Lazy

It's time for me to just admit it: I'm lazy.

I waited to do my laundry until I was wearing the absolute last pair of dress socks I owned.

I see one dish that hasn't moved since I arrived here a few weeks ago.

Boxes are still unpacked, sometimes still in the way of things I need.

When I get a free moment, though, I plunked down on the couch and watched a movie... when I still had clothes to fold. (Hey, they're clean, right?)

I think my fondness for watching DVDs might even stem from this admitted laziness. While watching TV, you need to flip the channel between commercials and possibly every half hour. For two hours with a movie, you don't have to do anything.

I got to thinking about this while reading about my college bud Michael Smoose's blog about running in a triathlon last weekend. Makes you sit back and think, "What have I done?"

I'll get to that triathlon... right after I finish unpacking and doing the dishes.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

It's safe to say I'm not one who changes things abruptly without careful consideration. I'm relatively conservative in dress, appearance and even diet. So, to anyone who knows me well, it'd take an act of God to get me to change my hairstyle.

Or maybe it'd just take an act of loneliness. Three times in the past three weeks, I've heard women tell me I'd be extremely attractive if I updated my look a little bit. After all, I've had the same hairstyle for as long as I can remember. I'm not so sure I wasn't born with that hairstyle. I've been wearing the same type of wire-frame, big-lens glasses since abandoning the thick, brown-frame look in sixth grade.

So Wednesday I finally did something abrupt. I got my hair cut off. Almost entirely.

Gone are the bangs and what some friends nicknamed the "sweep," the little wave generated by years of pushing the bangs from my left to my right. [I still try to push it occasionally.] Gone is most of the hair on the sides and back. Gone is a lot of the hair on the top. It closely resembles a military crew cut, really.

It's pretty dramatic. I'm not entirely sure I like it, but I entrusted myself to a female barber [barberette?] and told her I'd go with whatever she thought would look good on me. Now that the sides are growing in a little bit, I'm beginning to see the benefits.

It's amazing how much teasing a haircut can generate. Reminds me of elementary school, where people taunted you every time you had your ears lowered. Mostly it's a shock to them. It was something of a shock to me, the first time I saw it too.

The next step comes Monday, when I go in for a much-needed vision exam. I'm about ready to try something more stylish there too.

Those ladies better come a-callin' now...

Nightmarish weekend

Nightmare... now that's a word that makes you think, "Oh-my-gosh-what-the-heck-happened-to-David-and-where-should-we-send-financia-lsupport-or-perhaps-just-a-12-pack-of-Guinness?"

Girls high school tennis happened. LPGA golf happened.

Due to my vastly inferior knowledge about what events are important around here yet, we didn't have anyone around to cover the all-important Delaware County Girls Tennis Tournament today. And, because of my vastly inferior knowledge of how to say no to my boss, I'd already put myself down to cover the LPGA Tour stop in Dublin for the Wendy's Championship for Children on Thursday and Sunday.

In short, this is the absolute worst combination of things to cover that I can imagine. Maybe we could throw in a house fire from my intern days in between.

I'm not going to devalue these sports as a whole. Not right now at least. But I will rip on the difficulty in watching them and understanding what's happening.

We'll start with the golf first. A golf course covers perhaps 10 acres of land, all with little paths connecting each of the 18 holes. The players are moving along the course at an unknown rate of speed, in groups of three or so. There's really no telling where they might be. If you know where they are, there's no telling where they might be by the time you find that hole. If you find them, there's no guarantee that the player you've gone to watch will do anything interesting on the holes you follow along. And, oh yeah, while you're gone there's a chance the Tour officials will bring someone into the media center for an interview, so you'd miss that.

Thus you get some of the laziest good journalism I've ever seen. There are a number of golf writers [and NASCAR's the same, I'm told] who simply sit in the media center, watching TV, paying some attention to the boards on the wall that explain what's happening and then running into a press conference to gather quotes.

In short, they're covering a sport they're not really watching, just monitoring.

That's also my gripe with covering the tennis. The tournament locale today was just down the street, so they get high marks for my personal convenience. But there are eight matches going on at the same time. You can go look at the tournament official's cheat sheet to see which pairing might be what, but then you might miss something more interesting down the line.

