Super Prose: How Comics Can Make You a Better Writer (including a link to streaming video of the recent seminar by Jim Willse)

Wired News: Newspapers Should Really Worry
Adam Peneberg from Wired reports on how younger people are rejecting print media for online news. He paints a dark scenario for newspapers, but I think he neglects to figure what newspapers really are, at their core, into that scenario. Newspapers are not ink and paper. They are information collected by local experts with massive institutional memories (whether editorial or advertising experts) and delivered to a local audience (by circulation experts). There's no reason to believe that the newspaper company won't (or at least can't with the right effort) remain at the heart of information collection and delivery for the community it serves as we move into a digital age.

The Holiday Travel Begins With A Miles Meeting
Day one of holiday travel began with a quick trip out to Lisbon Falls, Maine. It's about four hours each way and so I didn't bring the kids and so Kristen stayed with them in Barre. I made the excursion to see our new nephew as representative of the whole family.

Miles, who was born on the 18th, is an adorable little guy. As much as his big brother Max looks like my side of the family, Miles has his father's aspect and, especially the strong nose and serious eyes.

It was great to see Rob and Cat's new place (still hard to believe after two years of co-owning a home our two little families now live so far apart). And great to see Max, though he wakes up from naps about as unhappily as David does. A bonus was that Mom was up from Florida visiting Catherine, so I got to see her too.

The ride itself was interesting, along U.S. 2 through Central Vermont and into New Hampshire, across the top of the White Mountains Region and angling down through Maine toward the coast. (Lisbon falls is about an hour west of Portland). The day was gray, the mountains shrouded in clouds and fog and in spots there were little drifts of early snow piled along the sides of the road. I made the mistake of using Mapquest directions alone without an actual map, and ended up taking a forty five minute detour near Bethel, but even that was interesting as I got to get a look at the trailheads of Grafton Notch.

CRUUUUUUNCH!!!!!
I sit straight up in bed, trying to figure out what that possibly could have been. Kristen, who can see the window from her side of the bed, notes the pair of headlights that have been arrested in their decent down the hill in front of our house, right about where our driveway begins. "Our mailbox..." she says.

So at 5 a.m. I get dressed (two coats) and go outside to help the guy who has run over our mailbox get his car out of the ditch. It wasn't his fault, the whole hill had slicked up with black ice overnight. I give him a ride to work, and he calls his boss, who has a truck and will pull him out. Later in the day he comes back and helps me reset the pole. Not too much damage done, but it made for a interesting start to the day.

Especially interesting since we had company -- Kevin was out for dinner and stayed the night. We had a great time and stayed up late talking news and newspapers and fly fishing and Web sites. Somehow he managed to sleep through all the 5 a.m. commotion. I guess the guest room is on the quiet side of the house!

Changing Ways Of Life
Despite having the largest per capita percentage of hunters in the country, the number of people who take to the woods every year for rifle season in Vermont is still in decline. One of the factors for this is the next generation not taking it up. A stat that in some way I feel a part of... My grandfather, and even my mother and father to some degree, hunted. I got a license as a kid and firearms card and all that, but the years passed and we moved around the country, and by the time I ended up back here in my home state, I'd only held a gun once in the last twenty years. And in that case it was just while my brother-in-law was aligning in his new shotgun sight at a family get together down in Massachusetts. I've toyed with the idea of taking it back up -- but I can't imagine how to find a time slot for another hugely time consuming activity. I barely got out my fly rod ten times all spring, summer and fall last year! Not sure why this news story caught my eye so strongly; maybe it's because hunting was so much a part of my grandfather's life and our return to Vermont has got me thinking about him and our connections to our pasts...

A Little Boy Watching The Snow Fall In Vermont

Oatmeal days ...

From Fall To Winter Overnight
I left work in Rutland last night, riding cold to the top of the transit station parking garage and seeing the snow fuzz the outlines of the church steeples against the horizon of winter-dark sky and mountain silhouettes. As I drove over the mountain past Pico the snow really unleashed and for a while all the traffic was slowed down to 25 miles an hour; some drivers pulled off on the side of the road because it was too hard to see. After that, the winding dark Routes 107 and 100 along the White River weren't so bad, but when I got back on 89, the police had flares out and a sign warning against snow and ice. A moment later I saw the cars in front of me skidding and felt the wheel go mushy in my hands. After ten minutes crawling along at 30 miles an hour the traffic came to a dead stop and stayed there for 40 minutes while the towtrucks and police cars crept past along the shoulder of the road. A woman in the lane next to me gestured and I rolled down my window. She wanted to know if there was an AM station that broadcast traffic and weather updates. "I just moved here," she said. "From Boston." I admitted that I didn't know. "I just moved here, too," I said. I felt like I had to add that I'd just moved here from Concord, New Hampshire, though, and that snow and ice felt like old friends after my I93 commutes last winter. Besides, I thought, I grew up here in Vermont. This bit of foul weather felt like a petulant but affectionate greeting: welcome home, Ernesto!

And in fact, watching how cleanly the cold weather seems to fit around our warm little farm house, and how the frost looks shining up on Milkweed Hill (which David and Kristen have pragmatically dubbed the hill behind the house where Kristen taught him to blow the fluff out of milkweed pods) in the mornings while David and I are fixing the coffee and Kristen and Sofia and snuggled up under the comforter upstairs, I'm feeling more welcoming toward winter than I have any time in the past ten years.

A Window On Welsh
Vin Crosbie posted comments on Poynter yesterday about a new BBC tool that translates Welsh news pages when you mouse over highlighted words. A great language learning tool in a country that's trying to reclaim its native but now minority tongue. Wonder if there are any applications for American newspapers ... targeted French editions in the northeast, Native American editions in the West, where the population generally speaks English but is interested in holding onto its linguistic roots.