Thursday, February 16, 2006

You-know-what is a virtue I have yet to aquire

Copy editing at a small newspaper has taught me something about myself. I'm impatient. I'm on the verge of throwing a very childish temper tantrum and cursing the I.T. person out loud before I even attempt to address and fix a problem on my own.

There are just so many steps, especially to the web site end of things. The stories on the page have to be "grouped" a certain way in a very specific font and saved to a particular version of the program in order to work. Then there's the waiting for the upload to go through and then editing the stories for the web site and saving the changes and making sure all the tags are correct. I could scream or tear my hair out.

Or make jokes. I told my co-workers that working in our department is like going through a 12-step program. Nothing, nothing happens seamlessly and simply, and if you skip just one step you'll find yourself choking on your tears of frustration and fumbling for a bottle, muttering something about being fired.

Of course if they fired just one of us that would be eliminating 1/3 of our department.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

I think I've had enough of TV

It's going to be Olympics all the time in Casa-Karen, because the only station I get is NBC. It's reason enough not to turn the television on. I'm not that old, but I seem to remember the Olympics being less sucky and All-American-centric in the past.

In fact, I choose not to concentrate to much on my crappy TV situation because that will just make me want to run off to Target and buy a new TV and DVD. So I just pretend that there's no alternative except NBC all the time.

I have no idea what's going on on American Idol or any of those other shows, except for when I go to work and have access to The Associated Press wire.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Cuba, N.M.

New Mexico is vast. Vast and flat. Searching for beauty here, I find myself looking for trees, for water for something lush and colorful. Instead nothing but wide swatches of brown desert. I was looking wrong. Like trying to write the story without doing the interview. The beauty lies in the rock formations, in the sky, so wide and big you feel like you could just reach up and touch it.

Three miles and 167 miles between Farmington and Albuquerque. Nothing but desert and the occasional trailer until you hit the small town of Cuba. A blip on the map that you could speed right through in a blink -- but not literally, the police live for speed traps there. I never stopped willingly in Cuba. Fate forced me to when my car broke down on the Apache reservation and the nearest tow was in Cuba. Left my car at a garage, Chris picked me up and we drove to Albuquerque to buy the parts needed to be repaired. Drove back to Cuba the next day and had the garage owner install it. Nice guy, sick of living in the city so he moved out here. He told us we should take a trip up into the mountains while we waited for him to fix the car.

Everything was green up there, like I'd never seen in New Mexico before. There were streams and trees and I was wearing ballet flats that got caked in mud. Chris and I ran around like hippies. We stopped at an overpast that offered a view of Cuba.

There's a sign in Cuba that says Natural(ly) Wonder(ful). I wonder how many people bother to stop and investigate that. I'm glad I did.