Forwarding address

I've switched platforms again!
I'm going to try WordPress, it seems like there's a little bit more flexibility with design and such, so we'll see how it goes.
You can find me here:
http://kitkatsmeow.wordpress.com/

~K.

A little less swimming, a little more synching

Lesson: keeping five-year-olds afloat in swimming lessons actually keeps you in decent shape.

I've been coaching synchronized swimming for six years; I've been part of a club for 12 years. Being at the pool every week for anywhere from three to six or eight hours is nothing new to me.

It's not like I was in the water for that entire time (though if there was an exhibition coming up, I can think of a couple of times we spent eight hours straight in the pool, desperately trying to nail down a routine last minute) but I'm realizing now it made a difference. Just like the year I coached twin five-year-old girls and would spend about an hour and a half treading water in the deep end apparently made a difference. My knees and hips hated me afterwards, but apparently it made a difference to how in-shape I was.

I haven't really been in the water at all this year since I left the club I've always swam with, but with having weekdays act as my weekends, the pool schedule actually lines up quite nicely and there isn't really a reason I shouldn't be in the water.

Until I went last night and realized how out of shape I am. Understand that doing a full length of the pool completely underwater, without coming up for a breath once is not a challenge for me. Whipkicking hard enough to get my torso completely out of the water in a body boost is nothing new. Spinning upside down and kicking my legs into splits without sinking is something I learned a long long time ago.

Last night, I walked out of the leisure centre and felt like jello. I got into my car and my left hip knotted; even now, if I shift the majority of my weight to my left, it does some complaining.

I don't like this at all. I much prefer some kind of exercise that I can do without, thinking, I guess for lack of better word, or scheduling, I guess — now I'm realizing that the fact I walked 10 blocks to school every day (yes, every day, no matter the weather, except for a couple times in third and fourth year when I knew I'd be at school until four in the morning) also probably played a part as well.

The thing I want to know is, when did exercise become, well, exercise?

Daydreaming

A couple of years ago, someone told me that it was impossible to dream about someone else unless that person gave you (obviously subconsciously) permission to dream about them.

I don't know enough about how dreams and the subconscious work to go any further with that claim, but it's kind of an interesting thought.

Especially when I had a dream last night about two people who have not been a major part of my life for roughly a year — in one case, not part of my life at all for over a year — and the fact that they're both from different areas of my life, so while they were both in my dream, at the same time in the same location, they don't actually know each other.

I find it weird to tell people that I had a dream about them, so I'm not going to use first initials like I normally do — call these two X. and Y. (I almost think there was one more person in my dream, but it's a dream and kind of fuzzy and I can't remember anymore.) I knew X. for about two years and worked closely with him for about two months; I've known Y. for probably about five years and distance is pretty much the thing that means we can't be a more consistent part of each other's lives, though I got to talk to him last week, which was good.

I dreamt I was teching at the theatre — something else I haven't done in just over a year — and X. and Y. were both there. Y. was in the background and interacting with X. more than anything else, but while I was trying to ignore X., X. was determined to get my attention.

I knew I was at the theatre, because obviously that's the only place I've ever tech'd, but the board didn't look like the theatre board — the tower with all the MD cards and everything was in front of me and looked like a bigger version of a VCR (which it definitely doesn't look like in real life) and the board might have been in front of X., who was to the left of me; it looked like we were at the work bench in my dad's garage. Part of the reason I was ignoring X. was because I was missing some CDs (which we also didn't use) and someone told me one of the actors had them, so I had to find those, then when I tried to find the right track, I nearly reset everything. I don't know how to explain it well, but it was kind of at that point, X. was like, if you pay attention to me, I can help you sort this out. So it was like, OK, I guess so — then I turned around from doing something else and he's fiddling away, changing everything from the way I'm used to having things set up, and it's like, what the hell?

The frustrating thing with dreams is there's always parts that you know happened but you can't quite remember — I remember Y. was part of the dream, but I can't remember what exactly he was doing there, and I think someone else (who is from yet another part of my life and has no connection to the other two) was in my dream, but I don't remember who or why.

Though, the good news I guess is that at least it was in English and I haven't had too many problems explaining this dream. When I was in immersion, we though the teachers were joking when they said we'll start to dream in French as we learn more of the language— it's actually true. Even now, sometimes I'll try to explain a dream to a friend, and I'll be stumbling for words before I realize that the reason I'm having problems is because I'm talking in English, to an anglophone friend and the dream was in French.

Shiny things (read: distractions)

The bookshelf is beginning to rule my life. Every time I have some free time, I think, "I have to read." Which, by the way, completely takes the joy out of reading (so I'm trying to avoid that too). And every time I pick up something that is not originally from my bookshelf, I think, "I am never going to get through my bookshelf."

There's a simple solution. I could just go through it and toss the books that are sitting there that I've started and have never finished because they're not up my alley, books that have appeared on my shelf and I've never started them because I have no idea how they got there.

But I don't really want to do that, as long as it's going to take me to do this.

And so it turns out that I'm writing a lot of blog posts about books (and copy editing). What can I say? Some people live with cats, I live with books.

Right now, I've detracted and started reading the Macdonald Hall books, by Gordon Korman, because I was talking with someone about No Coins, Please, and I remembered how much I loved the Macdonald Hall books, with Bruno and Boots.

There's a lot more to the series than I remember, though this is probably because we owned Go Jump in the Pool, and all the other ones would have been borrowed or loaned. Unfortunately, the library didn't have the complete series, so I think I'm missing the first one and one other one, but oh well, I guess. (Another excuse to read them all again later?)

They may be kids' books (they weren't even in the YA section. I definitely had to go to the kids' section to find them) but they're still good for a laugh. I also picked up Losing Joe's Place, which is not part of the Macdonald Hall series but I still love, and I can get through about a book and a half a day, which isn't bad either.

One of the fleeting thoughts I had when I was reading The War with Mr. Wizzle was how much times have changed — besides one other mention in another book that Elmer Drisdale has a computer station, the Magnetronic 515 is the only computer in the book.

In case you haven't figured it out already, I love the fact that I can read these books as an adult and still literally laugh out loud while reading certain parts. Maybe it helps that the books are set in Canada, but these sound like real people, that could have grown up and still be kicking around today. So considering the time warp with the computer, I started thinking — how old would Bruno and Boots and their peers be today? (Not actually that old, when you do the math, in case you were wondering — maybe mid-40s?)

One of the great things about these books is that besides some of the time stamps, like the computers or lack thereof, there isn't really a defining time period of when this was set (the copyrights on the books vary anywhere from 1979 to 1995) — I would have to probably read the first book to be completely sure, but as far as I know, we don't even know how old Bruno and Boots are. My best guess would be 11 or 12, if they were at the boarding school for seven years (there's seven books) and graduated.

But I think I'm thinking way too much about it. They're really fun reads though — so glad I left my bookshelf for another week or so.

Consider this a placeholder

I'm not quite ready for the month to get the best of me yet, but I've had a really long day — I've been up since 4:30 a.m. — and I really need a nap.

That sentence sounds less ridiculous when I remind you that the time change is tonight and soon, it will be quarter to seven, not quarter to eight — not like that's a bad time to crawl into bed though. :) (And, if you were wondering, even though Lloyd is on the provincial border and Saskatchewan doesn't do daylight savings time, the time change does not occur in the middle of the street. The boundary is actually a couple of kilometres to the east still.)

So if I get a couple of hours of sleep and can come back to this before midnight, I will. Otherwise, just consider the following as a placeholder for now.

"It's not that I'm a perfectionist, it's just that I care more than the average bear." – paraphrase of a Facebook status from third-year university.

Edit: Nov. 6
Sometimes, I wish I cared just as much as the average bear (read: journalist/person), not more. It would probably make my life less stressful and a little less busy.

When I'm working with InDesign, our desktop publishing program, I have about a 95 per cent chance of looking at an indent and knowing, just by looking, that it's not set at 0.125, or looking at some copy and knowing there's two spaces after a period, without actually doing anything.

Quite honestly, though it's a handy trick to have when you're copy editing, it's kind of annoying. Because once I find one two-spaces-after-a-period in submitted copy, I have to go back and check all the other beginnings of sentences, because history has shown that if someone does it once, they probably do it every time.

It's really come down to a battle of, who's going to notice? And I don't like that battle at all, one, because I'm going to notice and know I left it without checking it or fixing it, hoping no one would notice. Two, it leaves room for attitude, in that if you don't stick to strict consistency, it leaves room for "Well, I don't feel like double-checking that rule today. (undertone: who's going to notice?)"

