Filed under: Adventure
MAPLE GROVE, Minn. — Sorry about the horrible cell-phone photo, but it’s the best I could do. Tuesday evening, Lisa and I ventured down to the University of Minneapolis for some exploring before the night’s festivities. It was quite nice — the campus reminded me a bit of the University of Washington and the student housing/frat row area reminded me a bit of the University of Oregon.
The piture above is the Minneapolis skyline at dusk as we were walking over a footbridge near the student union building. It’s hard to make out, but the bridge in the photo goes over the Mississippi River, over to the smaller campus on the west bank.
Check out the map below for a blow-by-blow of the evening.
In chronological order –
A: We park our car in residential Dinkytown.
C: After wandering campus for a bit, we eat dinner at a funky burger joint called Annie’s.
F: To settle our full stomachs, we wandered some more, including a walk across the Mississippi River.
E: To kill some time, we hung out in the student union building reading the print version of The Onion. After a while, we moved to the main library to check election results in the computer lab.
D: Northrop Hall, where Bob Dylan was playing a concert. Lisa got one ticket off of CraigsList. I, as not much of a Dylan fan (I know, I know), was just fine with finding a cool bar, settling in and watching election coverage.
B: The Library bar, which had on NBC and CNN. After the concert, Lisa met up with me here just in time for John McCain’s concession speech and Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. It was perfect.
MAPLE GROVE, Minn. — Our journey across the West is complete. We got to Lisa’s home, in this suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul, about 7:30 p.m. Central Time. It took us just about 10 hours today to go 680 miles. Together with Sunday’s 685 miles from Spokane to Miles City, Mont., our trip was 1,365 miles in about 20 hours.
Looking back at how relatively little time it took to travel 1,365 miles by car, it’s hard to tell whether it makes the world seem bigger or smaller. Sure, the United States is huge and it takes a long time to cross — but not that long. The fact we were able to drive this entire distance in less than 24 hours actually, to me, makes the world seem a little smaller.
Anyway, it was cool to see parts of the country I’d never seen before. I can now add North Dakota and Minnesota to my “Where I’ve Been” map on Facebook. And I’m looking forward to the coming days, when Lisa and I will be exploring the Twin Cities. (By the way, a little Wikiwandering told me an interesting factoid. The greater Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area is the 16th-largest in the nation at 3.2 million. Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma is the 15th-largest at 3.3 million. And Spokane is the 107th at 456,000 people.)
A dozen photos from Monday’s trip are in the below slideshow.
MILES CITY, Mont. — Yesterday I alluded to a post about my plan for the near future. And as Lisa has said on her blog, that plan entails both of us moving out of our apartment in Spokane. It’s Lisa’s turn first, and we’re in the middle of a two-day road trip from Spokane to Minneapolis to move all her stuff back home.
Today was 10 hours of driving on I-90 and I-94, mostly through Montana — which is humongous. Unfortunately, it steadily rained for about eight of those hours. Fortunately, we’d recently seen a lot of that part of Montana — on our last road trip, three days ago. On Monday, we have another 12 hours of driving, largely through North Dakota and into Minnesota.
Above is our Sunday route — 685 miles — and below is a short slideshow of the view from the passenger seat (we each got a few turns). Monday will be 680 more miles.
Flush with free time due to unemployment, Lisa and I decided to take advantage of our freedom and visit our friend Jenna in Western Montana. Four hours of beautiful driving from Spokane is the town of Polson, on the southern tip of Flathead Lake. And, wonderfully, an hour and a half north of there is Glacier National Park.
Lisa and I left about noon Tuesday, timed so we could hang with Jenna on her day off Wednesday. That part of the country has breathtaking landscape, though the towns themselves are a little questionable.
So, a day trip to Glacier took up our Wednesday. I won’t talk much about it, so take a look at the slideshow below. But we did go on a three-hour hike up to Avalanche Lake, at the shores of which we found thin ice because it’s been a while since the sun hit there.
We got back to Polson near the end of dusk, enjoying the sunset as we drove along Flathead Lake. That evening, the three of us drank white wine and made caramel apples (well, we melted caramel and dipped apple slices in it).
We decided to head back to Spokane on Thursday so we could start planning the rest of, well, our lives. Which brings me to another post, which I will post somewhat soon. (No promises on how soon, considering my recent blogging diligence.)
Filed under: Adventure, Challenge, Events, Job Search, Journalism, News Industry, Sea Change
Well hey everybody. It’s been a month since I last posted. Part of that is because I’ve been busy at work, and part of it is because I’ve been lazy at blogging. Really lazy.
Obviously my big news is that I am on a list of 25-27 employees expected to be laid off by Oct. 24. But I’ll get to that in a bit.
The past month started out with some real promise. Steve Smith, former editor-in-chief of The Spokesman-Review, asked Brian Immel and me to kick off a big project. We were charged with taking the popular SportsLink blog and spinning it off into its own website, with the goal of making it profitable. That was going to be our job — I’d no longer be in the sports department.
