Back to the surface

I am resurfacing just for a few minutes to say hi and good-bye. A short good-bye.

It's just a few minutes because I have lots of writing on my plate. Last week, I had to work on several articles for a special edition we are working on; I had to get interviews and then write them up. I felt intimidated by all that. Plus, it was the first week of practice for the fall sports (football and volleyball), and I had to do articles on them. Plus, it was the week of the County Fair, and I had many assignments there. And the Olympics had my attention, too.

This week, where do I stand? All the interviews for the special edition have been done, and all but one of the articles, too. I feel much better about that! I did the sports previews last week. This week, I have a football scrimmage to cover on Friday and a v'ball tournament Saturday--so that's all at the end of the week. A busy weekend, but what's new?

Meanwhile, the fair is over. We pushed through many pictures on Monday, and I have one more article to write this week. It's the people's choice event, the one that always jam-packs the grandstand, the biggest money-maker of all: the demolition derby. I give it a tongue-in-cheek article in sports with a few photos. I have fun with it while (most importantly) not putting it down. Plus I was able to find a feature this year, too.

Then I've got some personal writing, too. I have to write S. I have to write a new female friend (don't get excited; she lives in Alaska). I want to write a funny blog entry about something that happened during the truck pull at the fair (the night before the demo).

The Olympics continues. I watched a lot of the swimming and Michael Phelps' achievements. I've been seeing this and that. We get three channels that cover the Olympics: NBC, USA Network and CBC, from Canada. Frequently, especially with the major events, both NBC and CBC carry the same event; CBC is Canada first, of course, but they closely watch the U.S. entries.

Sometimes it's fascinating, sometimes not. One sport I like to watch is show-jumping. Riders on horses, jumping over obstacles. CBC has a lot of that during the summer from Spruce Meadows (near Calgary), and my wife and I like watching the horses do their stuff. So yesterday, we found out when CBC was carrying the show jumping team finals and saw the U.S. and Canada in a jump-off to decide first place (which the U.S. won).

The other thing, you may have noticed, is that I'm back to checking your blog entries. I had a mental block about that for a while--just procrastinated on that, maybe worried about all the special edition articles. Now I'm back into that, leaving comments when I can contribute a thought or a joke or a pun (lame though it may be).

OK, back to my Ducks Unlimited article. See you guys around.