Mudslingers and muckrakers

 

Before raising children I was a news junkie who ate out more than she cooked.

Local and fresh meant the corner diner. 

 

Muckraking meant bringing up some really good dirt that needed to see the light.

Mudslinging was something politicians did and I reported.

 

 Gee, I'm happy to be a farm girl raising vegetables, flowers and children.

That other life was fun and I'm glad I had it.

It makes me appreciate this one so much more.

Birthday Fairy?

I am not a Material Girl, but still. Have you seen these Polish pottery pieces with the tiny handpainted designs? Have you seen them? Coming soon to a kitchen near me.

***

In all seriousness, the stock market's roller coaster is in that deep pitched, scream-aloud plunge that might ordinarily cause me to shrug my shoulders and move on to the next project. As a recovering news junkie, I don't even turn the news on unless it's after all children are fed, dressed, played with, read to, fed and re-dressed, encouraged to play outside, fed again, taught a little, ordered to do their chores and then put to bed (whee). The news of late (the past six or seven years?) has been mostly depressing to me. I am afraid to get sucked back into old habits of checking the news wire every ten minutes, living and breathing the AP updates.

I find that sort of devotion to the news unhealthy, even if one is paid to behave so.

Lately I spend much more time "living in the moment," hanging laundry on the line and putting up jam, as it were. I've said here that the economic crisis boggles me. Then, the other night, I was easily pulled back over to the dark side by a late-night report on the evils of the subprime mortgage market and its secret sister who's been kept in the basement... the "swap." These swaps comprise trillions of dollars of insurance taken out in case the subprime market went south (nah, that'll never happen)... and now there's no regulation of the "swap" market, and no way to count how many dollars further in crisis we're plunging as a nation, no, as a WORLD.

Does anyone else just want to go back to baking pies?

More Camera Begging

See that smudge up there in the left hand corner of this picture? I can't blame that on the camera since it was likely on my Suburban windshield. Everything else wrong with the photo, let's say it was the camera.

What I wanted that photo to do and what it does are two different things. I wanted it to tell you how insanely tired and hot those field hands are. I wanted you to feel the lead weight of their legs, how they can hardly lift their arms after days and days of bucking hay in the 90-degree heat. How that ride on the flatbed trailer may be their only rest, because there's more hay in the next field and rain's on the forecast. (What does the photo tell you, in actuality? That I followed a tractor for quite a while, and went slow enough to take a picture through my windshield.)

I'm not a photographer. Back in my cub reporter days (don't you just love the sound of "cub reporter"? Say it a lot, over and over again, and you could kinda get hypnotized. Then I'd command you to read my blog daily and comment more than once each time you read. A-hem.)... Anywhat, back when I was a news reporter, I had a photographer all my own. Sort of like an entourage of one.

I covered an air base; that was my "beat." I was intimately familiar with F-16s and spoke daily with "flaks" and even got to go in a Stealth Bomber once. I can't remember much about it because the military wiped my brain afterward. Or maybe it was later pregnancy that made me forget. Also, motherhood made me ramble. I never did that before, I swear.

My trusty photographer! That's where I was. Even though cub reporters (cub reporter, cub reporter) were paid diddly squat, just enough to make the $225 monthly rent on a riverfront cottage while your husband finishes eng-gen-eer school -- despite the low pay, I didn't have to take my own pictures.

I had a Nikon film camera of my own that sat in its sturdy bag with its many pretty lenses. They were a prerequisite to looking the part. My first photographer, Todd, tried to teach me how to use it. I was more interested in learning his unbelievably fascinating backstory than paying attention to F-stops and the like. Todd was formerly a minister who got washed up and ran away to the West Coast to take pictures for a small daily paper. Man, that was interesting to me. But that was before I knew that lots of pastors burn out and choose another career before they really get a foothold in the church. Hmm. That's for another post.

My second photographer was named Lou. He's still, 15 years later as I blog, taking fantastic pictures for the Associated Press. At that time he liked to take pictures of falling-down cabins and barns along the way to the airfield. He also liked -- a lot -- stopping at the local bakery on the way there and back. Don't tell our editor. I learned my love of rural landscapes from him.