The project got going slowly because Brian was busy working on the Spokesman’s yet-to-be-launched new website. So I continued my sports multimedia producer job. This included another new project, The Mike & Greg Show — a weekly video with two high-school sports reporters in which they make their game picks for the upcoming weekend. So far, we’ve done four episodes (1, 2, 3, 4).
Last Monday, Brian and I finally started having some good conversations on what we wanted to do with SportsLink. We wanted text-message updates, better play for videos, customizable home pages — we were even toying with the idea of making it a social networking site. (I know, it’s a dreaded term. There’s just no better one.)
Then came Wednesday, and everything came to a halt.
Layoffs. For me, out of the blue. I expected to get at least a little warning that layoffs might be coming. It was quite sudden — a morning e-mail announcing an all-staff meeting, rumors throughout the day, then the gauntlet came down.
Twenty-one union-covered newsroom employees were on the layoff list. Plus four to six managers. All said, 25 to 27 people gone from the newsroom. That’s about one-quarter of the staff. It’s devastating. Amid the turmoil, Steve also resigned. He had for months told people there wouldn’t be more layoffs under his watch. I’m glad he followed through.
The layoffs, as governed by an agreement between management and the union, must be done by inverse seniority. The majority of us on the list are 20-something journalists from all departments. Three of us are from sports. Wednesday night, a group of us gathered at Lisa’s and my place for some commiseration.
The next day, assistant managing editor Carla Savalli announced her resignation. And the exodus had started.
People have two weeks to submit voluntary resignations, which would help save the jobs of some of the people on the layoff list. I’m not holding out too much hope. And that gets me to, well, me.
When the news was announced, I didn’t know how to take it. I knew my name would be on that list; I’m the second-least-senior member of the sports staff. After Steve’s meeting, I immediately ducked out of the newsroom and headed home.
But now it’s sinking in. For the past few days, I’ve been working on getting my stuff together to send out job applications. Lisa graciously redesigned my résumé for me, I uploaded a few of my videos to Vimeo and I gathered together a bunch of print clips for my portfolio.
Really, I’ve started to see this as an exciting challenge, a chance to go somewhere else without feeling bad about leaving the Spokesman. I’m looking not just near my hometown Seattle, but elsewhere in the country. I’m not limiting myself to just print or just video, I’m broadening my scope. And, yes, that means broadening my scope past newspapers — though that’s where the majority of my searching has taken me.
I will soon make a new page for this website to function as a sort of video portfolio. And I may start putting up some print clips. But this means I may hide the blog for a little bit, to keep it out of the eyes of potential employers. I don’t think there’s anything that could hurt my chances here, but it’s not worth the risk. If I hide the blog, I’ll be sure to tell you all how to access it.
In the meantime, thanks to those of you who have called or texted me to check in. I’ll keep everyone posted.
SEATTLE — As some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been updating my blog recently. Well, I really don’t have much of an excuse for that, honestly, but this week I’ll blame it on the fact I’m home in Seattle taking a little vacation. It’s very nice. Relaxing, warm, fun. The only downside is Lisa’s not here, too.
But it’s been nice seeing family and catching up with a few friends back home. My mom, Brad (stepdad) and I even decided to be tourists for a day and take an Elliott Bay cruise on an Argosy tour boat. (It was a little odd for me boarding an Argosy, because when we used to row around Lake Union we’d to yell at them about their big wakes.)
Anyway, it was a beautiful day and the boat had an open bar. What else could you ask for?
The container “dinosaur” cranes ready for their next ship.
A week or two ago, I meant to write an entry about how I felt a little left out of the rush to cover the Valley View Fire, a brush fire in Spokane Valley that destroyed 13 homes. Being in the sports department has a way of keeping you out of the news loop.
But Thursday was a different story. On our way out of the door to take Lisa to work, her grandpa called to say there was an entire building on fire downtown. Just in case, I grabbed my ready-to-go backpack and drove downtown.
The smoke was everywhere. A giant plume rushing skyward. Once I dropped off Lisa at the newsroom, she called and said that, as I expected, no one was over there doing video. I rushed over to the scene (admittedly, I took a detour home to put on real shoes, get a real shirt and grab a hat — I’d just rolled out of bed) and busted out my camera.
Several smoke-filled (plus chemicals!) hours of shooting later, here’s what I came up with:
It was nice to be back on news, if only for a day. I got the adrenaline rush. My hair, two days later, still has a hint of smoke smell to it. And even though I worked 14.5 hours that day (8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. — still had to cover an Indians game), I would have done it a thousand times over.
Filed under: Adventure
Lisa beat me to the punch with a blog post. But she and I went on a nice little hike at Riverside State Park today. I told her next time I’ll taker her on a hike that old, fat people can’t also go on. Perhaps some elevation gain.
Regardless, we naturally took some pictures. She’s already posted most of the best, but here are a few unappreciated gems.
Lisa also blogged about this. We took a little visit today to the Spokane Falls downtown, where floodwaters are gushing over the cliffs in mindboggling volumes. Seriously, just standing at the viewpoint and watching the water was a little dizzying.
I took a page out of Jacob’s book and took some video with my cell phone. You don’t get the full effect, but it’s an idea.
Of course, we couldn’t help but also take pictures.