I'd asked a couple friends for arguments for and against CP Style awhile ago, and someone made the comment that it's not even about being consistent down the page, but throughout the paper.When I saw G. in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago, he took that even further and said it's about being consistent eight months from now.

Being consistent on a page and through a paper is doable. So is being consistent eight months from now, but like I said, at that point it really becomes a battle of who's going to notice? (Note: my solution is to set up a doable consistency goal so that you don't drive yourself crazy and that your soul dies from all the copy editing mistakes, but I'm still working on setting those guidelines for myself. The other option is to just memorize the entire CP book, and I guess I'm well on my way to doing that too.)

This is that whole caring more than the average bear thing, and being frustrated when people don't even care as much as the average bear. I got a lot of flak about it in third year from someone else in the journalism program, and funny enough, though we both more or less stuck to our guns in that I was going to care more than the average bear and he wanted me to relax a little, we became sort of friends — and I might have relaxed, a little bit, though by now I might have forgotten how to do that (relax).

I'm in this funny in between place where I care more than the average bear, but I'm still far from a perfectionist. When I hear that voice from third year in my head, it helps a little bit with the frustration, but I'm still not sure.  

Losing my voice

It's only Nov. 4, and I almost didn't blog tonight. Part of it is like I said at the beginning, I don't think I have enough interesting things to say to blog more than once or twice a week.

The idea of NaNoWriMo is quantity — 50,000 words in a month. As I understand it, it's just about writing, and getting your thoughts and story lines down on paper (or computer screen). The quality comes later, if you want it to, going through the manuscript completed over a month and actually doing something with it, refining and editing.

I don't know how well that idea translates to NaBloPoMo. I don't want a blog just to be about quantity. The one thing that made me post tonight, however, was the idea that of sheer quantity, eventually something has to be good.

I mentioned earlier that I don't like my writing voice. This is probably because the journalism program I went through — it has since changed since Mount Royal became a university, and when it comes to journalism intakes and degrees and MRU and the Ministry of Advanced Education that's a whole other story in itself — had its focus on straight journalism. We were taught to write a news story, and, as I put it to a instructor at an American school during ACP 2010 in Kentucky, "We have our voices beaten out of us."

He was a little concerned — "Who is beating you?" — but relaxed a little when I explained that it was just that there wasn't a lot of opportunity for us to write editorials or personal journalism, the focus was on straight news stories. Like I said, the program has changed a bit, and if some of the second-year work I edited last year is any indication, more are able to keep their voices, in both good and bad ways. Good in that they have a voice, bad in that sometimes they don't know when to quiet their voice and write straight news.

So I'm posting tonight because I want to find my voice. Even when I'm writing a column, there's times when it sounds too much like a blog, and I have to back up. It's been so long since I've used my voice, it doesn't feel right. It's a little unsure and shaky and I just don't like it.

But maybe by the end of the month I will have found it.

Musical numbers

I originally tried to write this as a column earlier in October, but then the BBM outage happened, and that was a lot more fun to write about. The idea came back to me yesterday though, when I was shooting photos at the Terri Clark concert.

If you're looking for the short version, I tried to sum it up in 140 characters after Alberta Arts days at the beginning of October:

That weekend, I shot three different concerts — U22 musicians working in a songwriting circle, the actual U22 concert, and One More Girl. The thing that I thought was kind of cool was that in all the groups, there was always one musician who looked like they had so much music built up inside of them, and the concert was the only way they knew how to let it out, but they were doing so in an as controlled manner as possible.

Usually, for the bigger name concerts, it's not the main musician who I notice with this trait (not to detract from the main musician, but it's true). In the case of One More Girl, it was their guitar player. I'd actually seen him before, he's a Canadian session artist that had played a Buddy Holly tribute concert in Bonnyville earlier in the summer. (Note: specifically to him, the other cool thing to watch is that he plays left-handed. If you know me, you might know why this is a big deal to me, and it's not the obvious answer, that I'm left-handed.)

But all the musicians – the One More Girl guitar player, Jordan Grant-Kaminski from U22, and the drummer for Terri Clark's band – they all have the same attitude about them.

Like any performer, it feels like they're very aware of the audience, but at the same time, it doesn't really matter. It seems like they would play like this whether there was an audience or not.

In the end though, it comes back to you can literally see how much music they have built up inside of them, and I think that is so so cool. The best example of the three is Grant-Kaminski — when it was his turn to play during the U22 concert — there were four artists in total — he performed on both the piano and the guitar. When he was on the guitar, he really knew how to play the mic. I'd guess he's about 5'10'' or so, and he adjusted the mic accordingly, but as he played, he'd lift himself up on his toes during some notes, only to settle back down and then shift and lift himself up again, as if he just couldn't stay still, the music was that good.

By nature, I'm a fiddly person — after crashing around the office today, dropping some things off my desk and knocking over a mug of water, I was teased that everything around me should be nailed down; I also fell off my chair yesterday, just sitting at my computer — so I guess the other part of it is that I'm slightly jealous these musicians have found a way to channel their energy, and seem so relaxed and laid-back about it.

edited Nov. 5.

Chicken Scratch

Day 2 of NaBloPoMo! I had another idea for a post, but then I saw this on K.'s blog, and it seemed like a much more fun idea.

1. Name of website.
2. Left or right-handed?
3. Favorite letters to write?
4. Least favorite letters to write?
5. Write this: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
6. Write these in all capitals: CRAB, HUMOR, KALEIDOSCOPE, PAJAMAS, GAZILLION.
7. Write your favorite lyrics to a song.
8. Tag some people to do this meme next.¹
9. Anything else you’d like to say?

Something borrowed, loaned or digital — the bookshelf that will not die

Note: K. posted this morning about Na(tional)Blo(g)Po(sting)Mo(nth), and I'm intrigued. I've heard horror stories from another friend about Na(tional)No(vel)Wri(ting)Mo(nth), and I hear he's trying it again, but I don't envy him. A blog post every day though? Maybe, if my somewhat/sometimes crazy schedule will allow it. I try to keep my posting to once or twice a week, mostly because I don't think I'm that interesting, but I guess that means I'm just going to have to be more interesting this month. We'll see.

Earlier this year, I talked about cleaning out my bookshelf.

It hasn't gone very well.

Yes, I've been reading, but not necessarily the things I'm supposed to be reading. I did start with my bookshelf, and then I decided I wanted to read all the Harry Potter books, from one to seven, in one go. Those were still at my parents' house, so the next time I went home, I brought them back with me. Going through my mom's bookcase to extract the Harry Potter books, however, I discovered a couple more of my books that had migrated and hadn't made the move with me. So those came back home with me as well, along with some books she had picked up that she thought I might enjoy.

Then a friend lent me P.S. I Love You. She's borrowed a handful of my books and still has them, months later, which I'm fine with, but I wanted to read P.S. and get it back to her.

The other thing about living in Lloyd is that if you can prove residency, you get a free library card. For the past couple of years, I've been using a TAL card — Total Alberta Library card — which gives me free access to any library in Alberta, but only allows me five books. I used to cheat the system a bit; I would get five books from Edmonton's libraries and then go out to St. A to get another five. This worked out OK, usually there were a couple of duds in my 10-book pile I wouldn't get through in a week and a bit (going to the library nearly every Saturday was part of my summer weekend ritual).

So I thought this would be great, having a free library card. The problem is there is no five-book limit, so I've been taking out a lot of books, more than I can read in a week. Not to mention if I'm reading library books, I'm not reading the ones on my shelf.

And there's also Twitter. I've mentioned before that I would really appreciate it if people ignored my favourites list — right now it's a mix of things I want to read later, things I have read and want to save but have no other place to save them, and tweets I've saved for later use in the online paper.

So even though I had a couple of things to do today, I've spent a lot of it on my couch, reading. My Twitter favourites nearly hit 200 recently, and while I cleaned that out last week, it's creeping up again, so I cleaned it out, again. Following is a list and links of what I'm reading. :)

(Note: these are the good links. Links I'd favourited on Twitter and have since read and decided are not worth anyone else's time are not included.)

Hamlet of Hairy Hill fading slowly into Alberta's past — I love rural stories, and the photographs that accompany them. Slowly, I'm also learning to love living in a rural community.

