All the currant news that's not in the paper

I've been laid off from my former job as a newspaper editor for about two weeks now. Except for the whole "I hope I won't have to live on the street in six months" fear, it's been good. Running a newsroom when you have enough people and resources to do a job you're proud of is fun. Scrambling to do the best you can with a fraction of the resources you had in the past? Not as much fun. The stress level in a newsroom is always high. In recent years, every single person in the industry would no doubt agree, stress has ramped up higher than ever.

When I was running a newsroom, I was never really off duty. If I heard about a fire or murder at 2 a.m., it was my job to figure out what to do about it. One night I went out in the freezing cold to cover what turned out to be a double murder-suicide because I just didn't have anyone else available. Once we had a severe tornado and I couldn't reach my son, who was in the area of the storm, but I still had to head into work on my day off and put in a very long day. (He was fine, I finally learned). Vacations are a joke for journalists. Once I was traveling out west in the mountains and had to keep searching for a cell signal to take a call from the office. Another time I was enjoying the view at the top of an old tower in Puerto Rico, turned my phone on just for a moment to take a picture, and instead got a call about an unexpected change that would make my job much more challenging. Internet access was extremely spotty when I visited Easter Island last winter, so I missed learning about a project that was supposed to have a quick turn around and would have been due the day I returned to the office. If I could have read that email, I could have assigned the work from South America, but I didn't see it until I was back in the U.S. 

So even though I've been lucky to take several extremely cool trips in recent years, I haven't actually had any real vacations, in the sense that I never really felt that I could forget about work for even a day. (Even in Easter Island, I spent far too much time standing by the hotel's router, trying in vain to force my email program to load, when I ought to have been out looking at moai or lying on the beach.)

This is a different story. I am off duty, permanently, and I'm learning to stop telling myself, each time I see something that looks potentially newsworthy, that I need to have somebody check into that. There's a new business going up in town? I don't care. Lots of sirens? If they aren't in my neighborhood, I don't care. There's something that would make a good picture, but you know what? I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.

You know what I do care about? I picked the last of the currants and froze them for later use. (You thought you had caught me in a spelling error in the name of this post, didn't you?)

Lovely bright red currants from my own currant bush. I don't know why I bothered freezing them, since I keep snitching tiny cold handfuls to eat every time I walk through the kitchen. BTW, if you thought currants were just those quasi-raisin-looking things in currant bread, you'd be surprised to try them fresh.

I have whole wheat bread rising in the kitchen. I cooked my husband a dinner that made him deliriously happy: fish, cole slaw, baked beans and french fries. Yesterday I fed him coconut-curry veggies over basmati rice. He was used to eating well only on the weekends, as my job often kept me until well past dinner time. He's happy to have me spending more time in the kitchen. (I sometimes suspect the only reason he married me was for my cooking). And I'm happy to be cooking more, too. I find it soothing and satisfying to create something wholesome and delicious from scratch. 

In between all this lovely, soothing cooking today, I wrote a first draft of another children's book, tentatively titled "Chore Time for Baby Mouse" -- obviously starring the same characters who are in my first book, "Bedtime for Baby Mouse."

Available from Theaq Publishing

I arranged to appear at a parenting event to read my book to children (and hopefully sell a few copies). I arranged the paperwork to collect sales tax in Illinois. I began researching which service I should sign up for so I can accept credit card payments with my phone. I laid the groundwork for a few other entrepreneurial projects. I wrote this blog. And, because my day is flexible, I was able to do a favor for a friend and let workers into his house to measure his kitchen for a new wall oven. I'm not doing any loafing around, but I'm more relaxed and all my long-stifled creative juices are bubbling up like simmering currants being turned into jelly.

Unless Baby Mouse and/or my cooking classes take off much more than I expect they will, I will need to get a real job soon, and of course I've been looking. I just hope for a better job/life balance in whatever I do next.