My favorite lyric...

Comes from Snow Patrol's "Lightning Strike'" a 16-minute song at the end of the band's album, "A Hundred Million Suns." It goes like this:
"And in the middle of the flood I felt my worth when you held on to me like I was your little life raft. Please know that you were mine as well."
In my 32 years, this best sums up what I think most of us are looking for - to need and be needed simultaneously. To feel the worth of being able to selflessly give to someone else who we rely on for similar sustenance.
There's nowhere I'm skilled enough to go on this topic without slipping into a graceless melancholy, but every time I hear that song, I'm struck by that lyric and just felt compelled to share tonight.
So in this holiday season when we tend fixate inward upon our insecurities about our worth (material and otherwise) to those we care for, and as we all grope for meaning in the wake of a far-reaching national tragedy, my wish for you is this: give freely when you are needed, and let those who you rely upon know what they mean to you.
We're only as alone as we allow ourselves to feel. Just reach past it. You might be surprised to find outstretched fingers at the other end of your grasp.

Tough Mudder!

In the immortal words of rap group Nappy Roots, "Aww naw, hell no, boy, y'all gone up and done it."

On Oct. 3, a group of friends who I've known since grade school and I took on Tough Mudder Seattle -- 11 miles and 24 obstacles of testing our limits. We finished in just shy of 3 hours.

Yes, we were shocked with electricity. Yes, both my legs cramped up after I jumped into the pool of water below. Yes, I still have scars all over my legs from how shredded they got when I raked them across sharp rocks while crawling through mud.

But you can bet we're already talking about doing it again.

You can do anything you put your mind to.

Moving day

6:44 p.m. On moving day and I've managed to ward off tears through two rounds of farewells. I have nowhere to sit in my apartment and little left to do today. The plan is to be on the road by 10 a.m. tomorrow and in Fort Collins by Tuesday morning.

That's really when this adventure begins, in what I'm calling the 5K Life. I have a lot of goals for this new start, and I'll let you in on them soon. But for now, I'll share a wish. Tomorrow, I wish for Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again" to play before I hit Utah. And I wish for joy and love for all of us.

Take good care!

Year in Review

This was a nice bit of recognition at the end of the year: Charles Apple with the American Copy Editors Society recognized our Dec. 31 Year in Review treatment as the nation's best.

Designer Jessa Moser did a great job putting it together, taking what was an originally unworkable idea by yours truly and wrangling it into something that folks could consume. I'm not going to share my original idea, because I'll find a way to make it work with something else. Just wait.

I was especially happy that the timeline I put together was well received, though. It was a pain to do, but made possible through our e-edition. It would have taken hours to go through the old paper stacks to review our front pages for the last year, but being able to pull up pdfs of each edition made that a lot more streamlined. I was also able to collect dates of stories to submit for awards in the process, so the time was well spent, I thought. I spread the work across a couple days, either before or after things got busy.

It's nice to have a little victory like this to point to, especially being that some of the papers that were also in the top 10 have more than 10 times our circulation and, at least theoretically, more resources to work with.

Here's a photo of the page, snagged from Apple's site, which got it from Newseum. You should check both out.