Deck the halls

I think I may have found the perfect Christmas tree. I've always been big fan of decorating for the holidays. I miss my family's traditions, but I have tried to make due since I've been away. This year, Jenn S., her husband Paul, their baby Riley, Justin and Sarah's friend Rachel came over to help me put it up and decorate. And of course, we had hot chocolate.

After a minor set back it getting the nails out of the bottom of the tree — which I won't disclose except to say that Justin broke my hammer — we draped it in lights, garland, ornaments and tinsel. Jenn was there last year to watch my process. "I mean this in the nicest way possible, but it looked like Christmas threw up on your tree," she said. Well, she hadn't seen my tree this year yet.

Lesson learned: Riley likes garland.

Dodging rocks

The warm weather has allowed me to sneak in a few bike rides that I haven't gotten a chance to do this season so far. There is a ride here up to the top of a peak about 30 miles from where I live. It's a cool 13 miles uphill to the top, then another six or seven downhill. The downhill isn't just a cruise through rolling hills either. It basically consists of dropping down steps, dodging rocks and hovering behind the seat of your bike trying not to go over the handlebars over granite rollers.

I did it once last year, but I've never gone back until today. I went with Steve, my regular riding buddy; Paul, Jenn S.'s husband; and Paul's brother Justin.

It was nearly balmy when we started, so I had to peel off the four layers I had on within the first two miles on the way up. They all went back on in the last two toward the top.

Few groups ever do this ride without someone crashing at least once on the way down. I went down first, then Paul crashed, so I didn't have to be the only one. I made it through with just a bruise on my thigh. Not bad.

Lessons learned: I need practice on the technical stuff.

Growing up fast

The Friday after Thanksgiving, our town holds its annual Christmas parade. This is a small town at its best — everyone in town packs onto the city's main street, people sell hot chocolate at stands, and classic cars, fire trucks and dancers stroll down the road waving.

I went with my friends Jenn, Renee, Jess and Jess daughter, Emma. A parade is much more fun with children, who always point out what we as adults take for granted.

Afterwards, Renee, Jess and Emma came over for macaroni and cheese and wine — the former being for Emma and the latter for the rest of them. As for me, I had both. We were sitting there as Emma ate her noodles out of a pink plastic bowl, andit came up that she will be starting school next year, since she turns five in February.

"I can't wait until I am an adult and don't have to go to school anymore," she said. I pointed out how once she's an adult, she will have to work instead. She countered that no, she is just going to stay home with the children. (She's four and she's already hating school and planning a family).

"They have a shop at the hospital where you can go get a baby," she continued.

Lessons learned: So that's where babies come from.

Giving thanks

I spent my Thanksgiving with my friend Sarah's family. Like I said in an earlier post, they take me in on most holidays. We ate early, with the usual favorites. I never had sweet potatoes with marshmallows when I was growing up, and I've decided that is my new favorite.

After pie, we worked on a puzzle that initially I resolved not to participate in. Puzzles are not my forte, and working on one is usually more infuriating than fun. But I gave in and managed put contribute to the union of 17 pieces. I now have a strategy.

Lesson learned: I'm thankful for Sarah and her family.

Please sign right here

Amid the reams of junk mail I get in my work e-mail, I get a steady stream of press releases from various organizations or interest groups. Some tout the latest book on alternative treatments for autism, others want me to call a certain doctor about new techniques for brushing your teeth, while still others give me the latest on an appearance the governor made at the some convention, all with the hope I'll jump on writing a story about it.

But one I got earlier this week caught my eye. It was from a nonprofit organization that is encouraging all of those who may be hosting a Thanksgiving dinner to make sure to have an obesity waiver available at your door and require guests to sign it. The waiver could protect you from lawsuit if someone sues you because they pigged out at your party and gained a few pounds. Among the list of grounds for such a suit could be 1. Failure to provide nutritional information, 2. Failure to warn of potential for overeating because the food tastes too good and is provided at no cost. 3. Failure to offer "healthier alternatives" vegetarian tofurkey. They even had a link where you could find such a form.

Wow. What's next?

Lessons learned: Nothing is my fault. At least that's what society tells me.

Still swinging

Steve and I played tennis last night. I've decided it's a great way to clear your head before the work week begins. They just resurfaced the courts where we play, so no more trying to judge which way the ball will shoot off the circuit of cracks that used to blanket them. There are lights there, so we we often go at night and hit around. As usual, we both had our glory shots that we would impress ourselves with, then turned around to lob one really long or smack it into the net. "That's what separates us from the pros," Steve said. For me, I think it might be more than that.

Lesson learned: Someday I will make it through a night without hitting a ball over the fence. Last night was not that night.