How many ingredients are there in a McDonald's McRib sandwich — All I have to say is, I'm so glad I'm a vegetarian.

Ten Edmonton haunts to put you in the Halloween spirit — I know Halloween is over, but I love Edmonton's history; I think they've done a much better job of keeping it alive than Calgary, and one of these times, I'm going to go on the cemetery and/or ghost tours that they offer (to be fair, I haven't been on any tours like that in Calgary either).

Linguist tries to rescue language — a quick, interesting read.

The crash, the boys and the game (and part two) — be warned, I cried reading both links. That probably has to do more with the fact some stuff has happened in my life recently and I'm the girl who now can't get through anything remotely sad without smudging her mascara, but still. Also, when I saw the news of this when I was in Edmonton, being a journalist, my first thought was, 'I know someone at the paper in GP.'

Taming the devils, demons and pumpkins — a very long read and not very succinct, but the message behind it is still very interesting and a good debate.

David Carr: The news diet of a media omnivore — I love poking around other journalists' brains, and this is a very fun read.

Sense of place, Edmonton — more than anything, I like the digital interactivity that it would have taken to put this project together. I really like Edmonton, but I'm discovering that the places I like, I always go back to. When I lived there, my usual haunts used to take me through Old Strathcona, Whyte Avenue, Jasper Avenue and the river valley. My running route used to take me through what I guess is kind of the south, southwest portion of the Oliver neighbourhood, but I went up to 124 and 106 (which looks like it's actually in Westmount or Queen Mary Park, even though I saw signs for the Oliver pool?) last time I was in Edmonton, looking for a shop someone had told me about, and found a whole different part of Edmonton that I really liked. So I like the city, but I think there's more that I could find to like about it, which is why seeing some of these pictures is cool.

The Second Second Date Story — a pretty quick (and cute) Longread.

The state of copy editing and how it affects writers — a roundup of copy editing talk, all pretty short, but with some linguistics thrown in there too. Kind of interesting.

Line editing, a guide — I actually found this through another tweet I had favourited that turned out to be not what I thought it would be. But I kept clicking on internal links at the bottom of the page, and found this.

There are more favourited tweets, but those are the most recent ones I had to sort through. I do this pretty regularly, as the editorial staff also has to list some of their favourite links for the online paper each week. (They're scattered throughout the paper, every paper, if you're looking for some more interesting reads, links and videos.)

In more tangible form, this is what I've gotten through that is staying on my bookshelf:
-Something Remains
-Crow Lake
-The Farther You Run
-He's Just Not that Into You
-Scribbler of Dreams
-The Lottery
-If…
-Jude
-From Anna
-Listen for the Singing
-Plain Truth
-House Rules
-Rainbow Boys
-Story Building (textbook from school that we used in profiles class)
-All seven Harry Potters
-My Posse Don't Do Homework

I also read Gordon Korman's No Coins Please, which is in the "donate" pile, but I'm thinking of moving it to the "maybe donate" pile — I mean, yes it's a kids' book (but so are some of the other books I've listed above) and it's a simple read, but it's Gordon Korman.

I'm in the middle of reading Wish You Were Here, which I picked up last year at the Winston Churchill Square during EPL's summer book sale, and will most likely go back into the donate pile, and the Great Typo Hunt, which is great once you get into it, but I've put it down and need to get back into it (that will be another blog post entirely when I'm done reading it).

This all of course, doesn't include the library books I've been reading. And I know my friend has books I want to borrow, but there's so many books and so little time. So if you've got reading suggestions for me, leave them here. I'll get to them….eventually.

Secrets of the universe

People who follow me on Twitter might notice I've been tweeting a lot lately about happy dances and good things happening in my life.

What can I say? I had an awesome weekend. Slightly whirlwind, but it was a good enough mix of professional and personal and down time that I can't believe it's only Tuesday (technically my Sunday).

Professionally, I got to meet with two other journalists: K., who has worked for a daily and now is still quite involved in the media scene, and G., whom I've worked with before and have a lot of respect for.

Talking with K. was a lot of fun, and it was exactly what I was hoping would come out of my discussion with her. In community newspapers, the unspoken expectation is that you do a couple years at a smaller paper, usually in the middle of nowhere, before moving up. Except I don't know what I want to move up to, or even if I want to "move up" — I love copy editing, but as both K. and G. pointed out, those specialized jobs either don't exist anymore or won't exist for much longer.

K. and I started talking about making digital journalism more interactive and she mentioned some local people who do exactly that, by not only being a journalist, but by being a journalist who understands programming and can create interactivity with words and visuals online. Did I mention they're local?

Wait, so if I were driven enough to self-teach myself some new online skills and fine-tune my existing print skills, I could eventually do that?

I follow an American journalist on Twitter whose somewhat official description and/or title is programmer-journalist, but I just thought it was one of those American-Canadian things — they have all this stuff we don't have (I can't think of any good examples personally, but everyone has that one thing they always have to bring back from the States).

I didn't realize there were people here that did the same thing, and that they are and can be self-taught.

I have vague memories of using Dreamweaver in second-year university, but I haven't really touched it since; I've been more focused on teaching myself Illustrator. I'm now considering picking up Dreamweaver again.

That's exactly it. One of K.'s points was that since journalism is becoming more interactive, you can either learn this stuff well enough that you can do it yourself, or learn it well enough that you can still talk to someone else who can do it better and explain, within realistic parameters, what you want.

It's funny how these things come together. I needed a new challenge at my job, and so now I run the online Sunday edition of the paper — it's specifically designed for smartphones and tablets, and going in the direction of this new interactive, digital journalism. I know this sounds like I've completely flipped away from my dream copy editing job — I haven't, but there's all these other options too (exactly what I wanted to know).

My conversation with G. veered a little bit into the digital journalism realm, but we also talked a lot about newsroom chemistry and making the real world jive with everything we learned in school — and some of the things we didn't learn. It was a lot of what I needed to hear, and I'm seriously debating posting a nice-looking sign with all those reminders on the back of my apartment door so that I can see it every day before I leave my place.

 This is my 140-character summary of my meeting with G. Want to know more? Ask.

I couldn't have predicted how these meetups were going to go, but like I said, both of them were exactly what I needed, and I was very glad for the two-hour drive home yesterday as I got to turn some things over in my head.

Funny enough, of the other three coffee/dinner dates I had this weekend, two of them were with journalism friends, and the third, I still managed to talk a lot about journalism. (Oops?)

In between all that, I got some shopping done — not Christmas shopping yet, though it was in the back of my head — as I nearly froze last winter, since I don't like to wear and don't have that many long-sleeved tops. Living somewhere that doesn't have chinooks however, means I'm going to have to come to terms with finding warmer clothes. Although last winter, I realized that my part-time job was the warmest office in the world, and so I could get away with not wearing long-sleeved tops. A friend and I also went to go see some live theatre, even though we were a couple minutes late (my fault, I didn't give myself enough time to get into the city), and I got to hit up the farmers' market and walk through the river valley, which I love.

As I go through the digital resources that K. pointed me to, I'll probably be tweeting more about being #happyhappyhappy, though the downstairs neighbours will probably be glad that I've stopped jumping around and happy dancing. :)

Christmas crazies

This year, people can actually talk to me about Christmas, at this point in the year, without me wanting to scream. That does not mean that the Christmas decorations that I saw today at West Edmonton Mall are OK (it's not even Halloween yet!) but being able to talk to me about Christmas without me screaming is a definite improvement.

For the past four years, I've been in post-secondary. Getting to the end of October was an exercise in survival, never mind getting anywhere near December. I literally could not think about Christmas until Dec. 22 or so. I was a girl who shopped for Christmas presents on Dec. 23. I had to. For the sake of my sanity, I could not do it any other way.

My parents and grandparents, however, like to ask for Christmas lists at the end of September. Beginning to see the problem? This year, it's been kind of great. I actually started a Christmas list in July, so I was ready to give it to my parents at the end of September.

What I wasn't ready for, was that my parents would ask me for it, over and over and over and over and over and over again. And over again. The first time we talked, they forgot to write it down. I don't know what their excuse was the second and third and fourth and possibly fifth time. The sixth time, they wanted a list to give to my grandparents.

Yeah, the list still hasn't changed – though, to be fair, there are a couple of things I've added as I've thought of a couple things I'd like. These are the things I want. Decide among yourselves who wants to give me what. I am not dreaming up eight different lists for everyone in the family. Here's the master list. Do what you want with it.

I am only slightly worried I will be unwrapping socks this year.