Took this one a month or so ago on a back road on the way from my farm to KL's. Dang if I didn't wish I had my old Nikon (I hear the song, Nii-kon Ca-mer-a, love to take a pho-o-to-graph, every time I type that). Because if I had been carrying my old SLR, you'd be able to tell there's a stock-still doe standing at attention between the trees. Her eyes were huge! Her ears were bigger! And yet it looks like a random photo of some reprod timber. Sigh.

Lou? Are you reading? Any tips on how to take a decent photo with a point-and-shoot digital camera? Any tips on how to remain in the state of contentment with said loaner camera? Any tips on how to get my blog on the AP wire? (Just kidding about that last one.)

So I'm not a photographer, but blogging pays even less (if I'm wrong, email me to tell me how) than a small daily paper does, and it does not come with a sidekick photographer to chronicle my mommy days. I have to take my own dang falling-down-barn pictures. And I need a new schmancy DSLR camera to do so. Anyone giving one away? Nikon? Canon? I'm not choosy. (But I could be ever so loyal and blog about you every day. Just mail me the camera and I'll mail back my contract to promote your camera shamelessly.)

These People

Long, long ago, in a town just 12 miles from here, I was a newbie intern with fresh white clips from the campus paper. The internship offers were many and various, by which I mean two; I chose the smaller weekly paper and infuriated (this is not my ego talking, it really happened that way) the editor at the rejected paper. He told me I'd never work in publishing in that town, which shall remain named Springfield. I am yet to be stung by that. The paper I did choose: Cottage Grove's weekly Sentinel, at that time an award-winning community newspaper. My editor was young and hip, or whatever we should call cool/phat(?)/awesome. She handed out interesting assignments and listened extraordinarily well. The newsroom atmosphere was lively. I learned to shoot pictures as well, since the only photographer was usually busy with local sports. She attended my wedding and gave me an apron.

After graduation and getting married, I moved to eastern Oregon and worked there for a much more serious daily, covering a military air base and police beats. My editor at the "real" job was as different from the first as could be. I understand now, from this hardly unique position of older and wiser, that he was probably burned out and marking time. He and his wife were empty nesters. He spent his days in deep thought or a semi-comatose state, it's hard to tell. I actually came in late one night to rotate my desk out of his line of stare. We all worked in a bullpen newsroom, listening to the scanner for breaking news and entering copy on dinosaur computers with no "Windows" software. Pagination, as it was called, was newborn and screaming. The Internet too was in infancy. We discussed whether there'd ever be a way to make money on it, whether it would live forever in geekdom, whether it was worth it to have an electronic front page.

I know my memories are beginning to sound like the eulogies of publishing past. I have more to write on this subject, but as usual, today takes over with urgency.

We have a brand new baby since my last post (talk about burying the lead)! Laura Abigail was born January 15 and weighed a whopping 7 pounds 12 ounces. Tons of dark brown hair. Ryan's grandma's nose. Really, really beautiful and a good baby to boot. The sleepless nights have been minimal. So has the farmwork. We moved the mares to short-term leased pasture up above the schoolyard. We moved Two Spot home and he has been packing on the (much needed) pounds. We moved Nestor to the Keenes and then sold him and moved him to the Oregon Horse Center, where he's spoiled rotten and has no pasture mates to pick on.

A cougar or fox or racoon got the last of our chickens. It was grisly and gruesome -- they waited until we were gone to the hospital to deliver Laura. Ryan came home to a mess and had to whisk it away so as not to upset the girls more than necessary. He is currently building a chicken tractor (more on this later too?) and we have eight chicks on order through Deiss Feed & Seed.

We have to move this year's garden because (1) we expanded the horse paddocks and (2) one of the huge maples split in two and fell on the old garden spot. We bought lumber to build raised beds and are hoping to do them lasagna style any weekend now. It is Spring Break, but the forecast is a very unseasonable "snow down to 500 feet."

Our neighbors with the overpriced B&B still have their place on the market. They did drop the price $90,000, but still no lookers. The deli is open on Sundays and serving Friday-Saturday night prime rib again! Life in Lorane goes on.