions, they would respect us, too.

Edits

I decided that I would finish edits to my project from November by the first of July. I started last week, opening the document and starting from the beginning, going through and line editing and trying to flesh out some things.

It is so painful.

I hate, hate, hate editing my own work. I don't think I'm particularly good at doing it, and the problem is that I always feel "Ugh, I've already read this, I fucking wrote it, how boring." I think if I could set things away for years, then it would be fine, I could edit well. For example: I have these massive three-ring binders hidden away in the bottom of a box of books at my parents' place that has printed-out copies of a ton of shit I wrote through high school and into my freshman year of college. Now, a decade or more (fuck, I'm old) after I've written all that stuff, I can look back on it and not get bogged down.

This was one of my biggest challenges in school, too, especially in college and grad school. In journalism classes I was always told to read through my stuff before I handed it in, but I never could. Not really. It's just so fucking boring, reading what I just did. I got pretty miserable grades on some stuff--my reporting teacher would dock 5 or 10 points for every little thing, like a comma in the wrong place or misspelled word--but I just could never make a habit of reading my stuff well.

Even in grad school, we were supposed to do lots of drafts and edit ourselves, particularly in this final-semester class on long-length narrative nonfiction. That class killed me. I love writing, and I enjoy editing other people's material, but I'm just too close to my own work to self edit.

I guess this isn't a surprise or anything. We're all too close to ourselves, too close to our decisions and lives and what we create, to accurately judge it. But then again, maybe ignorance is bliss. And maybe I'm an awesome genius who churns out Pulitzer prize winning first drafts and shits gold.

(Kidding. Just don't tell my editor I never read my stuff and don't ever intend to. I think just the concept would give her a conniption.)

Close Neighbors

It's official: I will be moving out of my one-bedroom apartment, where Fenway and I have been living on our own since last May, and will be rejoining the world of roommates come the beginning of June, the world of neighbors on the other side of walls who you have to actually get along with and all that shit.

Just to rehash, I signed the one-year lease on this apartment about a week before the first round of furloughs were announced at work. I even went through the trouble of asking the publisher if he thought we were going to have any financial issues, and he said no, so I signed and then BAM, paycheck cuts. Then two more rounds. We've been (knock on wood, cross fingers) without furloughs so far this year, but I don't trust it all.

Also, I've put a student loan on semi-deferment, and my grace period on that is up at the end of May, so I'll be looking at higher bills. It made sense to look for a cheaper place. I'm moving in with two other lovely ladies my own age who are renting a house, and I'll have more on that topic later.

As much as I adore living on my own, moving will be a good thing. I won't be stressed the fuck out about money all the time quite as much, and as of today, my AC in this little old apartment has gone out for the second time in the past three weeks. That shit's just not acceptable in this state. It's hot in here, and I can sit around in a tank top and shorts, but Fenway's stuck in his heavy fur coat. He's a snob like that.

Like I said, more to come later. For now, I'm going to spend the night at Dan's, where it's cooler, since the property manager won't do anything after 5 p.m. on a Friday unless the temperature is over 90.

Cats Eat Birds

My mother gave me a little Easter basket a few weeks ago, and I saved the Peeps because I wanted to share them with someone I knew would enjoy them the most. Besides seafood, the other food he adores is marshmallows. He's strange, I know.

We Are Family

This weekend saw a new addition to my little household. Behold: That Bitch.

Ok, so she doesn't have a name at the moment, or at least not a new name. She's a hand-me-down fish from a trainer at the barn, the woman who helped me find someone to lease Rio. She took in this fish, a female betta originally named "Barbie" by a five-year-old girl, several months ago.

Barbie got booted this week, though, because after living peacefully in a community fish tank, she turned into a serial killer and ate one guppy and seven shrimp just this week. The trainer, Mariam, was looking for someone to take her in, and I've always had a good time with bettas, so I offered to take her. Mariam's husband was the one who called her "that bitch" after her final killing, and I'm waiting for inspiration to strike before I name her again.

As you can see, girlfriend's scales are pulling apart because she ate so much. She's also got a nice gut hanging there, but hopefully she can do well on her own.

From the moment I brought her home, Fenway was excited. I had bettas before I had him, so his only fish experience is mooching seafood off my plate. He would rear up to peer in at the fish a bit better, but I tried to dissuade him from doing this because I could just see him knocking it over somehow and me being a fish killer. I eat a lot of fish, but I don't want to be responsible for the killing myself.


It's like cat TV. He spends half his time turning, wherever he is in the living room, so he can fix his gaze on the bookshelf. I did buy a new tank with a lid, since my others were open-topped, and I'm hoping that since the tank has yet to be sabotaged, we can all get along.