Some call it fall

OK, so it gets colder in autumn. If I were a bear and hibernated for the next seven months or so, I would probably be OK with this. Unfortunately, I'm a person who apparently has a body temperature 10 C lower than everyone else. This is these season where it begins — I go to introduce myself, shake someone's hand, and their reply is "Ooh, your hands are a little cold."

Yeah, I know. It is literally a conscious thought for me when all of my body is the same temperature — "Hey, I'm comfortable, and no part of my body, including my hands or feet, are burning hot or freezing cold." (The dead giveaway is if I have my hands pressed to my cheeks in an "O" expression — it means my cheeks are burning and my hands are freezing.)

Like I said, I think my body temperature is a good 10 C below everyone else's, because I was in Toronto this summer when they had that 48 C heat wave, and I thought walking outdoors from the Royal Ontario Museum to the harbourfront was a great idea. Yes, I was drinking a lot of water, but I was comfortable. On the other hand, though my friend didn't exactly say it in those terms, he thought I was crazy.

I must admit, I don't really help my cause — I have very few long-sleeved shirts, even in the winter I wear a lot of T-shirts, and I will wear flats, delaying wearing socks until the last leaf falls off the trees. I've tried to wear heavier sweaters in the winter, but seriously, my internal thermometer does not co-operate. Then, I'm way too warm.

But just once, I would like to go to an event, introduce myself, shake someone's hand and not have their next comment be, "Ooh, your hands are a little cold."

Hey, cold hands, warm heart, right?

Big City lights

It's been nearly a month and a half since I've gone into Edmonton or Calgary. To put things in a little bit of perspective, I've been living in Lloyd for 10 months. So a month and a half just hanging out here shouldn't be that bad, right?

More perspective: the last time I didn't do some major highway travel for roughly a  month was May. I went home at the end of April for Easter, and then was back in Calgary in June for convocation. Up until now, actually, I think May is the only month that I haven't gone into either Edmonton or Calgary at least once.

I mentioned this to my mom the other day, and she asked me what the big draw was. I've been trying to figure that out ever since.

I think one of the major things is an occupational hazard: if there's something going on in town, I'm probably there already, covering the event. If there's nothing going on in town, then I'm not working, but then, what do I do with my spare time if there's nothing going on?

In bigger centres, however, even if there's nothing going on in St. Albert, for example, that doesn't mean there's nothing going on in Edmonton.

I hate to admit it, but loving Edmonton had a lot to do with where I lived: I spent my Saturdays walking down to the Old Strathcona Farmers' Market, dropping in at the library, then across the river to the market on 104, sometimes I'd drive out to St. Albert for a bit too. I loved walking down Whyte Ave. and through the river valley; I got to start my Sundays with free yoga every week because lululemon was a couple hops, skips and a jump away from my building. So I'm worried if I go back to Edmonton, and I can't get a place in Old Strathcona, Garneau, Bonnie Doon or areas on the north side of the river (my running route used to take me through a couple of them, but I don't know what they're called) I'm still not going to be happy in a Big City.

I don't really have any desire to work at a daily paper unless it's for copy editing; I like doing everything from writing and photography to layout and copy editing at a community paper. So I knew that in order to do that, I'd have to move to a smaller town. The unspoken expectation is, however, that you do a couple years at a community paper, before "moving up." Except I don't know exactly what I want to move up to.

So I'm trying to find positives about living in a smaller city. The one I came up with this morning is that I don't have to jump through a million media hoops to talk to the director of education at the public division. His direct line is on his business card and he picks up when I call. (This in contrast to the million media requests and run-around you get when dealing with a certain school division in Calgary.)

It's not much. I guess rush hour is another thing — there are certain intersections to avoid at specific times of day, but I find if I don't drive the meridian and take a couple of side streets, it's fine.

Still, I'm going into Edmonton in a couple of weeks, and I can't. freaking. wait. It's nothing special — a friend and I are going to see some live theatre, I want to go to the farmers' market and the mall (I don't have that many long-sleeved tops and I am determined not to freeze this winter), and other than that, it's just going to be a lot of coffee dates with various people.

See? Nothing special. So I don't know why I feel so cooped up here sometimes.

What's that they say? The grass is always greener on the other side?

Do Not Disturb

Some people hide their phones on themselves when they start drinking. I'm beginning to think I should hide my phone on myself when I'm sleeping.

When I first got a cellphone, about five years ago, I turned it off every night. Somewhere along the way, I stopped doing that. I guess I figured that if people really needed to text or call me in the middle of the night, there must be a good reason. (So not true.)

And then, in third and fourth year when I had a car, I always left it on because I lived fairly close to school, and I was by default one of the choices for people to call when they were stranded at school because time had gotten away from them when they were working on a project, or they'd been drinking at the campus bar (or some combination of all of the above).

I also had a friend working night shift, and 2 a.m. was the only time we could talk, because he was sleeping all other times. I got really good at being woken up by texts and being able to respond coherently.

I seem to have lost that talent.

A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were texting, and I was falling asleep. One of his last texts came through after I had drifted off, and so I grabbed my phone in a half-asleep state, and while a simple "Yeah" would have sufficed, I replied, "Meanwhile up yup." Don't ask me what that means, but at least they were all actual words.

Last night, another friend and I were texting. M.B. has this uncanny skill of knowing when I'm either falling asleep or am asleep, and chooses those moments to text me. Without fail. (There's actually a plausible reason for it, our lives and schedules are just about as opposite as you can get.) Luckily, she's one of my closest friends, so I don't mind...much. :)

We were talking about various things, and at one point, I meant to text to say good luck on an upcoming quiz. Her last text had woken me up however, so my return text reads "You'll do fine! Do your job <s z zzz I'll."

It starts off good and then just goes downhill from there.

Real world Mack trucks

This portfolio scares me a little bit.

Actually, there's nothing really R-rated or doomsday about it, it's just it scares me because it's obvious that woman is very very very very very good at her job, and I wish I were that good at my job.

(Note: before, I've just looked at her blog. Today I was poking through her resume and experience, and it makes me feel just a little bit better that she has her Masters — mind you, I've worked for other people with Masters and they're definitely not very good at their job.)

I read bits and pieces of her blog in different chunks of time and usually skim a bit; there's only so much I can read before I get overwhelmed.

Tonight, I found this post, and I love it, maybe partially because I can totally relate to the post-conference hangover.

When the Reflector staff returned from Louisville, Kentucky, last year, we had all these ideas that we immediately wanted to put into action. That was in October, and the managing editor talked us into waiting until the new year, instead of instituting things pell-mell. (So I didn't really get to be a part of any of it, since I decided to go and do this thing called graduate in December. Oh well.)

The line that I love, however, is when she writes "…only to get slammed with…'a Mack truck' upon returning to the real world."

I don't get to go to Kentucky anymore (actually, this year the ACP is in Orlando), but one of my favourite things to do – usually it happens when I go home, since most of my school friends are still in Calgary – is go for coffee with j-friends and deconstruct papers. It can be the papers we're working for, it can be the paper sitting on the table in front of us that we have no connection to whatsoever. It's the exchange of ideas that I love. A friend and I went out to Vermilion last week, and for three hours (or more) we sat in a coffee shop, discussing grammar and copy editing, with a couple of editions of the Vermilion papers in front of us. I can only imagine what the teenager working behind the counter thought of us.

I love it. The part I hate is the Mack truck, because it's true. You get run over by it, in the form of just day-to-day deadlines and work, you don't usually have the extra time to cultivate the exciting things that you have all the time in the world to dream about other times.

I don't realize how much I go back to the Big Cities until I quit going back. I haven't been back to Calgary or Edmonton since the beginning of September, and while that doesn't sound like a long time, it is for me, considering how this year has gone.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about lately is how much I want to go for coffee with some j-friends and just talk.

Until then, I'm just going to keep reading this blog.

Just a thought

I'm thinking about changing platforms again, which I think is a bad bad thing in terms of consistency, but...

I started building a portfolio website over the winter, but I never quite finished it, mostly because I didn't have all my clippings together and everything. And since I work on a touch pad on my laptop and not an actual mouse, getting everything exactly where I wanted it was a little touchy.

As part of the website though, I had built in a blog page, though obviously I never used it, since I never launched the site. (Or thought I didn't launch the site. I Googled myself the other day and my site came up as one of the results. I have no idea how it published itself in its half-finished state, and I'm not impressed.)

