Stress.

All stress today. No single person's fault. Just too many things going wrong all at once, and I had the exquisite luck to be around for all of it, coming in from all sides. Perhaps it's just the waning crescent moon in Virgo (a feminine, but barren sign, ideal for eliminating weeds, but not much else). I honestly don't know. (I'm not into astrology, but I'll be damned if Blum's Farmer's Almanac doesn't have some halfway useful tips on how to run a garden.)

Went to Sissy's to water Charles' fountain so it won't shatter when it freezes. It takes me ten minutes, max, but it is *super* critical. I don't charge her for that, of course, because it's a personal favour I do for Charles; and if I happen to see something that needs doing for Sissy while I'm there, well, then, I'm there, and I can do it, and if it takes more than the fifteen minutes I am there for Charles, then I can charge her for that, which so far, is not at all.

Every time Sissy leaves town, though, all the house and garden servants start to seem to feel more or less threatened by eachothers' presence. I show up and the assumption seems to be that I am "on the clock".

So day before yesterday, Tender Like Woman tells me that the Accounts Manager told him to tell me not to water.

I tell him "of course, the ground is soaked", just assuming he'll see on a cursory glance that it's *obvious* I wouldn't water anyway, because I suspect that he understands enough about the outdoor plants that he will understand it's not in my own best interests to kill them by overwatering, without explaining that I'm not there to water the pansies but to water Charles' fountain, and that it's not going to cost the house a cent.

The communication problems go both ways. It's a big house, in terms of how many servants are involved, but we don't have even half the communications systems that, say, people working in an office involving the same number of people would. There's no messageboard we all check every day, and we don't exchange notes with eachother.

Signals therefore get crossed, and at best people ask eachother to tell other people things and they get muddled in translation, and before you know it we're all half convinced we're after eachother's jobs, which maybe we are, or maybe not. Who knows?

I'm about to give Sissy a whiteboard for Christmas.

From there, in to the newsroom today. For one day I'm determined to put the pansy and viola world out of my mind. It winds up the newsroom is just about as messy.

Finally I find *the* one super-specialized cable that I can use to transfer some sound I recorded over the weekend, but thought I had lost because I'd somehow aparently managed to record in sound in Hi-MD on an MD, which nobody thought possible.

But the sound comes in *waaay* soft. It's good sound, but it's just too soft to boost without screwing up *all* the levels. Sam shows me how to use "Group Waveform Normalize", which is *only* available in Audition 2.0. Sam's the only person I know who *prefers* Audition 2.0 to Audition 1.5, but he uses Audition *way* more than anyone else in the newsroom, since he *also* works in production. I learn a valuable lesson or two, and move on.

I edit out the sound and transcribe clips only to realize -- I asked some *really* dumb questions! Yeah, there's a story here, but I've come *nowhere* near "covering" it. The people on the different sides aren't even talking about the same thing. There's no rhetorical stasis. No stasis = no story. My job's to facilitate dialogue, not to enable people sniping at eachother. They can go on commercial radio for that. If I can't always do that, I take responsibility for it. But I'm *not* willing to put voices on the air just talking *at* eachother, regardless what the other side is saying, like they're just casually dropping rhetorical rocks onto cement.

Then the printer in the newsroom goes down, less than an hour before Steve's set to broadcast.

Fixing that problem winds up being *way* more complex than you might imagine.

Jonathan finds the problem, but it's not something he can fix before airtime. So we have to deal with various circuitous workarounds in the meantime.

Steve's computer won't print.

Mine will print on the alternate printer, but only from MS Word. Not from either web browser.

Adrian works some magic getting some super-crucial things of Steve's printed -- like his weather rewrite.

Meanwhile, Charles calls me from Colorado in order to tell me what I already know from Tender Like Woman.

Steve's in the newsbooth trying to get *any* printer to work, and simultaneously interviewing someone over the phone.

Finally, it turns out, the printer in Control will print.

But -- the computer in "Control" is temporarily "off limits" because the CD for "Democracy Now" (DN) was apparently burned at 48x, making for all kinds of skips, and so we're currently running DN backup off the Computer on LS-1. Meanwhile, DN got reburned at 12x by Sam and whenever Amy breaks -- if she will *ever* break -- will she? -- once she does, Steve can run DN off CD and use the CR Computer to access the wires and print headlines and copy on the CR printer.

But still no newsroom printer.

By this time it's time for "good evening!" ON AIR.

Jim's simutaneously crunching on two separate stories.

The newsbooth is alternately in and out of service as Jim demonstrates to Tristan what's going on and as Steve interviews a woman over the phone.

I'm still halfway despondent at my "planned" story not working.

I offer to rewrite some wire copy, based on something Jim had emailed me a couple of hours before. but Jim's already got that, and is rewriting and recording the story. (I hadn't checked my email to see what he'd emailed me a couple of hours before.)

Finally I take the phone interview Steve did, edit down a soundclip and do a "wrap" on breast cancer.

I know *nothing* about breast cancer.

Somehow it doesn't sound, ON AIR, like we're all desperately foundering. Sounds like a slowish news day on which things still seemed to happen. Not a big historic news day, but things happened, and we covered it.

Some days, I guess, that's the best you can say.

Tomorrow: pansies and violas.

Wednesday: up to Santa Fe for a government hearing which may either wrap up in a couple of hours or go late into the night.

After that, either I phone in a story, or come back to edit one, or phone one in and come back to edit a third. It's nothing super big, just has to do with how much most people in the state pays for electricity and gas.

Life is good.