season affected, disordered

here's the column i'd originally planned to have run in today's paper:

Mom used to tell me two things to steer clear of in polite conversations were religion and politics.

This time of year, I'll add a third: the weather.

Normally, this is a fine topic to fill an idle minute -- discussions of atmospheric conditions usually provide openings to all manner of harmless banter.

Unfortunately for me, my opinion would likely put me in an unwelcome minority.

That's because I think the winter so far has been great -- the cold, the snow, all of it.

(OK, except the black ice. As a person who's flown a vehicle off a highway and into a house, I can firmly say I don't like the black ice.)

After year upon year of generally mild temperatures, we're finally getting the winters I remember from when I was a kid in Beckley, which were piled high with snow and brutal with numbing cold.

That memory may explain part of its allure.

Now, nearly 30 years since finishing high school, perhaps my subconscious still hopes for the right conditions to call a snow day.

(Compared to now, where it seems a single flake or a cool breeze is reason enough to cancel classes. Which reminds me, I will say now this love may yet change should my wife and I ever have children enrolled in the public school system and we don't have a babysitter.)

But the real reason I'll have to say I like the cold is I like to exercise with my clothes on.

Regardless of temperature, I'd rather take a jog outdoors and see the world than schlep on a treadmill and watch television.

Consequently, I find it easier to bundle up a little to stay warm than remove articles of clothing to stay cool.

As I like to say when I unzip the collar on my fleece top, "It's instant air conditioning."

There are only so many things that modesty and the law will allow you to shed in public once heat and humidity begin their stifling summer campaign.

And even if you could run au natural, at 90 degrees and 70 percent humidity, you'd still be miserable -- and so might people who had to witness it.

Maybe it's just human nature to complain; that the grass is always greener in the other season.

Unless it's about 70 and clear, it seems TV meteorologists gripe to their audiences about cold snaps, heat waves or depressing rain.

If "perfect weather" were what we wanted, I suppose we could try living someplace else.

I had my chance to experience it. But a year living in the South only reinforced my love of four seasons, versus the two it had -- regular and hurricane.

It's probably part of the reason I came back.

If I can enjoy the bright greens of spring, the sunny energy of summer and the bountiful magnificence of fall, then surely a crisp, blustery West Virginia winter should not just be be endured, but embraced.

i wrote it monday, around 4 in the morning, with the temperatures probably in the low 20s, in anticipation of taking a nice, brisk jog through charleston's east end and back along the boulevard along the kanawha river.

it wasn't a bad run that gray morning, about three miles, an easy pace in less than 30 minutes. i hope to stretch the distance as the weather warms up and my fitness returns.

i really wanted to write this as a love letter to outdoor winter activity in the face of the grousing about the cold and the snow by friends and loved ones alike.

(seriously, you could avert all that drama with an extra sweater.)

while i reserve my love for the spring, winter runs a close second. (probably because it's so easy to run in it.) the air is so clear and biting -- it's invigorating, like pure oxygen. (yeah, this is chemical valley, so work with me.)

then the weather started turning on us in the early hours of tuesday morning as i had to make my own tracks through the snow out of my neighborhood and had to be pretty careful through town on the way to the gym. it was the first time i'd ever driven on a non-plowed street in this town.

while i was in the pool, i figured i'd swing by the newsroom to borrow the digital camera so i could post a few pics on my flickr account.

but the weather just got lousier and, without evidence of salt trucks, it looked like the whole town was getting bogged down.

it seemed like if i was going to be shooting with office equipment, i'd best take more than just some personal souvenir photos.

so i took a few shots in front of the newspaper building, then up the street, then up the south side bridge, then across the bridge at traffic headed toward kanawha city. (that one stayed on the homepage for a good part of the day and wound up in the next day's paper.) after all that running, i was sweating like a pig by the time i got back to the newsroom.

it seemed like a good trade-off, these snapshots for a few newspaper photos; plus it made us look kind of "in the moment" for those keeping watch online.

