A few people in the comments the other day were discussing how they learned to skate, on farm ponds, without supervision, with a casually tended fire for warmth. Ah, memories. Monday I took Kate and another friend to the park to skate again. This was the third consecutive day, and watching them, I was left with the feeling that most of what adults do for kids in this area is unnecessary. On Saturday, in her lesson at the indoor rink, they practiced jumping — not figure-skating jumps, but just little hops. The hops were tentative and lots of kids fell. Yesterday, at the outdoor ice at the park, one kid dragged a large stick out onto the ice and they all made a game of lining up to jump it. With every pass, their jumps got higher and more confident.

Then an adult came out and dragged the stick away. Because, you know, it’s unsafe to have obstructions on the ice. But it did its work. By the time we went home, Kate and three other kids had made a game of skating fast to fire snowballs at one another. She was keeping up with the hockey players. Not with their agility and fast changes of direction, but that’ll come next week, I expect.

I should have skipped the damn lessons and saved myself $100.

So. I need to get out of the house more, so yesterday I got out of the house. Clear to lovely Dearborn I went, for an interview. You know you’re in Dearborn when the signs switch to Arabic. Cooling my heels in the reception area of my subject’s office, a woman click-clacked through the lobby in stilettos. I looked up; she was dressed in tunic, pants and a hijab. That’s a hard look to rock, but rock it she did — I think the stilettos were key. That, and the confidence. Wear your clothes, don’t let them wear you. She had that part figured out, Islamic constraints or not.

On the way home, the on-ramp to I-94 was closed, so I opted to stay on U.S. 12, Michigan Avenue, and just see what I could see, in this case, urban decay infused with that unstoppable Motown pulse. (This makes no sense, but if you came here, you’d understand.) Soon the bilingual signs gave way from Arabic to Spanish, my stomach started to growl, and I knew what was coming next — carne asada tacos in Mexicantown with lots of cilantro and onions. I hate to say it, for fear of bringing on another rage explosion from my nastier commenters, but if recent immigration from south of the border did nothing but vastly improve the menus in Mexican restaurants, I’d call it an even trade. My favorite taqueria doesn’t take plastic, and I was down to my last $3, so I turned on to Vernor to look for a bank. Block after block — no banks. I decided to settle for a Quik-E-Mart with a high-fee ATM — none of those, either. Lots of Payday Loans and check-cashing joints, though. And people. This part of the city may be poor, but it is populated. Finally found a bank branch with a non-usurious ATM, back down to Taqueria Lupita and the lunch special.

Lupita’s sits in a strip with several other restaurants, one of which was named a “best of” in a magazine roundup I helped write last summer. We ate at the best-of place, and to say it was disappointing in comparison was an understatement. It was full of gringos, however, whereas at Lupita’s at least half the customers are speaking Spanish. When in doubt, choose the latter.

So, bloggage:

Christopher Hitchens is something of a self-parody these days, and while this piece in Slate doesn’t mention Islamofascism or Bill Clinton or any of his other well-worn topics, it’s b.s. just the same: In the matter of Michael Devlin and his captive boys, blame the neighbors. After noting Devlin’s adherence to the old psycho cliché (the quiet psycho who kept to himself), he adds:

Of course, as the story necessarily went on to say, the good people of this section of Kirkwood, Mo., are now slightly kicking themselves for failing to spot their neighbor’s uncanny ability to produce full-grown male children without having a woman on hand.

Of course, if Devlin had moved into Hitchens’ neighborhood and come home with a pubescent boy, things would have been different:

I live in an upscale building that abuts a not-quite-so-upscale neighborhood, and when I heard blood-chilling female screams one night, I know I had the (Kitty Genovese) story in mind as I caught up a kitchen knife and ran downstairs. I was almost abashed by the number of my fellow residents outside on the street before me. (The assailant ran off, and we were able to comfort the girl until the cops came—and more than one person alluded to the Genovese case.) But to find that you have been passively watching a crime, or crimes, in slow motion, must make you feel stupid as well as cowardly. This might help explain the slightly plaintive and defensive tone adopted by some of the local Kirkwoodians, such as the lady I cited above who had moved there just to avoid this kind of unpleasantness. “A lot of us are down on our luck and living paycheck to paycheck,” observed Harry C. Reichard IV, who occupied the apartment above Devlin’s. “When you’re just trying to survive, you don’t pay a lot of attention to people around you.” This justifiable emphasis on one’s own priorities extends apparently even to the avoidance of idle gossip—as in, “I see the guy downstairs has just had another teenager.”