I just finished my weekend (Monday and Tuesday), but since I have no plans to run away to Vermilion or Wainwright next weekend (places I've run away to for the past two "weekends"), I might just hole up on my balcony and build myself a website. (Though I might run away to Paradise Hill on Sunday — for work though — and I'm trying to resist the temptation to run away to Edmonton for a couple of days.)

Can I get a verdict? Should I build a portfolio website with a built-in blog? Or keep the two separate?

Flipping brain switches

"People who don't know me very well think that I'm quiet. People who know me very well wish that I were quiet."

That kind of applies to me. I can be "not quiet" when I'm with close friends, but at a certain point, when the group gets too big, I get quiet again, no matter whom I'm with. I think it surprises people who know I'm a journalist that I'm not an extremely extrovert personality — it's more something I switch on and off as needed.

It even surprises my mom, and when she does the following, it bugs me to no end. She'll call me to tell me something, and I'll reply something along the lines of "Oh, that's nice." It happened when my brother placed really well in the area and provincial Skills competitions this year. They called to tell me — "Congratulations. Oh, that's nice." That's really all I had to say. Then my mom gets after me, "Use your journalistic skills. Ask your brother about the competition." No Mom, I'm not working. If he wants to tell me about the competition, he can tell me about the competition. Otherwise, we're going to sit here and listen to each other breathe on the phone. A friend from school and I were talking a while ago — her family does the same thing to her with photos. Both of us are of the opinion, when we go to family events, we're not the designated photographer by default. At least ask us, nicely. And we'll consider it, considering it's already what we do all day, all the time.

So that part, the interviewing and photography, I can switch on and off. The part that I can't switch on and off, and it even bothers me sometimes, is the editing part.

I know there are a ton of complaints about the grammar police. Some, like this post, even make some valid points.

On the flip side, grammar saves lives. Which is it: "Let's eat, Grandma," or "Let's eat Grandma"?

The one thing I really do try for is that if I'm going to point out the errors in someone else's copy, my copy, to the best of my ability, is going to be as clean as I can make it. Still, there is a lot to be said for a fresh pair of eyes, not only by someone else, but even if you put copy away for awhile and come back to it later.

When I wrote my column about Sept. 11, I spent so much time on it and got so close to it that I developed sort of a mind-reading approach to it. Essentially, I forgot to tell people in specific terms, until the final paragraphs, that I was talking about Sept. 11. The words "Sept. 11" actually didn't appear in my copy until the second- or third-last paragraph, because I was so used to thinking, "OK, I'm writing about Sept. 11, I know I'm writing about Sept. 11, so everyone must know I'm writing about Sept. 11, and I don't actually need to say Sept. 11."

Seriously, it would be nice to be able to flip my editing brain on and off, and I swear, I really do try. If I feel like I absolutely must correct the press release with the poor grammar and lack of CP Style, I try and bury it on my desk under some other papers so people can't see I've made corrections to a piece of copy that will never actually see the light of day again.

The last time I was in Calgary, B., a friend whom I've worked with on a bunch of copy and newspapers, and I went for coffee. B. is now the editor-in-chief of the school paper, and he brought some proofs of the paper to show me. The first new online edition of the paper I work for had just gone up, and so we switched — I took his proofs, and he took my phone to look at the new online edition.

We talked about a million things that night, but I kept absent-mindedly flipping through his proofs, and even though we were talking more about layout and design, at one point I started digging through my purse for a pen; there was a correction I wanted to make. B. started laughing and even said he had thought (but forgotten) about bringing me a pen, because he knew there would be copy editing that I would catch, as much as I would try not to.

See, but at least that's an appropriate time and place. What's not appropriate is correcting and editing tweets (of other people) on Twitter. See my problem?

Things that keep me up at night

Five years later, I still have problems listening to the field show music from high school marching band. Not so much the parade tunes, because those were mostly pop tunes like the Beatles' Penny Lane and Green Day's Holiday, and I only have the mainstream versions of those songs, but I have show music from two of the three field shows I did. (I have the audio from the 2005 show, but found parts one and two from our 2006 show on YouTube.)

(By the way, if anyone has a recording from the 2007 Calgary Stampede Fanfare or 2007 MACBDA, I would love to have the audio for Bishop Grandin's Angels field show — I don't think there was a Music in Motion that year, and if there was, Grandin wasn't a part of it.)

Anyways, when I'm listening to the field show music, all I can hear is the tenor sax part. (Note: I was a tenor sax player.) Of course I still "hear" all the other parts, but I hear them in terms of how they interact with the tenor part, not how the four pieces are supposed to sound overall.

It's what happens when a) you live, breathe and sleep the music for pretty much June and July each year during the full-blown show season, and b) you memorize the freakin sheet music for nearly 10 months of the year.

Shifting gears, there's a parallel to journalism here.

Quite honestly, I hated learning CP Style (the grammar and style bible for most journalists in Canada; the U.S. uses Associated Press — AP — Style) in school. We were assigned a section each week and expected to regurgitate it the following week on a quiz. So I did. Then I went to my first internship and had 40 pages of copy land on my desk that needed to be copy edited each week. I learned a lot of CP Style that summer.

Then I went back to school for my third and fourth years and served in three different editor positions for two different newspapers. I learned even more CP Style.

I like editing. It eats at your soul sometimes, especially when you're editing work from someone you've edited before and they keep making the same mistake and they refuse to change, but I like editing.

I can also be a little touchy about editing. It's one thing for someone, anyone, not to know the difference between "there," "their" and "they're," or "it's" and "its." What scares me is when I see it in newspaper copy — I kind of hope journalists, of all people, would know better. OK, that's why there's editors. But I can still hope, right? (There was also a lot of "Clagary" when I was editing copy for "Calgary" newspapers.)

The parallel I want to draw is that if someone else listened to my show music, I think they would hear completely different music than I do — assuming they're not a tenor sax player. The same thing goes for copy. I think someone reading the newspaper is going to notice a spelling mistake. But if I didn't point it out, are they going to notice that I was accidentally inconsistent with my use of "yoghurt" and "yogurt"? (CP Style prefers no h, in case you need to know that in order to be able to sleep tonight.) Or are they going to be able to find the two mistakes, one grammatical and one CP, that I made in this column? (Two mistakes and one sentence that needs to be reworded, that I'm aware of, at least.)

I have to draw this parallel because it's gotten to the point where I absent-mindedly correct leaflets left on restaurant tables, and most press releases I have on my desk have some kind of copy editing marks on them.

I think there's a lot to be said for being a good editor. But I also have to be able to sleep at night.

This is the wrong highway — Life is a highway, part 2

When I got my license, I still wasn't driving right away. And when I got a car, two months later, I promptly moved to Edmonton. So even though I was born and raised in Calgary, the street system in Edmonton makes a lot more sense to me. P.S. – I lived in Garneau, near the university hospital and Whyte Avenue, which is land of the one-way streets. So I think that's saying something.

However, despite my mastery of the one-way streets near the university and my kick-ass parallel park skills, I still get lost — a lot, and in any town I'm ever in. I'm OK in Edmonton most of the time, I panic occasionally in Calgary because I can't picture the street that connects to the street I need to be on from where I'm going, and Lloyd has the odd curveball. I know it's not exactly something to be proud of, but I think at this point, I've just come to terms with it. And the good news is, once I've been somewhere once, I can get there again no problem, no matter how long it took me to find it the first time.

Those were some of the thoughts going through my head this afternoon as I drove into the outlying area in Saskatchewan around Lloyd; the directions the guy had given me on the phone were, and I kid you not, "Turn south at the red building at (town), go south until you hit the arena and turn east, if you hit the railroad tracks you've gone too far. We have all the hay bales in front."

Oh Lord.

Despite my worst suspicions, I actually found the place fine.

On a semi-related note, last summer, I found the house I want "when I grow up." It's in Edmonton's river valley, which means it probably costs a fortune and a half, just off of Saskatchewan Drive once you pass over Gateway Boulevard. The family that lives there doesn't know I'm going to live there one day. :)

 Today, when I went out to do this story that I was sure I was going to get lost en route to, I discovered what I want the layout of my house to look like. I'm assuming the place used to be a farm house, but it must be added on to now. It's huge and spacious, and I love it. Especially the wrought iron spiral staircase that starts in the floor in the corner of the kitchen and goes down to the basement (I'm assuming, I was just in the kitchen).