And while I don't have any photos of Little Jens Voigt, the last betta fish I had (who lived at home as well as on my desk at the Business Press until one day he died and was ceremoniously flushed in the middle stall of the upstairs ladies' bathroom), here's a photo of Noel, my first beta. I got him the first week of my junior year of college, and he lived until my summer internship in grad school. He grew to be massive, almost the size of this new fish, but he never ate other fish and he never got a gut. He did, however, fly home with me during Christmas and summer breaks when I was in college, and my senior year he largely lived on my desk in the newsroom at school. I would put him in a Gatorade bottle and take him on the plane with me, riding in the seat pocket. This was back in the golden days of terrorist watches, when you could still take liquids on planes. They always swabbed his bottle for explosives, but I think the TSA agents got a kick out of seeing some college girl carrying her fish everywhere. I was a dork. I still am a dork. I still think Noel was the best betta ever.

Belated

On March 11, I had a birthday. It wasn't terribly exciting: Work (and a deadline day), driving to Dallas, Dan gets off work late, he got me flowers, I got stuck in a motherfucker of a traffic jam on the way home and had to detour all over the damn place to get home.

I also, I'll admit, had a minor breakdown. It wasn't anything in particular--I actually was fine until I got stuck in Dallas on the highway without moving anywhere for a half hour (at 10:30 p.m., no less). Then I started getting all overwrought and thinking how boring I was/my life is/etc.

To make myself feel better, I thought back to everything I'd done over the past year. I'm actually pretty satisfied with the year, because I feel like I survived with some gusto. Within the past year I've joined Twitter, so I can waste more time; financially survived three rounds of furloughs; saw my family home in northern Virginia, outside D.C., get moved to North Texas; saw George W. Bush in person (so he wasn't some front cooked up by Cheney and Rove after all!); took a solo trip to Albuquerque; started and abandoned a few side projects; started and finished a fairly crappy novel in 30 days; saw my boyfriend on Christmas Eve; saw a lot of snow; saw Eddie Izzard; and made plans for 2010, including two trips to states and cities I've never visited before.

It does make me feel OK, the past year. It's just this upcoming year that seems daunting. I didn't get this uneasy feeling when the new year started on Jan. 1, but I'm getting it now, instead. When I was in school, my years, the way I kept track of them in my head, all started in August. Now they start with my birthday. Maybe one day I'll use January as a starting period?

But Reporters ARE Like Children

One of my favorite PR people, a woman who is a year older than me and works at one of the local hospitals, was at a press conference yesterday that Dan went out to go cover. He sent me a text message saying he thought she was pregnant because she said she'd be out for the fourth quarter and just introduced the person who would be replacing her.

And sure enough, Dan talked to her afterward and she is expecting. This woman will be a fantastic, enthusiastic mother--I've discussed infants with her a lot for stories, and she's always exciting. She actually got most of the way through nursing school before she realized she didn't want to actually be a nurse, so she's got a great geeky background, which I admire. I saw her get all teary-eyed once when we were in the same room as a birth (long story, but we didn't actually see anything behind a curtain, we just pounced on the poor woman for an interview like 5 minutes after she just pushed a baby out, how heartless are we?), and so I know she's got to be excited.

Anyway, the point is, when Dan called to confirm this with me after the press conference, I was simultaneously excited for her and reeeeaally bummed out because she is great at what she does and won't be around to cater to my every insane request for a few months at the end of this year. I feel like she should have taken a poll of local journalists before she went off to have a family, should have asked when would be a good time to take off. (Answer? Never.) Why didn't she think of the reporters?!

Paper

This is just a quick note of sorts, since I should be heading to bed. (Watch me turn this into a long and nonsensical piece of rambling bullshit, right?) Today I was at the symposium at TCU, and it was open to students and faculty of the nursing school, and there was this student sitting on the same row from me, a few seats down.

She was dressed like most students--jeans, T-shirt, backpack--and she pulled out this three ring binder, snapped it open, pulled out a few leaves of paper and got ready to take notes when the speaker came up. It was the paper that caught me--three-hole-punch, college-rule, beautiful paper. I don't think I've used paper like that since I got done with grad school in December 2006.

I'm a sucker for office supplies--especially pens (although I hate blue ink, so I guess that probably means I'm racist or hate babies or something) and notebooks. Seeing that paper made me think of the reams and reams and reams of notes or drawings or essays I've done on that sort of paper in the past. Today, when I go to get paper to jot something down, it's usually from a reporting notebook, torn out, or it's a sticky note or it's a blank sheet of white paper from the printer tray or something. There is no ruled paper like that anymore in my life. It made me sad and happy and nostalgic all at once.

Tomorrow I get paid, and I think I may stop by somewhere and buy a pack of paper and a little binder. Until just a few short years ago, that paper was the symbol of limitless possibilities. I'd like to bring that back into my life, I think.

Change It Up, Change Them Out

Last week I sat on this panel for a marketing association that was holding an event to show PR and marketing people how to get their health care stories into newspapers. The panel had been scheduled last year in November or something, and I'd consented without thinking once I figured out a reporter from the daily would be there as well as people from the daily and business newspaper in Dallas.