Hmm. Well. Good for Hitchens, running to the damsel’s aid with a kitchen knife. Note that no one in Devlin’s neighborhood heard any boys screaming, however. They just noticed that he had one, and then he had another one. I guess Hitchens doesn’t get into the lousy neighborhood next door very often, because if he did, he’d know that neighbors with ever-changing household demographics are as common as rain.

I’ve spent much of my adult life not just abutting “not-quite-so-upscale” neighborhoods, but living in them. Once I stupidly wondered aloud why, when I got a wrong-number call, the person on the other end so often opened with “Who’s this?” I say “stupidly” because I was sitting with someone who worked in the juvenile-justice system, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he said, explaining that his clients overwhelmingly lived in households where someone was always moving out or in, where every couch was someone’s bed, where the person who answered the phone might be mom, uncle, uncle’s friend Ed, mom’s boyfriend Skeeter, etc. “Who’s this” was a necessary salutation when you heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end.

In Fort Wayne we had a house around the corner from us, a three-bedroom of maybe 1,500 square feet, with 16 people living in it. They were very discreet, probably because someone was fraudulently using Section 8 housing vouchers, and you never would have known there were so many people under one roof, but if you counted noses, there were 16 noses.

And Hitchens disapproves of Devlin’s neighbors, who, when they saw another boy around, failed to investigate? Some people really do live on the right side of the tracks.

If I could turn back the hands of time, as Tyrone Davis sang, there isn’t a whole lot I’d change. A few boyfriends would remain strangers, I would have paid closer attention in high school Russian class, I would have taken more chances. But for someone whose big mouth has gotten her into so much trouble, I don’t regret all that much. The remarks that were hurtful, yes. The ones that gave voice to a truth everyone in the room was thinking but which were impolitic to give voice to, not really. Every step on that road took me to this spot on the road, or not exactly on the road, more like off in the ditch, spinning my wheels, shrieking to passing traffic, “Sure! That road seems like the one you should take! But beware! Beware!” — I don’t mind this spot too too much. All part of the journey, etc. Soon the tow truck will arrive, or maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start walking, and…

OK. Abandon metaphor.

My point: If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have chosen journalism. Time Inc. laid off nearly 300 people yesterday, eliminated three bureaus. Yes, yes, the next Britney Spears story in People may not have five reporters, what a tragedy, etc. I don’t want to sound any big themes about journalism here; in a lot of ways we made our bed and now we’re lying in it, only it turns out it’s no longer a bed but just this sort of narrow cot, and people keep falling out, and…

Abandon metaphor.

What particularly cheeses me is the timing. Speaking out of pure selfishness, this could not come at a worse time. For me, anyway. Too young for retirement, too old to make a graceful sidestep into another field, it seems that those of us who were drawn to journalism by its two great movements of recent memory — New Journalism and Woodstein-style investigation — are now in the worst possible position. Tough times may make tough people, but they also shred a few in the bargain. Again, speaking selfishly, those 289 jobs eliminated yesterday represent 289 lives turned upside down, and not all will be righted. Yes, it happens in every industry. No, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just taking note.

Pout, pout, pout.

I remember, many years ago, my newspaper sent a couple of reporters to some training sponsored by our parent company, Knight Ridder. They came back with their heads spinning; some Free Press people were at the same session, bitching about their latest degradation — the paper would not employ stenographers to transcribe taped interviews. How were they supposed to do their jobs, etc. I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, starved to a ravenous husk, remembering the antebellum tables groaning with food as she’s puking up that radish in the Twelve Oaks garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never…well, I’d better get to work.

