Goodbye, Vera

Word came by e-mail this morning that one of the members of my breast cancer support group died last night. She had suffered a stroke just before Christmas, which they initially thought had been brought on by all the chemo she was going through. But later, they found the cancer was in her brain. She had been under Hospice care this week, surrounded by her family.

She retired from an area school just this spring, where she had worked in the lunch room for many years. I remember her saying early last year they had told her that she would be on chemo the rest of her life. I think that was a big part of why she retired when she did. I sat at the same table with her at several of our meeting and got to know her a bit better than some of the others. She was a nice lady, and loved having her grandkids around (I think there was a first great-grandchild in there, too). She will be missed.

Otherwise today, it is snowy, but it's just a light snow for us. A bit of ice beforehand, but nothing big like the last one, at least not here. It sounds like southeastern Kansas and Oklahoma is getting it this time around. Keep warm if that's where you're at!

I'll be at work today, but hopefully will be home a bit early. We're going to try to get done an hour early tonight so the drivers have more time on the roads overnight.

This next week at work will be very interesting. We got some training on InCopy last week and started on InDesign yesterday and will finish that up on Monday. Then probably Tuesday afternoon, after that day's paper has gone to press, we'll switch out the computers and be up and running on new hardware and software for Wednesday's paper.

This all probably wouldn't be that big a deal to me, but our lead page designer and his wife had thier baby early last week, so he is actually gone for all this. That puts me in the lead seat! Usuallly, that makes me pretty nervous, because I just don't do that job often enough to be real confident in it. But where he's gone for so long, it's given me time to be more comfortable in doing page 1 and essentially being in charge. Our managing editor has been busy all week building our page templates from scratch on the new system, so he's pretty much been out of it as far as the daily work goes. It also helps he's not a jerk in how he treats people and knows something about computers, too!