The week before the panel, I get an e-mail from the reporter at the daily who said she was starting a new position in the newsroom and couldn't come. I sent her back a congratulatory e-mail; she'd edited me once or twice when I was a freelancer, and I frequently saw her around at events once she started reporting (after layoffs). Then, later that week, and just days before the panel, I see on the Dallas blog that the editor from the Dallas Business Journal who was supposed to show at the panel got canned.

Needless to say, I was pretty curious how things would work out, and I showed up at the panel early and saw the health business reporter from the Dallas Morning News, a really nice guy that I think I could learn a lot from. (I have plans to befriend him and absorb all his wisdom by osmosis.) Then I find out the other health reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is going to show up, since the woman I was used to seeing around town was presumably in her new job. I was glad also to see that the health reporter from the DBJ was able to come, since the editor who was originally scheduled was off cursing the heavens somewhere.

Ok, I don't know if he was cursing the heavens. But if I'd gotten canned, I'd sure as hell be shaking my fist at the sky and bellowing, right?

So there were four of us at the panel, all representing the four big papers in Fort Worth and Dallas, and I was pretty proud of the marketing group for making it look like everything was seamless, even though I know they were probably panicking in days leading up to the event, when things started falling apart.

And even though I had jack shit to do with any of it, I was proud of the four of us panelists as a whole, for showing up and representing, even in the face of the merciless and unpredictable journalism industry.

As a sort of side note, the health reporter from the Star-Telegram who showed up told me that evidently the woman who got switched to a new position got moved back to her old position earlier that day. How fucked up is that? A daily can't get its shit together enough to move a person without fucking it up? And having to move her back? Again, if I were that person, I'd be cursing the heavens. It's not like the newsroom is so huge that there are too many people to keep track of. They've laid off practically half their staff, so it shouldn't have been that hard to keep everything in line. Ugh. This is why journalism is a cold hard bitch.

Now on to non-journalism things. Spring appears to be making tentative progress here, and I have high hopes that pretty evenings will be back in about a week and a half, after the daylight savings change. We're in March right now, and after March comes April, and in April comes my favorite event of Fort Worth: The Main Street Arts Festival.

(I know you're ask yourself, Wait, she doesn't love the Stock Show the most? Really? Buckle bunnies and calf scrambles and Future Farmers of America goat judging? But no, my friends. I like art more, and walking around in sandals, not worrying if I'm stepping in pig shit. I am that yuppie liberal, I guess.)

(Whatever. I totally voluntarily and willingly walk around in horse shit. I'm not going to feel bad about liking flip-flops for the time not at work or at the barn.)

(I do not have anything else to add and so will end awkwardly and with parentheses, because I heart me some punctuation.)

I Forgot!

Dan totally got into the Leadville race. I think a bunch of people already know, because I announced it on Twitter and Facebook and everything but oh yes--the lottery system came through and he was chosen to be a participant in the race.

This means we'll be vacationing in Colorado in August. I'm hoping I can get onto my bike when it warms up and do some on-the-road training so I can dink around up there, too. There's no way I'd enter a race like that, or even 50 miles at altitude (I can barely due that in Fort Worth when I'm in cycling shape), but I do want to bike my way through Independence Pass. Dan and his sister did it last summer as part of a roadtrip to California, so I'm hoping I can make it up since I bike as infrequently as she does.

San Antonio briefly in May for a wedding; Chicago in June; Colorado in August. While furlough days would make scheduling better, I'm crossing my fingers we don't get any so I can continue to save money. I'd rather burn my vacation days up than be bummed out over a docked paycheck.

(Our publisher gave the newsroom permission to buy a modestly-priced camera. I'm hoping this is a sign of good financial things to come. This is the same place that quit buying monthly birthday cakes last year for the staff, after all.)

SNOMG

No kidding--SNOMG was the title Dan's TV station used when a record amount of snow fell on North Texas Thursday. It was beautiful, ranging from nine to 12 inches, and while it's not unusual for there to be a hard freeze or snow around Valentine's Day, this was more than anyone expected.

So anyhow, you can see why the news is going down the crapper. When it comes to print, we can't turn down a pun, and when it comes to local TV stations, they inappropriate and unironic uses of textese.

The good news is we all got sent home early on Thursday, and then Friday was declared a work from home day. The work I did? I sent an e-mail. It was awesome.

Before everything turned into a disgusting mess of slush and mud, the way much of the Northeast is for much of the spring, I went out to the barn to let the horses out of their stalls for a while. They have played in snow in New Mexico and in Virginia, but this is the first serious snow in Texas that stuck around long enough for them to (safely) play in. (Topper slipped on ice below snow once and tore a hole through a ligament, part of the reason he's no longer jumping, so I'm always pretty paranoid about when to take him out in it.)