that evening, though, after we watched the snow turn to rain and then ice, we heard the crashes of tree branches cracking in the backyard and found one had just glanced kris' car. (it wasn't until the next day that we found it had bent one of the bars in our fence.)

headed back inside, i stared at the ice-coated maple tree limbs spreading high above our bedroom and wondered if the branches could support the extra weight. (luckily, they didn't bear the additional burden of snow that the pines carried.)

the sobering thoughts of trees falling on power lines or through roofs and the prospect of cold nights in the dark began to intrude.

winter suddenly didn't seem to be all the fun and games we enjoyed when we were younger; we had bills to pay now, not just hopes for school cancellations.

i thought about those things when i decided to re-write the column. so much frivolous commentary didn't seem right when there could be real hardship for folks who might be deprived not just a little heat, but the very roofs over their heads. the thought of lives at risk gave me pause.

so i toned it down for something humorous, but a little less in-your-face.

it occurs to me, in these days where shelter and warmth are crucial to living through the night, that my love of cold weather is very much an affection that i can sustain only because i can afford it.

i am well aware that i can enjoy the deep chill because i am protected by layers of garments that delay the escape of heat from my body until the time i can retreat by foot or 4x4 to the warmth of a building where i live, work or pay money for membership.

just across the street from the ywca where i change and exercise is a soup kitchen run by a local church. depending on the time of day, i can see low-income or homeless people there for a free breakfast or lunch.

i can't help but be grateful that, so far, kris and i can afford our daily bread -- and then some.

it makes me wonder, especially in a season that can be unforgiving to the ill-prepared, if we shouldn't be making better efforts to ensure that they can live through, let alone laugh at, the elements.

inauguration, geek style

as a graduate assistant and ersatz mac lab supervisor, i often helped the faculty members at the journalism school with their computers.

after showing a public relations professor a few features of some long-forgotten program, we both marveled at its time-saving utility and the advances of technology in general. (this was the late 1980s.)

i said, "it's an amazing age we live in."

"every age is amazing to live in," he replied.

even in my callow youth, i knew he was right. he'd probably lived a good 40 years before i was even born and already seen a lifetime of amazing things.

i would have loved to have heard what he had to say on tuesday.

millions of people, their eyes riveted to screens or, if they were lucky, on three actual figures on a dais, serving witness to history.

living in a house without cable television, i sort of wrote off the idea that i'd watch barack obama's swearing-in.

plus, this guy was just another president, right?

um, well ...

the weight of the moment became too much to resist.

i had to watch this happen -- to record in my own memory with my own eyes and ears what was done and said on a day i never imagined i would see.

for work purposes, i wanted to know what time the event would start, so i could start trolling the associated press wire for images to use on our front page. (they turned out to be absolutely underwhelming, by the way; it was almost a crime that they failed to record that singular, signature shot.)

kris told me to check cnn.com.

sure enough, they had an inauguration schedule. swearing-in at 11:30. and -- ho! -- you can watch live on their site.

now i'm leery about live online video. it plays in fits and starts or freezes up or simply crashes your browser.

and that's assuming their server isn't clogged with the million other people trying to watch the same thing.

well, kudos to the guys at cnn for their foresight and wise allocation of resources.

not only did i get to the site without any problems, the video worked as well as a real tv. (well, after a very tense 10 minutes where i had to update my flash player application to watch. typical of me to wait until about 11:20 to even try checking the site without testing.)

the neat part was that cnn had teamed up with facebook to provide a kind of communal experience for you and your online friends.

on-screen, you could watch video of the ceremony. along-side it, you could see running comments by facebook users. if you logged in, you could see those of your friends, as well post your own.

now, i will be the first to rag on facebook for promulgating a culture wherein members can put their lives on display in an unceasing torrent of personal trivia and a misplaced need to keep everyone abreast of every little thing going on in their lives when maybe they should actually be more involved with carrying on their lives. ("he said as he wrote in his blog ...")

but on this day, everything about it seemed to make sense. it was more than just "social networking;" it seemed like the community it purports to be.