But first! Bloggage! Because that’s why you come here, right? A few snarky remarks, a report on how we’re doing in the D, maybe a dinner menu, and then some tasty linkage, after which we turn the floor show over to the commenters. See? We evolved a new form of journalism, justlikethat. Let’s make it pay for the proprietress, and we’ll all be happy. I will, anyway.

Salon reports on the latest alt-foods craze — raw milk. One of my college boyfriends rented a place in the country for a while, next door to a dairy farm, where he bought gallons of raw milk for something like a buck or two. I mentioned this in passing to my mother, who nearly leapt from her chair in alarm, then commenced telling a hair-raising tale about a girl she knew who got undulant fever (medical name: brucellosis, for you Zevon fans) from drinking unpasteurized milk. She made me promise never to touch the stuff, and I did. It was an easy promise to make, as what little I’d had so far was sort of like drinking liquified butter. In the Salon story, people say raw milk keeps them away from sweets. I’ll say — liquified butter will do that.

It made good coffee cream, I’ll allow. Still: Thank God for Louis Pasteur.

With a 10-year-old in the house, “American Idol” is simply an element that we must live with, and the lack thereof would make life impossible, kind of like oxygen. Eric Zorn tried to put up his dukes against the juggernaut of humiliation that is the early episodes, but on this, I’m more with Jody Rosen at the Slate AI blog, who points out “you couldn’t help but suspect that most of the ‘bad’ singers were actually savvy performance artists, angling for a few minutes of airtime.” Yup. And there were teachable moments, just the same; Alan told Kate the moral of this story is, “Always wear a bra.” How true that is.

Do you hate Pachelbel’s Canon in D? Rob Paravonian does.

UPDATE: And while I was feeling sorry for myself a little while ago, I forgot to thank my lucky stars that while I may not work for the New York Times, that also means I’ll never have to write a story like this:

For some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,�? Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

I mean: Whew.

One of those names from the past that only comes up every decade or so came up last night. Whatever happened to, etc.? We recalled that this person had been involved in an interoffice romance, which led to a particularly tawdry interoffice breakup, the sort of incident that makes managers long to be in the rank and file again.

(There’s one of these in every management career — when you have to tell people it’s not their work that’s the problem, it’s their b.o. Or their whack-ass meltdown over a love affair gone wrong. Whatever.)

Alan said, “She’s the reason companies have no-fraternization policies.” Yep. I never worked for one of those companies myself; if I had I’d be married to someone else today, if I were married at all, and Kate wouldn’t exist. Newsrooms, well-known as turkey pens of coltish intellects, weird hours, incompetent management, triple homicides on deadline and other spicy ingredients, are notorious for breeding office love affairs. I think of the journalists I know, and most are/were married to people they met at work, some serially, which is to say first this person from work, then that person from work. This can get complicated, oh yes it can. Office divorces and/or affairs have sold more quitting-time beers than Budweiser.

I met and married my husband through work, but even after the I-dos, we played it cool. Alan hated talking about domestic matters out in the open. He didn’t even want me to ask what he wanted for dinner. All around us were couples who held hands on the way to the Coke machine, or wives who marched over to collect hubby’s paycheck the minute it was distributed on payday. I’m sure he considered it a huge success when we threw a party and one of his own staff members was amazed to discover I lived in the same house, that we were in fact married and had been for about five years.

(Actually, I considered it a success, too, since it seemed to indicate I was such a boring person no one even bothered to gossip about me anymore.)

