ready to break
If news breaks as the dawn breaks, I'll be there.
As many of you know, since starting at The Desert Sun in June, I've been doing a little bit of everything — writing for the daily, writing for a community weekly, shooting and editing video and posting stories to mydesert.com — and I've been having a blast doing it all.
As great as everything has been so far, I've kind of been like the mythical Eighth SSP Staffer (which I guess was actually a lot less mythical this past summer) in that I answered to a number of different editors and didn't have many firmly set or regular assignments.
Starting Tuesday, I'm moving into a much more defined role at TDS — that of the morning breaking-news reporter. I'll be starting work at 5 o'clock each morning (still Tuesday-Friday with my Saturday shifts remaining the same) and chasing whatever news breaks until early afternoon.
I'm really excited to take on this much more fast-paced beat assignment, and I'm honored to be succeeding the very accomplished Denise Goolsby, who covered the AM breaking beat until last week.
People have offered me their sympathy with regard to the early hours, but I'm not too worried about working from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m. For one, I've had this kind of schedule before when I was copy editing for UPI, and in those few months I managed to have much more of a social life than I thought I would — and honestly, a fuller life than I've had so far with more "normal" hours.
Back during my copy editing days, I made it to a couple of regular weekday dinner gatherings each week, volunteered, played, read books, attended panel discussions and kept myself going with a combination of early bedtimes and afternoon naps. Now, getting home in the evening, I usually manage to zone out long enough that by the time I've finished dinner, it's time to start preparing for the next day and heading to bed.
Granted, reporting (especially reporting on breaking news from the field) takes more out of you than the desk-bound craft of copy editing, but I'm thinking these seemingly crazy hours will, if anything, create more space for other things to fill my life.
So, please, don't cry for me, Argentina, when it comes to my new work schedule. Just get ready to see more of me in the afternoons and evenings, and be sure to drop by mydesert.com in the morning to see what I'm up to.
Good morning!
Let’s go Devils!
You know, having Monday as part of my weekend is a beautiful thing.
Today, as ASU students went back to school in Tempe, Phoenix and Mesa, I had plenty of time to read the contents of today's 48-page State Press online, check out what the University is talking up on ASU.edu, watch what will hopefully be the commercial ASU uses during televised football games, listen to The Blaze 1260 AM 1330 AM while floating in the pool and basically catch the ASU fever a little bit.
And I'm not just talking about being excited for football season to start. (I've been keeping track of that countdown for some time already.) Rather, seeing my alma mater swing back into motion and gear up for another year of learning, journalizing, research, service and all the other things that make ASU great just made me really proud to be a Sun Devil.
Here's hoping that all my friends who are still in school (and that Sun Devil brother of mine) have a great semester.
o hai new couch!
SSP explained.
Before I get into the rest of how awesome this past weekend was, I suppose I should take a minute to explain what this SSP thing that I keep mentioning is.
SSP stands for Sierra Service Project. It's a nonprofit based in Sacramento that runs weeklong mission trips for church youth groups on Indian reservations throughout the American West, in South Los Angeles and in Mexico and Honduras — although both the international programs were scrapped this summer because of the security situation in each country.
I first went to SSP as a teenage camper in 2002 and barely made any mention of my first SSP experience online. I only posted a snarky comment about how surprised we were upon returning from Loleta in northern California to find the monsoon had already come to Arizona.
The next year, though, I noted that I was going and that I had returned. Then, I posted big, long lists of memories and quotes from SSP SoCal '03.
My last year as a camper, I was in Duck Valley and documented pretty much the whole dang week on Brian.Indrelunas.com upon my return from SSP '04.
The next summer, I spent a week as an SIT, a staffer in training, in Lukachukai, Ariz. Then in '06, I became a full-fledged staffer, working all summer as a spiritual life coordinator in Tsalie, Ariz.
For spring break '07, I went with the ASU and UA Wesley campus ministry groups on an SSP young-adult mission trip to work on Vermont Square UMC in LA, the home of SSP's summer LA site.
Then, during the summer months of '07, I was the SLC in LA. In '08, I was the LA site director, which entailed hiring the rest of the LA staff in April and then leading the staff during the summer.
And then, I graduated and got a full-time job, which meant no SSP this summer. Someday, I hope to become an adult counselor and take a youth group on a week of SSP, but for now I'm in a sort of SSP limbo.
So now you've got the basic outline of my SSP life to date, which should help you understand why my weekend was so great. I'll get to that next.
