Things are looking up

Thanksgiving isn't a fun week when you work at a weekly or (in my case) semi-weekly newspaper (that's twice a week for you laymen). A holiday that falls in the middle of the week screws up the production schedule. For example, my weekend paper deadline is Friday - which wasn't affected by the holiday. But of course, I had Thursday off - which means that, unless I wrote at home and brought stories with me to the office on disk, I would have had to turn a deadline around minus 24 hours.
Which of course, couldn't be done. So I had to write at home. The wife and I drove three hours to Dallas for Thanksgiving dinner with the mother-in-law, and then stayed only three hours and drive three hours back again so I would have enough time to write. Which I did.
Thanksgiving week is also a pain because most of the normal sources of local news - the cities and schools - are closed most or all of the week. I really had to be creative to fill up the pages.
The sport editor did take the long weekend off on vacation time, so I covered a football playoff game the night after Thanksgiving. Fortunately, I was able to hitch a ride in the cheerleaders' bus for the two hours drive. It also turned out to be a great game; hometown Hooks is now the only local team still in the playoffs and they go to the regional playoff round tomorrow night.
Since Patricia was home from school last week, we had no fuss about the car - and thankfully, I found a set of wheels this week. The aforementioned sports editor recently bought an SUV and didn't trade in her 1994 Chevy Corsica (yes, the sports editor is a lady). It's got 206,000 miles but still runs quite well, and she's let me use it for the duration. Nice gal. In the meantime I have local towing service looking for a wreck where we can get a Ford F-150 motor for my old truck.
With school and city hall opening back up this week, things loosened up considerably,and with the loaner car I don't have to worry about wheels for the time being. So things are looking up.
We're having some winter-like weather tonight - its dropped below freezing and there's a little precip. Patricia checked the weather reports this morning and she's stayed over in Mount Pleasant rather than brave the highway home. Tomorrow is her last day of student teaching. After that, it's on the glidepath towards graduation Dec. 16.
Still working in fits and starts on the fiction. I have a completed first draft of a short story where I've really been hung up over the title - and then I remember a song from over 20 years ago. The title of the song fits my story perfectly. And since I looked up the video on YouTube, here it is: