A List For Everything

I’m a list maker. Mostly it’s for two reasons: 1. So I don’t forget to do something important and 2. I enjoy the feeling of checking things off to-do lists when they’re done.

I did that Friday, along with NFPW AGENDA Editor Cathy Koon and Designer Katie Freseman, when we finished the spring edition and sent it to our web master for posting. It wasn’t on the NFPW website when I last checked, but it should be there soon.

That’s the good news. However, one job done often means the next one in line can be started.

As soon as the new AGENDA is posted, I plan to send mails, including the electronic cards Secretary Marianne Wolf-Astrauskas created, to media and college-university journalism people in the Salt Lake City area. I’ll invite them to check out our website, including all 2013 NFPW Conference details in AGENDA, and invite them to join us.

I think that will be one of my Sunday afternoon assignments, along with my usual routine that includes cleaning my kitties’ room, finishing laundry and spending some time with Mom.

We also get on lists for which we have no control. It’s my turn this weekend to baby-sit the police-emergency scanner for the Kearney Hub. I just heard that some counties south of Kearney are in a tornado watch area. It is expected that most of central Nebraska will have a risk of thunderstorms and possibly a tornado or two through the rest of tonight and into Sunday.

‘Tis the season for that kind of weather in the Great Plains and there’s a certain feeling that’s been in the air all day that makes me know the weather forecasts are probably right. Those of us who have lived here all our lives certainly pay attention to weather updates on such days – easier when you have the scanner sitting a few feet away – but we don’t panic.

One of my missions in life is to get my name removed from as many junk mail, phone call and email lists as possible. I’ve had pretty good success on the phone and snail mail fronts.

However, I told someone at work this week that unsubscribing to spam email must mirror what my mom says happens when you first start trying to get rid of gray hair. For everyone one you remove, 12 come to the funeral.

I’ve started next week’s work list and even my next shopping list, despite having gone shopping this morning.

I have several lists started for the many things I need to do between now and the NFPW Conference Aug. 22-24 in Salt Lake City, including sending the invitations to local media, agenda items for our annual meeting and getting speakers for this year’s President’s Roundtable topic. That last one is on my Monday to-do list.

I hope you all are inspired by the spring AGENDA’s news about the conference, including bios of most of the speakers, and soon will be on the list of conference registrations. I’m there already!

P.S. Just as I was trying to publish this on Saturday, I lost Internet service on my cell phone, which is my remote service at home. It wasn’t back until Sunday morning. That was not on my list!

Mother’s Day

I have an unusual excuse for being a day late with this blog: I was home most of the weekend.

That meant there were no good excuses to put off the many things that needed doing around home for all those weeks when I was on the road with NFPW activities. So, I treated myself to sleeping in until about 8:30 Saturday morning and then got to work.

I started with a workout and then went out to plant some pansies to fill a gap in my landscaping. Pansies were favorites of my Grandma Dunn, who liked to say they each had a face on them. So, that makes them a favorite of Mom’s.

Many people consider working in their yards as a relaxing alternative to their work. I’m not one of them. I hire neighbor kids to mow my lawn and keep the landscaping simple. If I’m out in nature, I’d rather be taking photos.

Next on my no-more-excuses list was cleaning … or at least getting the main layer of dust removed by dusting, sweeping and vacuuming floors, and shaking rugs.

I had time to read my Weekend Hub before Mary Jane Skala arrived around 4 p.m. to pick up her summer clothes stored in my basement and then go with me to a ranch north of Overton, about 30 miles away, for branding day.

I was at the same ranch last year to do a big feature and photo page on branding day. This time, I wanted a few more photos for an upcoming ag feature about the 125th anniversary for Nebraska Cattlemen, and I knew I’d be welcome.

Also, branding day is another event on the list of new things to show Mary Jane. I’m sure her column next week will be about this latest experience. She already told me she’d like to go back to the July 4 Sumner Rodeo, now that she has a little bit better understanding about what is going on.