I hesitate to bring up this topic, not because everyone has a story, but because everyone’s story is better than mine. Maybe Alex will tell us about the security camera that in one of his former workplaces captured an episode of oral love between a man and a woman who thoughtfully removed her dentures for the occasion. Maybe Kirk will tell us about the couple who was caught not only having an extramarital interoffice affair, but writing a pornographic novel with bondage themes in what they thought was a secret corner of the newsroom computer system. (I pinned down one of the bosses who read this treasure and said I’d be willing to do just about anything to see a sample chapter. He said, “It wouldn’t be a fair trade. It wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been.”) And then there was the young reporter who slept with an older colleague on his living-room couch after an impromptu party when his wife was away, gave him crabs, caused a crisis in his marriage (to say the least) and then later, when the parasites had been routed and the wounds had finally started to scab, showed up at another party where the wife was in attendance, along with her children. “Mommy,” said the little boy. “I saw that lady lying down with daddy on our couch once.” (That story may be somewhat apocryphal, but it still cracks me up.) Or the obsessed Glenn Close wannabe who demanded her lover, as the price of dumping her, insert a secret message to her in his newspaper column. She said this would be their secret. It remained secret for approximately as long as it took to survive editing and get onto the press. As the papers arrived in the newsroom, she showed it around, pointing out how the first letter in every paragraph spelled out, “I love you Joanie.”

None of those stories are mine, in the sense that they didn’t happen at my workplace, but were shared over beers later. It’s amazing to me that I heard them all and still sought out and married a colleague. It’s not like we weren’t warned.

So, bloggage:

You know how you get those e-mails from Nigerian scam artists asking for your help in removing $6 million from the national treasury, offering a 30 percent reward and asking only that you put up some of your own cash as security? You know how you ask yourselves, “Who could ever be so stupid as to fall for this?” We have an answer: The treasurer of Alcona County, Michigan.

Today’s forecast calls for a chance of snow in Michigan. Unless, of course, it gets rerouted to southern California again. Jeez, I remember being in LA once when it rained, and it had the same effect on traffic as eight inches of snow does here. I can’t imagine what actual snow does to the place. Besides freeze the oranges.

Whenever I hear a nitwit like Dinesh D’Souza pushing his latest book, I think to myself, “Maintain your sense of humor.” However, it’s difficult. Fortunately, we have Stephen Colbert to shore us up in the difficult moments.

One of the best seminar speakers of my fellowship year was Bill Miller, a UM law school professor. I mentioned him before, and we don’t need to get into it all over again, but he said something funny about the nervousness of today’s parents with their children’s physical safety that amused me:

“You know those stories about knights in the Middle Ages, how they wore so much armor that they had to be hoisted onto their horses? That’s a 5-year-old kid in Ann Arbor learning to ride a bike.”

I thought of this Saturday, when I watched Kate at her latest improvement activity — ice-skating lessons. She’s good on skates but she needs to learn some technique, like how to stop without running into the boards, crossovers and so forth. She takes them in a vast group divided by ability, and the age range starts at 3. In this hockey-mad town, that means the group is lopsided at the low end, with pint-size tots in tiny skates who can probably still remember learning to walk, now learning to skate. It’s pretty funny. They give them these little frame things like walkers, and they spend 50 minutes falling down and crashing into one another. They make Kate, with her relative competence, look like Nancy Kerrigan.

The flyer said “bike helmets recommended for the tots,” and about half wear them, the other half already in their very own wee-small hockey helmets. I understand this, even as I recall the words of the very first skate instructor Kate had, at McMillen arena back in the Fort: “Learn to skate correctly and you don’t need a helmet.” Children that young are lightweight and top-heavy; all you have to do is watch them fall a few times to see they do so like cartoon characters — the feet go way up, the head tips back precipitously, and it’s even money which hits the ice first, the noggin or the butt.

But it’s the extra padding I find amusing. Several of the kids wear kneepads, which seems silly on ice. (First of all, how often do you fall knees-first? And if you do, you fall and slide; it’s not a sidewalk.) One kid seemed to be skating with a drinking straw in his mouth, and I thought, well that’s pretty foolish, and then I looked closer and realized he was wearing a football-style mouthguard, and the drinking straw was actually the loop that attaches to the helmet’s face mask. Only it wasn’t attached to anything, because he was wearing a bike helmet. What are the chances a kid’s going to go face-first onto the ice in a long-billed bike helmet and land on his teeth?

On the other hand, I remember all those pictures of Bobby Orr, missing several of his lateral incisors. I can see where moms get nervous.