Pray for Sue

On Thursday night, Sarah told me news that no one wants to ever tell about one of their parents. Her mom, Sue, was just diagnosed with cancer, which was a shock because she has been healthy. Fortunately, they don't think the cancer has spread, so she has a surgery scheduled for Wednesday.

Sarah's parents have become my surrogate family here in Sonora. They're who I spend my holidays with when I'm not visiting my own family. They go to the same church as us. They host dinners and lunches and parties. Jenn S. and I started calling them mom and dad. So when I heard about Sue, it broke my heart.

Even more difficult is the fact that Sarah is suffering through her own illness. She's always been really strong about it, at least outwardly. But I know it must be hard to find the extra energy to cope with this.

So today, I helped Sarah into her parent's house, so that she can be there to help care for her mom as she goes through this process. When we got to her parent's house, Sue was camped out on the couch, protesting the shows on the Lifetime station she was watching. I gave her a card and a hug. It was her who took my face in her hands and told me she loved me and that everything happens for a reason.

Lesson learned: I guess strength runs in the family.

k is for krag

Last night Dan and I squared off in a cut throat game of Scrabble. Well okay, if it was cut throat, my game was the throat and Dan held the knife.

According to my job title, I'm a wordsmith. I am supposed to be good at this game. And maybe against anyone else, I might have held my own. But it's difficult to hang with someone whose average score was about 25 points a word. He was constantly throwing down words on double word scores that allowed him to collect points horizontally as well as vertically reaching into the 30-point echelon.

He failed to tell me beforehand, that when it comes to spelling, he is basically a prodigy. He also owns four different versions of this game. So I could write him off as a big dork, but I can't help being impressed.

Meanwhile, while I may have an uncanny ability to correct comma placement and weed out passive voice, I'm a terrible speller. Chris, one of my editors at work, takes endless delight in pointing out where synonyms of very different meaning than intended have slipped into my stories. There are times when it is so bad, it reaches levels of absurdity.

Last night, I attempted to spell crag, "krag." I misspelled the very first word I put down. I believe it was "goad." These are four-letter words, folks. This is what I'm talking about.

To be fair, there is more to this game than spelling. It does take some creativity too, which maybe I could work on.

Lesson learned: I had better get out the flash cards before I take on Dan in Scrabble again. Maybe they have openings in the fifth-grade spelling class at the local elementary school.

Season finales

I spent this weekend trying to squeeze the last good weather from the season by taking a couple bike rides. It is definitely getting chillier. And by that, I mean there were moments I worried hypothermia was only a few snowflakes away.

Saturday morning I woke up what I would consider early for a Saturday morning. My neighbor, Lisa, and I drove to a nearby area and road up a steep paved road known for its hair-pin curves. Its one of those rides that you love only afterward. I'm glad I did it, though, and I'm up for trying it again. It was warm on the way up, but bone chilling on the way back down with the wind blowing by.

Sunday, I went up the hill with my new friend, Dan. He rides in Davis, where he lives part time, so of course, I had to prove that there is some good riding here. It rained the night before and cleared up just in time. The slick trail just added one more element of challenge. It was beautiful as usual. I had uncontrollable shivers by the time we were done, but they were so worth it.

Lesson learned: I need to switch to a sport where I can wear a sleeping bag for clothing. (So hopefully it snows soon.)

Payback ala crazy

Our paper, like many smaller ones do, publishes items from the police logs. They vary from small stuff like burglaries to funny items about the crazy stuff that people do in our area. (I've written about this before).

It also includes a list of all the felony bookings and the names of people arrested for DUI. I get the occasional caller who wants us to hold their name from the list. So I give them my spiel about how it's our policy to name all offenders and, in the interest of fairness, we can't make exceptions.

But I've never had anyone ask why they weren't listed. Until today.

This guy called today to tell me he called police four times between last Thursday to Saturday, and nothing he reported made the paper. He told me he was "robbed" of $400 (It turns out his wife had $400 and she wouldn't give him $200). Then he said a well contractor overcharged him. Finally he got in a fight with his wife about how he was going to report the incident with the well contractor and ended up arrested on spousal abuse charges.

In my best fake professional voice while holding back laughter, I explained to him that we don't publish domestic or civil abuse reports from the police logs in our paper. And his arrest didn't make it because it was a misdemeanor (Guess he'll have to make it a felony next time). I couldn't help but ask why he wanted this stuff published.

He replied, "Because I want to scare my wife under the bed."

Lesson learned: Passive aggression knows no bounds.