i watched and traded back and forth online banter with friends and relatives from louisville, new york, florida, california and both charlestons. it was almost as if we were all in the same place.

while i had a good number of friends lucky enough to have been in d.c. to watch the proceedings, i thought it was kind of cool to have been able to hunker down in the warmth our living room in front of a light panel invisibly attached to a phone line to share history being made in the brilliant cold hundreds of miles away.

it's an amazing age we live in.

letter to the los angeles times

looking over e-mail this morning, i got my daily headline fixes from a few national papers.

after reading one from the los angeles times, i actually gasped, then screamed. then i got pissed enough to send out this:

To whom it may concern:

I'm writing to express my deep disappointment with whoever compiles and writes your "Top of the Times" headline e-mails.

Frivolous and lightweight as it might sound, the teaser headlined "'Battlestar Galactica': Kate Vernon reveals a Cylonic secret" upset me in the way that a child would be after having his balloon burst by a malicious stranger.

As a journalist who makes part of his living creating promos for stories in both print and online versions of a daily newspaper, I can appreciate the effort to draw readers into an article.

But there's a line between a teaser and spoiler -- and your writer crossed it.

We don't subscribe to cable in our house and depend on the generosity of a good friend to provide us with DVDs of the sci-fi series as they become available.

This puts us about a year behind the rest of the TV-watching world, but we do our best to keep up the suspense by, well, avoiding reading current stories about the show.

Looking over today's e-mailed headlines, needless to say, gave quite a jolt. But continuing to the the summary was just heartbreaking. What lapse in judgment led to such a thing?

As the perpetrator of countless online snafus both personally and professionally, I realize the horse is already out of the barn.

I'll do my best to forget and immerse myself into the new episodes I just received for my birthday. And I'm going to do my best to shield my Galactica-addicted wife from my knowledge.

But I hope in the future your staff will remember to not deflate the simple pleasures of your readers' entertainments for the sake of promoting a story.

Sincerely ...

seriously, what kind of crazed person writes crap like this to a major metropolitan newspaper?

kris actually asked after i howled and read the headline: "is it spoiler?! don't tell me!" and "our marriage is over if you tell me."

this may be the first time i'd actually heard someone use the word "spoiler" in a conversation.

(the first time i'd ever encountered the term was in an online forum for the first x-men movie. submissions containing key plot information were labeled "spoilers" or "spoiler alert" so as to warn readers that the entry would, well, spoil the surprises or even just interesting aspects of the movie. i pretty much only see the word online -- especially for sci-fi/fantasy works -- although i occasionally see it as a device in print.)

anyway, if you haven't watched the sci-fi network series, it's good tv, not just good sci-fi. there are interesting characters, topical, compelling storylines, and a wonderful, suspenseful plot.

check it out.

cat tale

when it comes to kitty personalities, kris tells me otto has a "personal assistant" temperament.

by that she means the cat seems to be very much interested in the affairs of running our lives.

doing laundry? "i'll just walk to the basement with you in case you need anything."

mowing the lawn? "i could be wrong, but from the window here it looks like you missed a spot."

making a sandwich? "um, you need someone to get rid of that tuna water?"

(otto sounds, by the way, not unlike marge simpson, but not as sweet. or smart.)

she's taken more of an interest in the computer lately, as she seems to regard it as a distraction in our lives from the more important work of keeping her amused.

it can be sort of sad, in that she will put herself between us and whatever it is we're doing on it, as if to say, "if i put myself here, will you pay attention to me?"

last week, the smidge hopped up on the laptop while kris and i were eating lunch.

usually the worst that happens is she'll press too long on a key and warning beeps will sound from its constant activation; we pick her up to make it stop.