Kate got skates for Christmas, which she asked for in hopes that it would be a nice cold winter and she could skate at our local park, which has two low-tech rinks, which is to say, they rely on Mom Nature for ice. She’s normally pretty reliable in a Michigan winter, but not this one. Or the last one. The weather ninnies are barking about “Arctic cold” expected later this week, so I checked the long-term forecast. To me, Arctic cold is defined as single-digit highs, subzero lows. Today’s revised definition, at least to judge from the forecast: Highs in the 20s, lows in the teens. Please.

Meanwhile, once again, it rained all night last night. At least now the rinks will freeze, though.

So what did Barbara Boxer really say to Condoleezza Rice that made Rush Limbaugh call her a “rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch … an African-American woman right before Martin Luther King Day”? You know, it must have been terrible for America’s foremost deaf drug addict to come to the defense of “an African-American woman” (although maybe he was just high). I looked it up in the communist New York Times. Winston Smith must have been hard at work that night, because this is all I found:

“Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.”

While I’m sure Rush, like lots of wankers, loves a good cat fight (rOWRrrrr…), this is ridiculous.

Finally, some fun bloggage for a slow Monday — the trailer for “Black Snake Moan.” Suggested discussion topic: Is Samuel Jackson committing career suicide (I mean, two movies with snake in the title, back-to-back?) or having the time of his life? I’m leaning toward the latter.

Today’s cruel taunting of the already wounded comes to us courtesy of regular commenter Basset, who forwards this photo of the Ohio State University Marching Band’s postgame show Monday night:

Funny, but sloppy Photoshopping; I can see the cloned areas. Although I’m an alum of the smaller, less well-known Ohio University, with its own excellent marching band, I have to say: I always enjoyed Script Ohio. Early in my career I had to do a lot of “first woman” stories. That is to say, “Miss X is the first woman to do whatever” stories. Among them was one on the first woman to dot the i in Script Ohio, a big honor for the sousaphone players. I recall only that my lead called it “something to toot your tuba about.” How thrilled my editors must have been, to see this early promise of the writer within.

Gah, a long day lies ahead. I hope I have all my obligations written down. The night before last was a stressful one, with two middle-of-the-night phone calls, followed by a busy day. In late afternoon I tried to catch a nap. I was lying on my bed with a paperback, trying to relax, and the next thing I knew it was dark outside and the phone was ringing. Foolishly, I answered it. Of course it was someone who wanted to talk to me about a job. I’m sure they won’t want to hire the aphasic idiot they spoke to, who said “uhhhh” a lot and seemed to be communicating from the bottom of a Placidyl binge, but you never know. I appear to have made an appointment to speak with them later. Note to self: Use lots of under-eye concealer.

One thing before I forget: Is anyone out there flying on Northwest Airlines this month, at least before the in-flight magazine changes to February? If so, grab the January issue. Kate’s in it. Really. This was yesterday’s excitement. Her birthday party in November was a repeat of last year’s, with a small group of her friends invited to ice-skate at Campus Martius Park downtown. A photographer was lurking around the edges of the rink, snapping photos. He was obviously a professional — he held his camera like one, anyway, and he wasn’t wearing skates — and we struck up a conversation. He said he was shooting candids of the rink for Northwest Airlines’ magazine. The girls went insane, of course, thinking their next step would be America’s Next Top Model, so I explained about how photographers shoot dozens of photos and only one or two get used, if that, so don’t get your hopes up and blah blah blah. Then we had pizza and everyone forgot about it.

Until yesterday, when I had to go over to Kate’s school, and she shows me the magazine, and whaddaya know, there’s her birthday-party ice conga line. Everyone’s in profile except one of the girls in the middle, who had turned to look at the photographer, resembling this sort of serene blonde ice angel. One of that girl’s mother’s friends was flying somewhere, opened the magazine, said, “I know that girl,” and the rest is a bunch of phone calls and checks sent off for extra copies. If you’re on an NWA flight, though, grab one (there’s a snorkeler on the cover, enjoying the many benefits of a vacation to Cancun) and drop me an e-mail. You can never have enough extra copies of Baby’s First Appearance in a National Magazine.