War wounds

I was curled up on my couch last night dutifully doing my Bible study homework when my door bell rang. I answered it to see my neighbor and coworker, Rebecca, gasping in pain with a bloody towel wrapped around her hand.

She was attempting to fix her tread mill when it started up and caught her finger in the belt. It tore off her finger nail and a little skin along with it.

She had come over because she couldn't look at it herself and she was unsure what to do. I swallowed some nerves and took a look, then gave her some ice and a painkiller.

I'm generally okay with scratches or other minor injuries, but this was definitely stretching my comfort zone. So I did what I always do when I have a health question: call my sister, the family nurse. She didn't answer her phone.

It was Rebecca who thought of our other neighbor Lisa, who is also a nurse. Thank God she was home. She swooped in with a bag full of gloves, bandages and other supplies and bandaged Rebecca up without blinking.

At one point, as Rebecca was sitting their bleeding profusely, the thought that came to my mind was, "How is she going to type?" I chided myself for being insensitive, but felt a little better when she asked the same question about 30 seconds later. We are slaves to our job.

Lesson learned: Good thing I'm not a nurse.

Baby pics

I just got the first pictures of my new baby neice Amber Lynn. So I may be just a bit biased, but I think she is the most beautiful baby ever born.

Showing off

A college friend, Jesse, came to visit this weekend. He is on a road trip through a few Western states, and I was lucky enough to be one of the stops.

Jesse is one of the original Knowles Hall Mafia, which is what we coined our hall in the dorms freshman year. Half the hall was girls, and half were guys. It made for some epic water fights and a steady stream of practical jokes. Anyway, Jesse and I have managed to stay friends all this time.

He and I have the same weakness for the outdoors, so I had to show off my area a bit. The minute he got out of the car I dragged him out for a game of ultimate frisbee. Saturday, we did one of my regular mountain biking trails. And Sunday we went on a hike near Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. I had to make him work off all that beer I know he's been drinking on his other stops. We were really lucky with the weather — it was sunny and warm every day.

Jesse impressed me by making me stir fry from scratch after we got back Sunday night. Who knew he could cook?

Lesson learned: Jesse can still keep up, three years later.

Happy Birthday Dad

It was my dad's birthday on Saturday. I won't reveal just how old he turned. Let's just say he's younger than my grandfather and older than me.

I hoped when I called he'd be preparing to go off on an epic bike ride or taking a nap — both some of his favorite passtimes. But he was on his way to Costco to buy his new baby granddaughter a stroller. That's my dad for you — buying other people presents on his birthday. He was excited about this stroller too, explaining it's many features like it's detachable wheels. (Don't ask me why that is cool. Seriously, what good is a stroller without wheels?). He told me in feigned earnesty that he plans to go get the tires "foamed" so that he could take the baby mountain biking with him. "But her mother is kind of overprotective," he said.

Lesson learned: Aging doesn't have to mean growing old.

Dusting off those super powers

When it comes to Halloween, I believe there is nothing wrong with recycling. I say that because I didn't have it together enough to get a costume this year with me being out of town. So I just resurrected my Wonder Woman costume, which I wore two years ago. I figured it's a great excuse to wear knee high boots, a cape and big gold earrings.

It was still as fun this year as it was the last time I wore it. There was a Halloween party on Saturday night that I went to with a friend, Katy. For some reason, it drew the entire population of 20-somethings in our area, and then some. I even met a new friend.



Last night I went to a party with a friend who I work with. This was a little quieter, but still fun.

Lesson learned: Wonder Woman can be blond.

A little embedded journalism

Despite the fact that I completely disappeared from this blog after I wrote my last post while covering the fires in Southern California, I did make it home safely.

There were points I thought I was going to die. Not from getting burned over, but of exhaustion. I was up at 4 a.m. each day, I worked 35 hours in two days and I drove more than 1,000 miles on the whole trip.

My second day was a lot more interesting than the first. I ended up hooking up with a local strike team and heading out to the fireline. The battalion chief was nice enough to just let me come in his truck instead of having to be babysat by a spokesperson.

It was pretty amazing to watch these commercial-jet sized tankers making retardant drops. We would all stand there looking up till the red haze hung in the air, then duck down behind a tree to try and keep at least the front of our Nomex clean. We got slimmed about a half dozen times, to the point where I don't think my back could have started on fire if I went and stood in it.

I went back to the base and wrote my story with retardant caked in my hair. I could taste and smell it the rest of the day until I was able to take a shower that night.

The whole trip was one of the hardest things I've done for my job thus far, mostly because I was on the move constantly. I never knew what what was next or where I was going to sleep that night. But it was worth it. I learned a lot.

Lesson learned: There is nothing like a shower and pizza after a day on a fire.