Today, of course, is Mother’s Day. I had taken Mom out to eat lunch on Friday because we knew the crowds would be big today at are restaurants. So we went to church and then ate dinner at her retirement place.

As usual for a Sunday afternoon, she came home with me to play with Thai and Tas, while I finished some Sunday chores. We also went into the yard to give an impatience plant a new home. It was given to me at church. Everyone who was there with their mother was received plants.

We went to the back yard and picked a bouquet of lilacs from the bushes Dad had transplanted from our farm when I moved here in 1992. I always make sure Mom gets some blooms several times each spring. The cold weather in Nebraska took its toll on many plants, including the lilacs. The blooms are smaller this year, but still pretty and still smell wonderful.

After taking Mom home, I put fertilizer spikes around my trees to end the outdoor chores. When I’m done with the blog, I’ll wash my hair and be ready to just sit for awhile.

There are other things I could do, of course. But I’m pretty sure they’ll be waiting for me next weekend.

Seeing Things Differently

After a long Friday at work, including a late afternoon-early evening of editing copy for the spring edition of NFPW’s AGENDA, I decided to take a walk around a small wetland behind my house.

I had seen some ducks on the water, so mostly I wanted to take my camera to shoot some photos in the great evening light. There was a wood and mallard ducks, a killdeer I recognized from the black rings around its neck and a brown speckled bird with a long narrow beak that it dipped into the water as if grazing. I checked websites and my “Birding Nebraska” guide to try to identify that last bird. I labeled it a willet, but it might be a sandpiper.

I like to take walks around the wetland that now is surrounded by a street on one side and a wide sidewalk on the other. It makes for a nice oblong circle walk. I don’t like the new, big, expensive homes occupied by people who were told the wetland would be turned into a nice park for the neighborhood.

I liked the area behind me just fine for about 20 years when those hills were a pasture. I also liked the alfalfa field to my north where, this summer and into the fall, more houses and businesses “planted” there instead of crops.

Many folks would see such growth as progress. I see it as an intrusion on my neighborhood. I’ve always been on the edge of the city, with a few neighbors on one side and rural Buffalo County on the other.

Even after the street went in behind me, the wetland, with its cattails and red-winged blackbirds remained …for awhile. Then, the water was drained, most of the big cottonwood trees were removed and the wetland grasses were dug up.

Then the work at the site stopped.

At a community meeting earlier this year, folks who had bought homes and empty lots in the new development, called Fountain Hills, were furious to learn that only a small playground will be built at the site and the rest will remain what they called a “swamp.” The developer had made promises he couldn’t keep because he failed to check with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which doesn’t just let people drain a wetland.

Furthermore, there might not even be the fountain that was promised.

Most of my new or future neighbors hated the idea of living near a “swamp.” I had gone to the meeting to yell at someone for draining the pretty wetland, the only natural thing left in that new development. I didn’t have to open my mouth because the wetland will stay and some of the plants pulled out will be replanted.

Obviously, we saw the situation differently. Some of the new folks threatened to move. I saw it as at least a small victory as “progress” I don’t like and can’t stop surrounds me.

At the Kansas Professional Communicators convention last week in Manhattan, there was a presentation about civil discourse by a speaker who helps lead community meetings on controversial topics. As I edited AGENDA copy Friday that included bios of many of the speakers for our 2013 NFPW Conference in Salt Lake City Aug. 22-24, I saw a similar specialist listed, along wih several of our talented members who are experts in crisis communications.

They all know what it’s like to be in the middle of a situation where people see things very differently. That can be a good thing for problem solving or just an interesting discussion, but a bad thing if the participants don’t know how to act in a civil manner.

One of the things I’ve always liked best about NFPW conferences is the wide variety of experiences, cultures and opinions represented. I know I don’t have to agree with someone to have an interesting conversation or to develop networking ties.

So when I see you in Salt Lake City, I expect that we might see some things differently. But I know that I’ll learn something from you and might come home thinking that our conversation was one of the best parts of the conference.