Anyhow, here are some pictures. No real frolicking, since they were on lead lines the whole time, but you can see Topper eat the snow and see Pony push his way through it to eat the grass underneath. You can guess which one of them would survive in the wild. And apologies for the bizarre blue color of some of the Po's photos; I was having flash/no flash existential crises.

Winter Itch

Last night I had dreams about drag queens.

This isn't really that strange; I found RuPaul's Drag Race, season two, on the VH1 site and watched the first episode. I love a good drag queen; the metamorphosis of it all, the pageantry, most of them don't take themselves too seriously.

After I woke up around 4 a.m. with Fenway, I went back to bed and dreamed about Albuquerque. I think I've written before about how I dream about London with alarming frequency (I'm too lazy to sift through my previous posts and find out whether I did indeed write about this, so sorry about that). I had a dream about London just over the weekend. They almost all have to do with walking from the Bloomsbury area south to the Covent Garden area and across toward Soho and Trafalgar Square and all the museums.

Anyway, I think this was maybe the second or third dream about Albuquerque since my trip there in October. Dan and I have been talking a lot about travel plans for this year, since we have some out-of-town weddings to go to and then there's the possibility of Leadville, and over the weekend I was thinking about Albuquerque, just picking up and driving back. I got this overwhelming urge to get in my car and just go.

I think it's because it's a time of year where everything sucks. Work sucks--we had all these furloughs last year, and I got used to taking lots of time off. I have more money now, true, but I can't spend it yet since it's all going toward trips. There are also shifts with things at work that are grating on my nerves because I'm that kind of a pessimistic-yet-prideful person, the way newspaper journalists tend to be after being at a paper for a few years. It's been raining for weeks on end, it seems like, and everything outside is a mudpit. The riding arenas are a mess. It's generally cold and still fairly dark.

Everyone is itching for a change, everyone is waiting for spring, and that's why I thought about New Mexico, I think. It's just the irritability that comes with late winter. If I were still up in Boston, I'd be going crazy about right now, because winter never really ends until around March, and spring is all rain. At least I'm not on the East Coast, 10,000 leagues under the snow.

I've decided a project to get me through the rest of this season is to work on my Spanish so I can exchange at least a few words with the guy who works at the barn in the evenings. I've tried looking things up in dictionaries and trying to remember some conjugations, and it should be remembered that I only had two years of Spanish in high school and only made a B in each class. Those classes were more than 10 years ago, now, so there's a lot to be learned. These days I can say about four lines in Spanish, and all of them have to do with horses or being sick.

Some day I will get back to griping about the newspaper industry, don't worry. A big shout-out to those who are still sticking it out. I heard someone once refer to us all as "The few, the proud, the morons." I'm glad to be a part of that, even if just for the martyr aspect.

A Whole New Year

Although we're at the end of January, there's still an entire 11 months ahead of us in 2010. There are some things in the works right now that I'm hopeful about--nothing actually has anything to do with me directly, but that's ok. I'm going to be cryptic about it all anyhow on my blog because I can.

One of my goals for the year is to get back on the bike (when it gets warmer, because I'm a fucking wimp and already spend enough time in too-thin tights at the barn) and to be able to climb up all the hills around my apartment. I'm going to be moving out of my lovely little smoke-smelling wonky-window-blinded one bedroom in the spring, but before I do, it'll be warm and I'll have the chance to tackle the nearby roads and hills.

Part of this comes after years and years of encouraging/berating words from Dan. Dan got into cycling and moved over here to this part of Fort Worth, and he would sometimes take me out biking with him. This is before I had a bike, so he'd go on his road bike and I'd follow on his mountain bike, a huge heavy thing that was too big for me. He'd go through these really hilly neighborhoods, and I couldn't pedal up the hills, and I'd start to panic and the slight asthma would kick in and I'd panic some more. I never really made it up the hills. I walked up them. There was one time I threw his bike into someone's front yard and kicked it out of frustration. Dan wasn't a fan of that, but he still tried to talk me up everything.

Once I had my bike, things got better, and I became a semi-OK climber because I can break out brute strength for brief periods of time. However, I have zero stamina for stuff, so long hills still generally eluded me.

Then I got out of the bike routine, and everything went to hell. Last big hill, in the fall? Walked up it. Now I'm doing this spin class twice a week, though, hoping to at least sort of get into the groove of pedaling and pushing big climbing gears. We'll see how it works out.

The reason I bring this all up is this is one of the things in the works. Dan applied to do Leadville this year, a 100-mile bike race at extremely high altitude in Colorado. It's a lottery system, so he's hoping he'll get chosen, and he'll find out in two weeks. If he gets it, I'll go with him, mini vacation, see Colorado. He wants me to bring my bike with me so we can go riding in Colorado, and I keep wondering if he remembers how poorly I climb in Fort Worth, much less in a mountainous state. However, he's perpetually optimistic and keeps assuring me I can do some of the shorter routes, 20- and 30-mile ones. We'll see.

