AM Routine: Coffee or HR First?
- Thread starter OpenWater
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Coffee brews while making breakfast. When breakfast and coffee are ready I sit down, do WORDLE, check HR, then open the newspaper.
Like, REAL paper with news written on it? I've heard of those before. Never seen one, though.
You're better off, because you avoid getting ink all over your hands.
And get this, on Sunday mornings young people everywhere used to put their sections together for a really big one, stuff them in a big sack, and then hump them around the neighborhood dropping them off on porches and in doorway thresholds ... all just for some spending cash that was literally coins and paper money, which they had collect in person weekly and stuff in a little envelope. I know, ludicrous.
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In 66 years I’ve always had a newspaper delivered, even in college. Burlington Hawkeye, Des Moines Register, Amarillo Gobe-News, Houston Chronicle, Bergen Record, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and now the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Newspapers remain the single best source of accurate and in depth news. Our national ignorance and susceptibility to fake news has risen as newspaper reading has fallen.
Worst job of my life. Collecting money was awful!
Agree with your take on indepth reporting.
I would think that most, if not all, of those papers (if they're still in existence) likely deliver the identical information to your inbox. And one doesn't have to fumble with hopping to a random page to continue a story, with it's seemingly endless unfolding, flipping, and refolding. That's when most of the ink transfers.
And God forbid if I didn't refold a section satisfactorily to its original condition when it was one my father hadn't yet read. Not to mention the abject fear of hearing "Who has the sports section?" echo thru the house while I'm with it on the toilet.
In addition to saving publishing costs, I bet electronic newspapers have improved father-son relationships more than imagined.
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Did you have to rip off a little, I want to say far less than a half-inch square tab, from a ring full of subscriber payment sheets to ostensibly track customer payments?
Try doing that cleanly in the rain or dead of winter. That 'ticket' process was also a joke.
Inevitably you wouldn't be carrying that ring with all the half-soggified and redried tickets, and a subscriber would want to pay a week or two early not on collection day. A little trust was involved in those instances, but they did know where I lived, so not that much.
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Yes, I remember the book of tabs. I delivered the Des Moines Register in the mornings for about 3 years. I had a spread out area and would ride my bike over a several mile area in Keokuk along the Mississippi. At least the route helped with my conditioning and weight management during wrestling season.
Warren Buffet, Henry Tippie and I were all paper boys. I was lucky never to have to collect door to door. Delivered the crummy La Grange Shopper first, then the Trib and Sun Times. This with: mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, odd jobs were the basis for making some coin into high school. My friends Dad had the janitorial contract for cleaning the locker rooms at the La Grange Y, so added that in HS. Our 4 "boy" team screwed around more than we cleaned up.
Paper to me is preferred, but we lost our route personnel 2 years ago, so now I get the Den Post and WSJ on the internet. Still walk the dogs to the cul de sac every morning to get the imaginary paper. They don't seem to mind.
Professional news is good, but there's not much of it left. Huge losses in the industry led to mass firings so that traditional newsrooms are a shell of their former selves. It's agenda driven too, Op Eds masquerading as news stories etc. The Trib and Den Post are only worth the Sports section, the rest only qualifies as cat box liner.
I digress, but this thread is about what we do in the AM
I kept a journal this week...
- Try to BM first thing (before showering). I feel the day just starts cleaner that way. Success rate 83%.
- Complete Quordle and Wordle during 1. above (at least 17% of the time). Snap results to my favorite ORDLE niece (No pics.) in LV, hoping she's still sound asleep.
- Shower and brush teeth.
- In parallel, make one freshly ground French press and breakfast, and put cushions in rockers on porch (weather permitting).
- Move to the front porch to bird listen and watch (usually before sunrise to enjoy pink light). Crows have been noisy AF these past few mornings. I think I heard a gobble three mornings ago. Heard a few shotgun blasts the past two days.
- In parallel, eat breakfast, drink coffee, and get on the boards to the sounds of nature.
- Check to see if my wife is awake. (Again, no pics for you!)
Edit: First thing my wife asks once she's up and about is "Did you feed the cat?" to which I reply "No."
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If you currently read some of those papers and don't think you're reading fake news, I've got some beachfront property in Oklahoma I'd like to sell you. The media in general is just a propaganda machine these days, newspapers included. True journalism is nearly dead.
It sounds like we had similar childhoods. Mowing, shoveling, raking, pulling weeds, and a paper route were the ways I made money until I was 15 and got a real, per-hour job. Kept my paper route (and most of those other jobs) through high school. The paper route started 53+ years of getting up between 3 and 4:30 AM for me. I'm two years retired and don't miss waking up in the middle of the night at all. I could tell stories about that paper route and the two my best friend had (we subbed for each other during vacations and trips, etc.). When we subbed for each other we had upwards of 200 papers on Sundays, which required a few trips back home to refill our bags. Today, most of the delivery people in Muscatine are adults in their cars, and you're lucky if they even get the paper somewhere on your property. I used to put them exactly where the customer wanted them, mailslot, hooks on mailbox, milk box, inside door, on the porch, whatever. It was good training in H.S. when I would run the whole route and see how fast I could get it done and get back to bed for an hour or so before getting up for school. Simpler and better times for sure.
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