Prairie Party

It’s been a good day to celebrate being the fourth generation of a family from the prairie. My roots are in south-central Nebraska, but I’ve celebrated my pioneer and farming heritage today with my NFPW extended family in Kansas.

I spent today in Manhattan at the annual spring conference of Kansas Professional Communicators. What a wonderful program and a great time! I’ve learned new things, explored the history and ecology of the tallgrass prairie of eastern Kansas, and shared in the celebration with KPC members who received communications contest awards and honored Gwen Larson as their 2013 Communicator of Achievement.

There were workshops about food writing by culinary historian Jane Marshall, who has “Teatime to Tailgates: 150 Years at the K-State Table” nearly ready to go to press, and by David Procter, director of the Institute for Civic Discourse and Democracy. There also was a panel discussion on social media.

We spent most of the afternoon touring the year-old Flint Hills Discovery Center. A film and exhibits tell the story of the tallgrass prairie. It’s an endangered ecology, with only 4 percent of native prairie remaining. The tales are told through photographs, science lessons and the words of prairie authors, including Willa Cather.

We then took a late-afternoon caravan south of Manhattan to the Konza Prairie Nature Trail. Four of us went far enough to climb a hill for a panoramic view of the prairie, now regrowing after a prescribed burn was used as a management tool. Several dozen grazing bison are another tool.

My very long must-see-in-America list now includes another visit to this prairie region in the summer or early fall to see the waves of grass that captured the imagination of pioneers coming from East Coast places near the sea.

Maybe that time will come in September 2016, when KPC members host the annual NFPW conference in Wichita. Tonight, I signed the memorandum of understanding on behalf of NFPW and Kansas President Jennifer Latzke signed for KPC.

Each conference is special, partly because it’s an opportunity to see and learn about different parts of America, and to take short tours planned by people who know an area best and can pack a ton of information and experiences into a few days.

Now the planning begins for the Kansas members.

I’ll be heading home to Nebraska tomorrow and to Salt Lake City, Utah, Aug. 22-24 for the 2013 NFPW Conference. But, I’m ready to mark my 2016 calendar for another prairie party in Kansas.

Telling Their Stories

It’s late afternoon break time at the 2013 Nebraska Press Women spring convention on the Creighton University campus in Omaha. The final event of the day will be the NPW Communications Contest awards banquet.

We’ve had some amazing presentations honoring Nebraska women journalists of the past. We’ve also learned about some job opportunities of the future and how to create the networking, resumes and cover letters needed to get those jobs.

At the noon lunch, we honored many of our high school contest winners, our college scholarship recipient and the two newest inductees into the Marian Andersen Nebraska Women Journalists Hall of Fame at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

One, Clara Colby (1846-1916) was Nebraska’s most prominent suffragist and editor of the longest running suffrage newspaper published by an individual. Her paper, The Woman’s Tribune, received nationwide attention. While Colby was friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and other famous suffrage leaders, her story is mostly unknown, said Colby expert and Beatrice Public Library Director Laureen Riedesel.

She said Colby was part of a generation that was born before the suffrage movement began and died before they had the right to vote. Riedesel said that while the “first women” and those who celebrate an accomplishment are honored, the work of those “seconds, thirds and fourths” also deserve attention.

Colby also is remembered in a new book, “From Society Page to Front Page Nebraska Women in Journalism,” by Eileen Wirth, NPW member and chair of Creighton’s Department of Journjalism, Media and Computing.

She said that what she discovered during her research “blew me away,” because she found many untold stories – one Nebraskan working for the Christian Science Monitor was the longest serving war correspondent in Vietnam – to go along with information about well-known journalists that include Willa Cather and Bess Furman.

The major part of the book deals with “gender integration” in journalism, an issue Wirth personally dealt with at the start of her newspaper career in the 1960s.