I have to admit, I'm grateful to have a boyfriend who encourages me even at things I'm really generally awful at. I'm also glad I still have several more months to try to make myself not so generally awful.

Mental Inventory

Remember back when we were in middle school, before everyone had programmable phones and you had to remember phone numbers or write them down? I used to know about a dozen phone numbers by heart--home phone, naturally (in case of stranger danger), work phones for parents, friends, maybe the barn.

Today, I know about a half-dozen phone numbers. I know Dan's. I know how to call work. And I can call about four PR people for various hospitals. But that's it. I don't know my parents' numbers, even though their cell numbers have been the same for about eight years. I have no idea what my sister's number is. I couldn't call a single friend.

Tonight I went to this lecture at an engineering school, and it was one of the most tech-y tech lectures I've sat through in a long time. Usually I can muddle my way through, remembering vague bits of physics and math, recalling statistical things from some college biology research classes. I'm much better at the biological- or medicine-based lectures, but this one was supposed to be about the semiconductor revolution, 1947 to present day, so I thought I could handle it. Frankly, I'll be lucky to pull together a short story. It was all numbers and theories and abstract stuff.

As I think I've written about before, and as I'm sure some have heard me complain, I am amazed at the stuff I've learned and forgotten. I used to know calculus. In fact, I was a year ahead all through high school when it came to advanced math. I didn't even have to take math my senior year because I'd already taken calculus. (Keep in mind I went to dinky high schools where only like 20 students took calculus every year and Cal II would never be offered.) But today? I've forgotten all of it. I've forgotten all the algebra II I took my freshman year, too, and pretty much everything about every chemistry class I ever took.

I'm better with the big-concept stuff, like history or literature. There's more room for bullshit there, and you can talk about theories and consequences without getting bogged down in details like dates or which king was actually leading England at that time, if you throw in enough superfluous information.

So tonight I was driving home, again baffled at things I've forgotten, when I decided to try to think of everything that is taking up the room in my brain where calculus and chemistry and physics and whatnot used to be.

--I know a lot more song lyrics than I used to, and I still remember the lyrics to all those soft-rock songs and musical numbers that my mom listened to when I was a kid. So I figure that's a good portion, right there, because there's a lot of songs out there and I love singing along to them, preferably loudly and slightly off-key. Fist pumping is optional.

--Books. I'm more well-read than I was in high school and even in college, when the reading was required. I told one of my grad school professors that I spent more time reading narrative nonfiction books than doing work for her narrative nonfiction class, and looking back, it wasn't a mistake to do all the reading but it was a mistake to tell her that.

--Sports stuff. I didn't have to remember Jacoby Ellsbury's birthday before he joined the Red Sox and became unbearably awesome. I also didn't have to know anything about cyclists, bicycle engineering and mechanics or European races prior to meeting Dan.

--Dan's family history. There's four kids, and he's the youngest, and he's got a sister-in-law and two nieces and there are tons of aunts and uncles and it's an ongoing headache.

--Celebrity gossip. One of the blogs I follow distills everything into a handy twice-a-day bullet-pointed listing, which I read when I'm waiting on my e-mail at work to load.

--Health care. When I was in high school, I had this little pocket-sized notebook I'd fill with descriptions of bizarre diseases (like Prader-Willi syndrome) and concepts (a fetus is a lot like a tumor) because I was a weird kid and kinda pretentious. I never shared or showed this notebook to anyone, but I liked thinking I could diagnose someone's problem and save them the trip to the ER or something, probably. Today, I know about even more useless stuff (the hemicorporectomy) and also a lot of useful things, like health disparities and preventive medicine and the names of PR people and their phone numbers at their office, since I don't know how to program their numbers into my work phone.

--Beer. I still know jack shit about liquor and wine, but I'm slowly learning more about beer. And granted, I don't know a lot, but it's more than I used to and I know what I like and that's the most important thing, right?

--How many miles past an oil change I can go in my car. Because my old car would spontaneously die even if I'd just gotten an oil change.

(And in case you were wondering, I know I can get at least 5,000 past the recommended mileage.)

Couch Sleeping

For some reason, I was just not able to fall asleep on Sunday. I was tossing and turning in bed, throwing blankets off and then pulling them back on, trying to breathe deep and think of the color black, and it wasn't working. It didn't even work when I got up and went to my loveseat and curled up on there.

I did finally fall asleep, around 3 a.m., and it was back in bed and not on my short couch. When I was a kid, I used to turn around and sleep with my head at the foot of my bed on nights when I couldn't fall asleep. As a last resort, I'd trundle myself into my parents' bedroom and sleep on the floor on there, usually near the dog.

