Things have been busy, and when they haven’t been busy I’ve been trying to rest up. So I haven’t blogged much in a few days. Here are a few notes and followups:

• Rehearsals are going well; I think I may be turning a corner as far as memorizing the play, although there are still a few scenes that give me trouble. We are supposed to have a Paul, finally, and hope he will be at practice tonight.
• My parents thoroughly enjoyed their bus tour to the northeast. My mother especially liked seeing the whales, while my father thought the boat trip around Manhattan Island on the way up was the highlight of the trip.
  In a weird coincidence, their tour group had near misses with two of the month’s biggest news stories. They spent the night in Pennsylvania Amish country just five miles from, and a few days after, the terrible school shooting. Then, they were in New York seeing a Broadway play on the same day that the small aircraft crashed into the apartment building. My father actually has footage of the building with flames and smoke.
• I loved “Doctor Who” this week, with the guest appearances by Sarah Jane and K-9.
• We’re now waiting for my certificate to arrive from Inland Press Association before making an announcement in the newspaper about my second place award. I got a call from the Tennessee Press Association today asking for my photo. At first, I thought maybe they had gotten a press release about the IPA thing and were going to include it in their newsletter. (I was the only Tennessee reporter to place in the awards.) But, no, this was about something totally different. I had written a column a couple of weeks ago complaining about a state agency sending out huge e-mails with four or five news releases in each one. (We’re talking about 15MB e-mail messages.) The woman who puts together TPA’s newsletter agreed with me wholeheartedly and wanted to reprint the column. She needed my mugshot to run next to it.