Riedesel said that after one of her presentations about Clara Colby, someone in the audience thanked her for rescuing the crusading journalist from her “second death.” Riedesel said the woman explained that our first death is when we cease to live and the second death occurs when no one remembers a person’s name or accomplishments.

The Nebraska Women Journalist Hall of Fame, initiated by NPW in 2011; Wirth’s book; and similar efforts in other NFPW affiliates are small, but important steps to ensure there are no second deaths for the great women who paved the way for today’s journalists.

Walking in Memphis

I know that some people think I spend too much time with a camera pressed to my face when I travel and not enough time just enjoying the views.

They’re probably right. Because I’m always rushed when I visit new places, all those photos allow me to look back later and enjoy the many things I saw, learned and did.

There was much to do during our NFPW spring board meeting in Memphis last Friday and Saturday. We had a lot of business to cover and our great host Paula Casey provided us many opportunities to see her city during non-meeting times.

Every place I’ve ever been to for an NFPW spring board meeting or annual conference has been beautiful, interesting, thought-provoking or all three.

Few places are home to as many places fixed in the memories of Baby Boomers as Memphis. We remember the Civil Rights Movement. I got chills at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music when hearing the familiar soul and early rock ‘n roll music of my childhood.

I’m not a big Elvis fan, but you simply can’t go to Memphis without visiting Graceland. (Yes, I ordered the peanut butter and banana sandwich at Graceland’s Rockabilly’s Burger Shop.)

The house is smaller than I expected. It’s a mix of ’60s and ’70s era living with the wild decor in the media, pool and jungle rooms.

There is excess reflected in the private jets, the Las Vegas jumpsuits and walls decorated with gold records.

Elvis and his immediate family are buried by a fountain in Graceland’s backyard, where thousands and thousands of people pass by each year.

We also walked along the Mississippi River as barges were pushed south toward the Gulf of Mexico.

We ate comfort food at The Little Tea Shop – chicken pot pie, sweet potatoes, peach cobbler, fried catfish, gumbo – and barbecue at several places, often with live soul music accompanying the meal.

However, the stop that meant the most to me was the Lorraine Motel, now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum. On a second floor balcony, in front of room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

The motel and the boarding house across the street, from where the shot was fired, are still standing.

The motel, with its aqua railings and doors, and aqua, red and yellow sign, looks just as it did in the 1968 news photos of the terrible event that changed our American history in so many ways.

In Memphis, nearly every step takes you along a path of history.

Experiencing such places is a special extra benefit I’ve enjoyed in 34 years of Nebraska and National Press Women membership.

Check out the similar opportunities in August in the tours offered before, during and after our 2013 NFPW Conference in Salt Lake City. The details are on the http://www.nfpw.org website.

Home Again, For Now

I got home late this afternoon after four days on the road to Memphis (sounds sort of like an Elvis movie) for the National Federation of Press Women spring board meeting.

By now, almost all the elected board, appointed directors and headquarters staff should be home too, at least those who traveled by air instead of car. The exception may be Ellen Crawford and Karen Stensrud who left at 7 this morning from Memphis for home in North Dakota, where 7 inches of snow or more were forecast.

We had a great, productive board meeting; ate some amazing food; heard live soul music; walked along the Mississippi River, on Beale Street and to important sites in the Civil Rights movement; and, of course, we paid our respects at Graceland.

I’ll share more when I get caught up a bit and have a chance to download photos from our meeting, special events and some fascinating Memphis experiences.

I’ll be on the road again the next two weekends: to Omaha for the Nebraska Press Women spring convention and to Manhattan, Kan., as a guest of the Kansas affiliate.

Connecting and Reconnecting

As I prepare for the 2013 NFPW spring board meeting in Memphis, I’ve been thinking about another board meeting in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s. I was president of Nebraska Press Women then and the NFPW board included affiliate presidents.

I had attended several NFPW conferences by then, starting with the 50th anniversary celebration in Williamsburg, Va., in 1987. However, I was still getting introduced to many of the state and national leaders who now, 26 years later, are some of my best friends.