Considering the rest of my day, I guess the fact that I didn't get lost (actually, there was one other highlight too when I got back to town :) balances out all the frustrating stuff that happened today. :)

Life is a highway

One of the last stories I did for my internship in St. Albert was about a local playwright and the Christmas play that they would be performing again, which I guess is kind of a tradition in the city.

We made some chitchat before actually starting the interview, and it turned out that she's a graduate of the same high school as me (we figured out this by talking about marching band, of course :). Somehow, that turned into a conversation about driving from Calgary to Edmonton or vice versa, and she made a comment about how she gets a lot of thinking done on that long, boring highway.

I agree, the QEII is pretty boring. Maybe it's because I've driven it a lot more than I've driven Highway 16, but I much prefer to drive 16 than the 2. The interesting thing is, that while Highway 2 goes up and down, Highway 16 tends to wind more side to side, though there are a couple good hills on it too.

That was my first summer that I did a lot of highway driving (OK, it was also my first summer driving) but since then, I've realized that you can get a lot of thinking down during highway drives.

I've done a lot of highway driving this year – in the past nine months, I've put over 10,000 kilometres on my car, and that's just trips to Edmonton, to Calgary via Edmonton, to Bonnyville, or, today, to Wainwright.

There's arguments for and against going home so much, although I would like to point out some of those trips were for must-not-miss events, and others were just because. Most of my friends are fairly amazed I don't mind doing the drive, and my mom too doesn't understand how I don't "mind" getting in a car for six hours and driving.

I just don't. I get to think, I get to sing along with my iPod (except when I'm coming up on the south Anthony Henday exit. Singing to Janis Joplin's Another Piece of my Heart – well, really any song – is a guarantee that I'll miss that stupid exit and have to go in on the Yellowhead, which, even if I'm stopping in Edmonton, is never convenient), and yes, I even talk to myself a bit.

There's been three times this summer where I've just gotten in my car and put it in drive. The first time, I went up to Frog Lake and area, the second time I made it down to Ribstone Creek area, which kind of reminds me of Drumheller with the hills and colours, and I went to Wainwright today.

Because when you're driving, you have to think about driving. When I'm at home trying to sort through my thoughts, it's too easy to check Twitter, pick up a book or watch a movie.

Considering there isn't much option for shopping as therapy here, I consider driving through the prairies a pretty good alternative.

Today though, I'm a little disappointed. It feels like it didn't work — that, or else I just didn't need it enough. 

Give a girl a staple gun (and a screwdriver)...

I've been tweeting pictures of this project as I put it together, but I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out, and it's the first big project like this I've done, so I thought I'd put the sequence up here to share.

Every August, St. Walburg (about an hour northeast of Lloydminster) has their Blueberry Festival. Since the town is only about 800 people, it's a good time for garage sales too. I was up there to shoot photos for the paper, but I also wandered around some garage sales, and found these chairs.

I'd seen a magazine article at my parents' house that had taken vintage chairs and redone them in different colours — I can't remember what the back looked like, but the seat bottoms were orange, purple and green. They looked awesome.
When I moved out, my parents gave me a bunch of things — their old kitchen table and chairs, for example (which I'm pretty sure are older than me) with the reasoning that as I settled, I could start collecting my own stuff, replacing the handmedowns if I didn't like the style. Quite honestly, I think that's only going to happen with the kitchen table and chairs, because I love my couch, dishware and entertainment unit...the bed might go. Oh, and the desk is definitely going (it's a the size of a teacher's desk, and it's all metal and weighs about a million pounds. The next time I move that thing is not coming with me).

So I bought the chairs — there's only three, so if someone has a similar one kicking around, I'd love to have it, but they were $1 each. Even if they weren't salvageable, $3 for chairs is hardly a loss. My mom's friend, E., does a lot of recovering furniture, so I brought home one of the chairs the last time I went to Calgary, and she showed me how to take it apart and put it back together.

This photo is from when I started working on them by myself at home, but you get the idea. The one on the right is the original, the one in the middle is just the padding once I'd stripped off the two layers of vinyl on the seat bottom and three layers of vinyl on the back, and the one on the left is the finished one.
You'll see later that the back of the chair has a different pattern on the front and back, but it's from the same sheet of vinyl, it's just the way I cut it. The fabric on the seat bottom is actually a curtain panel. It would have been nice to do them in all different colours (there was a gorgeous blue and a very nice purple) but the panels were each $42 (but half-price if you have a Fabricland membership, which E. does), and big enough for four or five seats, so I just did them all in green.

Ignore me looking horrible in the background, but this is Katie, one of E.'s dogs. I was trying to take out the seam on the curtain, just so that the fabric wasn't bulkier in any one part, and so that we got an extra half-inch out of the fabric (not that we needed it, like I said, the panel was huge). Katie likes to be wherever you are, and in this case, she wanted to be right on the fabric. Even when we accidentally mis-cut a piece and laid it out for her to sit on, she still wanted to be right in the middle of things.

The after and before product. Fabricland prices actually become halfway reasonable if you have a membership, so I spent about $30 on fabric and $10 on upholstery tacks and feet covers (from Rona), and since every chair was $1, it works out to $13 per chair — all things considered, I think that's pretty good!
The first chair took us about five hours, but that includes shopping for fabric. I did the other two chairs over the course of yesterday and today — I did the seat bottoms and the back of one yesterday, and the back of the other one today. I was worried my hands were really going to hurt from the staple gun — I have joint, tendon, ligament and muscle damage along with mild carpal tunnel in one wrist (it's what happens when you carry a 16-pound tenor sax in a marching band on a sprained wrist for over a year and don't let it heal), and mild carpal tunnel in the other — but other than a little bit of twinging in my wrist and fingers, it isn't too bad at all. My palm does feel a little bruised from the staple gun since I don't have enough strength in one hand to use it, I had to use two hands. At least I wasn't going to staple my fingers accidentally to something like that.

This is the backs of the chairs. Like I said, the pattern is different, but it's from the same sheet as the front, with the black, green and white pattern. We only forgot to mark the holes for the screws once, on the first chair. I nearly forgot a couple times on the other two chairs, but remembered just in time.

I don't know yet what my next project is going to be, like I said, this one didn't take me as long as I thought it would, although there were times yesterday and today when I would glance at the clock, and then look at it hours later, even though it didn't feel like much later. I'm thinking I want a circular table, especially if I can't find a fourth chair and if I do only ever have three, but I am eyeing a green-topped table at Ikea....

Ripple effect

I had intentions to write about something other than Sept. 11 for this blog post. I kid you not, I spent nearly my entire Thursday trying to write a column about it (it's on page 17, since with the web version we can't link to individual pages), which involved essentially writing a little bit, reading some related links, deleting what I had written and trying again, reading some more links, deleting what I had written…

First of all, I can't believe how much is out there. Yes, I know it's the 10th anniversary, and one of the pieces that finally got me to focus wasn't a specific Sept. 11 piece, but rather about the love-hate relationship that journalists have with anniversaries.

This anniversary is a little bit different though, because unlike Elvis dying or JFK being shot (other events where everyone remembers where they were at that moment) it seriously affected the function of the day-to-day world, and its security.

So despite the sheer quantity of anniversary pieces that are out there, it's pretty interesting to read them all, because they all manage to tell a different story. (Though I must admit, at this point, when I see another one come across my Twitter feed, I first think, "Another one?" before I click on it to read.)

As a journalist, I'm interested to see the way that other journalists have put together multimedia packages. (I also think not only was Portraits of Grief a huge undertaking by the New York Times — you can read the back story here — but that they went back and did Portraits Redrawn — I guess that's why they're the New York Times.)

But I also think I keep clicking on links because I can understand a lot more now — I was 12 when it happened.
(Tangent: I was having a conversation with a friend, and when I mentioned this, he looks at me and goes, 'What?' He remembered crowding around the portable TVs in MacEwan Hall at the University of Calgary, and I guess the whole irony of this is that because of this conversation, we all — members of the editorial board we worked on together — realized that while I may have been the boss of the editorial board last year, I was the third youngest on the board; there were about 14 of us.)

I had seen the TV images before I went to school that morning, but the family I was supposed to be carpooling with was late and I was panicked about being late. (Remember, I'm 12.) I heard people talking about it in the halls while I was trying to get to class, but I still wasn't thinking much about it. Then, in fourth period, the principal came on the intercom. Up to this point, I don't think we had talked about it much in class, I didn't know anything else had happened other than the first images I had seen on the TV with my mom that morning.

