Salt Mine

Ugh. I returned to my job as a newspaper online editor a few weeks ago, and it's a big blur.

I leave my house by 5:30 a.m., and I may have slept 90 minutes at any point the previous evening. In fact, just this afternoon at the office, in my out-loud voice, I actually sighed and said, "I hope my little bastard baby sleeps tonight."

I made the quote board.

Lots of women do this, lots of nursing mothers of infants get up at stupid o'clock and work their brains out. They do it with varying degrees of success; most of them probably more successfully than I am doing.

Well, I'm not going to do it for much longer. Through some serious serendipity and a fair amount of finagling, I am switching positions and moving my base of operations from a downtown 30 minutes away to my happy home.

I will still be caught up in the World Wide Web, feeding the hungry beast of one of our new community-focused microsites, but I'll be doing far more reporting than editing. I haven't been an actual reporter since I was a freshman in college, so it's still a tremendous challenge for me.

But I'm getting excited about it. I'm really thrilled that after Max's 4 a.m. (or 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. or whatever damn time he feels like) feeding I will be able to go back to SLEEP instead of checking email on my glowing smartphone while I brush my teeth in the dark.

I went to a county commissioners meeting today with another reporter -- where police and fire chiefs and city officials discussed centralized emergency call dispatching -- to meet the players and introduce myself. I had some initial panic that I was out of my depth, but those fears quickly dissipated as my geeky interest in protocol and standard operating procedure and, let's admit it, men in uniform was piqued. By the time I met the mayor and city administrator of Perrysburg, I had my feet under me again.

I got this.