Oddly enough, both of these sports force you to follow the favorite. You have to guess who you think might work and pray you won't miss out on seeing the real winner altogether.

Never mind writing about this stuff... it's all in cliches and terminology that typical people just don't understand. Heck, I'm in the sports realm and only understand it partially. This won't help people get interested in your sport which hasn't reached the mainstream.

In an effort to make this somewhat constructive, one of my favorite non-mainstream coaches to ever deal with was Rob Kilmer, the girls soccer coach at Sherando High School in Virginia. He wasn't amazingly witty or funny, but he was extremely informative. He used the terminology, then he explained what it meant to both me and my readers. More coaches should consider mainstreaming their language to build a better following.

Dinner with dad

Eventually you hit a point where your parents' nurturing isn't quite as necessary as it once was. You no longer need them to provide your next meal, your next pair of shoes or a reassuring word after falling off your bike.

In independence, though, you can find an even greater dependence on your parents, emotionally speaking.

One of the perks of being back near family is the resurgence of dinners with my dad. We'll often go out for a bite, just the two of us. You'd be amazed what a good friend a parent can be.

It's nice to slip out of the traditional roles of father and son and try to speak more as peers. We each have different perspectives on issues, with some 30 years between us and how we see things.

The beauty of it is it's one-on-one. It's not a regular family crowd, but just two guys going out for a bite.

Everyone should try to get to know their parents on some different level. It's reminds you what's really important about family.

Paper towels

I'm notoriously cheap. I tend to use and reuse things until they're completely unusable, mostly because I'm too cheap to buy a new one. Once soap gets into that unbelievably tiny size where it wants to slide down the drain, I put it off to the side with other tiny pieces of soap, hoping one day to mold them into a useable piece of soap.

That having been said, I think I've seen an organization even cheaper than me. And I couldn't be prouder of them.

In the newspaper world, you're never quite sure what to do with the "end rolls," which is a fancy name for the little bit of paper left at the end. A lot of papers will sell it to the public for something like 25 cents a pound. People in the public might use it for packing, or drawing, or creating three copies of their own newspaper... who knows.

The Delaware Gazette discovered another use for it. They hang the remaining part of the roll in the men's restroom... instead of paper towels. You rip off however much high-quality paper stock you need to dry your hands.

I couldn't be prouder to work here. As they say in those Guiness commercials, "Brilliant!"

First day of school

I couldn't sleep very well last night. I kept getting up in the middle of the night, checking the clock, just to make sure I wasn't late. When I got up, I couldn't decide what I was going to wear. I wanted to make a good first impression and start things out right. I even rehearsed in my mind a couple one-liners to answer inevitable questions about my move: "No casualties, that we know of yet" or "It was more fun than a root canal!"

It was really like the first day of school all over again. It's a baffling feeling that I haven't had in so long, trying something different and wanting to do it well.

Here's the biggest surprise from my first day on the job. My boss came in to check on me around 5 o'clock, to make sure I was planning on going home. It still seemed early to me, but then again I need to be back there at about 6 a.m. tomorrow. Much to my surprise, the newsroom was deserted at what would've been the busiest time of day at any morning paper.

This is a very different world I'll be living in. When I came home, I had time for a nap. And to finally watch "Vertigo," which I've had out from Netflix since last October. And to run out to BW3's for a "You Survived Your First Day" dinner and chance to watch the first half of the Hall of Fame preseason game.

I think I could learn to like daytime hours.

The people I work with seem genuinely nice and friendly. Quite a few people ducked into my office -- I actually have an office, with a door, that I share with one sports writer -- just to say hi. Five of us went to lunch together, and I'm told the group's usually seven or eight guys. In comparison, I never went to lunch with more than two work people in my two and a half years in the last stop.

The job itself is going to be a challenge. The space is pretty limited (two open pages for me to do tomorrow morning, vs. our typical five a day in Virginia). The bar is set frighteningly low on some things. I'm pretty much being thrown to the wolves, as everything I know about their system I taught myself today. [Ever try to set up your 0wn e-mail account on a system you don't know? When in doubt, try combinations of pop.yourdomain.com, smtp.yourdomain.com and mail.yourdomain.com. Sooner or later, you'll find something that works.]

