Rang in the new year with maddening work computer problems at home on a midnight governor swearing-in story that needed to go online.
Fortunately, Journalistos Steve Williams and Rob Browman were on the ball and pitched in to bail me out on the posting of a story our bosses really wanted to get on the web as close to midnight as possible.
Actually, I had fallen asleep in my living room two hours before Capitol reporter Dan Boyd was to post the midnight story to the web. His cell phone call had not awakened me. Departing politics reporter Jim Monteleone had been trying at the office earlier to get Willie Nelson’s “Blue Skies” set as my ringtone, but somehow I ended up with a blackout on all alerts. I shouldn’t point fingers though; I probably have some hugely outdated component on my iPhone, like the Bluetooth button being switched to “Two tins cans linked by string.”
We had planned elaborately for the coverage of inaugural events and the posting of the midnight sweaking in. But as the late Gov. Bruce King once contorted: “The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go aft.”
Heard the comedian Robert Klein say on Letterman recently that, “Life is work.” I think he meant your career is your life, especially for a bachelor like me, even though I continue to dream of retirement and writing freedom.
At any rate, worrying about my aging body and brain, I took the anchovy cure after getting home at about 9 p.m., loading tinned anchovies on three pieces of forbidden, reheated pizza purchased at the Bernalillo Pizza Hut the night before. (Coronado once ate there). The immediate effect was to knock me out in my chair until the old newspaper person’s “I screwed up something” alarm went off in my head at 12:34 a.m., 34 minutes after the swearing in began.
By the way, congratulations on a new term, Governor Susana Martinez. Fortunately already on the job as I scrambled to catch up were Boyd, Browman and the hard-working but eternally unthanked Journal design and copy desks, down to just a few people on New Year’s Eve. (Thanks Leah, Ruth and Robin).
So, I’m slightly hopped up on computer-problem adrenaline, anchovies and the half a cup of black coffee I treated myself to with a piece of peach pie left over from Christmas.
And Cooper, who’s only had his usual — hold the anchovies — is wondering what the hell we’re doing up at 3 in the morning.
Two weeks later, I would get a lung cancer diagnosis.
dream ranch 