I think I really started feeling a part of the NFPW universe at that Washington board meeting. I know there were a bunch of us thirtysomethings who went out to eat together in the evenings and we started to get introduced. Some remain a part of the NFPW leadership today – Cathy Petrini, Meg Hunt, Allison Stein, to name a few – and another, Paula Casey, will be our Memphis host.

I can’t remember if Mary Jane Skala of Ohio was at that board meeting, probably was, but I know that I first got to know her well at another one in Portland, Ore., a year or so later. We both had Sunday afternoon flights home and Mary Jane said she wasn’t going to waste the morning. Her plan was to rent a car and either drive to the Oregon coast or east to Mount Hood. I said I’d love to go as long as someone else was doing the driving and we settled on Mount Hood because the Portland airport was on the east side of the city.

We couldn’t have imagined that some day we’d both live in the same small city, Kearney, Neb., and work on the same small daily newspaper, but that’s what we’ve done for the last nine months. Mary Jane had left her 30-year-plus career as an editor for suburban papers in Cleveland, decided to travel for a year and then found it difficult to impossible to re-enter the communications field at home.

She loves the West and had told me on an earlier visit to Kearney that she thought she would be happy anywhere from the Great Plains states to the West.

I’m not saying that NFPW is the key to someday finding a second career – knowing someone who knows of a job you would be fabulous at – but there are many benefits to the networking possible by attending NFPW events. The 2013 conference Aug. 22-24 in Salt Lake City would be a great start if you’ve never been to one and you can even apply to the Education Fund for a first-timer’s grant that can pay all or part of the registration fee.

Check out the http://www.nfpw.org website for details about the conference and the grants.

I wrote last week about having a great, inspiring Saturday morning in a cornfield blind photographing sandhill cranes. Mary Jane went home to Cleveland for Easter weekend and couldn’t join me then, but we went out for a couple of hours this morning.

Unfortunately, you can’t train or even coax wild birds to go and do what you want. They were near us, but not nearly as close to the blind as last week.

The noise they made waking up on roosts in the Platte River and flying over the blind in wave after wave was incredible. A deer even jogged right past our plywood box before I’d hardly unpacked my camera.

We’ll try again next year – the sandhill cranes that spend about six weeks of their migration in the Platte Valley will head north in great numbers over the next week – and see if we can share a better wildlife experience.

It was great just the same. We had a visit, enjoyed the fresh air and saw a little piece of one of the world’s great migration events.

It was an experience I never could have imagined when we first met about 20 years ago at an NFPW meeting.

Me Time

I’m blissfully tired after a long day spent mostly doing what I wanted to do. That’s a rare thing in our busy lives, which made today’s adventures even more wonderful.

As I’ve done on the last Saturday of March the past two years, I got up well before sunrise to drive to Fort Kearny State Historical Park … well actually to the next turn-in with a couple of small grain bins and some stacked irrigation pipe. Then I walked to a small plywood box that serves as a field blind in the cornfield just east of the fort and kept my fingers crossed that some of the sandhill cranes still in the Platte Valley would choose that field as their first morning stop after roosting overnight in the river.

It was really foggy this morning when I entered the blind. I could hear the cranes on the river and could tell they were getting more restless as the fog lingered for more than an hour after sunrise.

Then a few ghostly images flew over and I could see the faint outline of gray cranes well north of the blind, but on the field road straight ahead of me. It was a good sign.

As they made their way toward me, the fog started to lift and more cranes landed in the group. After two hours of waiting, I spent the next two hours taking photos.

They danced, tossed sticks into the air, called back and forth to each other, and fluffed and groomed their feathers. Some got within 10-15 yards of the blind.

I had told someone that just sitting out in the middle of the field in a box, with my telephone turned off, no deadlines to meet and only the sounds of nature around me would be a treat. However, I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen the amazing sandhill crane show.