Tomorrow's the real challenge... designing on a new system, figuring out how to find stories on a very stripped-down version of NewsEdit and trying to do all this at 6 in the morning. The payoff, of course, is another one of these wonderful nights.

The interesting thing about the comparisons to the first day of school is this: I always thrived in those school situations. We'll see if that continues.

Prioritization

The move is complete, and there were very few casualties this time. Nothing broken. Nothing ventured, nothing gained... wait, that's something else.

Now it's to the painstaking process of unpacking. These are the times you discover your priorities.

After a day and a half of unpacking... Bookcase: Empty. Kitchen cupboards: Empty. Linen closet: Half full. Computer: Set up, both of 'em to work on the new cable modem. TV, DVD player: Of course.

These are the days when I can say it's good to be a man... My entertainment is obviously more important to me than my nourishment.

All packed up

Finally and mercifully... I'm packed and ready to move. Which is good, since the guys helping me load up the truck will be here in about seven hours. I still have some cleaning to do around here, but that'll be easier when I can see the floor and sweep it.

Someone I worked with was teasing me about my constant organization. He commented, "I bet you have all the boxes lined up against a wall with little tags on them saying what's inside."

Guilty as charged.

I think I should have bought stock in Sterilite before this move. I ended up getting so many of their silly tubs. It did make packing easier and should make stuffing a truck easier too. But right now my old apartment looks like something out of a Star Trek episode involving the Borg, with stacks of identical boxes eating up a whole wall in my apartment at about three deep.

I'd better get this one last thing... my laptop... packed and get some sleep. Tomorrow could be a long day.

Last Goodbye

A Kenny Wayne Shepherd song, Last Goodbye, seems to be the best way to describe my last day at the Northern Virginia Daily:

Now pardon me if I appear
To see beyond the now and here
To try to save myself
I'm not the kind to pin the blame
But I can't take more of the same
Livin' on your shelf
I could lose myself
I could curse like hell
But I've lost the will to even try
If you ever doubt
Listen to the sound
No lies, no no no
This is my last goodbye.

I didn't particularly enjoy my last day. It's never a real fun experience, having people come by to wish you well who generally you'd wish just left you alone anyway. It's hard to act like you're going to miss the people who had a lot to do with why you're leaving.

It particularly doesn't help that once you announce you're leaving, you become dead to a lot of people there higher up in the chain of command. You hate to see anyone take anything that personally.

I don't want to come off as totally unaffected by my time here. I enjoyed myself, and we did some great things. I always enjoyed the exchanges of "Doctor?" with Charles. I enjoyed blowing off steam after deadline with Kevin and Charles. And I always liked going to the budget meetings, if nothing else as a prime time to people watch.

But another memory will probably overshadow them all, one from my last day. As I was working, one of my cohorts came walking up to my desk, like many other people did over the course of the day. She looked at me intently, again following the script to the "gonna miss ya" spiel. Then she said, "Can I have your chair?"

All right... Back to packing.

Packing it in

I'm not sure if there's anything in the world quite as aggravating as packing boxes for a cross-country move.

In my own typical anal-retentive fashion, I have a schedule. The goal is to finish roughly a room a morning before I have to go to work. That way I don't have to do too much with my one open day Thursday. It's a brilliant plan, really.

Except I hate moving. And I hate knowing each day when I wake up, I'm going to be packing these big blue Sterilite boxes I've purchased.

The most amazing thing happens when you try putting everything you own in a box. Through some magical agreement between the physical world and the physically moving world, everything starts taking up more space. While you know you're putting a bunch of things into one smaller, confined area, somehow your entire apartment looks like Sanford and Sons' junkyard.

It's coming along, though, and I'm relatively confident whatever doesn't get packed in time for the big move Friday ought to be flammable enough that I can just burn it where it stands. After all, there's no problem so big a gallon of gasoline and a match can't fix it.

[If, for some reason, my apartment catches fire in the next week, I'm now officially in deep doo-doo.]