I don't remember exactly what the principal said, but I remember what she prefaced it with, and that's when I understood that what had happened was big. I went to a French immersion school, and as a late French immersion, we were just starting to learn the language, but that was just more of an excuse to always speak in French, not less reason to. So all the intercom announcements, lessons, everything, were in French, never English.

What the principal said at first?

"I'm going to say this in English, so that everyone understands."

Like I said, 10 years later, it's interesting to see exactly how much I understand. Todd Babiak from the Edmonton Journal wrote a long piece on it, and I didn't read all of it (I've read a lot. Do you blame me for skimming?) but the line that stuck out to me was when he wrote, "In 2001, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no iPhones. Most of what we read was printed on paper."

I have Facebook, Twitter, and an iPhone. Respectively, they were acquired four and a half years, eight months and nine months ago. And already they feel ubiquitous. But "most of what we read was printed on paper"? It's a true statement, but it feels so strange.

10 years later, I'm 10 years older and supposedly 10 years wiser. Crazy to see exactly how much I understand.

Slaying the dragon

At one point in my university career, one of my managers at my part-time job gave me a piece of advice that, at the time, I wanted to post in a location where I could see it, and be reminded of it, every day.

We had been discussing a situation that I was unhappy in, and S. offered this piece of advice.

"Just remember that those people are compensating for something."

It's a common enough thought, but it sounded so perfect coming from her.

I didn't work with the other manager, J., as long as I did with S., but J. was good at knowing what you sometimes needed to hear, and if he had something to say that you didn't want to hear, at least he could put it nicely.

When I quit because I was leaving Calgary, J. and I were talking about my new job and that despite the fact I was OK with living in a smaller town, no doubt there would be some adjustments.

He told me to consider it slaying the dragons — paying my dues.

I was thinking about that yesterday when I was sitting on the side of Highway 16, just outside of Edmonton.

I had a flat tire, and yes, everything turned out OK in the end, but it wasn't much fun during — first of all, once you get over the initial shock of 'Hm, I have a flat tire and no, I'm not going to get to go where I want to go when I want to go,' there's the big semis whipping by, the jerk contract mechanic that AMA sends out (for the record, the actual AMA guy on the phone was really nice), the stress of trying to find someone open on a holiday Monday to replace a tire, and then the added stress of trying to find a friend in Edmonton to pick up their phone so I could stay the night because no one is open on a holiday Monday to repair a tire.

Like I said, everything turned out OK. I mean, c'mon, it's a flat tire near Edmonton. It could have been a lot worse in so many ways. But at the time, it really did feel like a 25-foot (just a baby), firebreathing dragon.

BAM!!

I've hit the blogging wall.
Even writing this post has taken three tries, and it's certainly not my first attempt this weekend. 

Other attempts include (and forgive me for some points being cryptic):
-A post on the grammar police - I found a couple interesting websites that I have an opinion about, and yet I can't voice it succinctly
-A post about losing my (writing) voice - in school, we weren't expected to write many columns or editorials. In fact, because we wrote just so many straight news stories, I've referred to it a couple times as having our voice beaten out of us. It never truly is - even straight news stories sound different written by different people - but it's still something I struggle with and am a little frustrated about; there's a lot of times I don't like my "voice."
-Missing someone - it may sound like an excuse, but I really don't know what I did that makes them act friendly towards me sometimes and as if I don't exist other times.
-What I want from life - very very very very very slowly I'm putting together a plan. On one hand, I need feedback. On the other hand, I don't think I'm quite at that stage yet. 

A week ago, I tweeted about feeling restless and aimless and hating that feeling. I hate it when that sneaks up on you. 

Geeking out

This is how I know I'm in the right job: I get excited about things that anyone outside of my industry probably wouldn't get excited about.

Today, my editor and I had a meeting about a new project. We were talking about some new layouts, and he relates everything to sports, so he handed me a couple editions of ESPN magazine. To be perfectly honest, I'd never seen the magazine before. If the sport doesn't have something to do with water, I probably don't care. (OK, that's a lie. I like playing basketball, and being a backup for a soccer team last summer was fun, even though I sucked at it.)

But let's go back to that other sentence: I'd never seen the magazine before. That's embarrassing to admit, because in my job, I should be leafing through all the magazines and newspapers I can get my hands on. In university, I had a broadcast instructor who advised us to read two or three papers before breakfast in the morning. At the time, I thought, "Hell no," mostly because I didn't have even have time for breakfast in the morning, but I'm coming back around to the idea. In a nutshell: Read and examine every piece of media you can get your hands on. (Also, Nate Silver's advice for young journalists: "Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs — it’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.")

I love finding interesting blogs and interesting profile pieces. I love looking at layouts, designs and graphics and thinking, "That is such a cool idea."

But I'm also usually a little jealous, because someone else had the cool idea. One of the things I miss about not being on the Reflector editorial board anymore is the brainstorming we used to do. For big projects, our EIC liked to send us into the archives and skimming through other publications, to figure out what bits and pieces we liked, and how we could bring that together into our own creation.

One of my favourite memories is creating the parking edition, where we sat around the table for a very long time, brainstorming a cover. Someone would come up with a bit of an idea, or explain a concept they liked, then someone else would disagree but build off of the idea, occasionally the photo editor would redirect us based on technical capabilities. It was probably the longest time we spent trying to design a cover, and even though it was long, I loved people bringing up ideas and others tweaking them to get to the final product. Eventually, we settled on the idea of using the kids' game Rush Hour, except I couldn't remember the actual name of the game, and some time was spent on just trying to describe it in terms so that everyone else could figure out what I was talking about.

Now that I'm not in school anymore, I have a lot more time to read blogs and read long profile pieces. What I haven't been doing is looking at layout and design so much — there are places in town that have the Edmonton Journal, but I don't get any form of hard copy newspaper or magazine.

So looking at the ESPN magazine was a lot of fun — it reminded me it's something I should do more often. Their layout is very clean, but they've kept a magazine feel, breaking some of the newspaper rules, especially when it comes to white space and snapping to columns. They don't create dog legs — which earns them a lot of points, in my opinion :) — but a three-column page (six columns on a spread) might have eight photos running horizontal, and the breaks between photos don't necessarily line up with the breaks between columns.

Consider this blog post fair warning. If you need to find me in the near future, I'll be the one with her nose in the various hard copy publications, geeking out over layout and well-written articles.

Right here, right now

That's all I really have to say, is the title of this blog.

It's a reminder to me (and whoever else needs it) that sometimes, you just need to remember to be right here, right now. I have no idea where the Desiderata came from, but my favourite line in it is this:

"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

I need to figure out a way to hang the plaque (there are no hooks on the back) because there are other lines in it that I should read more often, but, like I said, the above line is my favourite.

Letting the universe unfold as it should is something I'm struggling with right now. I have all these big plans — where I want to be in a couple years, what I want to be, even who I want to be. Overall, I want to be content. And I feel like I'm so focused on that — daydreaming about how I'm going to get there and what it's going to look like when I do — that I can't be content, right here, right now.

Right now, I'm living in the middle of the prairies. You can walk to the edge of town and see canola fields. You can drive past the limits of town and drive through gorgeous landscapes. Right now, I'm doing exactly the kind of job that I set out looking for when I left school, knowing that I didn't want to be pigeonholed into any aspect of working at a newspaper (just writing, just photography, etc.) In a couple of weeks, I'll start working on a new project that should be challenging to me as a fairly recent journalism graduate.

In the spring, I lamented to a friend that with the seemingly hundreds of copy editing positions available (OK, there were maybe 10 or maybe 15, but that's a lot all at one time) that I was sorely tempted to apply, except for the fact that I want to stay put for a while and I'm done with moving for at least another two years (the moving count for me stands right now at six times in three years). I think he asked why I was so hung up on it, and I said something along the lines that I'm worried I won't know when the perfect job walks up to me, knocks me on the head and says, "Hello, I'm your dream job." His reply? "Yes I worry about that too. Then I realize that I'm 20 years old and not in a hurry."

I almost came back with a retort about being 22 and thus in much more of a hurry, but let the comment slide. Like I said, right here, right now.

Working even when I'm not working

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." – H.G. Wells

For whatever reason, my Firefox browser won't remember my StumbleUpon bar — according to one friend, it's because I have a Mac, but I'm not sure.