Today, the couch is my go-to place for when I can't sleep. It's awkward in my apartment, since my couch is so short. (It really is a loveseat.) It's nice at Dan's place, since he has a long and wide hand-me-down couch from a friend's parents. They bought nice furniture, quality stuff, and when they replaced their living room stuff, he got a couch and a loveseat. I've napped on both, slept on both, and even today I'll still spend the night on there occasionally. Usually it's when Dan is extremely drunk and won't stop snoring/taking up obnoxious amounts of the bed, but whatever. It's still good.

My parents' couches have been through cycles. They used to have a really good one, then got rid of it for a couch that was slightly shorter and narrower, juuuust enough smaller to make one have to pay attention where to put the pillow. If you tried to move too far down, you'd end up cramped. Now they have another couch, and it's leather, and frankly, I'm afraid of sliding off it.

There was a leather couch in the science journalism lounge at BU that was marvelous. It was scrounged by one of the students a year ahead of us, and this thing was long, deep, worn and so comfortable. It wasn't uncommon for a few of us to curl up on it between classes. A lot of last-minute studying happened on that couch. I spent the night on it once, too. It was a Friday, and some of us stuck around to get drunk off the free beer and wine offered to some grad student tour thing or some such. We drank a ridiculous amount down there, then snuck bottles of beer and wine into the lounge (we all learned how to jimmy the lock open, since there weren't enough keys to go around).

Long story short, I proceeded to get shit-faced and was also having a mental breakdown of sorts, related to my own neuroticisms and fears of the future spiraling out of control, and Eric was the one who put me to bed on the couch when everyone else left to go catch the last train. I slept there until about 7 a.m. the next morning, then stumbled down the stairs, out of the building and out to wait for the train back to my own bed. The couch was damn comfortable. I miss that couch.

I know Dan will sleep on the couch--he's actually probably the person who got me into serious couch sleeping. Before we dated, when we were just friends and he had a jealous girlfriend, I'd sleep on his couch at his apartment occasionally after we'd been up late watching dumb movies on TV. She was too jealous for me to have ever thought about taking the bed, even if he volunteered it and took the couch himself. Someday, when we have a place together, I want to have a long, wide couch that comfortably naps two people. It'll also be a great place for me to go on nights when I just can't fall asleep on the bed.

Art Form

I've worked a long time, many years, to perfect the need to blog. It only comes when I have something else I should be doing. Tonight, it's my stories for the paper, but what the hell. I'll take 10 minutes before I do anything real.

The holidays were a bit of a whirlwind of bad weather, long weekends, time wasted at work when no one else in the city was at their desks, and spending time with family and friends and the horses. Dan got off a few days, and for the first time ever (in five years, no less) we saw each other for Christmas. Well, ok, it wasn't on Christmas, but it was Christmas Eve, and you can tell it was true love because it was a disaster on the roads, took 40 minutes to see him, we spent 40 minutes together and then each took off for two-hour drives to our respective families when each of those drives normally take only a half-hour in good weather.

Anyway. Last week was a long one, primarily because of a frigid spell that froze up the pipes at the barn and required me to drive out twice a day to haul water buckets for the horses to drink. It was a pain in the ass, but in some ways I liked it. It gave every day a structure. I'd get up, pile on layers, pull on a hat, lug buckets back and forth, feed the horses treats, go home and do it again in 10 hours.

This week I've been seized with the urge to write again. After a month and a half off from the novel from National Novel Writing Month, I think I'm ready to return again, mostly to add more scenes, more background, more cursing, more bad decisions. I know November has come and gone, and a lot of things since then, but I'll admit it still makes to proud to know I can do it. I can write a book while having a full-time newspaper job, a relationship and a horse. Granted, it was probably crap and I didn't sleep much for the whole month, but who cares? That's what they make Diet Coke for. To keep you churning out crap.

(Coffee is the thing that keeps me churning out newspaper story crap. I applied for a fellowship in Boston after being encouraged to apply by the director, and then they chose to give the Texas spot to the Dallas Morning News. The fucking DMN, who has far more resources and more reporters than our paper will ever have. An aside, I know, but I'm still angry. And turning out crap. At least a fellowship may have given me some help in the crap department. And it would have been in Boston. This month marks three years since I moved back to Fort Worth from Boston. Fuck.)

I don't remember where I was going with any of this. I guess I don't have a point. I'm kinda scattered at the moment, which means I probably shouldn't sit down and churn out a story, but who gives a fuck? Maybe it makes me a more brilliant writer.

I think I'll get back into regular blogging soon, as soon as I settle into a routine again. I converted myself into a morning person (que horror!) with daylight savings and have been going to the barn to ride at daybreak, since there's no sun or light by the time I get out there after work. Now I've added a gym routine to my post-work hours, and I'm still working on getting that to fit with other things, like reading, blogging, watching inordinate amounts of Showtime dramas with Netflix.