I guess next year I’ll have to invite Vanity Fair.

Yes, I heard Bob Greene’s stupid commentary on NPR last night. No, I don’t feel like taking it apart. If he’s still fooling editors and producers into believing he’s some sort of Bard of the Midwest, well, it’s out of my hands. I will say this, though: It made me think that OSU losing wouldn’t be the worst way to end the day. And whaddaya know?

And with that, Bucks fans, I will say no more. OK, I’ll say just a little more, a quote from an e-mail that arrived just seconds ago: The Scarlet and Gray once again proved that the Big Ten conference is one of the most overrated in the nation. Given the performance of the Big Ten teams in their various and sundry bowls – Michigan also was beaten to a pulp – I’d love to think the fans of these schools and this conference would sip from a tall, frosty glass of STFU, but that is probably not in the cards.

Now I’ll say no more.

Actually, I think I’ll really say no more. Does that qualify as having a tall, frosty glass of STFU? Maybe just Schadenfreude pie.

Last year’s Detroit auto show wasn’t the first I’d attended, but my first as a working journalist. I freely admit to being a total country mouse about these things, but the most satisfying word in the event, for me, was “show.” You don’t have to suspend your journalist’s skepticism about the b.s. you’re being fed in the press conferences to appreciate the entertainment factor. The car companies go to great lengths and even greater expense to make their product roll-outs special, and I’m happy to appreciate them. Only 6,000 people — journalists, most of them — get to attend the press preview. By the time the public is admitted at the end of the week, the buffet lines will be gone, the liquor will be packed up and the celebrities will be back in Los Angeles. I think it’s important to let your readers know what the rollouts were like.

Nevertheless, there’s always someone who’s too cool for the room. Say, “I loved how they drove that Jeep through the front window at Cobo,” and he’ll say, “Oh, they did that 10 years ago.” Say, “Those cappuccino-flavored yogurt thingies at Maserati were delicious” and he’ll say “They totally ripped off that idea from some place in Milan.” And so on.

This year, Mercedes installed an ice-skating rink in Cobo. Really. Ice. With skaters twirling around the cars. Many reporters act as though this is simply the most boring thing they have ever seen. Oh, an ice rink. They did that in Berlin five years ago, didn’t they?

So when I saw this picture, taken on that very same ice rink…

…I thought, “At least the photographers aren’t afraid to smile at the amusing sight of Emmitt Smith and Cheryl What’s-Her-Name, reprising their ‘Dancing With the Stars’ gig.” And then I looked closer. All the “photographers” seem to be carrying the same camera. They’re also holding them wrong; you’d think someone could instruct someone pretending to be a photographer in how real photographers hold cameras. And they’re wearing ice skates! They’re shills, dammit.

No wonder reporters get cynical. I guess the real pros were on the other side.

(The guy in the upper right-hand corner, dressed in a suit? He’s a real photographer — correct grip, no skates. But I bet he’s not news media; looks like corporate PR to me.)

By the way, for the best mise en scéne reporting, I recommend the NYT auto-show blog. For car pix, Jalopnik. The Freep auto-show page is getting most of the breaking news, but seems to be having intermittent technical problems. Best all-around goes to the News’ blog, but they have no pictures; apparently those are all on the main auto-show page.

Meanwhile, as I seem to be working on a minor in alternative-energy vehicles, I paid close attention to the roll-out of the Chevrolet Volt concept, positioned as GM’s bid to reassert itself in the alt-energy field and something of a mea culpa for killing the EV-1. Wow. What a woulda-coulda-shoulda this thing is, even for a concept:

…a hybrid that could get as much as 150 miles per gallon of gasoline. From the hints GM has dropped, the Volt could be on the road in three or four years.

…The automaker faces a major hurdle in finding a supplier that can build a battery system GM wants.

You know? I’ll be a billionaire once I accumulate as much as a billion dollars. However, I face a major hurdle in finding a supplier. Stay tuned.

