Final rejection

My last rejection letter for law school arrived today. It was from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which had put me on its waiting list earlier this year. I left myself on it even though I knew I wouldn't be going there once University of Iowa accepted me. But I liked Wisconsin and would've given it serious consideration without Iowa in the picture.
That makes five acceptances, two rejections and one deferral. The deferral would have become an acceptance or rejection, but I withdrew my application because it was the University of Illinois and I didn't really want to go there.
As the countdown reveals, 48 days until I start law school. Just 30 until I leave my job.
I received my orientation packet from Iowa last week. Besides the usual "congratulations on your acceptance" and "law school will be the most important experience of your life" messages, there was this one: Have your fun now, because starting Aug. 18, you belong to us.

Aspirations

Nicholas was watching a DVD show with firefighters this morning. They put out fires, he told me.
Do you wanna be a firefighter? I asked.
No, he replied.
What do you wanna be when you grow up?
A bumblebee.

Asking for directions

I was walking across the street this afternoon when a battered blue minivan pulled up next to me to ask for directions. In the passenger seat was Latino man with a buzz cut and unshaven whiskers. He asked me for "dohj street" in broken English and pointed to a street address scrawled on the back of a folded yellow paper.
I've lived in Rockford nearly all my life and I've never heard of a Dodge Street. A quick look on my Treo's Google Maps confirmed it -- there isn't such a street in Rockford. Then he showed me the rest of his chicken-scratch note:

1111 dodge st
duplex, iwoa
52003

Then I realized -- he was trying to get someplace in IOWA. Whoa. I told him he was in Illinois. He groaned. I asked, where are you coming from? Miami was the answer.
The minivan was full: half a dozen Spanish-speaking adults on the seats and their gear crammed into the recesses. They chattered back and forth in their tongue, unintelligible to me. I assume they were migrant workers, coming up here to meet someone with nothing more than an address and a cursory grasp of the language. Later, I tried to imagine what it would be like to try and travel 1,500 miles in an unfamiliar country -- especially as a stranger.
To try and help out, I turned to Google Maps again and searched the address based on the ZIP, I came up with Dubuque, Iowa -- the town he wrote as "duplex," I'm sure.
Even though this caravan was about 90 miles away from his destination, I could at least help a little. They were only four blocks from East State Street, which is Business U.S. 20, so I sent them back that way and told them to take it west all the way. It goes straight through Dubuque.
They should have made it by now. I really hope they did.

Wild cats

Spoken by Nicholas while looking outside for his mom's cat:
"Where's Willow? I think she's having a cat party with all her friends. I had a party when I turned 5."

Touch of gray

Today I was over at Meegan's apartment discussing how we were going to handle Nicholas' transfer of placement when she looked at the top of my head and exclaimed, "You've got a gray hair!"
Actually, I had several. This caused her considerable glee.
I guess at the tender age of 31, my world weariness is finally catching up with me. I can't say I'm too surprised. Between the divorce, work stresses, caring for a hyper 5-year-old boy, trying to sell a house and getting ready to move, I think I've earned every one of those three gray hairs.
I've never been somebody who wanted to cling to youth. I've always wanted to be older, ever since I was a first grader hanging out with my sixth grade cousins. They seemed so sophisticated and grown up. I want the respect and wisdom that come with age. Meegan would tease me that I was an old man in a young man's body. Well, looks like the body is catching up with the soul.
So next week I'm going to get my will made up and start shopping for cemetery plots.