This afternoon, NPW member and my former college journalism teacher Glennis Nagel and I went to the Stuhr Museum in Grand Island to attend the final reception for the annual “Wings Over the Platte” art show and then take home three photos I had exhibited.

While snooping in the gift shop, a woman came up to me, asked my name and then told me her’s. We had lived across the hall from each other during our freshman year at Doane College and I don’t think we’d seen each other since. I had transfered to Kearney State College as a sophomore.

I spent a lot of time in that friendly room across the hall because my freshman roommate and I had nothing at all in common. So it was amazing to catch up with an old friend.

Glennis and I had a good long visit coming and going to Grand Island, and through supper.

So, it was a good “me time” day that I really needed to restore my spirits and get me ready for the many responsibilities at work and with NFPW in the weeks ahead.

Showing Off

One of the best things about any NFPW conference is the opportunity for members of the host affiliate to show the rest of us some of the special things about their state. That starts the year before during the Saturday morning invitation breakfast presentation and continues through a conference.

It’s even more special for those of us who are able to take an affiliate-sponsored pre-tour, day tour or post-tour – maybe all three!

I hope you have read about the 2013 tours in Idaho and Utah in the monthly eletters, quarterly AGENDAs and on the http://www.nfpw.org website. I’ve already told our Idaho hosts that I intend to take the pre-tour and post-tour, and probably one of the day tours too.

I hosted the pre-tour in 2011 when Nebraska and Iowa co-hosted the 2011 Conference in Omaha and Council Bluffs. I loved showing some of my NFPW friends from many states a little bit of south-central Nebraska and the Sandhills, plus our state capitol in Lincoln.

People in the Great Plains states know we have a reputation for being large geographic areas of nothing but crops and cattle. We’re proud of our work in feeding the world, but it can be a challenge to get people to stop to see the other natural, cultural and historical attactions.

My town of Kearney, where the 2011 pre-tour folks were headquartered, is right on Interstate 80. Most people can’t drive through this area fast enough to get to the mountains of Colorado or the East or West Coasts.

However, this season, particularly this weekend, lots of people come to Central Nebraska to see one of the world’s great natural events, the mid-migration stop of sandhill cranes in the Platte Valley. It’s the largest gathering of cranes in the world. For about six weeks, up to 500,000 to 600,000 stop to feed and rest, mostly in about a 40-mile stretch between Kearney and Grand Island.

This weekend is the National Audubon Society’s Rivers and Wildlife Celebration in Kearney. People come from across the country and around the world. Famous chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall is here for her annual visit to see the sandhill cranes.

Many of us enjoy taking people out to see the cranes. We’re familiar with the area and know some routes and backroads where it’s almost certain to find cranes at about any time of day. They are wild birds, so they often aren’t exactly at the same place at the same time from day to day.

This week, I took Mom and two of her friends on our annual sandhill crane watching drive. We were going to go today, but because of the forecast for snow, we went on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. We saw them by the thousands and in places where we could just park to marvel at their numbers, hear them chatter and watch them dance.

They leap into the air, bob their heads, spread their wings and sometimes toss sticks or dirt. Part of it is courtship, but I like to think it’s mostly unbridled joy they can’t contain.

I took NFPW Membership Director Mary Jane Skala out on a gray Friday evening after work. This is her first crane season after moving to Kearney last June. I knew the conditions weren’t as good for watching. There were cloudy skies and a lot of cranes already were flying to staging areas for short stops before going on to their overnight sandbar roosts in the river.

We didn’t see acres and acres of cranes in one spot, but we sure saw some dancing. Every group seemed to have a showoff or two, as if they were releasing the last bit of energy before starting to unwind for the night.

Keep your fingers crossed that next Saturday is much nicer than today to sit in a blind. The last two years, I’ve crawled into a small plywood blind in a harvested cornfield just east of Fort Kearny before sunrise. I’ve had very good luck in having cranes land near the blind and enjoyed some of the best few hours of my life just watching, listening and taking photos.

Here’s hoping there will be a lot of crane visitors next week and a lot of showing off!