Some thoughts before I go:

I'm terrifically happy for Andrew and Annie, who got engaged. He was a freshman photographer when I was a senior editor at the college paper, and now he's finishing grad school. We're still friends. He makes me feel partially hip and with it, and partially just like fucking old balls. I'm excited for both of them!

They started mysterious road construction outside my apartment. While not as bad as the jackhammers that would occasionally grace the road outside our place in Boston, it's still pretty offending on the few mornings I can actually sleep in and not go to the barn.

I'm crossing my fingers for Dan on Friday. I don't want to get into it, and I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but I'm hopeful. Wishing. Hopeful. Not the same thing, but I guess I'm both.

I don't want to jinx it, but I think the paycheck we get next Friday will be the fourth one that is normal and non-furlough. I will still have to move out of my apartment when my lease is up, though, and go back to roommates. (Fucking roommates.) The furloughs did a number on my savings (wiped it out) and credit card (ran it up) and it's just not smart to stay here.

Dan got me Eddie Izzard tickets for Christmas. He's in Dallas Jan. 21, and I'm expecting greatness--when we saw him in Austin a few years ago, I nearly keeled over from the awesomeness of it all. I'll report back then and hopefully have some bizarre quotes to share.

(Last time we saw him perform, I took a notepad. Yeah. I know, right? In my purse. And wrote down quotes that I thought were hilarious. Maybe I'll do the same, since goodness knows I'm no less dorky than I was then.)

(My 'thoughts' are as long as the actual blog post body, I think.)

All Together Now

I'm not exactly sure where this year went, but I do know that three weeks of it were spent on furlough. I also know that our parent company firing our publisher and bringing in a new person to run the place about two weeks before Christmas was not the kind of end-of-year surprise we wanted, but what can you do, right?

Work has been a whirlwind, mostly because it's a rushed time of year anyway--deadlines are shorter because of the holidays, you try to work ahead so you can have days off (and to accommodate the bigwigs in town who take off about three weeks and are impossible to get ahold of for interviews), and, if you're me, you're so jumped up on processed sugary foods that it's nearly impossible to concentrate. No lie: Some company delivered an entire massive cookie cake to our office. This is why I will probably die of a heart attack at 35.

And in the middle of this, our publisher was fired on a Thursday and we were told a man from our parent company and a new publisher would come down on a Monday. This gave us an entire weekend to worry about getting laid off. It was a pretty anxious weekend.

But somehow we survived it all and still have jobs (so far). It's Christmas Eve, there are snow flurries outside, and I'm sitting on my living room floor with Fenway, who's got one eye on the window above which some sparrows have a hangout. He talks to the birds every morning, and they disappear about midday and he lies waiting for them. Most days, the spot where he sits is a big patch of sunlight, where he can warm himself and look ridiculous, but today's it's chilly and the windows are a tiny bit fogged up.

I'll be going out to the barn later, giving the horses some treats and making sure they have warm blankets for the night, then driving out to Dallas to spend the night with my parents. I'll take a timeout in the evening to see Dan when he gets off work, and I admit I'm excited about that. We've been dating for about five years but have never yet seen each other on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, since my parents always lived halfway across the country. I would usually see him on his birthday, which is Dec. 27, but I think it will be nice to give him his Christmas gift actually on Christmas and his birthday gift on his birthday. That, and I hope I can convince him to drive me around the ritzy parts of Dallas to look at Christmas lights.

Spending Christmas with my parents in Texas is a bizarre thought. I think part of the reason work has seemed so frenzied lately is because usually I just check out and leave, using up most of my vacation days to take a luxurious trip back to Virginia. This year I actually had to be at work during all those days I'd usually be gone. (Actually having to work--what an indignity!)

This Christmas will also be the first one without any family pets. Our last childhood pet, a cat named BC, had to be put to sleep over the weekend. She was about 16, I think, and we got her when I was in 5th grade or so, and she was getting old and the vet had said before that she seemed to have some kind of slow cancer growing. I don't know what exactly happened--it happened on Saturday morning, and my mom still doesn't want to talk about it yet--but when Mom sent a text message to tell me (I suspect because she would have started crying if she called), I found myself crying pretty hard.

BC was a good cat, and we all loved her and all her weird quirks, but her death was also the final one of all the pets we had when I was growing up. Sugar, the yellow lab my parents got for themselves as a wedding present, had to be put to sleep when she was about 11 and I was in fourth grade. Taffy, the cocker spaniel we got when I was in third grade or so, was put to sleep when I was a sophomore in college. He'd actually been diagnosed with a bad heart condition when I was in middle school, and the vet told us he'd die that year, but he was on daily heart medication and lived until he was about 10.

Ginger was the cat we adopted while we lived in England. At the time, taking animals to the U.K. was just a pain because of the rabies quarantine laws, so Sugar lived with my grandparents the three years we were there and Ginger was a tiny orange kitten when we got him from a farmer who was going to drown the litter if he couldn't give them all away. Gin went through the embarrassment of being called a girl for several months before we figured out his sex, and he was a loving but very vicious cat. He killed every bird and rodent he could get, leaving feathers strewn in the back yard, before we moved back to the States and he became an indoor cat. He was put to sleep when I was a senior in college.

