Self-indulgence

Yesterday, I bought Lucky Charms and milk at HT, along with lime beer for my one alcoholic drink per week, and Swiss cheese and Boursin and Chavrie and strawberries and Oats & More, which were all on sale (they always get me with the sales! Or do I get them? Chicken or egg?). I had been craving Lucky Charms for weeks and always denied myself but finally thought, hey, you only live once, and I had had a long day and needed to chill out with my Michael Mahan first-firing-of-new-kiln bowl/crock full of sugary empty calories.

I sat on the porch for the first time in a while and finished a book, then came inside hoping to catch What Not to Wear, but as usual of late, it wasn't on. So I read Real Simple until The Soup came on. It was a perfect night for the sole soul. Real Simple had inspiring three-ingredient recipes. I'm inching toward clarity on some questions about my future and calling. (Inching forward and footing back, it seems sometimes, but on the whole, progress is progress and not to be pooh-poohed.) Now, here I am at PCJ, having fortuitously escaped Saturday assignments, bit by bit working on my pottery articles. Wishing there were a bike lock-esque thing for laptops for when you're in public and want to go to the bathroom and are tired of asking strangers to keep an eye on your computer while you're away. Glorying in the realization that I don't have to go for a run after this if I don't want to. About to get a free refill. Life is good.

The New Busy

I knocked off work early today for a dental cleaning. After having my teeth and dental hygeine praised, I came home, read a bit, and had plenty of time to run and shower before supper, a rare occasion. Now I'm watching MythBusters and letting it get dark, checking other people's blogs and finishing a Googlechat. Free time is so much dearer now, in every sense of the word. Something to savor.

Can't wait for Seagrove in August. It will be different because I'm not actively (or passively) working on the book, but probably better for that, more carefree. Plus I now have a bit of disposable income to support Potters for Peace.

I'm off to do some information-gathering. More later.

Weekend Update

Hi there,

I'm sitting at the one wi-fi hotspot in Kenansville, North Carolina, killing time (hours! five hours!) between assignments. They close in thirty minutes and I'll have three hours left after that. Very glad to have found it, though; A&M cafe. I would never have checked it out had not an acquaintance recommended it, because from the outside it looks pretty sketch, but inside it's nice. I'm sitting next to a print of ivory-billed woodpeckers, in a comfortable chair with a table at a great height for typing, looking out the windows at green trees and blue sky.

I just did the questions for chapter 11 in Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World. My small group is reading it and loving it, but there are 12 chapters, so we're almost out. Luckily, the same author, Joanna Weaver, has another book, Having a Mary Spirit, so we're going with that next. But after that we will be back to square one in the Salt Shaker (Christian bookstore), wandering around being indecisive and feeling blind. We've picked some terrible books--we all agree on this, it's not just me and my snobbery--so I tense up as we near that time again. The reason for my saying this is, does anyone have good ideas for books for Christian small groups to read? Even though we have all of Having a Mary Spirit before next time, I would feel good if we had a few titles up our sleeves. Maybe I'll turn them onto Adam Hamilton.

I'm going to see a movie this evening (for work) that was written, produced, and directed by a local 17-year-old. I was dismayed this morning to find out it's a scary movie, because I hate being scared (come on, the world is scary enough already, people) but I'm thinking it might be bad enough to be funny instead. Which puts me in a bind: do I want a sweet lil' earnest teenager to make a good movie if it means I'll be scared on the long drive home? Or do I want his heartfelt work to be low quality just for the sake of my peace of mind? Not too much longer until we know, confreres. Either way it's part bad, part good, in keeping with the pattern of life in general. I'm slowly learning that it's all about the ratios.

A quick post before buckling down

I sometimes get frantic for NPR talky-talk when it's classical for too long. Did you know that WHQR stands for "Wilmington's High-Quality Radio?" I think Bill Radke and the other Marketplace guy (Ari...?) are my faves, even though I'm close friends with Neil Conan after my stint on Talk of the Nation.

Heat index 106 today. About the same yesterday. Let's hope tomorrow is a bit more tolerable for the U2 cover band! It makes everything about ten times more difficult and me about ten times more irritable. What if I just walked into the ocean fully clothed?

The Life

Working at home in my pajamas today. I'm about to go for a run after way too long without, and then I'm going to a concert at Topsail Beach and getting paid for it. Sweet!

The Good with the Bad

I found out yesterday that we sometimes get paid with live checks (just learned that neat and apt term) and sometimes with direct deposit. We never know which until it happens. Peggy said, "It's hit or miss." People shrug this stuff off! I don't think it's OK! Seems like it's asking for someone's check to be missed someday. This workplace gets more Twilight-Zone-y every day.