So many SSPers are goin’ to the chapel and gettin’ ma-a-aried
Apparently, August is the month for SSPers to get hitched.
As you may already know, Laureen and I went down to San Diego to see two former staffers, Kari Neal and Dane Robinson, get married.
The wedding was beautiful, the reception was fun, and it was good to see old SSP friends as well as meet some SSP counselors who I never crossed paths with during my camper or staffer years.
Oh, and how cool is this setup? The ceremony was at Kari's church, La Jolla UMC (right), and then the reception was at Dane's church (left). And when we got to Dane's church — after a wrong-direction detour to the church on the other side of the freeway — there were a bunch of kids in the parking lot either loading up before some sort of camping trip or unloading after a trip. Although they were too young for even junior-high SSP, it was cool to see those kids, it was cool to see an SSP-esque sight right after two SSPers got hitched.
But they weren't the only former staffers tying the knot over the weekend. It looks like Philip Harrell's wedding was on Saturday as well.
And the Saturday before that, Jessica Moore, who I was on staff with in Arizona way back in '06, got married too.
Of course, congratulations to all three couples (as well as Jessi Banks, who got married earlier in the summer) are in order.
Also appropriate, I think, is a reminder that there are 20 days left in August during which this extremely single SSP alum can also be proposed to and/or married. Ready, go.
a musical note
Lately, I've been listening to more rock than pop in my travels around the Coachella Valley and my hangin' out around the apartment. (The one notable exception is gettin' low with serious-business rap whilst ironing.)
That probably has something to do with the fact that we have more classic rock in the Palm Springs radio market than I know what to do with. There are two stations here that brand themselves as classic rock stations. Plus, the local Jack FM plays mostly older rock, and the "new rock" station, KCLB, plays a significant number of tunes from decades past. For those of you who listen to the radio in Phoenix, KCLB has KUPD's attitude but KDKB's playlist.
But that pendulum swung back the other way over the weekend, and I've now embraced some songs that I was trying so hard not to like — like "I've Gotta Feeling" and even "Birthday Sex." I'll at least partially chalk that up to my interest in finding out what LA's new KAMP was all about. But perhaps my hanging out with SSPers all weekend had an influence as well. Something about Rihanna, JT, the Black Eyed Peas and the like just works well with SSP dance parties... and wake-up songs, for that matter.
At one point when I was hanging out up in the office at the LA site, I saw a white board that had different morning songs listed under Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, underneath Thursday, it said "Boom Boom Pow" and there was an arrow drawn all the way through to Saturday. When I asked, the LA staff assured me that they didn't actually sing "Boom Boom Pow" to campers for three days in a row, but the thought of waking up to an SSP rendition of the Black Eyed Peas even once still made me smile.
Anyway, we'll see if I keep up my dedication to phat beats now that I'm back in the land of way too much classic rock.
an epic end to an epic weekend
This is why I hate Ontario.
So someone decided to leave some sort of hefty-ass shopping cart type
thing in the No. 2 or 3 lane of the 10 as you come up on Milliken Ave.
in Ontario.
The driver ahead if me swerved out of the way in time, but since I
took an extra second to make sure I wasn't going to plow into anyone
in the next lane over as I was trying to slow down and swerve, I
clipped the thing with my car, knocking out my little left-front
parking light.
Well, at least it's in good company; most of the other dents and dings
in my car are on that same corner.
Still... Ontario, you and I are no longer friends.
manly movies
I had forgotten that my aforementioned Amazon purchase was kind of a
themed one.
All three of the DVDs I got are movies with "man" or "men" in the
title: "All the President's Men," "Anchorman" and "Yes Man."
Happy Boxing Day!
For those of you who aren't yet convinced that July 31 is the best day for celebrating Christmas in the summer, consider how appropriate it is to then celebrate Boxing Day on Aug. 1.
For instance, tonight there's some serious-business boxing going on at the Agua Caliente Casino Resort Spa in Rancho Mirage. Don King is even in the house. Anyway, we're covering all the ins and outs with a live boxing blog on mydesert.com.
Plus, Spike is airing most if not all of the Rocky movies tonight. (Rocky III, which I hear is the one with Mr. T in it, just started out here on the West Coast.)
And to top it all off, when I opened my front door to depart for work this afternoon, I discovered a box containing what could be considered my Christmas in July present to myself — a bunch of DVDs I ordered off of Amazon.com a few days ago.
