By George! - November 28, 2008

Editorial commentary by George Petrisek, Journalist & Curmudgeon.

(George portrait by Susan Carlson)

This is the time of year when things really get nutty.

What with :The Holidays”—Thanksgiving, the First day of Buck Season, Christmas and New Year clogging up the schedules, disrupting routines and thought processes and just generally adding to my already rampant confusion, it’s difficult to come up with news, let alone intelligent and/or entertaining columns.

This is Friday, the Reporter-Argus just came out yesterday, but the deadline for next week’s Thanksgiving addition is today, so here I am writing a nonsense column just because I have to.

I just finished doing a police report that covered three and a half days, and on two of them there were no entries on the log.

It ain’t easy coming up with news in a week as short as this.

Two things make it bearable—my work for next week will be done when I finish this, and, even more important, there is the certain knowledge that I have only six more months until I retire to the peace and quiet of Potter County, God’s Country and soon to be the Land of the Whirring Windmills.

Actually, in some ways, I’ve been creeping up on retirement—or maybe practicing for it for at least six months now, not writing any Saturday columns and turning down a bunch of assignments from the Bradford Era.

Yesterday was the Correspondents’ Luncheon the Era holds annually for us part-timers and freelancers—“independent contractors” is the formal name.

Each year the staff chooses some of the better writing from the correspondents and gives out some awards—this year Marcie Schellhammer was in charge and along with the usual “Best in Category” awards came up with some truly original and imaginative special “awards”.

Mine was a beautifully decorated scroll with a picture of a canoe and an old-fashioned pen splotching out some ink.

But the high spot was the inscription : “I’m too busy trying to keep up with Wanda to keep up with the news.”

There is much truth in that, we still go to Survivor events in faraway places and she still gets calls to perform occasionally.

Of course we did our Canadian canoe trip in August, and in case I didn’t mention it before, two weeks ago we were on Long Island for a dodgeball tournament charity event. Wanda participated; I watched. She did rather well, remaining the last person standing on what ended up the second place team. It ended up when a mightily thrown ball hit her upside the head with highly audible “Whack!”

Now we are looking forward to Thanksgiving when Dawn and her new husband will be here for the first time in almost a year, followed by Sunday when a half dozen downstate hunters will arrive to stay at the cottage for three days,

Wanda believes that it is the duty of any real man to go into the woods and come back with a supply of meat for the winter so I bought a new bright orange hat and will sally forth into the woods behind the house on December Fool’s Day,

Since I have seen only one deer in our general area in the last three months, I am hopeful that I will be spared the effort and mess of having to gut, drag and skin some luckless animal that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As for the winter’s meat—what’s the Jubilee for, anyhow?

 Shantih