(one site, though, had a frame that cycled through five different features, each with its own graphics. i think the illusion of motion was enough to make her start pawing at the screen. we intervened before the claws came out.)

after last week's lunch, however, i returned to check e-mail and discovered that the text was so super tiny, i couldn't read it.

nothing i tried could restore it to normal.

finally, i went to the yahoo mail help page and typed "yahoo mail very small."

while the search results offered useless topics, a sidebar titled "answers from yahoo users" caught my eye.

here, yahoo users throw out questions -- e.g, "what for haircut would fit me?" -- for other users to answer. the questioner, in addition to a poll of other users, then picks the best response.

at the top of the list was this query:

cat jumped on keyboard and the lettering in my yahoo mail is very small to you can't read it, how do ?
how do i get the lettering normal size?

i was flabbergasted. how universally intrusive are these mammals?

long story short, the answer was that otto had managed to simultaneously press the "command" and "-" (minus) keys long enough that the page text was minimized to an unreadable size.

(why that option would be necessary, i'm not sure. to discourage prying eyes?)

so a few opposite keystrokes later -- this time, using the "+" key -- my text was restored.

thanks to the weird, wired online village along the information superhighway, a call for help from juluu_girl and the helpful response by jcurrieii solved the problem created by laptop_cat.

like coming back from hawaii, minus the luau

the past two mornings, i've gotten up feeling like i've put my body on backwards and inside-out.

kris and i are trying to adjust to our new evening work hours.

it ain't as simple as flipping a switch and inverting our sleep and wake times; sand has to run through the hourglass.

the result, for want of a better term, i'm calling "life lag."

we've pushed back our schedule by about 8 hours -- almost four time zones. by that reckoning, we could freakin' be working in hawaii.

and our bodies are reacting accordingly.

well, more like we'd just returned east from the aloha state and, no longer on her tropical isles, find ourselves tired and having to go to work. (i.e., like long, lingering, mournful death.)

from my previous experience working a.m. papers, i've learned not to waste the free morning hours.

(it helps being married and having someone to come home to. as a single person, i can't recall the number of late nights spent unwinding in local establishments with beverages and loud philosophical discussions. paybacks on wasted mornings after were hell in many ways.)

we chose to make better use of our time by going straight to bed rather than lingering into the night. that way, we hoped we'd start getting up and doing stuff before noon -- stuff we used to do after work, like shop and hit the gym.

the first salvo hit monday. with about two hours left in the shift, a bunch of us suddenly felt like our tanks went dry. kris and i hit the sack 15 minutes after we got home.

three days in, i've awakened after six hours or so, still fatigued yet unable to roll over and sleep. so i get up.

kris so far has kept snoozing, so i get up, pray myself awake and check e-mail and, um, the facebook, (yeah, i know) and the news and sports. i've done little bundles of laundry.

once up, kris gets a light breakfast going. we follow with some housework, gym, then home for a big lunch.

mealtime was a big concern for us. evening shifts in newsrooms tend to mean lots of take-out and delivery. i packed on about 20 pounds my last a.m. job.

plus, kris loves to cook. she figured since we couldn't have dinners anymore, she'd make lunch the meal of the day and pack either leftovers or a lunch variant for a lighter dinner.

however, my friend matt brought me birthday pizzas monday, and tuesday, my buddy kevin brought a sample bowl of the spicy vegetarian chili he'd been telling me about, and, well, now it's wednesday.

still, things seem to be going according to plan.

good Lord willing, our bodies will catch up to our heads and our heads will remember to stick to the program.

(if it's any validation of our strategery, i ran into a colleague from the other morning paper [ha!] whose words of advice for a successful transition were fairly close to the ones we were following: be in bed within an hour of coming home.)

hopefully, the lag will subside and we will indeed get our brains and bodies realigned.

a look back before going forward

it's the first day of charley west's new life.

the charleston daily mail, the city's longtime afternoon paper, along with its iconic mascot, publishes its first morning edition sometime after 8 tonight.

kris and i head out to the newsroom after noon mass today to get ready. i hope our hyper-preparedness will be more than what we need. the schedule's just upside down, right?

production of the last p.m. edition friday proceeded the same way i'd known it for ten years -- there by 6; then story, layout, art, headlines, proof, print.

the only things marking the occasion were the donuts we brought in and our buddy tom taking photos of us on deadline.

donuts are big in the newsroom, serving as demarcators of little events -- farewell, usually, to an employee -- but often as thank you's or pick-me-ups during "blah" weeks.

