Family sharing

I forgot that I took this picture while home for Thanksgiving break. It’s too adorable not to share I’ve decided.

Yep, that’s my father and my sister’s dog sharing a blanket as a pillow.

A newsroom fish no more

Don’t worry. He’s still alive, or at least was last time I saw him. I kidnapped Woodstein and took him to a new home. I suppose it wasn’t actually kidnapping because I told Rikki first. As she pointed out, he just wasn’t doing well in the newsroom.

So I gave him to the veterans in the CUB. They agreed to take responsibility for the little guy. For now he’s living in a coffee pot carafe until I get him a better bowl. I wasn’t going to clean out his current bowl. It’s too gross. I did buy a toothbrush, though, and gave his skull a good cleaning. I couldn’t part him from that.

A return to senior year

Just to clarify, I’m talking about my senior year of high school. One of the first assignments (or maybe it was one of the last, I can’t really remember) for my final high school English class was to write a “Who I Am” essay. It could be no longer than one page, single spaced. I found mine when I was going through some boxes in my closet and decided to share excerpts. I feel like I’ve changed so much since high school, I was surprised to find that a lot of what wrote still remains true.

A note from my great-grandmother

My father got a copy of this note from our relatives when he went to my great-uncle’s funeral a couple months ago. It was the note my grandfather’s mother wrote to her father after she was married. It’s dated Dec. 9 1912. She married below her class, thus the elopement. Transcript below because of poor picture quality.

A cold little chickadee

As I left work at Ferdinand’s yesterday, I came across this little guy in my path. I’ve always been fond of chickadees as they’re adorable. Their name is fun to say, they’re adorably small, and they are pretty quiet – no obnoxious sounds. I decided I wanted to take a picture. I took one from a reasonable distance, then moved closer and closer, seeing how close I could get before it flew away. But it never flew away. So I couldn’t help myself. I tried to pick it up.

And it let me. It didn’t struggle or chirp. It just let me scoop it up, which meant something was wrong. And now I had involved myself. I felt bad for the little guy, but what are you supposed to do with a sick chickadee?

Back in the newsroom

I have returned to the Evergreen, kind of and only temporarily. I started last week helping at the News desk. This week I filled in as copy editor two nights and News editor on Thursday. I am amazed at how quickly and easily it is to get sucked back in.

Other than dropping in to meet Rikki before going to a class we both have, I’ve pretty much stayed away from the newsroom. I thought it would seem mocking to hang out there without having any work related to the paper to do. But it still seems so natural to be back in the newsroom, even with my previous absence.

A lot of the faces are different, and Dom and Rikki did do a pretty good job of cleaning the newsroom out. I was happy to discover a few of my things left though. One the quotes I chose is still hanging by the news desk. Also, a sticky note is still on a news desk drawer warning people not to throw away anything inside the drawer. I put it there the summer before I became news editor because I didn’t trust the summer  news editor with my documents.

What I’ve been up to

Two weekends ago, my room flooded while I was out for the weekend. Apparently a pipe between two of the suites got clogged, and so grayish sewer water came up through the drains. My roommates were kind enough to move my stuff in my room so everything survived.

This is Hubie, my de-humidifier. We had three of these monsters in the suite for more than a week trying to dry everything out. Our rooms hummed. Environmental Health & Safety kept taking wall and floor samples too. Now they want to entirely replace my carpet.

Last weekend, I drove out to Palouse to do a story on Haunted Palouse for one of my classes. I also ended up giving it to the Evergreen. How did I not know that Palouse was home to a printing museum?

I also got a tour of the whole town, which unsurprisingly, didn’t take very long. It was quite interesting though. The event is adding a Haunted Hay Ride this year. It’s going to run through Shady Lane (actual name of a wide walking path behind town). Shady Lane was Palouse’s red light district back when it was near a stagecoach stop, according to townspeople.

In addition to those adventures, I had my first CUB Advisory Board meeting, first President’s Student Advisory Board meeting (which I’m coordinating), Student Conduct training, two papers due, another article, a class debate and work at Ferdinand’s.

September was a very busy month. But now that I have survived, I hopefully won’t have to do another catch up post for a while.

To click or not to click

I have only recently started reading my news online. There is an abundance of newspapers on campus, so even working at the Evergreen, instead of surfing the internets for my news I would just walk to a nearby building and grab a paper. In part it may be that I hoped my resistance to internet news would somehow save the print industry.

But because all my efforts to resist advances in technology have proved fruitless, and because internet news is nothing if not convenient, I have started reading the news on my computer before I leave for class in the morning. One of the problems I have discovered, however, is that there’s no way to fool myself. I can’t pretend to be an intellectual who forgoes reading entertainment news and instead keeps up to date on real, actually important issues. I have to consciously pick the links I want to read, making what news I am interested in undeniable. It’s not like reading the paper where you glance at every page and can pretend to be interested in the third health care reform story from that day’s paper.

Still, being forced to admit to what I actually want to read and what I don’t care to hasn’t bothered me too much until today. The darn New York Times just had to have the link Baby Mongooses!.  Nevermind world and U.S. news, there were baby animals. I tried to resist and continued reading about Gabon, China and North Korea, but then I gave in. I included Baby Mongooses in my precious amount of news reading time this morning. Completely worth it, but I am slightly ashamed and worried that some day this interest in not real news will lead me to USA Today.

I made the front page

The photo below is from the front page of Monday’s Daily Evergreen. Can you find me?

A forgotten overheard

Idaho bartender upon seeing my temporary, vertical, enhanced license: “Wtf is this.”

So I begin to explain. I get about four words in, “It’s a new enhanced,” and the bartender cuts me off. “Never mind. I don’t care.” He hands me my drink.