Anyways, every time I feel like Stumbling, I have to go to a previously bookmarked Stumbled page and then start Stumbling from there. I think that's a good thing, that it's a conscious move, because otherwise I would never get any work done when I logged onto the Internet.

I started Stumbling tonight for a bit, and apparently StumbleUpon has a new feature. Initially, you put all your interests into preferences so you only Stumble, in random order, on pages related to your interests. Now, the added features asks you to type just one interest into a search bar, and it not only shows you just pages related to that initial interest, but you can also continue Stumbling on that one interest alone (instead of the mixed bag of interests you usually get when Stumbling).

For whatever reason, I typed in "copy editing." (Note: I haven't been working full weeks lately. The paper closed for a week in July, and since then, due to stat holidays, days we close the office early and me taking some personal vacation, I've worked anywhere between three to four-and-a-half days in the last five weeks. Even this week I unexpectedly took some time off, so I shouldn't be in "work," ie copy editing, mode.)

However, I found this post. It doesn't get really interesting until the end, the part that is bolded and boxed out.

The story of my term as an EIC in my last semester of university deserves a post all its own when I can finally look at it objectively, but one of the things I'm firm about is that my own copy should be clean if I'm going to tear apart someone else's copy. Which is why I'm happy working as a jack-of-all-trades journalist right now — I think there's still some things I need to learn and get better at before I become a full-time copy editor.

That said, when I'm editing, I will double-check rules I'm only three-quarters certain about. I have learned to keep style preferences in check (putting the verb before the noun in attribution drives me crazy — you wouldn't write "said he," so why do people write "said Jones"?) but I have one rule. I firmly belong in the "said" camp when it comes to says vs. said attribution, and while I've come to respect people's preference, here's the catch: if they switch tenses and there's one "said" when all the rest of the attribution is "says," then it's all going to past tense. You had your chance and you screwed up.

What I'm trying to say is, the guy has a point. Style should be respected — I would personally rather use "such as" instead of "like," but that's his choice. Same thing with the we/I/you point he has.

Him and his copy editor need to meet each other halfway — everyone needs at least a second pair of eyes. I doubt this guy is that good that everything he writes is perfect, in style, grammar and spelling that he never needs a copy editor.

I have a friend who is an English major, and if I ever want to get into a really fun argument with him, I tell him that under no circumstances should periods or commas ever be outside quotations marks. Which is true, unless you're British. Question marks and exclamation marks can be inside or out, depending on the tone of the quote and if it's a quote with a speech, etc.

He has a couple different views on this, to say the least.

Digital body language

In junior high, my Grade 8 English teacher came into my homeroom and started talking to my homeroom teacher, who was also coincidentally my Grade 9 English teacher. I don't remember why this came up, but the Grade 9 teacher essentially asked the Grade 8 teacher — call her Mme. C. — about my personality. I was sitting right there, by the way (which they both recognized).

I found Mme. C's response interesting.

She said I watch people very intently. Which, she added, is kind of a scary feeling when you're teaching at the front of a class, though it's nice to know at least someone is listening. :) 

I didn't realize it until she pointed it out, but it's true. I like to sit at the back of the class so I can see everything going on, but I'm still really focused on what's going on at the front.

I think it's for the following two reasons.

I have really poor eyesight, and when I'm not wearing corrective lenses, I forget that people can see me, and how hard I'm focusing on them because I can't see them very well. It sounds stupid until you think about it in child's logic — if I can barely make out the blurry shapes and barely see them, then how are they able to see me?

I also find people fascinating. Communication is about so much more than just the words that we say, or the print that appears on the page. It's about the way we move, the way we speak, the way we interact with people. In marching band, when we're all in the same uniform and the girls all have their hair pulled back in the same style, I can tell exactly who's who at a distance where faces aren't recognizable, simply by the way someone holds themselves, the way they're walking, or, if I'm grasping at straws, the instrument they're holding.

So people-watching is an incredibly fun past time for me. I was just in Toronto, and a friend and I went down to Yonge and Dundas. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything scheduled going on, but people were still running through the fountains and just generally hanging about the square. (This is also the day it was 48 C with the humidex.) We'd been walking all day, and it was nice to just sit and let your mind wander; later we went up on one of the roof top patios and definitely switched tables just so we could lean over the edge and continue to watch the flow of people.

Now, in the digital age, I guess blogs are an extension of people-watching. It gives you an idea of the person, what they're thinking, what interests them.

I really like the idea that Facebook is for the people you went to high school with, and Twitter is for the people you should have gone to high school with. I've found a ton of interesting (mostly language- and grammar-related) links through there (because my feed is largely journalists and editors) but blogs also get you thinking about ideas that can't be said in 140 characters, or expand on an interesting link.

I love finding a new blog of an interesting person or interesting topic; I don't even mind going all the way back into the archives, but I can only read so many posts before I start skimming and not really paying attention to the links that would normally catch my eye, etc.

Another list

Most of the reason that I haven't been posting has been due to lack of Internet (my favourite part of what is quickly becoming an epic is that the Internet service provider who has failed to hook up my Internet for the past two months still tried to send me a bill for the month of July).

However, I've also been on vacation, which has started me thinking about the following.

Now that I have a “big girl” job and I actually get vacation, I’ve started compiling a list of places I want to go. Despite the fact that it’s my list, even I’ll admit it doesn’t seem that exciting. I will say this though – I love road trips, and a lot of these places, given the time and right opportunity and possibly the right people, could turn into road trips instead of flight plans.

Ontario - I have family there, and though I was back there just a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t been back for 10 years before that. And it’s hard to beat laying by a pool with a book.

Montreal and Quebec City and the Maritimes (not necessarily all the same trip) - the furthest east in Canada that I’ve been previously is Hull, Que., though I’ve been further east in the States.

The North - I spent four months reading the weekly papers from the three territories as part of an internship, and I find it fascinating that it’s a completely different culture. I’ve been considering even taking a position for a year at a northern newspaper, but we’ll see.

New Orleans - there’s so many reasons for New Orleans. But if I had to pick just one reason, I’d say the jazz history.

Dallas, Lubbock and Clovis - I have family in Dallas, Buddy Holly is buried in Lubbock and he recorded the majority of his songs in Clovis, New Mexico, which is about an hour drive straight west from Lubbock. The time difference makes it so that when the group was recording, they'd try and get to the studio before they'd left. Now, I think there are these things called speed limits.
Follow-up trip: Clear Lake, Iowa - it’s where Holly died, and while there’s not much there – I’m not sure if the farmer still lets people into his cornfield where they crashed; the ballroom where their last concert was is still standing – I still have to be able to say I’ve been.

Greece - I know they’ve got problems, but it looks so gorgeous!

New York - because it’s New York

San Francisco - because it's San Francisco

(edit, Aug. 7) Coquihalla Highway and Seattle - my childhood summers were spent driving around the country in a pickup truck and tent trailer, and later a fifth-wheel trailer. Except this highway is too steep to haul anything on, so we've never done the Coquihalla. And on my way out to the coast, I'd have to stop at the Enchanted Forest. ;)

And finally (keep in mind this is an evolving list, so more can and probably will be added):
Fort McMurray.

The problem is, I’m not interested in Fort McMurray the townsite. I’m interested in the oilsands surrounding Fort McMurray.
Even though I was born and raised in Alberta, and in Calgary, essentially the headquarters of nearly all the major oil firms, I never really cared about oil until I was an intern with Natural Resources Canada. I realize what an ignorant statement that is – not caring about oil, even though it has everything to do with my everyday life – well, I know that now. (Side note: Normally, I don't think I have much of an opinion. However, when faced with writing an editorial on a topic of my choice when I returned to school, I'm pretty happy with the way my piece on how oil affects our lives turned out.)

Natural Resources Canada essentially has three branches: forestry, oilsands (formerly coal research) and mining and minerals (the Geological Survey of Canada).

I did hardly anything with mining and minerals, and did a little bit of work with forestry, though I had just started a major forestry project when my internship ended. Most of the communications work I did was with the oilsands.

I know I’m a communications major, and yes, math is usually beyond me (I was strangely good at logs and algebra though), but I love science. And the science behind the oilsands, especially the tailings ponds, fascinates me.

So I want to go up there and see what all this fuss is about. I narrowly missed out on a trip hosted by U of A through Mount Royal during my last semester of university, but it was interesting interviewing the people who came back. Sure, I've seen the pictures, but I want to see it for myself. And while I said I'm not interested in Fort Mac the townsite, the social problems from having a ghost population is certainly interesting.