Sorry for taking the day off. I was tired. Although I probably should come up with a better excuse; who isn’t tired in January? How about: I was in mourning for Gerald Ford, and it just seemed wrong to fritter time away blogging.

But really, I was tired. Our friends John and Sam came by on their way back home to Atlanta — they’ve been in Michigan most of the last three months (sick parents), but we haven’t seen each other. It seemed time to take the night off, go spend some money on beef tenderloin and open a few bottles of wine. (Although I will say: You can spend all you want on beef tenderloin, but you know what’s a bigger hit? Picking up a couple dozen tamales in Mexicantown for microwavable breakfasts. My kitchen still smells like salsa.)

So, anyway: Tired, but now rested. Back in the proverbial saddle. But I need to hustle. A freelancer’s income depends on multiple income streams, and all the streams are trickles at the moment. There are a few checks expected in the next few weeks, but it’s time for QueryFest 07. Oh, well — what else is January for?

Of course, thanks to the newspaper business, the ranks of potential freelancers swells seemingly hourly. It’s a jungle out there. In the sturm und drang of my last days in Fort Wayne, I talked regularly with a friend who works as a newspaper journalist in another city. His advice: “Don’t get bitter.” Exchanged e-mail with him yesterday, and learned his wife didn’t escape the reaper’s blade in Philadelphia this week. Guess what? He’s bitter.

Ah, but enough of that. This new year more than any in recent memory, I’m sensing a vibe of Big Change in the air. I know now that big change is as likely to be cancer or terrorist attacks as a new pony under the Christmas tree, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. You really do never know, and that’s why we get up every morning: To know.

Actually, yesterday I got up for another reason — I had to be Cocoa Mom at Kate’s school, to make warm chocolate sustenance for the incoming crossing guards, who are inordinately exposed to the elements as part of their duties. This being the Winter That Wasn’t, it was a borderline day; you’re excused from duty if the temperature is above 45 degrees. It was a couple below that, so I came in and stirred up a couple pots of Swiss Miss. Most of the takers were boys, who then sat down around a table in the small kitchen area to drink. I turned around, and caught them in a brief moment when their poses were not that of little boys, but of old men talking over coffee in all the places that old men do that — a casual slump, one hand wrapped around the cup, staring into the middle distance, dreaming of whatever. One boy wore, with no apparent sense of irony, a Sinatra-style fedora, which is probably why my mind made the connection. I just stood there for a minute, looking at the old men they will become (if they’re lucky enough to live that long), enjoying this moment of time travel before the bell rang. A little gift from the cosmos.

And now a little gift of bloggage:

When conservatives get high, they get high with a doctor’s prescription: William Rehnquist, addict. A fascinating story, really, which would have been an interesting cautionary tale, had its central figure chosen to tell it before he died. It seems the man in the striped judicial robes fell victim to a classic trope of the age: If it comes from a doctor, it’s not a drug, it’s medicine. Only the medicine was Placidyl, a “sleep aid” that could knock out an elephant, and the judge was taking three times the prescribed dose. Withdrawal made him a raving loon, and he tried to escape the hospital in his jammies.

Why laid-off newspaper journalists get bitter: “There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable. But I’m not prepared to reenact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility.” An inside look at the looting of the Chicago Sun-Times. Don’t read if you’re on blood-pressure medication.

One dark cloud on our visit with our friends came when they were preparing to leave early yesterday morning, and John checked his e-mail one last time, only to learn of the death of a college friend, Steve Korte. John writes a nice remembrance, but I’m linking separately to a little treat within for you Columbus natives: Steve’s recreation of “Wake Up, Mr. Tree,” beloved by all Columbus kids who watched “Luci’s Toyshop,” which is to say, all Columbus kids.

I’ve loved Djimon Hounsou since I saw his staggeringly fine ass in “Gladiator,” and resented the preachy movies of Edward Zwick since I saw “Glory” for the second time. Joe Queenan has his own problems with the Zwickian genre, perhaps best described as Whitey Saves the Black Folk. The usual Queenanesque evisceration.

Now I gotta go make dog biscuits. Why? Because I care, that’s why.

