Opinion

Over the weekend I took my daughters to the ocean for the first time in their lives. It was a trip planned for quite some time - before I knew what my current working situation would be. And so, with our non-refundable plane tickets, we boarded a plane late Friday for a weekend in sunny California. I'd decided a while ago that to visit the ocean, they needed to visit somewhere warm and especially during the winter months. Thanks to a lot of help from willing contributors, the three papers were able to get out on time with full coverage of events. It really does take a village, and I'm very grateful to have the help so I could get away for the weekend.

The big day is approaching. No time to waste.

I've got to find an address for Mother Nature. Someone needs to bite the bullet and apologize to her. It could be just as well be me. One day the wind blows from one direction and the next it blows from the exact opposite direction. At least the drifts are equal height. I did notice that there was not much wildlife out in the open. Not even many birds on the wing. Except in the area of my bird feeders.

Allow me to take a little detour from the general topic areas for this column. The cold weather is reminding me of past experiences in the frigid outdoors - all perhaps conditioning me for a life in the great frozen north.

Last week, the new owner of the newspaper was gracious enough to send all of us who wished to go to the Minnesota Newspaper Association Convention. I jumped at this opportunity because working the way we do these days, remotely and with much smaller staff sizes, networking opportunities don't happen very often. I've always found networking opportunities like this to be a match-strike of inspiration. Being able to chat with those in the same industry and hear what others are doing, or the challenges they are recognizing, and how they are overcoming them helps me to mull over my own thoughts and ideas with more perspective.

So, January is many things, but I think the word most people use to describe it is “long”. Yes, technically it’s tied for the longest month of the year with others but I’d like to see any other month look hard and long into the cold, grey eyes of January and see who blinks first.

Contemplating the fact that it’s about 50 degrees warmer inside my refrigerator than it is outside as I write this, my thoughts go back to the indigenous people who survived in our outside winter environment for millennia. Yet, amid those challenges, they did manage to eke out a subsistence existence season after season.

I see my complaints to Mother Nature about the seesawing temperatures didn't do any good. We've been swinging again this week. All day Thursday the weathermen were telling us that the highs would be in the 30s. They even announced that as the actual temp. All the while the thermometer on my dash was reading in the single digits and the wind was whooping it up. Gave me a giggle anyway. Really pining for spring.

After months of having to hear from my mother, my sister, my grandmother, and my husband how terrible my previous column photo was, I decided to change it. Not because I thought it was terrible, because honestly, who cares? My column picture isn't a beauty contest, and I'm 40. I hardly see why it makes a difference. However, I just got sick of hearing how "old" I looked from all of them - thus, here's a quick photo from my porch featuring my seventeen-year-old hat that I originally purchased at the Minnesota Newspaper Association. This hat was a purchase made the very first time I attended the convention. Back then I was just a young, perhaps overly ambitious newspaper owner who was asked to speak, as a part of a panel, to a group of journalism students about the nitty-gritty of what living a life of journalism is like.