Some of the good news I'm allowed to talk about, and some I am not. The first bit of good news: Mike won second place for his column from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and is picking it up in California this weekend. Nothing like a national award to enhance the resume. But that aside, there's also a cash award that goes along with it. While it's not the Lotto, it will make it possible for us to enroll our daughter in public school and pay Mike's quarterly life insurance without dipping into the safety net. Anything that involves cash is, for us, a beacon of hope.
I mentioned yesterday that the main push on the book is done (for us, though not for our editors and designer). Fun as it has been, putting together all that copy so quickly was taking every single minute of our "off" time from piano teaching and column writing. Of course there's still the editing process. But that shouldn't be nearly as much of a fire drill as the writing and interviewing were. So with any luck, there should be more time to look about for other ways to raise our income.
One possibility is selling off some of the construction stuff left behind by our house's previous owner. Mike's already been into it and it looks like we have some old-house stuff that might fetch us a few extra bucks.
There's that, and the fact that some aspects of the economy seem to be improving. No matter what happens to newspapers, it would be great to see some alternative jobs popping back up. All we need is some extra time to look, which should now open up. There's only so much stuff we have to sell.
All this has kept the despair away--as long as I don't allow myself to think about the haters. Never underestimate the power of the haters. That week Mike was getting thrashed by O'Reilly, out there on a limb, making the Star look good. That week he had a constant stream of bile, thinly veiled threats and out-of-thin-air posts--most of which he insisted on reading to me. You're just trying to raise your kids and live your life, and these people will bring you down in an instant, apparently for the sin of disagreeing with them. It's very hard to stay positive when you have people out there willing to make any hateful thing up just to bring you down. On the one hand, I hate reading them. But on the other, we need to archive them. Nothing like a good archive to help you prove "malicious intent," should it ever come to that.
Fie on them. Let them go stew in their own juice. I've wasted too many sentences on them already and it's ruining my gazelle-like intensity on imagining a positive outcome to this year. Back to the fun.
Free Food
It was Barbecue Battle weekend in Lenexa--the Daddy of free food events for the summer. Yesterday my son and I spent the bulk of the afternoon wandering around Sar-Ko-Par, and flirting with heat stroke. But although the heat kept the big crowds away, there were still plenty of samples out of ribs, chicken, brisket, etc. One site even had a banner advertising the "Bacon Explosion" featured in the New York Times a few weeks ago. But sadly, there was no exploded bacon out when we passed by.
Here are a couple of pics:
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