Great plan, guys! Lemme know how it works out

The start-up company that bought my newspaper a year ago is about to implode. GateHouse Media was formed four years ago when two bottom-feeding newspaper chains -- Liberty Group Publishing and Community Newspapers -- met in a dive bar five minutes before closing time. They were too drunk to see straight and went home together. Because they both specialized in raping small community newspapers, it was a perfect match.
The new company's CEO, Michael Reed, was lauded as a savior to the flagging newspaper industry. The fledgling company created a "hyperlocal" strategy: delivering content in small markets where newspapers still own the advertising dollar. Using cheap borrowed money, GateMouth gobbled up small dailies, including Gannett's Rockford Register Star, which became one of the largest papers in the new chain.
The company IPO'd at $18 a share in 2006 and a New York hedge fund, Fortress Investment, held a majority of the stock, which paid dividends -- a sweet gimmick attract shareholders.
Then the magic faded. Ad revenue tanked. Thanks to the mortgage meltdown, free-lending banks got kinda stingy with their dough. A year ago, GateMouth was trading near $20 a share. This week, its share price fell below THREE DOLLARS. That's an 86 percent free-fall in value.
If its stock chart were a ski hill, you'd break land speed records going down the slope. And then you'd crash and die...
Last quarter earnings showed a 4.2 percent slide in same-store revenue. Operating margins were barely wide enough to slip a credit card through. That's bad news when you're $1.3 billion in debt and promising your shareholders a dividend payout every quarter.
So long story short, analysts are now predicting the dividends will evaporate so the company can pay its own bills (including $24 million in debt service payments). And with them the last few shareholders will vaporize too since they were only hanging on to the penny stocks for their dividend anyway.
Did I mention that this media company shaved payrolls at nearly every paper it bought in the last year? We lost six people in my newsroom through buyouts. Now we've got one editor for every two reporters.
So one of three things is going to happen: GateMouth is going to start sloughing off its newspapers to stay afloat or file for Chapter 11 protection and slough off its newspapers to appease creditors.
Man I'm glad I'm getting out of this @!#$*& business.

Law school swim team

Most of eastern Iowa is flooded right now, including the university I'm planning to attend in less than two months. The Iowa River, which runs through the middle of Iowa City, has been over its banks all week. It beached the arts campus and a residence hall had to be shut down.
But the good news (for me) is that the University of Iowa's law school sits on a hill above the river and it would take a Noah-style deluge to get water into it. My apartment building is even farther away from the angry river. Here's what the dean has to say about it.

Who is this guy?

This is just to damn bizarre not to post. Watch it without context:

Father's Day festivities

I had dinner with my parents on Father's Day. Visit my flickr site to see a few photos from the evening.
My mom and dad are back in the states for the summer and staying at an old farmhouse out off south Main not far from the airport. There's a strawberry patch on the property, so we had strawberry shortcake. Mmm-mmm. I wish I would've gotten a photo of that, but I ate mine too fast to think of it. And then I ate Nicholas' because, well, he left it sitting on the porch stairs.

Waste-land

I'm at Chipotle, eating dinner outside and a teenage or early 20s girl pulled in and parked her black Mercury Mountaineer next to me. She ran inside and left it running. By my watch, the gas-guzzling hogmobile ran for at least 7 minutes while she ordered a meal to go. Gas is about $4.10 a gallon around here. She didn't leave it running to keep it cool inside the cab; the windows were down and it was a pleasant spring night anyway.
Clearly, someone is not paying for her own gas.

Oh, the agony

My left wrist is aching thanks to the ailment that is the bane of every desk jockey: carpal tunnel. A colleague called it the wuss' disease.
But people, it HURTS. I couldn't get to sleep last night it hurt so much.
I wonder if my precious, precious Treo is contributing to this inflammation. Typing messages with my thumbs on a keyboard smaller than a business card can't be good for the nerves in my arm.

Mobile blogging

I just got a new smartphone and I am in love. It's a Treo 680, which is there entry level model. As annoyed as I was with Palm after the debacle I had with them over my TX, I opted to stay with their line rather than forsake $200 in software that's only compatible with their operating system.
Now I can do everything with this handy gadget. I can check email, go online, use my calendar, make shopping lists, look up contact information, edit documents, etc.
I can even post to my blog from this device. In fact, that's what I'm doing right now.