I first encountered the work of Michael Browning in the pages of Tropic, the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine. It was a piece about what a handful his 2-year-old was, normally a subject a young, unmarried, fearful-of-parenthood female reader would avoid like gum surgery. Intrigued by the headline — “The Life and Crimes of Matthew No” — I started reading. Within a minute, I was giggling. In a few more, guffawing. It was an early lesson that in the hands of a gifted writer, any topic can be entertaining. Even toddlers. Even gum surgery.

I don’t know if Browning ever wrote about that, but I learned to look for his byline on the KRT wire. For years, he reported from Beijing, then came back to Florida and found good stories everywhere. In 1999, seeing the inevitable in Miami, he moved to the Palm Beach Post, where my friend Carolyn works. She forwarded my fan letter to him, and he let me know that Matthew No turned out just fine:

Good old Matthew. We all give hostages to Fortune and Fate when we have children. They could end up drunkards, drug addicts, smushed by oncoming trucks, Knockers-Uppers of 14-year-olds. But to my amazement, he grew up to be a very decent sweet young fellow with a good work ethic and a gift for drawing and a love of art. I’m proud and relieved.

So am I. The picture he painted of the kid at 2 was truly terrifying. In a funny-terrifying way.

You know where this is going, however, don’t you? Michael Browning died this week, too young. The obit has links to several of his best pieces. A former colleague at the WashPost has rounded up a few more. I recommend every one.

I’m of two minds on Dick Clark’s appearance on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. First mind: Good for him, soldiering on after a stroke left his speech muddy and his body partially paralyzed. Just think, a generation ago he would have been put out to pasture and not allowed near a camera, lest he bum someone out. So rock on, Dick Clark.

Second mind: What the hell was he thinking? A veteran news broadcaster once told me he was effective only until his appearance and delivery became a fatal distraction from what he was saying. (Of course, as a man, this guaranteed him 25 more years on the job than the women in the newsroom.) Not that what Dick Clark has to say on New Year’s Eve is so mesmerizing, but still.

It was oddly appropriate for the weekend, though, which had the theme: Soldiering on. Alan was hard at work on yet another of the projects which have saved us thousands of dollars over the years (installing a garage door opener, this time), when he went down to the basement with a hacksaw and a piece of steel to perform some manly surgery on it. A minute later there was an extended clatter that suggested much more than the steel was falling.

Relax, he didn’t have a stroke. He just tripped on something in the work room, nearly recovered, tripped again and smashed face-first into the wall, splitting his lip and necessitating a trip to the emergency room Saturday night for five stitches. He came home with three no-nos until they come out — no beer from the bottle, no smiling and no kissing. So as midnight struck and the sound of gunfire resounded from the direction of Detroit, we leaned toward each other and Alan said through his stitched-up lip: “iss e, I ick Cark.”

I hope karma allows him this small joke without too much payback. The split lip seemed to be pay-forward, in a sense.

That gunfire — that is the sound of Detroit celebrating. Yes, it’s what you’d call tops in stupid. Alan had only been on the job a week when he came to work Jan. 2 to find a bullet hole in one of the department’s windows, a gouge in the wainscoting and other evidence that, duh, what goes up, etc. I let the dog out — trepidatiously — shortly after midnight and it sounded, no kidding, like high noon in the Green Zone. Some of it was fireworks, but one thing life here has taught me is the difference between the pop-pop-pop of fireworks and the pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic weaponry. And there was more gunfire than firecrackers.

The first house we looked at when we were house-hunting here was in the Park, the first street of the Pointes as you come north/east from Detroit. One of Alan’s colleagues lives there. She said they spend New Year’s Eve “on the floor.” How festive.

(If you click on that link above, you’ll see the city’s suggestion for an alternative activity: “Hugs, not Bullets.” It’s like they have meetings to think of the lamest possible alternative, to insure the original undesirable activity goes on forever.)

Ah, I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’m going back to bed to get a little more. In the meantime: The WashPost tells us what’s in and what’s out. Study up. There’ll probably be a quiz.