One down, nine more to go

Some tidbits:

I just finished off my first week at the paper. It went pretty well, I think. My bosses have been telling me that I'm doing a good job, so unless they're habitual liars, I think I'm OK.

Meg and I went to the Padres game yesterday. It was a day game (hence why I could go), and we rode the trolley down to the ballpark. We got obstructed view seats (whoever designed Petco Park to include a part that juts out into the field was an idiot), but they weren't bad. And I got to watch David Wells pitch - not that he did that great. We also got some free entertainment courtesy of the drunken goofball guys who were sitting in front of us. And somehow, even though we were sitting in the shade, I managed to get a nasty fricking sunburn. It looks like I have a shirt on when I don't - yeah, one of those kinds. Not cool.



I bought my first bikini today. For those of you who know me, that's a pretty big deal. But everyone here seems to have them, and call it peer pressure or conformist if you'd like, but it'll be nice to fit in with the native SoCal people. Now I just have to work up the courage to wear it in public...

Tonight at the paper I got to spend some time in the composing room. The U-T is the last major paper in the country that doesn't paginate. That's right - The Post is more advanced than the San Diego paper. Anywho, for the non-journalists out there, here's a short lesson on how the U-T creates the newspaper: People lay out stories on pages on computers. The stories then get sent to the composing room and printed, but the layout means nothing. In the composing room, people cut up the printouts and use wax to paste the sections of stories onto dummy sheets. If you ever worked on like a grade school yearbook, it's the same principle. Then the pages go through a machine which makes a negative and the images get transferred onto plates, which then get fed into the presses to print the paper. Basically all other newspapers use some sort of pagination program and do the whole thing on the computer. So it's really a throwback to do paste-up. Watching these people run around with Exact-o knives cutting up sheets of paper that are already laid out was kind of strange. It seems like such a waste of human labor. But it's also pretty cool to watch it all come together - sort of like a living history museum.

I'm beginning to consider the option of a cross-country drive to get home after this is over. I want to buy a car out here, and how do you get a car from Cali to Cleveland? Well, you drive it, of course. I think it would be a fun adventure and a great opportunity to see the country that I might not ever get again. Plus I could stop and visit people on the way back (not that I really know many people in the states I'd be traveling through, but I think I could draw up a pretty decent route). But the first step to all this is buying the car. I hope Megan's friend Dan will be able to assist me with this endeavor, since the two main guys that I would go to in this situation (my dad and John) are both three time zones away. Updates forthcoming.