BC we found under our car at the barn one night in San Antonio. The back pastures were patrolled by coyotes when the horses weren't turned out. While the animals never posed a threat to the big horses, every barn cat and most barn dogs disappeared, and we were going to leave the barn one night when we saw this little kitten under the Suburban. She wouldn't move, so we hauled her out and took her home and named her BC for Barn Cat. (Just as we named Ginger for his coloring as a big ginger cat, as the British called their orange tabbies, we named BC for something obvious. We're an original family.)

BC was referred to as a vampire cat for the first few years with us, since she largely lived under my parents' bed and only came out at night. She finally got kicked out of the house for two years when we lived in Alabama--she wouldn't quit peeing on people's shoes and clothes, so she was relegated to the barn. We were out there every day for several hours with Rio and Topper anyway, and she adjusted well and became a great mouser. She came back into the house when we moved to Virginia, and she never peed on people's clothes again.

As I said, I'm sad about BC, but I'm also sort of sad because she's the end of an era. She was one of the last things about my childhood still around, and it's sad to realize they're all gone. They had good lives with us, and we dote upon animals like nobody's business in our family, but it's still painful. Fenway is my own cat, so he's a bit of a different thing--I got him as an adult, as someone with a job. Rio and Topper are also something different, since they're not exactly pets and since horses are generally so long-lived. I expect them both to be around for a long time yet, and still BC's death just reminded me of how much I dread having to one day say good-bye to them.

Now that I've dragged this post down with talks of death and everything--sorry!--I'll wrap it up. The snow has picked up outside, and it reminds me of what it looked like one white Christmas in Albuquerque, when we trekked out back behind the house to the barn to let the horses out to play in it. Topper ate the carrot nose off the snowman and startled himself when a piece of the head fell off. Christmas isn't quite the New Year, so it's not a time yet to look toward the future and make plans. Instead, Christmas to me seems more a time to remember the past, remember the good things that have happened, and try not to forget.

Home For The Holidays

I haven't updated lately, although I meant to write about what a transcendent experience it was to be at the sold-out TCU/Utah game a few weeks ago. I showed up with my signs for College GameDay, ate a giant burger at Dutch's, drank warm beer and then cold beer given to me by the guy who was my editor when I was but a young reporter at the college newspaper and then another cold beer given to me by a former professor. I fought the lines for the bathroom--sometimes I wish I could pee like a guy--and watched TCU kick the shit out of Utah. It was good, and the fans were so noisy and everything was so great I almost wanted to cry.

But anyway, enough waxing poetic there. I've been mostly keeping up with the National Novel Writing Month that is November. I'm about 34,000 words into what needs to be a 50,000-word short novel by 11:59 p.m. Nov. 30. I didn't really start with much of a plot, except I'd have a reporter who gets laid off and gets a job at a horse stable, and I've gotten that far. I don't know what else to really throw in, so I'm making stuff up as I go along, under the careful watch of the wonderful Kate, who's a great coach. Maybe I'll actually do a triathlon some day. She'd be a great coach for that, too.

(Hey, Kate, tonight I'm going to go running for the first time in . . . well, a very, very long time. You should turn your whip that direction, too.)

Thanksgiving is this week, and it's so nuts to think about the holidays with my parents nearby. They're about 50 minutes away, which is just mind-blowing. My parents buy me like a week's worth of barbeque and send me home with leftovers, and this time I'll see them without the vacation days and flights to Reagan.

Winter and the holidays were always my time to be in Virginia, to be riding the Metro around D.C., to be walking around in the cold from museum to museum, iPod on and hands in pockets. I knew when I was at home (I refer to everything as "at home," it feels like; my apartment, my parent's place, Dan's apartment, etc) in July that I'd miss Virginia. I miss the gray skies that hold the possibility of snow. I miss the fat squirrel who lived behind our first house and the fat rabbit that lived behind the second one. I miss driving around to the Bloom grocery store or the Safeway, and I liked the church our family went to there, since there were windows to look out and see the trees through.

Since I was a sophomore in college, holidays always meant Virginia. I spent summer vacation and spring breaks there, too, and I did spend two brief Christmases in Tampa when I was in grad school, but they're pretty firmly linked with Virginia in my mind.

This holiday will be fantastic, no doubt. But at the same time, I won't have the luxury of stepping completely, totally away from my responsibilities as an adult to go home anymore. When I was halfway across the country, there was no chance of an editor calling me to do something or of me worrying about getting something in the mail. My parents are close, now, and their new home is, too. I just won't be able to get away from my home, either.

I love Fort Worth, I sort of think of it as an adopted home, but I am antsy.