I’m working away on deadline, but the story I’m writing currently requires enough thinking that it’s helpful to do something mindless, like tweet about weird aspects of it do my weekly-or-so check in.
This week, I’m
Reading
We Fed an Island by José Andrés and Richard Wolffe
This continues my reading to help Interact with their Puerto Rico project. Am I getting a little antsy that we don’t know what, exactly, that Puerto Rico project is? Yeah, a little bit.
Anyway, like most of my Puerto Rico reading, this book reiterates how infuriating and disappointing the official US response to Hurricane Maria was.
I’m not saying I’m a huge fan of Andrés recounting how he basically swaggered himself into places, but at least it got the job done.
Listening to
A ton of classical music.
It’s ruined my Spotify algorithms (I had taught them to never play me slow pop songs, now they’re dominatin my playlists). But I can’t work around a lot of noise, and there’s a lot of noise in our office lately, so it’s helping me get my job done. So, that’s a big help.
Working on
Our Active Living special section, which is targeted to people over the age of 50. I’m doing micro-interviews with five cool retirees to show how they stay active — if I get everyone to say yes, I’ll have a social butterfly, an alderman, a super-volunteer, a yoga fiend and a veteran’s organization volunteer.
We’re putting a fun spin on it by doing these micro interviews and asking questions about things like what they wish they knew 20 years ago and what’s good about getting older. It’s not easy that their age is the second question, but I tell them straight-up that’s the hardest question they’ll get.
Excited to publish this week
Miss Leah’s costume was too big for my ring light, but the setting sun helped.
Our Halloween costume contest pictures! Not only is every event happier when it involves excited kids, but for the second year I held a mini photo booth near the costume contest.
It helps me photograph the winners for the paper (in the past, when the sun went down, so did the photo quality), but it’s also a chance to get photos of all kids and upload them through our photo website, not just the winners.
It’s the world’s most bare-bones photo booth: literally just whoever wants their picture taken between the ring light and a brick wall. But I think the simplicity really complements my purpose (get a good picture of the kid in the costume so the family can remember). They end up looking really dynamic, too.
Sadly, not a lot of people seem to value even a $5 download’s difference between my SLR and their iPhone — we don’t sell a lot of photos online, and may need to consider not having the website in the future. Hopefully interest will pick up before then. I’m excited to hit “publish” on the photos Thursday.
And if you’re looking for the winners, they’ll be on 1B of this week’s paper.
Reading list
A strand of polio has been eliminated, which is a win for Rotary and its partners on ending Polio
Disinformation campaigns now include mocked-up local news sites