The Future: Decided!

I'm excited to announce that I'll be joining the KENS 5 news team in San Antonio in June!  I visited the station earlier this week and accepted the 6 p.m. producer position on Friday!  I'm looking forward to heading back to Texas and getting to know the San Antonio area and audience!

Convenience of the Kindle

Santa brought me a Kindle for Christmas and I've been reading on it since then.  I didn't realize how spoiled it made me until I started to read Cutting for Stone, which is thick in paperback.  It's nice to go back to a real book, but at the same time, it's bulkier and heavier than the Kindle.  And I didn't realize how much I had come to rely on the instant dictionary!  I found myself wanting to know what a word meant and looking for the arrow to navigate to the word for the dictionary.  But, I had to pull the word up on my iPhone dictionary app and wait for it to load.  It took so much time compared to the Kindle dictionary that I eventually gave up and used context clues to find the definition.  To say the least, I'll be sticking with the Kindle for a long time!

That spontaneous roadtrip I mentioned?  It happened!  Three of my puppy-crazed friends and I headed to Texas and spent the weekend playing with Cowboy (the puppy's name).  I'm sure that puppy was always being held or being pet!  We also lucked out and had beautiful weather so we played on the lake too! 

A Google A Day

Have you played agoogleaday?  It's Google's new interactive trivia game released this week.  The question gives a few sentences that serve as clues.  The player uses the first sentence's clues as Google Search keywords and explores the links to find the answers.  Each answer helps figure out the next sentence's search words, until the player finds the answer to the entire trivia question.  I think this is a fun way to learn random facts.  The first one I tried was about Robert and Rohan and their musician father.  In the end, I learned that Bob Marley had a ton of kids.  The creators are smart because they include links to let people share the question on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and email and to follow the question on Facebook and Twitter.  This allows them to stay in contact with the users who might forget to keep playing after their first try.

But, this game leaves me with questions about Google's motives.  Are they trying to increase their site hits or is it a way for them to interact with users?  Will they eventually give in to the pull of more profit and let the trivia question be sponsored (publicly or secretly) so that the answer ends up promoting a product, company, event, or person?  I'm sure that over time Google's motives will become clear and only time will tell if this becomes a popular game or not.

Fulfilling Week

This week, I gave myself the goal to keep the live recap in my 5 p.m. show.  In the past, my reporter either forgot to write it or the show got heavy enough to drop it, so I've never had the live recap in my 5 p.m. show.  I was determined to keep it!  I went into my show 27 seconds light, and dropped only four items.  I was so excited when I finished the show with the live recap that I was shaking when I walked out of the control room!




Tuesday's 10 p.m. show was the first election coverage I'd ever produced.  I was nervous at the beginning of my shift because I wasn't sure how our station planned on covering it (special reporters or graphics, etc).  As the day went on, I worked with my executive producer and we figured out how we were going to get the election coverage into the show.  What you don't see when you watch the show is all the manpower that was in the newsroom.  We had a team of people calling cities in the surrounding areas for the outcome or progress of their elections and the news director and another girl putting the graphics together. So much effort went into making our election coverage great.

A new addition was added to my family today.  Meet Cowboy Boots (he'll go by Cowboy).  He's an 8 week old yellow Labrador Retriever.  I haven't even met this puppy yet, but thanks to technology I feel like I'm getting to know him.  My dad and brother have been sending me pictures and videos all afternoon - but it still doesn't fill my desire to hold and pet this puppy!  Maybe a spontaneous roadtrip is in place?

Quest for the Best

I'm constantly looking for the best tasting pain au chocolat - or chocolate croissants!  Every time I see one, I can't resist getting one - it doesn't matter if I'm not hungry, in an airport, or in a rush.  The best ones I've had by far have been from Europe.  But, over spring break in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, those European croissants got a run for their money.  A local bakery, Chocolate Soup, makes a chocolate croissant that's light but chewy.  The flavors were well-balanced between butter and chocolate.  Don't they just look beautiful too?  I was sad to find this treat on the last day, otherwise I would have been there every morning before hitting the slopes.  Leave a comment if you have a recommendation for other chocolate croissants I should try!

Overall, it was a good senior year spring break spent skiing and road tripping across the Midwest.  Along the way, I added 4 states (Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa) to my list of visited U.S. states, giving me a grand total of 30!