Redemption.

Today, I think, I redeemed myself.

Yesterday, I seriously think I made every mistake a person *can* make running weekday "All Things Considered", and hung in there, regardless, which is about the best that I can say for it.

Today I went in knowing what all *could* go wrong, and knowing *when* it could go wrong, and was therefore prepared to be prepared to take the right steps at the right times to prevent problems before they happened. Were all my cutaways 100% clean? Nope. Did I have segments of a few seconds in length playing the annoyingly repetitive NPR theme when I *could* have been ad-libbing something clever, amusing, and/or informative? Yep. But on the whole, I think the newscast held together *far* better than yesterday, and I can *still* only improve from here. I *know* it.

I think it was a pretty solid newscast. Not great radio, perhaps, but pretty solid. Ed Murrows aren't made overnight.

Showed up before noon; promptly started preparing. Steve left around 12:30, meaning I was the only host-type person in the newsroom for most of the afternoon. Being a newsroom -- surprise, surprise! -- things kept happening. I'd get into focusing on what I had to do and something would come up. I'd follow the sidetrack for a few seconds or minutes as needed and then get back on track. Other stuff was important, or not so important, or whatever, but I knew all along that in precisely two hours, seventeen minutes, and thirty-four seconds I *must* be ON AIR. The tyranny of time's inexorable forward march was now my freind, because I had submitted totally to it. There's no stopping the clock.

Work-study students kept asking me questions -- like I really knew much better than they did what all was going on. All I knew was that I neeed five minutes from them for my Hour 2 (which is really Hour one, for us) Segment D at :48:30, and that a *little* bit over or under was fine, but that the margin of error *wasn't* a full minute or more on either side.

Devon Armijo (who hates that I pronounce his name like the native-born El Pasoan I am) guided me through the Friday two-way interview with him on sports. I know nothing about sports, but Devon actually makes me want to know more, which is a very rare gift. His passion is contagious, even for this thing that I consider unworthy of my time and consideration. Besides, by now, people are expecting to hear him do a sports two-way on Friday. He wrote out the questions for me, and I actually had more occur to me during the interview. I didn't ask 'em until afterward, though, 'cause I was on deadline and so was he. (Perhaps I should have. It would have made for better radio.) Of course anyone who hears that will just hear me and think "Damn, he's no Steve Shadley" but whatever. It may not be a tape that either he or I use in our audition tapes but damn it, I did pull it off, with his guidance.

The news today wasn't Domenici's resignation -- it was the vultures circling around him after he's announced his resignation due to his incurably degenerative brain disease. Too bad we don't live in Shakespeare's time when we might go on air (although I guess they didn't have "AIR" then) and just say that King Lear was resigning due to "madness". It would sound better. But we don't live in such times, alas, and thus the Senator's not "going mad", you see, not "going senile", doesn't have "a touch of the dementia", but suffers from "frontotemporal lobar degeneration". Not that I don't feel sorry for him, and not that I don't take it seriously, but geez, try saying that fast in front of a hundred thousand people with no chance to go back and correct yourself, and then repeating the word "degenerative" about a dozen times in one live broadcast sometime, and *then* tell me Shakespeare knew something we don't!

As I predicted, Wilson jumped right in and got to be the first to formally declare herself running for his seat, fulfilling my water cooler prophecies of yesterday quite admirably, and proving herself to be the on-the-ball Air Force Academy type I have known all along that she is. Then it's about half a dozen others saying they won't run, or will run if so-and-so doesn't, or will run if so-and-so number 2 does; and of course the Republicans have their minds made up while the Democrats need all weekend to simply decide whether or not to declare their intentions.

Meanwhile there were other stories out there. A health clinic here, a call center closing there, a new case of West Nile Virus here, and of course a further development in the ongoing case of the lesser prairie chicken there. And then there was a plane crash right as I go on air. I don't mean that it happened right then, but that's when we first heard of it. Another medical transport flight going down -- wasn't like a transcontinental commercial jetliner or anything -- but still.

I got all the headlines read that I considered important and undercovered by the mainstream press. What more could you ask for? Oh, yeah -- consistency as to *when* I read breaking headlines. And weather.

My weather sucked. It was just currents and forecasts with very little in terms of what all was happening where, but what the hell. It's mild, with a few gusty winds here and there. And thank gawd for that.

I can hardly wait to do this again.