No talking, for real

From this week's Brentwood Home Page:

The first birthday card I gave my husband while we were dating was of the humorous variety. It said something like, “With you in my life I know there will always be joy in my heart,” then something else nice, followed by the inside punch line, “… and sports on my TV.”
I knew early on that Tim was crazy about sports, both watching and playing. The first time I ever saw him at UT Knoxville, he was heading into the Presidential cafeteria on his way back from an intramural softball game.
For some of our early dates, we’d watch the Vols basketball team, coached by Don Devoe, play in the new Thompson Boling Arena when so few fans attended that entire sections of seats were blocked off with a huge black curtain.
After Tim and I married, I often fell asleep to the voices of Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann anchoring SportsCenter. Some of our most fun times involved his work softball teams and church basketball, and to this day weekend chores are planned around the Vols’ and Titans’ game times.
I know Tim has always dreamed of sharing those sports experiences with our boys, and to be honest I always looked forward to that day as well. I mean, how many games can one halfway-interested woman be expected to watch?
As often happens with dreams, though, reality doesn’t match the expectations.
Tim is picky about where and with whom he watches the Vols or Titans on TV, for example. He gets a little too intense to high-five a bunch of friends at a sports bar. We also don’t invite a lot of friends over for game-watching parties, either, because his laser focus is not conducive to friendship-building conversation.
I mean, such a serious fan can’t trust just anybody to enter the sacred zone of spectatorship. What if they talk about something besides what’s happening in the game at that moment?
Unfortunately, he can’t be so selective when it’s our own kids who’ve somehow gotten past the velvet rope.
The twins caught on to football at a young age, but they weren’t too distracting since their interest usually would fade after the first quarter and they’d go play elsewhere in the house.
They’re older now, though, so they stick around for the whole game. They also like to spout off their semi-informed 14-year-old observations about the plays and personnel like grumpy old men, much to the annoyance of their well-read father:
“That quarterback’s the worst! They need to get rid of him!” one of them will yell.
Of course, Tim can’t let it go.
“Why would you say that? His numbers are actually better than they’ve been all season!”
Tim attempts to educate them for a few plays before pulling rank: “You can think that if you want to, but I need silence now.” Then, 45 seconds later, he breaks his own rule when he says, “OK, this down is HUGE. We need this!” opening the floor for discussion once again.
Since 7-year-old Owen has played football, both the real and Madden-on-Xbox versions, he actually understands the game pretty well.
He also doesn’t leave the room. And he talks. A lot.
“Wow, there’s a lot of red in that stadium. I thought they were playing Alabama in Knoxville! 34-10. Oh no. We’re losing.”
This kind of exchange doesn’t lead to the father-son bonding experience where they all cheer the touchdowns and encourage each others’ predictions for the next play. It often ends with a series of comments like this:
“Owen, sit down.”
“Owen, please don’t walk in front of the TV.”
“Leave the dog alone, Owen.”
“Owen, sit down!”
“Owen, there are only 3 minutes and 18 seconds left in this game, and I want to watch them in peace!”
That’s when I attempt to distract them all by loudly unloading the dishwasher and carelessly tossing the silverware into the drawer.
On the field or off, nothing bonds a team like fighting a common enemy.

The good news: Fewer trees have to die

Man, the news industry has changed.
I think the state of my profession has changed more than almost any other in the past 30 years.
I am not THAT old, but when I was in college studying journalism, the Internet didn't exist. No one had a cell phone. All newspapers were printed on paper. At The Daily Helmsman at Memphis State, we literally cut out the printed articles and glued them on a board to deliver to the printer, where they "made the newspaper" overnight.
I still remember the smell of that hot glue machine. I remember occasionally using an X-acto knife to "edit" stories that already were glued to the board.
I remember the very first time I saw a Macintosh computer and Windows menus dropping down on the tiny black-and-white screen.
But I still had to spend hours in my design class learning about rotogravure printing and ink types and when you would use which method.
I'm too young to have prehistoric memories of my career.
Going back even farther, I remember an elementary school field trip to The Commercial Appeal offices in Memphis. The vast, open newsroom with ringing telephones intimidated me.
But the press room was the coolest, because I'd never seen rolls of paper so big they could only be moved by forklift. I'd never seen a machine that was three stories high. As my class listened to the tour guide explaining press runs, I remember him having to shout over the machinery.
I finally understood the phrase "stop the presses."
I didn't fully appreciate how much my industry has changed until a friend asked me to help her get a news office tour for her son's Cub Scout requirements. Our one major local newspaper, The Tennessean, wouldn't even do it because they fired the people who used to give tours. They're owned by Gannett and they're streamlining, you know.
She e-mailed me the requirement from the Scout manual:

"Visit a newspaper or magazine office. Ask for a tour of the various divisions, (editorial, business, and printing). During your tour, talk to an executive from the business side about management’s relations with reporters, editors, and photographers and what makes a “good” newspaper or magazine."