But I got to watch a search-and-dive team train by retrieving a dummy from a pond, touch a (disembodied) baleen, and interview four magicians for three stories. I'm very lucky in very many ways. I meet the neatest and sweetest people. And readers seem to respond well, which is the whole point.

Plus, I'm awesome at "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me," because I listen to NPR all the time. Fret not, WHQR, I didn't pledge during the drive, but you will get your recompense yet, dear friend. Just you wait.

Enter the mini

Hiya,

I'm going to try some mini-blogging, like a couple of sentences at a time. I believe it will make me more likely to post regularly rather than lapsing. And of course, once I'm logged on I'll probably spill at least a paragraph or two, so the idea is to trick myself into thinking I'm only writing a bit, which seems so much less daunting than having to deliver some insightful, decisive thing.

Thus:

I found the way to keep lettuce crisp and delish for a week or even more! Rinse (in a bowl if the breed has a lot of sand in it), drain, pat/shake dry, and then put in an airtight container with paper towels to wick away the excess moisture.
Also learned that my bread freezes quite well and thaws just fine in the microwave.

I finished Devil in the White City in a record four days or something. What a thrill! I recommend it to everyone. It's about the Chicago World's Fair in the 1890s and a serial killer who lived in Chicago at that time. As a nonfic writer, I found the notes almost as intriguing as the book. Larson was so thorough and so detailed in his research. Definitely a new role model for me. Now I'm on another book by Erik Larson, Thunderstruck. A bit less ferociously all-consuming but well above other books. This one's about Marconi, the beginning of wireless telegraphy, and also a murder but I don't think it's a serial killer like in the last one. Larson writes history really accessibly because he focuses on people. I want to implore him to write textbooks, or just adapt his existing books slightly for a student audience. I'd devour a history class if it was structured like his books.

That's all. I've an early morning tomorrow. Stay tuned for mini-posts.

A Good Day

Yesterday, I went to the office to upload my week's articles, then left on assignment. I covered art camp at Art Exposure in Hampstead, a really great place with wonderful people. Then I visited the Sea Salt Bakery, which was recently started by the same people who opened my beloved Sweet 'N' Savory in 1992. Their display trays are made of bread.

I left early because I had an oil-change appointment, and rather than go all the way to Wrightsville Beach for one hour, I decided to sit in Port City Java in the Harris Teeter across the street from the Honda place. I ran into a couple of friends from school, one of whom had just returned from Japan. Also saw some of the familiar faces from Flaming Amy's Bowl. At the Honda place, I ran into another friend from school and had a wonderful long conversation with her while waiting for our cars. She's hilarious and insightful. I was very happy to skip my reading session.

On the way to dinner, I saw someone who used to go to my church, then at the restaurant a couple the wife of which is in the MFA program, then at the concert, two friends from high school. That makes eight people I randomly ran into in one day! I wonder why that always happens in clusters and then not for weeks. But I love when it does. I also finished Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, a wonderful and surprising and educational and funny book I'm intensely glad to have read, and then started in on Devil in the White City, which it hurt to tear myself away from at 1:30 a.m. to go to sleep. I wish I could read it while working out so I wouldn't have to choose between the two later today. So everything added up to a wonderful, fun day, and here I am on the other side of it still riding the wave and enjoying my first fully unscheduled day in a long time. Let's keep it up, okay?

The state of things

It's been a long time since I posted, and for excellent reason, though I say so myself. I have a full-time job now! I'm a newspaper reporter, which is delightful since I actually (gasp!) get to work in my chosen and studied field of writing. Despite the hour-or-so drive to work and the sometimes-several-hours of driving to and from assignments, I very much enjoy the work. Someone asked me the other day what exactly I do. I said, "Well. I decide what is newsworthy. I go to the news. I interview people and take pictures. I write the stories in InDesign and deal with the photos in PhotoShop, and I upload them to a server." It's much more manageable than it sounds, mostly because the crew is quite laid back and gives reporters some hard-core freedom to cover whatever we find interesting, on our own timetable. I'm very lucky to be working in this setting as opposed to a traditional daily paper. Of the four papers owned by the company, three come out once a week and one comes out twice a week. It's a good pace: always enough work, rarely too much for sanity. Also, I love interacting with all the different people I write about: professional magicians, children taking art lessons, librarians, owners of art centers and bakeries, businesspeople, politicians. Even town council meetings are surprisingly eventful and easy to find the story in. I've gotten a lot more comfortable making cold calls on the phone to find out when an event is or some other tidbit of information. We crack ourselves up at the office, and I should soon get a computer with all the right software so I can do some composing at home. NPR/WHQR is my new best friend, with all the driving I do, so I'm always learning something illuminating. It's a sweet deal overall. Since I write so much for work, posts here might become more sparse and will probably include some links to pieces I've written for the papers. But do keep checking, and I will do my utmost not to let this blog lapse.