(all-night news events -- elections and the majorette festival we sponsor -- are served up with either pizzas or trays of deli meats and chips. the past few years, we'd have a theme potluck lunch, just to break up the monotony.)

i think we greet the new schedule today with smoked turkey breast and sandwich fixings.

the notion of the newsroom as combination information gathering space and feedbag sort of characterizes the way our paper operated -- like a family dining table.

the benefit of having your reporters, editors, photographers, artists and designers in the same place at the same time went a long way in terms of communicating how we wanted to present a story.

Lord knows it wasn't perfect -- the screw-ups from bad assumptions and misinterpreted directions are too numerous to mention. (it's funny being in the communications business.)

but the solutions that came together by being able to walk to a few people's desks were usually enough to overcome any impasse. on rare occasions, what resulted was brilliant.

and, like a family, while individual members of the group could drive each other crazy, we pretty much stood united as an organization and seemed to genuinely like each other.

as in any workplace, there's criticism and differences of opinion, but by the same token, they were leavened with earned praise and mutual -- if sometimes grudging -- respect.

best of all, on most days, it was a fun place to work. our irreverent sense of humor probably wasn't going to reduce anyone's time served in purgatory.

a bunch of us from the paper gathered at murad's after work friday to meet with daily mailers past and present.

it was nice to see the turnout.

i got to meet some of the old photographers and reporters from back in the day.

one of them, earl, brought pictures from his years at the paper. one of them seemed to capture the bustle of the the place.

judging from the hairstyles and ties, it seemed to be from the early 1970s. it was a hive of activity, full of machinery and tools long in disuse in our newsroom -- teletype machines, pneumatic tubes, electric typewriters, spirit glue and x-acto knives.

i think the only things we still use are the phones, tv set and clock (which was the only object in the photo that remains in place to this day.)

i wish i'd have done a better job serving as interlocutor between the new kids and the veterans.

i'd managed to work with earl on a few feature packages. he was a photographer when the press wire moved the photo of the marines raising the flag on mount suribachi in iwo jima during world war ii.

he was still shooting when our old lifestyles editor, julie, started working at the paper. she worked here for more than 50 years, retiring almost 4 years after i joined the staff.

i told her friday she was my hero. here she was, a woman who started working when my mom was still a teenager, who witnessed and utilized all the technological changes in journalism -- from manual typewriters and paste-up all the way to the electonic page design i use today. (my mom can't even use a vcr.)

it would have been nice to introduce our young staffers to these folks, if for no other reason than to know the faces of our paper's past.

it was funny, though, to hear a former colleague remark upon meeting one of our young reporters, "does his mother know he's here?"

old meets new.

and our new begins today.

regret ... so soon?

the new year's barely an hour old and already, i'm sorry for something.

the fact that i'm online instead of sleeping -- or anything, anywhere -- should be reason enough.

(this i say believing new year's eve is an over-hyped holiday promoted by the champagne industry.)

(by the same token, i'll never take living another year for granted, either.)

but checking the freakin' facebook is an embarrassing way to back into 2009, as i'm trading quips and greetings with friends here and in south carolina.

sample of new year's banter:

me: listening to celebratory fireworks ... or gunfire.

bill: ...or both....

me: happy new yeeeeeeow!

bill: duck!

me: why are we doing this instead of ... well, anything for new year's? i should be asleep.

bill: we're dorks.....

this is why al gore invented the internet.

before i go to bed, though, i'm going to also regret never having had a picture taken in these spiffy "2009" specs -- or any of its "nought" brethren this decade.

we won't see their like until the next millennium. why? because tacky lives forever.

and since i'm tallying regrets, i'm also sorry i didn't find the times square countdown until it was too late to load. would've been nice to have had the site up around midnight, as we don't have cable. eh. kris was in bed anyway.

it's about time i joined her.