At first, she thought I could give him a "tour" of Brentwood Home Page, the online newspaper I write for. I tried to explain that it's only online, that there is no press, and it's literally a "home office." It would be like sitting in someone's den and talking to two women with a desktop computer.
They could offer him excellent advice on the news industry, but it wouldn't quite be the memorable Citizen Kane experience.
I contacted other smaller papers that still print on paper, but they declined, saying there "wasn't much to see" and they send out their stuff to be printed anyway.
Can't anybody show a Cub Scout what a newspaper looks like anymore?
Modern news is either corporate, mass-produced aggregates of wire news or localized, personalized news that, frankly, isn't very exciting to watch being made.
There are no "divisions" of a newspaper. Even established "papers" feel like start ups because in an attempt to save money, they have to function with as few people as possible doing everything.
Someone needs to let the BSA know what's been happening to local newspapers so they can update their manual.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Top-notch stuff in this week's Brentwood Home Page column:

Yeah, I know Halloween's over, but I gotta say this

I know one thing my older boys did not do this Halloween: roll anyone’s yard.
Come to find out that there’s been a whole lotta nighttime pranking in my neighborhood lately. Most of it has NOT been as good-natured as the two times my own kids rolled someone, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Ever since I joked about our buying TP for my kids and a couple of their friends so they could roll another kid’s yard during a recent sleepover, I’ve gotten e-mails and Facebook messages detailing all manner of midnight vandalism.
Of course, everyone now assumes my kids did it all.
So I’ll just set their records straight. They rolled two friends. The friends know who they are. They did not touch anyone’s house or doorbell. They did not spread anything on the windows of anyone’s house. They did not touch anyone’s vehicle or patio furniture.
The only product my kids threw on anyone else’s property was toilet tissue, Publix brand two-ply. No eggs, no paint, no pickle relish. (I know, sick, right?)
They didn’t even fork anybody.
Needless to say, our family won’t be chuckling about our faux delinquents around the dinner table anymore, since my flip remarks probably made most of the people who live in my neighborhood assume my kids are straight outta juvie.
And why wouldn't they? After all, some idiot wrote about it in the (online) newspaper!
Many parents, however, have whispered to me tales of their own kids' failed attempts at neighborhood naughtiness and lessons learned the hard way.
For example, nothing ruins a fun night of TP-ing faster than dropping your cell phone in the bushes.
I also learned (second-hand) that if you plan a night of juvenile jocularity, your getaway vehicle should not have a loud, distinctive muffler that your neighbors hear regularly as you drive out of the subdivision on school mornings.
In fact, the closest thing my older kids came to committing a crime on Halloween is the fact that they are six feet tall and they still went trick-or-treating. Some towns have age limits on that.
They did make an attempt to go out in “costume,” but at age 14 Halloween’s not about dressing up anymore. It’s about getting candy. A LOT of candy.
I think next year we’ll encourage them to hang around here, maybe pull the old “live scarecrow on the porch” trick and leave the midnight TP runs to some other unsuspecting parents.
It just goes to show that one kid’s hilarious joke is another mom’s home maintenance nightmare.

Freedom!

My dad once tried to convince me that I should try the one-touch system of handling paper that comes into the house or office.
I had just started my first REAL job as an associate editor at Memphis magazine, and I had accumulated one of those Bermuda Triangle in-boxes where I deposited stuff that wasn't due immediately but that I wanted to peruse "later."
Of course, "later" never arrived.
"The one-touch system. You should try it," my dad advised. "When you get some mail or a memo, you pick it up and decide right then and there whether you're going to act on it, file it or throw it away."
Sounds simple enough, of course, but I am a hoarder at heart.
My in-box never was empty until I left the job and moved to Nashville.
In my 19 years of being a married person and/or mom, I have never been able to adopt the one-touch system. I have what the Fly Lady calls "hot spots" all around my house. You know what a hot spot is: Those not-so-out-of-the-way places on desks or counters where you stash mail that you can't deal with right then but plan to get to "later."
There's that word again.
Recently, I started collecting a small pile of catalogs that I thought I'd want to look through LATER for Christmas gift ideas. I have pretty good luck finding stuff that way for my hard-to-buy-for loved ones.
The pile next to my chair became unwieldy, so I started another "to read" pile on the kitchen counter next to the coffee pot.
Pretty soon I kept having to move the kitchen pile when I would cook or bring in a load of groceries.
Yesterday I finally got tired of moving the pile, so I did something outrageous.
I threw the whole pile away.
Yep, I just tossed an entire stack of unread catalogs in the trash!
I haven't felt that free in years.