This past weekend marked two things: Two years of living in Richmond and two years of having my car, Nicole Cobb. I also hit 50,000 miles in Nicole this weekend too. I’m OK with that because I used to drive 30,000 miles a year and most of them were from work. This 50,000 includes Louisiana and a couple trips to New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
I just realized I’ve shot my tags all to hell when it comes to marking benchmarks because there are so many different special dates now. On the 13th I celebrate five years in Central Virginia. On June 1, it’s seven years of having this blog. Aug. 1 starts year three of living in this house. Dec. 26 is roughly three years at my current job.
Speaking of that, I need to interview people to include my former publisher on Thursday. That should be interesting. I’m going to plan out really good questions between then and now. Also, tomorrow is going to be very awkward and I don’t have a reason to explain myself yet other than this is going to get pretty interesting.
I’ll explain that later.
In other news, I’ll know the results of the Virginia Press Association awards tomorrow but I can’t (and won’t) tell you until the conference occurs. I’m nervous as all get out about it because I need to win something to justify everything we’ve done so far. I need the validation since we don’t have any real journalism people with decades of experience to guide us. We only have people who freak the fuck out when we make a couple mistakes because it’s the end of the goddamn world when we accidentally truncate a story or a cutline is wrong. There are 156 issues a year with an average of 2,100 pages and who knows how many words and you’re certain that the paper’s going to pot because the wrong page three ran AND WE PUT IN A CORRECTION AND POSTED THE STORY TO THE INTERNET AND EXPLAINED WHAT HAPPENED ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER BEFORE THE PAPER EVEN HIT THE NEWSSTANDS?
I’m sorry. I’m just a little pissed because those mistakes shouldn’t have happened and one of the readers was a bit pissed off because someone apparently took an earlier call about the mistake and told the caller something along the lines of go fuck yourself. It’s not worth tracking that down. It was a day that our receptionist was out so it could have been anyone who was plopped on the main line for a few minutes. At least it wasn’t someone from the newsroom.
Just the whole smug satisfaction of being able to tell a newspaper it’s wrong irks me. Especially when it isn’t a factual error. I mentioned a few issues back that Virginia is the only state where all of the cities are independent of counties and of course I’m an idiot because Baltimore, Carson City and St. Louis are independent. They failed to realize things such as Frederick, Md., being categorized as a city as well but it’s within a county and that proves my statement as correct.
I’m getting to the point where I’m afraid that I can’t be polite with people on the phone much longer. That’s not good. But ranting on the Internet here helps.
I’ve completely forgotten what I was talking about here. I guess I could scroll up but I’ve already typed out this sentence.
Oh, I hope to get some awards so I have some sort of measure. I mean, if taking on trying to do something with this newspaper was in vain, forget it. I mean, if we can’t get an award for something we’ve done, they need someone else to do this job. I know I’ve done a lot of heavy lifting to get it to where it is now but, if I can’t get it all the way there, I’m wasting everyone else’s time.
If Katy were here, she’d tell me to shut up and I’d say that, although I think I’m awesome, I don’t think I’ve done enough awesome for my reunion this year. I would love to say something ridiculously kick ass about my job and say that I have a publishing deal by then.
Hopefully, I’ll have a better handle on that last bit after this weekend.
Est is nacht. Mitternacht.
