The eagle has landed and it's one small step to a small town newspaper but a giant leap for Phil's kind of adventure.
After a few months of madness busy beyond belief -- both from combination of finishing my internship up in Whitecourt to moving my life yet again and into another job as a full-fledged journalist in Ponoka.
I'll explain in a follow-up soon why I'm standing on a cat-walk over a bunch of cows, but for now, here's the
article.
Six weeks in I'm loving even the high pressure nearly daily deadlines just to try to keep up with the flow of the new assignments hitting my desk. There's so much happening in town and as my role as roving reporter dictates, I've been everywhere between Red Deer and Edmonton and a lot of the time in little towns I'd scarcely heard in passing. All I know is I handed in 1,000 on my out-of-town mileage in one month.
It was like lifting weights and then realizing I picked a heavy one, requiring so much more concentration and effort, but totally worth it when I can finish the set of reps. I'm happy to report I'm starting to raise my writing stamina and even though I wrote four articles today and did half a dozen interviews, I'm still going strong.... almost.
Broke down and finally started texting twitter thingies and started to log some of the fun and insight I was having. As much fun as blogging was, I was doing over a dozen articles every week and my editor here in Ponoka is helping me to top that. I was excited to have my own desk when I was an intern, now I feel a tiny bit of cabin fever I spend so much time in my office. Not complaining because I get to write a ton of fun articles and photo assignments for whatever I can dream up and keep newsworthy.
So far, I've been nearly making par.
Check-it if you want an time-line of how exciting my days got over the last few months. Don't worry, I rarely wrote more than one a day. It sounds odd that I finally tried out twitter, I just had heard such terrible repercussions with slander and job-dismissal over comments, that I went slow. Plus it takes a moment to come up with something that isn't lame.
Word of advice, avoid over-doing the caffeine. Withdrawal sucks without some ibuprofen and yoga does wonders too ^_^ Then again, yoga seems to work for everything.
It's just the Christmas special which has kept me busy since I managed to get through Remembrance Day special with a dozen articles extra to write in a week over my usual ten assignments. After this, it quietens down -- not until after I get through another dozen fun articles with way too much cuteness and Christmas joy.
Anyhows, here's a search result link to my three dozen articles that were posted on the website, I'll try to link a bunch later of my favourites over the past few weeks.
Enjoy.
It's been quite an adventure and I wish I thought to twitter some of the more cool moments I've had. Such as culture shock of hanging out for assignments on the Hobbema reserves near Ponoka. Who knew it's possible to put up a stop-sign with a Cree translation on it. Learn something every day ^_^
As part of my return, I'll start rocking the cooking experiments. Admittedly, I've collected up a few over the last month and haven't had sufficient time to post them. Fun times for all. So time to sleep and I'll write the next time I slow down after production day, which I have a bunch of them coming up pretty quickly. Meh... fun times.
Glad to be writing too much to be able to write my blog. Working the writing lifestyle and still loving it.
Goodnight and stay classy or whatever.... Brain stops with a zonk.
-- plr --
